completely customizable? |

I know it says these ships are completely customizable, but too many times have I bought games where they say the ships are customizable, but there are only pre-made ship bases and it has a fill-in-the-blank type of interface.
My questions are simple: Can you start from scratch? Are there really limitless possibilities in ship design? Can I make a borg-cube type ship if I wanted to? Or is it a fill-in-the-blank type of interface?
For example, can I make a lego type ship and expand on it until it fills my screen?

Upgrades = More kT
Every time you upgrade a hull you get more space, up to a maximum for that ship size. For example, Cruisers starts at 550kT, but with enough research you can cram 1000kT into the same hull size.
Also, you can mod the game so that each level of a ship hull adds some amount of available tonnage, and by making the maximum level of that hull 999 or higher, you'd basically make it infinitely huge and unbeatable, but it would get pretty hard to fill up more than 10MT of hull space 
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With all these people, you would expect one of them to carry an iguana around...

Hulls
I'd like to see Hull upgrade affect the number of engines allowable... the whole automatic 12 engines deal for the fast ships is annoying, 8 at 1st upgrading/level to 12 at 5th would be nicer.
Maybe some increasing max weapon tonnage too.
I wonder if you could put a MINUS sign in the size formula?
Okay, I just checked all the components, and there aren't any formulas in any of the entries for
Tonnage Space Taken Formula
That's too bad.
Still, I wonder if this field supports formulas. For example, let's make the Rock Colony component line item say:
200 - ([%Level%] - 1) * 10
Then, I'd increase the maximum level to 20. At that ridiculously high level, I'd have a component that would easily fit on a Frigate.
Where is the number of engines stored? Is it hard-coded?
I just did a quick search through the data files. But I couldn't see where it is that they set the max number of engines per ship type. I thought it would be in 'vehiclesizes.txt'.
Is that info hard-coded?

in VehicleSizes.txt
Engines Per Move := 1
and
Requirement 5 Formula := Get_Design_Ability_Component_Count("Movement Standard") <= 12

AI Consideration for engines
Although for the AI, you'll need to edit the Script_AI_GlobalSettings.txt to change how many engines the AI will add.
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Reply
"Because from what I saw this is exactly the same as galactic civilizations II."
Nah, while GalCiv2 allows for very varied ship -look- customizing, I felt the components aspect was very limited. SEV does not limit nearly as much and I have complete control over things that can be added to the ship.
I am just disappointed over certain -forced- features like having to fill carrier with so many fighter bays, but it's only a minor thing, except colony and freighter designs there aren't really that many limits.
I'm not too worried about the looks of ships. While I'd love to visually know which of the enemy fleet have more decent components on it, it is not that much of a problem. Remember that most sci-fi shows for example have one-look-per-size type approach, which is why I'm not worried about the fact that my different carriers don't look different visually.
SEV ship design aspect, though annoying in it's mechanics, is one of the best aspects in the game in my opinion.
If it says
If it says formulas on the end it supports forumlas- the stock files just don't use them.

You can control the combats
You can control the combats but only in single player mode when you have "turn-based movement" turned on.
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Mr. Flibble says...
Game over, boys! 
Just to point out, there is
Just to point out, there is -no- dream ship. The amount of components and items required to make one ship for all purposes needs something not moon-sized, but probably Star sized ship. ANd that's quite pointless in my opinion. Game is more than about just one ship, it's about fleets. A co-working fleet however is that -ultimate ship-, any well built fleet can take out any -dream ship-.

ROFL
ROFL. Feel glad you never ran into an AI that played the way I did... you'd get chewed up but good when you ran into a dinky little empire with only a few ships... and those few ships had tech so far in advance they made your ships obsolete.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

hrm...
ROFL. Feel glad you never ran into an AI that played the way I did... you'd get chewed up but good when you ran into a dinky little empire with only a few ships... and those few ships had tech so far in advance they made your ships obsolete.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
If you're referring to the dread lords they're meant to have the best ships out there, and by "biggest cruisers" I meant the best teched up, and customized ships out there. Plus, there really isn't a way to have so far advanced tech, and a "dinky little empire" and be so far ahead of a bigger empire. (unless of course the person you played against was a complete and total fool, and took all the funding out of research).
Every human life is a spark in the darkness, it flares for a moment, catches the eye, and is gone, forever, all that remains is a retinal after-image that fades, and is forever obscured, by newer, even brighter lights.
By "dinky" I mean small in terms of ships, and smallish in terms of planets -- I generally don't have or need many ships, and I don't go conquering for new planets. I play the peacemaker, I get my bigger friends to destroy anything that threatens me (diplomacy can have... fun results when you say "destroy so-and-so, and I'll give you the tech for such-and-such".
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.




Ehhhhh....
All the ships in the SE series are basically blank templates that you can fill with whatever components you've researched, allowing for a vast diversity of different ships. You can arm your colony ships, put cloaks on your freighters and make dreadnoughts that are little more than the biggest missile in the galaxy, so in that sense, yes, the possibilities in ship design are pretty much limitless. The representation of the ship doesn't change based on what equipment is placed on it, so a repair ship based on a destroyer hull looks exactly the same as an armed destroyer.
As for borg cubes or lego ships, you could add these to the game with relative ease if you wanted to.
Suction feet are not to be trifled with!