Why bother with manual ship design against AI?

[Zhe Toralf]

I am NOT looking for the best ship design.

Now that this is out of the way:
Hello everyone. As you may have guessed, I have asked this question before elsewhere and I have not gotten a satisfying answer yet.

Why should I bother with manual ship design when playing against the AI?

The AI is using auto generated ships, which have balanced weapons and defenses, right? That means I need balanced weapons and defenses as well. The automated ship design does that for me. What incentive do I have to do all that manually? And more importantly, would it be worth the work?

Once science gets going, you get new ship parts every few minutes. Going over the ship design every time that happens seems way to much hassle. There is already so much to keep track of. But if I forget to do that every once in a while, my ships become terribly outdated. Auto design does that for me.

Don't get me wrong, I juse specialized ships against spaceborn aliens. I just don't see how I can specialize my ships agains AI empires, when they use generalized ships as well.

 

[orc4hire]

I am NOT looking for the best ship design.

Now that this is out of the way:
Hello everyone. As you may have guessed, I have asked this question before elsewhere and I have not gotten a satisfying answer yet.

Why should I bother with manual ship design when playing against the AI?

The AI is using auto generated ships, which have balanced weapons and defenses, right? That means I need balanced weapons and defenses as well. The automated ship design does that for me. What incentive do I have to do all that manually? And more importantly, would it be worth the work?

Once science gets going, you get new ship parts every few minutes. Going over the ship design every time that happens seems way to much hassle. There is already so much to keep track of. But if I forget to do that every once in a while, my ships become terribly outdated. Auto design does that for me.

Don't get me wrong, I juse specialized ships against spaceborn aliens. I just don't see how I can specialize my ships agains AI empires, when they use generalized ships as well.

Because it's fun to design ships?

 

[RobInconformista]

I am NOT looking for the best ship design.

Now that this is out of the way:
Hello everyone. As you may have guessed, I have asked this question before elsewhere and I have not gotten a satisfying answer yet.

Why should I bother with manual ship design when playing against the AI?

The AI is using auto generated ships, which have balanced weapons and defenses, right? That means I need balanced weapons and defenses as well. The automated ship design does that for me. What incentive do I have to do all that manually? And more importantly, would it be worth the work?

Once science gets going, you get new ship parts every few minutes. Going over the ship design every time that happens seems way to much hassle. There is already so much to keep track of. But if I forget to do that every once in a while, my ships become terribly outdated. Auto design does that for me.

Don't get me wrong, I juse specialized ships against spaceborn aliens. I just don't see how I can specialize my ships agains AI empires, when they use generalized ships as well.

Mining droids, you want 100% shields and laser or missiles.
Other creatures you want hull & armour not shields.
The AI ships may use point defence on a slot on every ship, so instead of missiles use every slot for guns.
Building fleets, mixed ships are better ...
None of that can be done on auto.

Good designs will actually out punch FE ship fleets, when they appear at a small disadvantage.

 

[fourteenfour]

Because it's fun to design ships?

Damn straight. Plus all my games are effectively roleplaying my fictional empire which includes naming ship classes. I don't care if its not optimized to have a missile heavy fleet, my empire has always had missiles/drones and fighters.

I do wish when I select a missile module that it was more missile than anything else

 

[Ryika]

Ship designs from the designer are often nonsensical. It will happily combine weapons that bypass shields with weapons that do bonus damage against them and lower damage against everything else for example. It'll also slot potentially undesired utility slots instead of the ones you actually want, and the combat computer it chooses usually makes no sense. On top of all of that, it has a tendency to decide to replace the section template all the time, leading to increased upgrade costs.

Overall, your main goal is to build ship designs where all parts form a coherent package that works well, not to counter your opponents.
Counter builds are more of a side objective, and usually only really useful when you go against space monsters with fixed templates.

 

[Zhe Toralf]

Because it's fun to design ships?

Is it?
I can never tell what impact the weapons an my ship actually have. Like, how effective are those torpedos really? How often do different weapons actually hit? If you would show me two different ship designs with roughly equal dps, i could not tell you which one is better.

 

[orc4hire]

Is it?
I can never tell what impact the weapons an my ship actually have. Like, how effective are those torpedos really? How often do different weapons actually hit? If you would show me two different ship designs with roughly equal dps, i could not tell you which one is better.

I think it is. If you don't, don't do it. It's that simple, really.

 

[mial42]

Because while the auto ship designer builds balanced designs, they’re often terrible balanced designs. You want good balanced designs, not bad ones.

 

[sillyrobot]

Is it?
I can never tell what impact the weapons an my ship actually have. Like, how effective are those torpedos really? How often do different weapons actually hit? If you would show me two different ship designs with roughly equal dps, i could not tell you which one is better.

You can get a sense of how the weapons actually function in the field by reading the after-action reports of fleet engagements. It provides hit percentage and amount of damage per defence type by weapon.

