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I slightly confused on how upgrades work. The Wiki says they cannot be retrofitted but you can have different rolls. If you go through the process of upgrading you cannot choose which roll.
The only way this would work is if the terms retrofit and upgrade do different things. Retrofit meaning you can change roll but upgrade means you can only improve (better weapons etc) the platform, thus retaining it's roll.
Currently, we don't have the option to "upgrade to new design" like we have with ships. It is a missing feature whereas defense platforms are ships technically (perhaps the interface would need a serious rework).
Likely, the system won't "upgrade to closest design" when a design is erased from the ship designer. Another yet minor missing feature.
But a platform will upgrade to it's current upgraded design whenever you hit its Upgrade button, whether the design was auto-updated by the Ship Designer (as it does with ship designs), or you manually changed it. Did you try to uncheck the auto-design box in the Ship Designer?
You can upgrade them to use the newer weapons, armour and shields.
And alter their loadout in the ship designer.
The station itself on the defence platform tab, there is an upgrade all button?
You can upgrade them to use the newer weapons, armour and shields.
And alter their loadout in the ship designer.
The station itself on the defence platform tab, there is an upgrade all button?
to change and revert a whole mixed fleet with several ship classes and several designs per ship class, and not a mono fleet, for example to fight a given Crisis or defend in a given special star system. This is not specially handy but not a chore either: it is practicable. To this intend I just double the number of ship designs in the Ship Designer and tell each group of ships in the fleet to upgrade to the most suitable design (I mean that there are one canon model and one adaptive model for each ship role).
However, I am genuinely interested to learn some practicable workaround to the current Eternal Vigilance design choice, when 1) I don't play with a single platform design in the Ship Designer (you never know), and 2) I want to actually have different types (roles) of platforms in any given system.
True, when you have several platform designs in the Ship Designer, the game knows how to update platforms each time a new tech is researched, or even, I figure without having tested thoroughly, upgrade to a new model, based on same design name.
Let's say that I want to have four defense platforms around each non choke point starbase: 2x [Short range / Point defense], 1x Hangar, 1x Long Range. That should make, and that makes prior to activating Eternal Vigilance, 6 designs in the Ship Designer, counting the pulsar versions.
Currently, as uninformed as I am, I have to:
Watch in awe at the 10 same outdated SR/Pt-Def platforms the algorithm built for me (let's say I updated techs in the meantime);
Hit the update button for two of them (same name: no problem);
Go to Ship Designer and delete or seriously alter all designs but one, and change it into an updated Hangar (eventually change the name but see below);
Return to starbase panel and hit update button on one of the clone platforms (remember which ones are to be changed, or hover over their button to get the cost of the update, or just pop up their panel to remember their current design);
Repeat steps 3 and 4 to get one Long Range platform as well;
Delete or "strip" the remaining 6 outdated clone platforms.
-> Of course, I try to do it in batches as efficiently as I can, when I have a (couple) dozen of starbases in the same case, plus a handful of starbases in pulsar systems. One useful trick is to have a first pass to strip most of the platforms from their armament. Thankfully, you get around 40% of resources back when you downgrade a platform (I tested with upgrading/downgrading 2xAA Pt-Def from T2 to T3 and back to T2: +8 alloys -3.2 alloys, but I could be wrong (although it sure wasn't a clean +8-8 = 0)).
-> It may be a false impression, but it seems to me that the system gets the "design to upgrade to" in memory longer than I'd expect, and I ended up in waiting the end of month before actually hitting the buttons after designing next wanted model.
-> I actually play with double that number of designs, so the work is double.
This is not convenient for me, because I don't want to play with but a single design (or two). How would you handle the situation in this example?
Icing on the cake: name of defense platforms won't change, be it manually or upon being upgraded to a new named design. In my example, I end with one "Defender- SRPD" of class "Sharp Claws - H" and another "Defender- SRPD" of class "Punisher - LR", but this is a lesser offense.
TL;dR Please, allow us to deal with defense platforms units and designs the same ways as with ships units and designs.
Let's say that I want to have four defense platforms around each non choke point starbase: 2x [Short range / Point defense], 1x Hangar, 1x Long Range. That should make, and that makes prior to activating Eternal Vigilance, 6 designs in the Ship Designer, counting the pulsar versions.
A workaround that would be less work for paradox and easier for a modder might just be to make a double size platform that had more weapon slots. If you could put L, Hangar, 4xP, 2xM (or something) onto a single platform that might be good enough to allow 1 design to be used almost everywhere (as long as it's not pvp or high difficulty pve).
Just stacking long ranged killing power, is generally my go to for a single universal defence platform.
2 shields and 4 armour as defence.
Will then also build the citadel itself as a close to medium fighting force or just as tanky as possible.
It's easier if you have access to the Zroni storm caster.
