I'm not sure if these are useful ideas, but here goes:

• Ships (at least the larger ones) require upgraded Shipyards ... so it seems logical for ship production to be ordered in orbit at the Shipyard instead of from a factory on the planet surface.
  
  My idea is that you would actually click on a Shipyard icon to build ships; this is in addition to whatever the factories are building on the planet (which might also be small "size 0" landing-capable ships like Scouts/etc, if you like). I can understand that all those planetside factories are producing ship components to be assembled at the Shipyard, but this all-or-nothing approach seems a little oversimplified. Perhaps the factory blocks could be divided into two rows (which don't necessarily need to have equal maximum capacities) so production could be split between planet and orbit? Or perhaps just a percentage slider bar or something? Some way for the player/AI to decide how to focus the "balance" of his production efforts.
  
  Further, if a Shipyard has the capacity to handle, say, "size 3" ships then it should be able to simultaneously build one size 3 ship, or three size 1 ships, or any combination adding up to size 3. Perhaps Outposts and Starbases could add more "berths" or other capacity to the Shipyards?
  
  A player/AI would be able to more quickly produce a lot of smaller ships from a few heavily industrialized systems with big expensive shipyards - assuming of course that he has the resources. All while continuing to build useful structures on the surface, instead of having to halt all progress on everything else in the whole system for many turns until some shiny new battlecruiser rolls out of the hangar.
  
  It might be as simple to put into the GUI as just clicking on the Spacedock/Shipyard/Outpost/Starbase icon and issuing build orders, not a lot different from ordering a Transport to build an Outpost.


• A second idea is some sort of way to Refit ships. That trusty little destroyer you built 50 turns ago might have an elite crew but it's obsolete by half a century worth of tech, it has useless shields and weapons that even a minor race could blow away. Being able to order a Refit (upgrading to a current design) at a Shipyard would make it worth keeping around.
  
  (This seems to be a common theme in Star Trek, anyhow. Their ships are always reporting to a local Starbase for some kind of refit.)
  
  I'm not sure if it's already been implemented, but obviously a Refit option to upgrade Outposts and Starbases to current designs should also be implemented.

I'm also not sure how actual costs for such things would be calculated. I guess much the same way as the costs of building an Outpost/Starbase are currently calculated.

refit ships won't be implemented in the official version. maybe in a mod made by the community. What is thought about however are crew transfers once a ship gets dismantled. So an elite crew can be moved towards a newly-built ship in the system their former ship was discarded at the cost of some experience points due to newer tech and equipment they first need to get acquainted to.

separating troop, structure and ship building like in Supremacy is also not wanted in the official version and would belong to a likewise community mod. It's mostly because it shouldn't be possible in-game to build up large fleets in few turns like it would be possible then. Also large systems would be overproportionally strong and important in that case.

Ah well, not all ideas are good ones.

Another idea about ships:

An "auto" button on the design screen, which automatically selects the best weapons and shields available.

best meaning the most expensive ones?

there are many differences in weapons, e.g. the microtubes with rapid fire torpedos and different fire angles, all in combination with specific ship-type-dependant ship stats make up for a complicated definition of what's the best weapon for a ship's given weapon mount.

but with shields that would work. maybe a button to upgrade all ship classes at once additionally.

By "best" I meant

• For beam weapons:
  the maximum damage values you can get by clicking the stronger button, for every beam weapon mount.
• For missile weapons:
  the launcher type with the max firing angle, armed with the heaviest warheads available.

I realize, from looking through some of the ShipEditor data, that there are many types of weapons and they each have a variety of properties which define their base accuracy, damage, firing arc, rate of fire, etc. But (as far as I can tell) the beam weapons on a ship cannot be changed, only made weaker or stronger. Stronger (strongest) is "best". Whereas it seems that the most important quality in missile tubes is their firing angle, and the other properties (rate of fire, etc) tend to be better on the more advanced launch systems which also happen to have wider firing angles, so "best" is basically wider.

(I've noticed that "micro" launchers can still fire normal missiles; this seems to be an error/oversight because it allows large volleys of normal warheads to be rapidly fired from those fast small launchers. Once you obtain any ship design templates with micro launchers you can just equip them onto all your other ships and use your heaviest non-micro warheads.)

The "best" shields are obvious, as you've already said. This wouldn't be as straightforward if there were different types of shields which offered different protection against different weaponry ... but that's probably more complexity than is necessary in this game.

The "best" hull metal should be determined by your current tech level; ie: Titanium at tech 1, Duranium at tech 4, Iridium at tech 7. Standard or Double hull is a matter of preference and should probably be left unchanged.

Yes, "best" usually means "most expensive". I usually plan for my ships to be used for quite a while, so I almost always choose the "best" equipment I can put onto them. You get what you pay for, and besides, starships are a lot like personal computers; if you buy a high-end one now, it'll be useful a little longer before new technology makes it obsolete. The only times I'm ever concerned with cutting costs are when I build noncombat (colony, transport) ships or when I'm desperately trying to break a siege on one of my worlds by throwing guns into space as fast as I can build them.

The game currently doesn't support tactical combat, so it really seems to be all about raw numbers. Bigger numbers have a better chance of victory, and it seems like the AI currently just uses "standard" ships. My human opponents in multiplayer games tend to think like I do: I believe that paying extra to build a few ships which survive the battle is worth more than saving credits building a lot of ships which get killed. If you lose your ship, and have to replace it, then you're not really saving anything on cost - you're also losing turns to your opponents while they continue to use their ships to press their advantage.

The player can always change details manually. I was just suggesting an "auto" button so that the latest/greatest technologies could be easily applied to ship designs without a ton of clicking. Not strictly necessary, just a bit of a timesaver ... possibly also useful for the AI.

you're right, for beam weapons, it's all about the beam range so the more the better.

for torpedo weapons, although currently angles get wider with simulatenously heavier damage with higher techs, this could change respectively there could be mods where there is more discrepancy in that, e.g. maybe only the angles get wider with lower damage or vice versa. So where to make "auto-"preferences there?

actually I think the micro launcher bug is fixed already but I'm not sure, would need to check it myself. Do you have the latest Alpha 6.1 version? The site here offers only the Alpha 6 version, kind of forgot to update the download section. You can get the latest one over here: http://www.heise.de/software/download/b ... ires/72923

There is a downloadable combat simulator here where you can see a 3D ascii-style combat when setting repeat=0 in combatscript.txt : http://www.botf2.com/bote/Shared%20Docu ... ulator.zip . You can check different battles with all kinds of ships (always standard classes from shiplist.data, but you can edit them according to your needs with the ship editor when simulating a battle with upgraded hulls or something like that).

The micro-launcher bug was definitely present in my copy of Alpha 6.0 ... I'm playing Alpha 6.1 now but haven't yet had opportunity to confirm if the bug was fixed. I can report once I actually acquire some minor race ships armed with micro-tubes.

I looked at the combat simulator before. I can understand its value as a tool for testing play balance while building the major race ship templates. But, to be honest, I don't see it being a useful play aid because you can just build and deploy your ships into a battle - and save/load your game any time - so there's really no need to simulate the outcomes.

I have wondered if the abstracted battle results are calculated from the same rules (code) used in the combat simulator.

there are no abstracted battle results, all battles are carried out with the combat simulator running in the background invisibly. You can see a gif file of the graphical combat simulator here: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1731

in a nutshell, a full 3D battle is carried out when pressing autocombat in-game.

With the combat simulator you can have like 300 or 1000 battles in a few seconds and have a look at the stats so you get more information than just with load/save in-game.