DW Design Guide

A guide to designing useful ships in Distant Worlds

The ship design screen in Distant Worlds has been called everything from "basic" to "overcomplicated", regardless it is flexible and allows a huge range of roles to be created for virtually anything.

It's only real downside is that it throws a huge amount of numbers at you with virtually no indication of what they mean, how they relate to each other, or how they can be used.
Yes, it is somewhat flawed in that respect.
However, most of that information is not all that useful.

The screen

Top Left
Retrofit Stance - Tells the AI if it is allowed to refit this design by itself or not
Size - How large the current design is. You can design a ship larger than your current limit, but you won't be able to build it
Role - How the ship will behave when automated, and what kind of orders will be available to it
Stronger Opponents - How the ship will behave when fighting a ship stronger than itself
Weaker Opponents - How the ship will behave when fighting a ship weaker than itself
Invasion - When the ship will try to land troops on a planet when ordered to attack
Flee When - When the ship will try to disengage when under fire
Image Scaling - Allows you to specify how large the selected image appears in the game
Image Selection - Allows you to select how your design looks

Top Centre
Purchase Cost - How many credits you need in the treasury in order to build this design
Maint. Cost - How many credits you need to spend out of the treasury every year to support this design
Mark as Obsolete - Automatically flags this design as obsolete so the AI will not build it on it's own
Warnings - Shows any problems with the current design. Yellows are advisory and will let you proceed regardless. Reds are critcal and will stop you saving the design.

Top Right
Save/Cancel - You are smart enough to take a guess.
Energy Collection - How much energy this design produces from passive collection
Reactor Output - How much energy this design produces from burning fuel
Static Usage - How much energy this design uses just by existing
Excess Output - How much energy this design has available to run it's systems *important*
Fuel Type - Which fuel it uses
Fuel Capacity - How much fuel this design can store in it's fuel cell components
Energy Storage - How much energy this design can store in it's reactor components
x fuel per 1000 - How efficient this design is at converting fuel into energy, lower is better

Middle Left
Show Only Latest - Toggles between showing only your "best" components or everything you have access to
Component List - Shows a scrolling list of all the components you can use to build things
Component Guide - Shows the stats and resource requirements for a component

Middle Middle
Name - An imaginative name for your design
Design List - Shows a scrolling list of all the components in the current design
> / < - Allows you to add and remove the selected component 1 or 5 at a time
Summary - Shows the resource requirements for the whole design

Middle Right
Shows a small graph which tells you how much energy your design needs to achieve certain speeds. *important*
Along with it's acceleration, turn rate, and estimated maximum range.

Bottom Left
Component Display - Shows some basic stats for the currently selected component

Bottom Middle
Shows a scrolling list of all weapons fitted on this design with a small graphic displaying thier damage output over range.
Energy use per second - How much energy this design needs to fire all it's weapons at once for 1 second *important*
Weapon Summary - A basic list of summed stats

Bottom Right
A summary of the defensive capabilities of this design. *important*


Designing a Ship

First off, a lot depends of the role of the ship. Some ship roles have a requirement that you have "at least x amount of something", while others determine what kind of orders you can give them or if you can give them orders at all.

Different Types of Ship
Military Ships - Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Capital, Carrier
These are state owned ships controlled by and paid for by you.
Must have at least 1 weapon, but otherwise can be fitted with anything else.
Carriers have a +50% size bonus, but must have at least 40% of thier capacity dedicated to fighter bays.
The rest are interchangeable and be any size or have any equipment you want, even to the point of having multiple identical designs.
The only difference between them is in automated behaviour.
Escorts and Frigates tend to fly solo and either follow civilian ships or hang around mining stations.
Cruisers and Capitals tend to group into fleets and wait near a port for threats to appear.
Destroyers and Carriers will frequently do both.
They all appear on the map as upward pointing triangles.
These ships can be added to fleets without restriction.
Fleets (should any exist) appear on the map as upward pointing triangles containing the number of ships in the fleet, and will have floating text with the fleet's name next to it.