 

[MK1980]

The AI is using auto generated ships, which have balanced weapons and defenses, right? That means I need balanced weapons and defenses as well. The automated ship design does that for me. What incentive do I have to do all that manually? And more importantly, would it be worth the work?

that's the part where you are wrong. neither the AI ships nor the automatic designs are balanced. they'll just slap on a random mix of the highest tech stuff they currently have. which can be as stupid as a combination of autocannons and disruptors or similar nonsense. you don't want that on your ships.

it takes like a minute or so to design a reasonable loadout for each hull size and you only revise those designs when new weapon classes are unlocked (like replacing L Plasma cannons with neuton torpedoes or similar). minor upgrades like moving from tier 2 shields to tier 3 can be handled by the auto upgrade option

 

[Dragatus]

Since we're on topic, first a bit of shameless self-promotion for my Smarter Ship Designs mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2094420716

Now with that out of the way, the problem with auto-designs in the vanilla game is that they are semi-random and often nonsensical. The key problems are:
1) It doesn't realize that guided weapons skip shields or that disruptors skip both shields and armor, leading to designs with absolutely no synergy such as mixing plasma with missiles or disruptors with autocannons.
2) It has absolutely no awareness how advanced you weapons that go in each type of slot are. Do you have Stormfire Autocannons, but your best medium weapon are Railguns? If you designed your own ships you might intentionally pick ship sections with more S slots instead of ship sections with more M slots. The auto-design on the other hand will just pick the ship section largely randomly.
3) In a small cases the ship section will be selected based on it's preference for one type of weapon (kinetic, energy, explosive, strikecraft), most notably this will affect the corvette design. But it still doesn't check what weapons you actually researched. Does the auto-designer think you should be using missiles but you kept researching lasers instead? Enjoy using Nuclear Missiles in the year 2347.
4) It will actively avoid using X sized weapons if it thinks you should have a preference for missiles. The irony is that even if you did research missiles you can't put them into any of the other battleship bow section either. Presumably that check was implemented back in the day when missiles still came in S, M, and L size and never got updated.

That said, there is some degree of sportsmanship in fighting terribly designed AI ships with your own terribly designed ships.

 

[King Harkinian]

In addition to what others have said: The AI does in fact not use auto-generated designs. The AI designs its ships differently based on its personality. Some AI types love missiles, others love energy weapons, and so on. I believe you can find the weightings for their preferences on the wiki.

 

[glee8e]

For me, it ususally to get rid of certain weapon from the autogenerated ships, including but not limited to

• strike crafts. i don't research these until very late, so please stop putting scout wings on my battleships
• missiles. same as above. I want a corvette with balanced 3S weapon slots, not a futile nuclear missile.
• PD. Just, why?

 

[LughC]

it takes like a minute or so to design a reasonable loadout for each hull size and you only revise those designs when new weapon classes are unlocked (like replacing L Plasma cannons with neuton torpedoes or similar). minor upgrades like moving from tier 2 shields to tier 3 can be handled by the auto upgrade option

You don't even have to do it that often. I only go to the ship designer when im getting ready to fight rather than constantly updating designs that never get applied.

something I haven't seen mentioned but is one of the main things I have to change from the auto design is it will almost always pick the highest tier of powerplant even if the ship needs no where near that much power. I will look at a design that has 500-600+ power just costing extra to build and upkeep for no reason.

 

[malakhglitch]

One of the biggest problems with the auto-design is that it will not use Crystal Forged Plate, which increases your hull points instead of your armor. This is particularly useful for ships fighting in Pulsars if you remove all the shields an focus on armor and hull.

 

[Dragatus]

In addition to what others have said: The AI does in fact not use auto-generated designs. The AI designs its ships differently based on its personality. Some AI types love missiles, others love energy weapons, and so on. I believe you can find the weightings for their preferences on the wiki.

The AI does use auto-generated ships. Auto-generation takes weapon preference into account. Even human empires will have an assigned AI personality, it just doesn't do much when a human is issuing commands. But one place where you can see it have an effect is auto-generated ships.

You can see that by playing certain empire types with a given weapon preference and see how your corvette designs change after you research a tech that improves them. If your empre has been assigned a personality with kinetic preference the auto-design will give you interceptor corvettes, if it's been assigned a personality with energy preferrenced you'll get PD corvette, and if you've been assigned a personality with missile preference you'll get missile boats from the auto-design.

 

[Ludaire]

Because I like customizing certain aspects of my ships. I often put regenerating hull on my corvettes once I get it, since I'm a pretty big fan of it. I like putting afterburners on battleships so they aren't quite so slow. I tend to go heavier on lasers and shields so I can get my weapon and defensive upgrades mainly from physics, freeing up more of my engineering to focus on ship types, ship type buffs, starbase levels, and economy buffs (I almost never research missiles or strike craft).

Also, like others say, playing with the ship designer is fun. In the end, if you don't find it fun or valuable, ignore it. That's why they have the auto-build. It's totally fine for you to ignore it while other people enjoy tinkering with it.

 

[Dr. B]

If designing ships manually is confusing (and it really is at first, when you dont know much about it) then do as others above has talked about, and look at the utility sections.

For example afterburners for more speed, crystal plating for extra hull, or my favourite, regenerating hull tissue for going deep into enemy territory without needing to repair as much.

The auto-designer has some weird ideas about utility slots, so they are a good place to start with experimenting.

 

[ImaTomato]

The AI is using auto generated ships, which have balanced weapons and defenses, right? That means I need balanced weapons and defenses as well. The automated ship design does that for me.

Because the autogenerated ones are terrible.

I need balanced weapons and defenses as well.

Manual ones are balanced as well....

 

[beleester]

The auto-best ships are not always balanced. If you have better lasers than kinetics, it will load your ships up with lasers, which can sometimes lead to you losing battles that seem like an even fight. They'll be balanced if your tech is balanced, but if you're deep into one side of the tech tree, or your reactor tech isn't good enough to power all your best weapons/shields, you can get some funky results.