Forced Update of Ship Systems: PLEASE Revert this change (with example)

[Noble713]

Ok, I'm still playing my first LeGuin game, currently in the 2400s. My expansion was more or less hemmed in, so I decided to build up and assault the Holy Guardian FE near me, and take all their Gaia worlds. Reconnaissance indicated this was probably the strongest of the FEs, so I really needed to min/max for this fight. I decided to field a large number of "glass cannon" naked Arc Emitter Battleships. I wanted to put the maximum amount of shield/armor bypassing damage in the field, and with the longest range. I was able to destroy most of this 1st FE by going WAY over Fleet Cap, spending a bunch of rare resources on ship-buffing Edicts, taking the Ascension Perk, etc.... but I suffered a lot of casualties and now I need to rebuild my navy. This is what I WANT to build:

However, this is the design I'm FORCED to build:

Do you see the difference? Because I now have ZPE Reactor tech, this ship is a whopping **20%** more expensive to manufacture, and 28% (energy) / 11% (alloys) more expensive to maintain, compared to what I need (NOTE: my original design for the 1st war had Lvl4 reactors which were also too powerful and too expensive). For NO legitimate reason and no added tactical/operational value.

Why was this change to the ship systems even made? I admittedly don't spend much time on the forums but I never noticed people demanding this as a "feature". It really hamstrings the player's ability to tailor their ship designs to efficiently fit their requirements/use cases. Another example: maybe someone wants to design slow and cheap corvettes for anti-piracy patrols: the slow speed ensures that they spend as much time in a single system as possible, lowering the Piracy Effect. You can't design such a ship anymore. It will automatically have super-fast and expensive Lvl5 engines, if you have the tech.

So, Paradox, please revert to the 2.1 "core ship systems" functionality of allowing the player to set the components as they desire, and NOT automatically forcing the highest-tech/most expensive component into the design.

 

[Slynx]

if it's true - that su…. bad.
and since there is auto-fill, auto-upgrade and auto-designs I don't see a point in removing ability to customize for those who want

 

[Xeorm]

Are you sure they're forced? I've not been forced into components. Click the component you want to change (aka the reactor) and then hit save. The design will be saved with that reactor. As soon as you click it again it'll auto-update, but the actual design won't be saved unless you hit that save button.

 

[AlanC9]

Is this a joke post? Nothing's changed about how components work. You downgrade them now exactly the way you always did.

 

[Noble713]

Are you sure they're forced? I've not been forced into components. Click the component you want to change (aka the reactor) and then hit save. The design will be saved with that reactor. As soon as you click it again it'll auto-update, but the actual design won't be saved unless you hit that save button.

Is this a joke post? Nothing's changed about how components work. You downgrade them now exactly the way you always did.

I'm waiting for a demonstration video to post to Youtube (can't upload MKV files here?)......

When you downgrade the component, you can't overwrite the design. It won't let you save. If you downgrade the component, change the class name, and hit "save".....it saves a new class but with the UPGRADED component. Even if you don't click on this newly-saved class after hitting save, and you go straight to the shipyard to queue up construction....you can see that the price is the same as the original design (in other words, not a cheaper design with downgraded components like it should be).

 

[Noble713]

Ok, see here:

 

[Xeorm]

Alright. Tried some more. The only way I could get a similar occurrence is when I added on an extra design that was identical to what I had already designed. Try this: check to see how much the un-upgraded ship costs in alloys, then check to see if the same amount is matched when building it in a shipyard. Because I'm betting the design you have saved is the version you want. But whenever you click on the design it'll have automatically selected the newest components. The design itself should be fine.

 

[AlanC9]

The reason it won't save the design with the downgraded engines is that you already have it saved. "This design already exists" means exactly what it says; the game won't let you overwrite a design with an identical design, although you can overwrite it with an upgrade or downgrade. (I have no idea why they bothered to have a check there.)

 

[Noble713]

Ahhhhh, check this out:

Yeah apparently the underlying design does in fact change but the GUI in the Ship Designs window displays the wrong components........that's a bug IMO.....

 

[Xeorm]

Ahhhhh, check this out:

Yeah apparently the underlying design does in fact change but the GUI in the Ship Designs window displays the wrong components........that's a bug IMO.....

