Ship Design Mechanics

Interesting thoughts; can you elaborate on Star Drive mechanics for a non-SD player?

I assume more tactical space battles would be part and parcel of what you're suggesting?

Look at Sots 2, DWs, Stardrive, and a cosmetic side too. (yes lots of money and time to make but so good) 

I would dearly love Stardock to include a system to allow players to design their own ship parts and components or even the ability to import models, meshes and textures for ships and ship parts. I love to play star trek designs but always found that there was only  limited options for Federation designs because they only had one ready made "saucer section" and one design that looked like a warp drive nacelle. There was a work around using smaller parts to make very complex designs, but a single warp engine that way might need 25-50 parts! 

IMHO Stardock should look at how Bathesda does modding support for games like Skyrim. imagine if we had a total "shipyard creation kit" for GalCiv III comperable to Skyrim's Creation kit!  Please, oh, please do this Stardock. I've been playing this game since the first edition 20 years ago and I can't wait for GalCiv III!

Follow up to my last post. I remember building Star Trek ships with 50-piece engines. Sometimes the whole ships themselves required literally hundreds of pieces.

Essentially, yes. The beauty of SD's system is that you can be tactical with your ship designs and if your not looking for that extra tactical depth in space battles, as in micro-managing it all, you can rest assured that all sorts of little calculations are being made in the combat. Modules matter where they are, including internal systems. How you've got your arc of fire setup as well as the different values in speed and engines matter more than they did in GalCiv 2. It just adds a whole lot of depth that GalCiv 3 could really use, and should use.

Adding models to GCII only really required you to add the null points and get the model into DirectX format. The XML to hook it up was trivial boilerplate. For adding new models, that's actually easier than TES modding.

Weapons placement determines firing arcs, among other things.

SD had fixed hulls with a slot-based equipment system. But the placement of parts actually mattered. Shields and armor had to be placed to cover possible threat angles. Engines could only be placed on the rear of your ships, cockpits on smaller craft had to be somewhere the pilot could actually see things from and so on.

I would like to see a way to make the final design products look more organic, flowing curves. I cant recall how many hours i've spent trying to make two mating surfaces look good at their joining point. There were also a lot of designs that I never was happy with and ended up scrapping because I just could not get the look I was going for.

That said I like the ability for ship design that was available in GC2:TOA and don't want to see that flexibility vanish.

I liked how the ship design in terms of where you placed things is inconsequential because this gave maximum creativity in terms of your ship designs. All I want to see is the ship modules expanded so there is more strategy and variety available so ship design isn't a super simple rock-paper-scissors exercise.

The freedom to place hull elements everywhere or to completly design new ships from scratch is a nice feature, but one I never used. I want to create a warship with the proper mix of defenses, weapons, drives... I found it somehow disturbing that it didn't matter where to put your systems. 

I find the way ships are designed in stardrive very good. I didn't play it because it is RTS, but the ship designer looked promising. Of course, it would be very hard to allow the degree of hull design like in GCII and to compute weapon angles, shield covering etc. correctly.

The AI could use predefined hulls (the shapes), so you'd "only" have to take the firing angles etc. into account. Or the AI completly ignores ship design and uses predefined ship types. The drawback would be that sooner or later, one would now all strengths and weaknesses of those fix desgins, so it would be very easy to counter then.

one of the biggest things i want out of the ship designer is an upgrade button that does not strip all useful parts off of a hull

That was already possible in GalCiv 2. Go to the Interface tab in the Options menu, and disable "Remove Functional Components when Upgrading a Ship Design".

I use this feature extensively, so I hope it returns.

.... really that simple wow I feel stupid

Don't worry, I have played for years and this is the first time I have known of that setting 

As for the topic...I am really looking forward to seeing what can be made. I am sure it is quite the balancing act of keeping it accessible as well as deep for those who really like to customize and design.

I've been going back and (finally) playing GalCiv2 ultimate edition in-depth.

- The freedom to put anything/anywhere is useful and I would like to retain that.  Maybe I want to put the engines on the bottom for some strange reason, or pointing in random directions. 

- The ability to hook pieces together like lego-bricks was a big plus in GC2 for me.  I didn't have to fiddle with getting things exactly right and it mostly just worked.  I would like to see more pieces and more varied styles and generic pieces in the new game.  Maybe even "art" packs that can be bought for $1-$3 to expand what you have.

- Weapon and defensive systems could be interesting if they were positional, but that might be too much micromanagement.

- One nice-to-have feature would be some sort of "this is how big your ship is, measured in meters from bow to stern".  It was hard in GC2 to get a feel for how big the ship I was designing was turning out to be.

- A way to scale the entire model up/down rather then part by part.  I made a really cool design, but it's about 2x too large or too small, now what?

- A 3D pop-up window that lets me zoom in, rotate, and closely examine a ship part before I bring it into the canvas to place on the existing ship.  In GC2 it was difficult to find out which modules looked like engines and which ones looked like cockpits.  Or how big the various items were at the default scaling size.