AI ship design should be removed entirely and just use ships from a bank of designs.

[roachbeef]

They are being used as an excuse to prevent players from having more freedom in creating more historically accurate ships. No direct editing of armor schemes, huge limitation in barbette points (not even talking about placing barbettes at bow or stern—just want more barbette points), no more exotic armor schemes (like some RN cruisers). 

 

Leaving aside whether that excuse is believable, I would rather have a more in-depth ship designer and hardcoded AI designs (or which just use player submissions) rather than have to deal with the current system. It is not like the AI designs halfway decent ships in the current system anyways. Quite the opposite—they build ships no sane navy would have chosen at any point in time (although the designers themselves and some of the officers had a loose definition of sanity). Maybe the AI should not be given that freedom in the first place if the devs have no confidence in giving them options?

[Cptbarney]

If that means we get to use the modular system, then im for it as then we can design some really unique stuff.

Also having a ship library that you can add to with your own or other player designs would be excellent as well.

Armour schemes doe is more just the lack of features currently present, but hopefully that will get solved later on.

[Cpt.Hissy]

I was already thinking in this direction... had following idea:

AI is way too dumb to handle free generation of ships anyway. Thus, it should not do it.

At first, code in a set of historical ship layouts and make AI use those, just swapping modules as needed (this is already partially done, they definitely use predefined archetypes, AI just dorks them heavily all the time. Isn't it strange that it started to make so many all-forward designs with new patch?)). These presets should be loosely tied to ship classes, nations and years, and some other variables (like of what can go where and what should not), so that they could be used for similar ships of other classes, by other nations in similar situation etc., and hopefully be less derpy.

Later as game develops and gets played more, it should record player made designs alongside with data about where and how these were created, and reuse them for AI later alongside with initial presets.

For this to work, game should "spy" after players, keeping records of certain data generated during playthrough. Ideally, there should be a global database that can be accessed by all clients to add to, or borrow from, new data.

With this, editor can be freed of hardpoints, instead of that AI will be given the position data of various parts tied to presets (they have coordinates internally anyway, with or without visible hardpoints) and use that as hardpoints for it. It should be allowed slight adjustments in position and should attempt to use them for balancing offsets or increasing firing arcs.

Edited December 7, 2020 by Cpt.Hissy

[Faolind]

That would be significantly less interesting, no thank you.

I love fighting random designs and most of their designs are not "bad" and some are "good"
They produce a nice spread of designs, just like humans tend to do.

Further, I don't like the combative attitude expressed in OP.

[Dan Dare]

I do strongly support the idea of a bank of desings, really i hate some dumb compute-desing ships, they are inmersion breakers...for example the diferent sizes of funnels, incredible...diference on diameter is understandable, but hight?, well some British BC's  and someothers destroyers had the foremost funnel higher than the others but who on hell will put the largest funnel in the middle or the aftermost position???!!!, nope....

Being said that...well...somehow.. I found quite radical that "AI ship design should be removed entirely...", we need options so give me options, .... and also what i will appreciate is that auto desing is being improved or documented from real life...,come on guys chek the Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships series of books (or Jane's)...do some googling...you sure will found them...I guess they are quite cheap nowadays

I do like the game...please make me love it

 

(btw...having a point of view from the bridge wings or the weather deck on top would be much appreciated...I want to roll with my ships!!!!)

[Skeksis]

On 12/7/2020 at 10:19 PM, roachbeef said:

They are being used as an excuse to prevent players from having more freedom in creating more historically accurate ships. No direct editing of armor schemes, huge limitation in barbette points (not even talking about placing barbettes at bow or stern—just want more barbette points), no more exotic armor schemes (like some RN cruisers). 

 

Leaving aside whether that excuse is believable, I would rather have a more in-depth ship designer and hardcoded AI designs (or which just use player submissions) rather than have to deal with the current system. It is not like the AI designs halfway decent ships in the current system anyways. Quite the opposite—they build ships no sane navy would have chosen at any point in time (although the designers themselves and some of the officers had a loose definition of sanity). Maybe the AI should not be given that freedom in the first place if the devs have no confidence in giving them options?

I disagree entirely. Except recently all alpha's so far have been successful with AI designs, right from alpha 1. And they do have a number of named ships too.

They could have rolled back to alpha 8 and worked fixes on 9 but I think their choice to push forwards into the next update will benefit us more, better to flush out all bugs in this update and push fixes onto 10 and then for us we get to have the fixes plus any new content in 10. Our feedback on this update advances the next and that leads into advancing the whole game forwards.

They will get AI designs working successfully again, no need to bail on it yet.

Edited December 10, 2020 by Skeksis