Just stack full armour platforms with neutron torpedoes, in a large system, the enemy might not even get into range to fire!
i never saw any need for anything more than hangarbays, but sometimes i do one torpedo module one hangarbay module on the same design. for the long range, i don't use defensive platforms, i use the XL platforms with the archeo beam. i let eternal vigilance max out the hangarbays, then i spam the XL one to top it off. i realize this is not that helpful, just my take on how to avoid some of this.
otherwise, keep in mind you CAN combine designs by using two different modules, so i suspect you can at least cut your work in half that way, the way i don't have a torpedo design and a hangarbay design when i need torpedoes, i just have a half torpedo half hangarbay design and keep it to one. you don't need to keep it to one if you don't want to, but i suspect this can help you cut your 12 designs down to 6, or 6 down to 3, and make it more manageable that way. in fact, you may be able to combine MORE than one. hangarbays and torpedoes are unique since i can put nothing else on each of the two modules, just one hangarbay module all hangarbay slots and one torpedo module all torpedo slots.
but YOUR designs sound like you could mix up the Medium or Large slots more between the different things you want to use so you COULD theoretically get even MORE efficient combination than 2 in 1 design.
Just stacking long ranged killing power, is generally my go to for a single universal defence platform.
2 shields and 4 armour as defence.
Will then also build the citadel itself as a close to medium fighting force or just as tanky as possible.
It's easier if you have access to the Zroni storm caster.
Just stack full armour platforms with neutron torpedoes, in a large system, the enemy might not even get into range to fire!
The problem seems to be that the description of the Eternal Vigilance policy quite specifically gives you *random* defense platforms, not useful ones; and you're trying to mitigate that by a complex retrofit process. If the designers had intended for you to be able to pick a specific mix or customize them, they would have designed a user interface to let you do that, and quite probably made the policy more expensive.
My general suggestion would be to have one design which is your general-purpose / defense in bulk build, probably one hangar and either one small or one PD. Leave this one enabled all the time with auto-upgrade enabled, and let the computer build those. When you want something else, pause the game, create a design, queue them up for manual construction as needed, and then remove the design before the computer build queue ticks around.
The related option is that EV only builds up to 50% cap. Have a generic build which you're OK with being 50% of the cap (presumably again 1 hangar, 1 something), and build your more specialized platforms only on the stations you actually care about and are filling out to 100% of cap (again, deleting the designs before the computer gets their hands on them).
Like most things in Stellaris, if you want precision control over what you get, you have to do it yourself. Letting the computer manage or build anything results in an inefficient-at-best mess.
All in all, seems like the best is to have one standard platform for all.
Best to just focus on longest range possible without minimum range, and maximum dakka.
What if we instead just got what we've always wanted?
Defense platform "fleets".
Simply put, we should have the same system like fleets use where you can create a fleet template and then use the reinforce button to build all.
Eternal Vigilance could then instead of building random designs, only build on starbases that have a defense platform fleet, allowing more control over which starbases you want defensive platforms on, and it'd then build only the designs you chose for that fleet.
This would also eliminate the spam-click needed to fill starbases with defense platforms.
I doubt defense platforms were ever designed to come in but one single design evolving over time. That would make sense only for an AI empire, to save computing resources.
If besides turning off Eternal Vigilance, having but a single design is what the game's to offer in order to be enjoyable, then this suggests that platform management needs some rework. Again, the least to do, given that scripts would perhaps struggle to auto-manage several platform designs in various system environments (pulsars, black holes, etc), would be to allow the player to manage a starbase like any other fleet; they are already stored in memory anyway, and all subsystems seems to be there.
Then, Eternal Vigilance would bring a welcome touch of automation, and a discount on unequipped platform hulls, or on a basic and cheap, generic design (say anti-pirates), that would require player's attention to be upgraded to whatever role whim, RP or efficiency require at this location. Those who don't like micro-management during the transit time of their war fleets could always resort to current workaround, keeping with a single design in the Ship Designer, and the game would know what it means: use this chosen, optimized design instead of a generic one deemed to be refined.
Or, as Metallichydra says, allow players to set up one starbase design in the Fleet Manager (or two for pulsar systems), and add a new checkbox to a starbase panel; Eternal Vigilance would automatically apply this chosen design to any starbase (or above bastion-level, etc) those checkbox is kept checked per default.
My solution would be to just add a little check-box in the ship designer that says "Auto-construct". Then you could un-check it for the specialised platform designs that you don't want automatically built around normal starbases.
You would still have to manually design and build the specialised platforms on your 'special' starbases (neutron stars etc), but as I understand it that isn't the problem.
This isn't the most inspiring solution, but it would be the simplest. As to your current options, I think @Miuramir has it figured out as best it can be.
Like most things in Stellaris, if you want precision control over what you get, you have to do it yourself. Letting the computer manage or build anything results in an inefficient-at-best mess.
If the only benefit of the EV policy is to alleviate micromanagement by automatically building the "best" current design in the Ship Designer, or the only left one (after being first caught in surprise in my case), then yes, I accept this QoL strategy (and next time, I turn it off right from start to never enable it again).
It's only that I didn't read Devs' notes, only the Wiki page that tells
Code:
The design is picked at random from all current defense platform designs
, so I was caught off-guards, and then I fumbled by choosing the middle policy instead of shutting it down completely, so I'm stuck for ten years with it, or so, and damage is done already.
On a 20, 24 or 30 platform capacity starbase, random pick-up among 4 or 5 possible designs up to 50% capacity would have been fine, even if the set is a bit small for true statistical randomness, and I would have had room enough to rebalance the layout to my liking without virtually destroying or hand-tailoring the same clone platforms.
