PROBLEM #1: ship style canalization. It is very limiting to have to deal with the "ship style" in the ship designer. I don't know about other players, but I never paid attention to this before, and now my designs are spread over different "ship styles" that have nothing to do with what I was doing. I would use one ship style one day, another the next. I just made ships. So now, I go to design a ship, and it gives me a list of a SUBSET of the hulls I have designed, based on (I assume) the ship style I was using when I designed them. What if I was using a non-standard ship style? Do those ships just never show up?
WHY THIS IS BAD: Some of us don't play by the rules. Some of us have user-designed ship styles. Some of us just want to have the flexibility to mix and match. I suspect only newbies and casual players pay attention to ship style when designing ships.
SOLUTION: Can we please just have an "ALL" function that permits us to use ALL ship designs at once?
PROBLEM #2: starbases, shipyards, and the perpetual hull size issue. Some of us designed ships under the "wrong" hull size. Specifically, we didn't have the option to design starbases before, so most of us put them under "cargo" hulls. Now we can't make these into starbases because they aren't considered starbases in the fleet designer.
WHY THIS IS BAD: Lots of us have old starbase designs, or "oops" designs in the wrong category, that we can't use now.
SOLUTION: Could we please have an option that says "ignore hull size?" If we checked this option, it would allow us to use ANY design for ANY ship ANYWHERE. Thus, my "Large Firggle Frangle" could be used at a "Tiny Guardian" or a "Shipyard" with no harm done.
PROBLEM #3" blueprints and the fleet designer. Not all ship blueprints are in the Fleet Designer. The drone designs are not in there. I hear other blueprints, like the mixed-weapon blueprints, aren't either. I haven't checked myself, I gave up at the drones...
WHY THIS IS BAD: Obviously, we would like to make a complete fleet. What is the point of going into huge detail designing a coordinated fleet of perfectly spherical ships, then the drones look like little Terran fighters?
SOLUTION: Would you please put all of the blueprints in the fleet designer?
Please address these issues. Until that is done, much of the previous work that has gone into ship designing, etc. has been wasted. The ship- and fleet designers will be, in my humble opinion, of limited value and will not be major selling points of the expansion. I would really like to change my reviews of this game to reflect the addition of these wonderful, long-needed capabilities, but the point of GalCiv is to provide UNLIMITED possibilities, not to canalize players into preset "ship styles," and certainly not to limit options. Right now, these are sapping some of the fun from my favorite game.
Thank you!