It's not displaying the wrong components. See, the system is designed to make life easier for the usual case. Every time you click any design, it'll automatically select the most up to date piece of equipment for any slots on the right. So when you select the design, you aren't seeing the actual design - you're seeing the design after the computer tries to help you.

 

[Delthor]

This is just a visual thing. When you open a ship in the ship designer, it will always auto upgrade everything on the right. However, if you manually downgrade it and save, the saved version still uses the lower level parts.

It's pretty confusing when you're building a ship that uses lower than max level stuff and open up the design, but you can just ignore what it shows when you re-open the design. What you save is what you'll actually build. They should probably adjust it so that you get a little warning or something, rather than just silently upgrading everything on open... But for 90% of cases, this works fine.

 

[AlanC9]

It's pretty confusing when you're building a ship that uses lower than max level stuff and open up the design, but you can just ignore what it shows when you re-open the design.

Well,maybe not ignore... if you downgraded equipment last time around, you'll probably want to downgrade on this pass too.

Hey, are these glass cannon designs actually any good? I thought they went out of fashion several patches ago.

 

[Delthor]

Well,maybe not ignore... if you downgraded equipment last time around, you'll probably want to downgrade on this pass too.

Fair enough. It's more that people need to not freak out the instant something looks a bit off. If the OP had taken a deep breath and checked to see the cost of the ship in the shipyard, it wouldn't be an issue. Much of the difficulty people have with some of the new mechanics is similar. They see a yellow number or symbol and instantly try to make it go away asap like a game of whack-a-mole. Then they wonder why their economy ends up in ruins. And people were coming to the forums complaining about the day 1 no progress visual bug without even unpausing to see if it started working.

Yeah, they can definitely make improvements, but not taking the time to see what the bug actually is with a bit of poking around? Kinda silly. Also, for the record, I'm 90% sure this wasn't something that happened in Le Guin since I remember a post about this from a few weeks back, which is how I found out what was going on (I never downgrade stuff like that, though I might start doing it for piracy fleets).

 

[daisha]

This turns out even worse if your power generation tech has been outpaced by your other ship component techs. You can't, for example, forgo jumpdrives in favor of hyperdrive III to get your energy usage under budget.

 

[Noble713]

It's not displaying the wrong components. See, the system is designed to make life easier for the usual case. Every time you click any design, it'll automatically select the most up to date piece of equipment for any slots on the right. So when you select the design, you aren't seeing the actual design - you're seeing the design after the computer tries to help you.

But there is nothing to indicate that's what the game is doing: displaying its prediction of what you might want, rather than what you currently have. When I click on a list of my ship designs, I wanna see......a list of my ship designs. The game isn't helping me because, as I've demonstrated, the game's understanding of what I might want is completely erroneous (no surprise there).

Well,maybe not ignore... if you downgraded equipment last time around, you'll probably want to downgrade on this pass too.

Hey, are these glass cannon designs actually any good? I thought they went out of fashion several patches ago.

The AI had 3x 96K fleet power fleets, each 4x Battlecruiser and....~18?x Escort. My entire offensive navy was <100k total (about 40 battleships, including some older kinetic artillery/mega cannon designs). I lost almost no battleships as long as I had 60+ torpedo corvettes to draw the FE fleet's fire at short range. The battle reports indicated that almost all of the Hull damage I was inflicting was from the arc emitters, and I was winning battles with ~15-20 corvette losses per battle. As my corvette casualties mounted and my ~20 point defense destroyers also died, that's when I finally started losing battleships (while attacking both a damaged FE fleet AND one of their Citadels with a bunch of defense stations). But so many arc emitters doing an alpha strike causes an FE Battlecruiser to either wink out of existence or withdraw as soon as your BBs fire their opening salvo, and that's a huge drop in their damage output very quickly. Because I've now found PD destroyers to have pretty much NO survivability, I'm mixing in a few arc emitter/PD/hangar BBs, so my battleline has an organic and survivable capability to stop all those damn torpedoes. I need to downgrade these, and pull the fighters out as a cost-saving measure too:

 

[Noble713]

Fair enough. It's more that people need to not freak out the instant something looks a bit off. If the OP had taken a deep breath and checked to see the cost of the ship in the shipyard, it wouldn't be an issue.