Resupply Ships
These are state owned ships controlled by and paid for by you.
They can be built up to your maximum station size but must dedicate 50% of thier capacity to cargo bays, docking bays, and fuel collectors (in any proportion).
They have NO automated behaviour and will do nothing if given to the AI.
Can be easily turned into a ghetto battleship and/or an infinite range scout.
Is the only type of ship which can refuel itself from gas stored in it's cargo bays.
Must be deployed in order to collect fuel or refuel other ships.
Can only be deployed at a planet, moon, asteroid, star, or nebula cloud.
Does NOT need to be deployed on a fuel source to refuel other ships, so long as it's tanks are full it can be deployed at any object and refuel ships for as long as it's tanks have something in them.
These ships can be added to fleets, but will not be able to refuel any ship in the same fleet as itself. Better to keep these as singles or in fleets of 1 on thier own.
They appear on the map as large upward pointing triangles.

Exploration Ships
These are state owned ships controlled by and paid for by you.
When automated will head for the nearest unexplored object and scan it.
When no unexplored objects are in range they will refuel at the nearest convenient source and idle.
These ships can not be added to fleets.
They appear on the map as diamonds.

Colony Ships
These are state owned ships controlled by and paid for by you.
They have NO automated behaviour and will do nothing if given to the AI, unless you have set empire colonisation to automatic.
These ships can not be added to fleets.
They appear on the map as diamonds.

Troop Transports
These are state owned ships controlled by and paid for by you.
Must have at least 1 troop bay, but otherwise can be fitted with anything else.
When automated they try to load any available troops until full, then they idle.
These ships can be added to fleets without restriction.
They appear on the map as upward pointing triangles.

Freighters
These are private owned ships controlled by and paid for by your civilian AI.
Must have at least 1 cargo bay, and cannot have more than 1 weapon.
Cannot carry fighters.
Completely automated you can never control them, and can never be added to fleets.
They appear on the map as circles.

Passenger Ships
These are private owned ships controlled by and paid for by your civilian AI.
Must have at least 1 passenger bay, and cannot have more than 1 weapon.
Cannot carry fighters.
Completely automated you can never control them, and can never be added to fleets.
They appear on the map as circles.

Mining Ships
These are private owned ships controlled by and paid for by your civilian AI.
Must have at least 1 cargo bay, 1 mining module and cannot have more than 1 weapon.
Cannot carry fighters.
Completely automated you can never control them, and can never be added to fleets.
They appear on the map as crossed circles.

Construction Ships
These are state owned ships controlled by and paid for by you.
Must have at least 1 cargo bay, 1 docking bay, 1 of each assembler (3 total), and 1 construction bay to a total of 35% of it's used capacity, but otherwise can be fitted with anything else.
When automated will try to build mines to cover empire needs.
These ships can not be added to fleets.
They appear on the map as squares.


So let's say we're going to design a military ship.
The design requirements for this are pretty simple, you need the following at an absolute minimum:
- A command centre
- At least 1 thruster
- At least 1 turning jet
- At least 1 fuel cell
- At least 1 reactor
- At least 1 weapon of any kind
- Enough life support and habitation to support the above

That makes a pretty rubbish ship though, so you'll need to add some more things to make it useful.
More guns, shields, armour, enough engines to make it move a little quicker than a cathedral, and a hyperdrive for going further than the other end of your galactic couch.

Reactors are probably the most important part of any ship. They give power to everything else, store power and act as batteries, and determine what kind of fuel the ship will need to run.
Technically it doesn't matter which fuel type you use for what, but it makes logistics a little easier if you keep civilian and military on different types so they don't interfere with each other. And Hydrogen reactors have higher output so are better suited to military, so I try to keep civilian ships on Caslon (fisson & quantum reactors) and run military on Hydrogen (fusion & hyperfusion reactors).
Adding reactors will increase the design output, and this will be indicated in the Energy box (Top Right) as a colour highlighted number.
This is an important number as it defines how well this ship will be able to fight in general.

Weapons need energy to function at all, and thier total draw on the reactor output will be marked at the top of the Weapons box (Bottom Middle).

Shields need energy to charge themselves, and thier total draw on the reactor output is equal to the "shield recharge rate" in the Defence box (Bottom Right)

Engines need energy to move the ship, but are a special case as they can operate at 33% power with no energy so you don't have to deal with the nonsense tedium of stranded ships. (Hi Aurora!)
For design purposes we are interested in the amount of energy it takes to "sprint", as this is the type of movement which is most critical in battle.

