Ship Designer

I think if you have Twilight of the Arnor installed it will let you design ships with all tech and parts available.

The 'Battle of the Gods' scenario also starts you with all techs, that could be used as a substitute if you don't have TA yet.

Or you could simply start a "Cheat-Mode" game and hit CTRL-Shift-R to get all techs in that particular sandbox gameplay situation; the advantage of such cheats being that you can also use any pace of your own and get the techs one_by_one with CTRL-R.

Ships styling is a different beast altogether and there are a number of threads in the modding section which provides extensive help for these complex tasks... even i must puzzle my tricky ways into some folders switching between C:\Docs.. & X:\...Mods\ while keeping track of whatever valid templates or race prefix is currently "in use". Sadly, the only steady path for this editing gamble is available via the AI opponents' Create_Custom_Style' button; which defeats the purpose of even trying to tie a specific race with a pre-defined ship set UNLESS we put all files in the correct location(s) and that these must have the right values.

I could even wish outloud for a true DA ship-designer button too. But, that's yet another backporting task for SD staff if we should ever receive any 'bonus work' on what we really think has become (somehow) essential.

TA is quite fun, but i sometimes prefer DA and its regular single tree fits all context.

I took a somewhat different approach to this problem- Instead of designing ships per se, I created empty hulls, just the hull and whatever extra components I wanted.  I used these basic ship templates to produce all my "production" ships, since they would appear the moment the hull became available, regardless of my weapons or defense technology.  Adding the functional parts takes far less time than creating the look I wanted, so having the look ready to go with no tech requirements just made the most sense.

That's exactly how i am "designing" the entire X-Worlds fleets right now, too.

I went as far as creating some S99 hulls for the standard issue core ships (Colony, Miner, etc..) which allows me to loadup any one of the 36 races and be sure their templates stick to their RC tags; mind you, again, the editing must go on with subsequent individual styles & *UD* removals & replacing the usual S0,1,2,.. prefix WHILE maintaining the whole set of files ready for a direct MOD folder access.

Kinda tricky, **because** the UI itself doesn't provide any other (or easier, btw) way.

OK yea, I'm an idiot. I see the 'Ship Designer' button on the main menu of TA. That's exactly what I wanted.