At no point does the game communicate that the design being pushed to the shipyard is different than the design I'm staring at in the ship designer, especially when a review of the interface shows every single "auto-upgrade/refit/design/etc." button unchecked. I've been playing the game since Day 1, regularly fielding obsolete tech in my ships, and this is the first time I've encountered such an unclear communication of information in this window.

 

[Badesumofu]

The ship designer UI has worked this way for quite a long time. When you open a design it auto-fills better stuff to make it quicker to upgrade designs. It is not in any sense preventing you from using older tech.

It's been like this since about 2.0 (I think). I find it saves me a lot of time and is more or less intuitive. I say more or less because the first time I saw it I was confused for about half a second until I realised what it was doing and then thought 'okay, that is quite useful'.

 

[AlanC9]

At no point does the game communicate that the design being pushed to the shipyard is different than the design I'm staring at in the ship designer, especially when a review of the interface shows every single "auto-upgrade/refit/design/etc." button unchecked.

Doesn't the save button tell you that? If the save button isn't greyed out, then the design you're looking at is a change.

I suppose it's possible to be confused by a greyed-out save button,because that can result from two different cases. Either the design already exists, or the design is impossible because it doesn't have enough power. Although the latter case also shows red numbers for available power.

Edit: I guess that's why they have the check to make sure that the design doesn't already exist -- otherwise the save button wouldn't tell you anything.

 

[Retry]

But there is nothing to indicate that's what the game is doing: displaying its prediction of what you might want, rather than what you currently have. When I click on a list of my ship designs, I wanna see......a list of my ship designs. The game isn't helping me because, as I've demonstrated, the game's understanding of what I might want is completely erroneous (no surprise there).



The AI had 3x 96K fleet power fleets, each 4x Battlecruiser and....~18?x Escort. My entire offensive navy was <100k total (about 40 battleships, including some older kinetic artillery/mega cannon designs). I lost almost no battleships as long as I had 60+ torpedo corvettes to draw the FE fleet's fire at short range. The battle reports indicated that almost all of the Hull damage I was inflicting was from the arc emitters, and I was winning battles with ~15-20 corvette losses per battle. As my corvette casualties mounted and my ~20 point defense destroyers also died, that's when I finally started losing battleships (while attacking both a damaged FE fleet AND one of their Citadels with a bunch of defense stations). But so many arc emitters doing an alpha strike causes an FE Battlecruiser to either wink out of existence or withdraw as soon as your BBs fire their opening salvo, and that's a huge drop in their damage output very quickly. Because I've now found PD destroyers to have pretty much NO survivability, I'm mixing in a few arc emitter/PD/hangar BBs, so my battleline has an organic and survivable capability to stop all those damn torpedoes. I need to downgrade these, and pull the fighters out as a cost-saving measure too:
View attachment 433734

Any particular reason why you're literally basically naked and not using Crystal Plating?

Are you strapped for strategic resources? Crystal Infused/Forged Plating gives extra hull for only a cost in crystals: No alloy cost. According to the recently-updated wiki, if you used 4 of the Infused Platings in the spare slots, you'd get +2640 hull points (6440, ~69% increase) for 4 crystals per BB.

If you used all Forged Platings you'd have +6600 hull points (10400, +173%) and just under 8 Crystals per boat. Unless you're running a deficit or spamming the crystal edicts, you could manage the ~400 crystals you'd need for 50 BB hulls pretty easy, and it's way cheaper than the alloy cost of the high-tier shields and armors. (1 alloy needs 2 minerals, 1 synthetic strat resource needs 5 IIRC. Large T5 armor costs 88 alloys, ~176 mineral equivalence, while Forged Plating would only cost only what, 6.5 minerals equivalent? It'd help them be more likely to retreat instead of being insta-gibbed too.

 

[Noble713]

Any particular reason why you're literally basically naked and not using Crystal Plating?

I haven't had a single space encounter with the correct aliens for that to be an option (sadly). I should go looking for some, especially since one of the FEs has Awakened. Anything that boosts hull points is worth it, IMO. Thanks.

Also, if this UI change was made around 2.0/2.1....I think I was playing ST: New Horizons almost exclusively at that time, and the component and playstyle differences vs vanilla may be why I never noticed it before 2.2.