So, regardless of whatever else we put on this ship there is one rule which you should try to follow wherever your tech limits will allow:
The sum of the following
- Weapons energy use per second
- Engine sprint energy draw
- Shield recharge rate
Should be less than or equal to the Excess Energy Output.
This will allow your ship to move into and out of combat without lowering it's fire rate or shield recharge.
It's not a 100% hard and fast rule so you can break it if you need/want to, just don't expect optimal performance if you do.


Lets say we are a Pre-Warp empire with only the most basic of tech.
You will often read about how you should always pay the pirates that come harassing you. Well here is how to see them off with a basic ship design, and why it works.

Firstly you will need a spaceport. Doesn't matter what kind, even the basic unaltered design you start the game with will do. Get that built then design this ship:

Role -		Escort
Stronger -	Standoff
Weaker -	Standoff
Invasion -	Whatever, leave it alone
Flee When -	Whatever, leave it alone
Components
Command Centre -		x1
Ion Thruster -			x8
Small Fuel Cell - 		x2
Directional Thruster -	x2
Basic Space Reactor -	x2
Hab Module -			x2
Life Support - 			x2
Seeking Missile - 		x2

This will give you a ship with a size of 124, well within our current limits.
A maximum speed of 38 which is enough to kite almost anything in this era.
And a firepower of 10 which has a range of 400, which being missiles does not lose any damage over distance. Perfect for bashing shields down.
The most important thing though is the engagment stances, both of them are set to standoff, aka "kite the hell out of all enemies".
Having both stronger and weaker set this way is referred to as "Double Standoff" and is a staple of early game ships where defences are thin or non-existant, and of dedicated artillery ships later on.
Inavsion is irrelevant as it carries no troops.
Flee setting doesn't matter as they depend on shields and armour, and this design has neither.

The engagment stances are:
Standoff -		Approach to the maximum range of the longest range weapon and try to maintain that distance
All Weapons -	Approach to the maximum range of the shortest range weapon and try to maintain that distance
Point Blank -	Approach the target as close as possible and try to maintain maximum fire rate
Evade -			Try to stay outside all weapons range of the target, but still somewhat near it.
Note: Stations are always set to point blank as movement is impossible for them, so fire rate is the only thing they care about.

Build between 3 and 5 of these things and let them hang around the port until the pirates show up.
And here is why they work.
The pirates main goal is to land troops on your planet in order to raid it, so they will head right for it. This means they get a faceful of missiles from the starport when they try, which might be enough to see off 1 or 2 ships on it's own but that's a coin toss.
This is where these little missile boats come in - they will dogpile the nearest pirate ship with missiles and force it's shields down. And pirates (like most automated ships) are cowards, because as soon as thier shields start going down they turn tail and run.
Missiles are rubbish against armour so you probably won't be able to destroy any. (Great job if you do though.)
But the extra firepower will divert the pirates from the planet, but since they won't be able to catch the little ships they will get run off one by one as their shields fall.

Note:
I have since learned that I am in fact an idiot.
While this driving off the pirates thing does work, it's kind of expensive and only really worth using for RP purposes.
I was having such an easy time because I've been using a theme that reduced all the hyper speeds, so the pirate ships were running out of fuel before arriving and literally not being able to fight.

The theme I was using is called "Lower Speed & Range", and to make it work at least somewhat sensibly you need to go into all the pirate design templates and make sure the escorts, frigates & destroyers all have at least 4, preferably 5 fuel cells.
This is an incredibly dull task, and I feel exceptionally dumb for it having taken several ~years~ to figure out this was even a problem.


Notable Quirks and Tricks

Sorting the component list in the design screen has a flaw.
You can do this by clicking on one of the headers, and it will sort all the components into order based on that.
Maybe you like that sort of thing, maybe you don't.
Just be aware that you can NOT restore the default list order again, unless you quit/close the game and restart it.
[edit]
Not 100% sure about this any more - I could swear I reset a derped list by double clicking one of the headers, but I can't remember which one.

Ships (of any kind) do not require energy collector components, but it is often beneficial to include them to cover the static usage (Top Right) in order to save fuel when not on mission.
Be aware however, that collectors only work when stationary. Perfect for stations and mining ships.
It is recommended to use them wherever possible for the fuel savings, but if you have a chromium shortage missing them out isn't going to be the end of the world.

Hyperdrives.
If you put more than one type of hyperdrive on a ship it will use the lowest initiation time of them to determine how long it takes to start a jump.
And it will use the highest speed of them to determine how fast the ship travels while jumping.
Sadly, the energy cost also picks the highest so the the "efficiency" drive is still useless.
Whether the extra space needed to both have and eat your cake is worth it is up to you.
I wouldn't bother for most things, with the exception of suppy ships fitted out for combat, or big ships with "special" weapons on them. Not only for the improved performance, but some redundancy in case it gets mauled.

Spaceports.
Ports don't need any cargo bays so long as they are built over a colony, as they will share it's (infinite) cargo space.
However, ports can and do exist away from colonies and these do need cargo bays in order to store materials.
Ports can also have mining gear, but it only works if they are at a resource location which is NOT a colony. (This is how pirate bases work fyi.)

A set of assembler components (1 each, weapons, energy and high tech) can provide enough freshly manufactured components to run 30 construction bays at full speed.
Only the largest of your spaceports will ever need more than one of each manfacturing assembler.

Mining gear can be added to resort and research bases in order to save maintenace on (yet) another mine.
Add the following:
- Mining extractors (either a mineral or gas, plus a luxury)
- Add extra cargo bays until there is at least 10
- Add extra docking bays until there is at least 3
- A commerce centre

You can build as many "Star Bases" at a planet as you like. But ONLY before a mine gets put there.
Contrast with: You can only have 1 mine at a planet. Ever.
Design a Star Base with mining gear as above and build several on a valuable resource, then build a mine to lock it down so no-one else can get it.
This gets you a huge boost to production and distribution for that resource.

Conversely, since you cannot build on a planet which already has a mine EXCEPT for defensive bases, design a defence base with mining gear and mine with impunity.
Note: You still can't built anything inside another empire's territory without permission.

Put fighter bays on every fixed structure you design.
They won't deter a dedicated attacking force, but they will make your mines and bases much less attractive for casual raiding.
Also works very well against monsters.

Put fighter bays on your construction ships, if only to distract and peck to death any monsters that would otherwise force your constructor to retreat.

Civilian ships can be fitted with long range scanners to provide almost total live scanner coverage of huge chunks of the map.
Be aware that any such ships will have a vastly reduced range due to the constant power draw of the scanner, and it is possible to bankrupt the private sector by doing this which is a really hard thing to recover from.

The huge size and energy limits of "super" weapons can be sidestepped somewhat by mounting them on a Resupply Ship.
As the RS gets a huge size bonus, you should just be able to squeeze in the weapon with enough reactors to power it, plus all the mandatory mission equipment and basic ship systems.
This is the DW equivalent of building your own Darksaber.

Another Resupply Ship quirk is that it is the only ship class which can both carry fuel in it's cargo bays AND refuel itself from that stored fuel. This gives an RS a huge range, OR a very very long loiter time.
If you put a Long Range Scanner on an RS you will have a mobile sensor platform that can stay in position for years if needed, as the constant fuel burn from the scanner is tiny compared to the huge fuel stores on even the most basic supply ship.
This same quirk allows you to use a supply ship as an infinite range scout, with you stopping to deploy and refuel the ship at suitable locations along the way.
This size bonus allows a supply ship to be decked out like a battleship or carrier long before you have the tech to do it the traditional way, and along with the long range travel ability makes a it one of the best early game counters to pirates you have. A single RS properly equipped can take on a small pirate clan by itself.

"Ghetto" Construction Ships (aka any ship fitted with construction gear which does not have that role set) have a flaw which severely limits thier utilty.
They can and will build anything normally, but any object they build at an orbiting location (planet, moon, asteroid) will when completed detatch itself from that object and stay forever motionless in space with the following consequences:
- Mines will not collect resources
- Resorts will not attract tourists
- Research bonuses will be lost
- The object they were originally built at will have the "occupied" flag set forever, and this can not be removed even by the scrapping or destruction of the structure
Basically, only use a GCS to build nebula collectors, listening posts and other stationary objects, or as a recovery platform for damaged/salvaged ships.
Only pirate empires will ever really need to worry about this.

Speaking of....
When playing a pirate empire, redesign your mining ships to remove the luxury extractors.
Luxuries do nothing for you early game, and your mining ships will frequently wander off to mine luxuries you have no use for.
You can put them back later to cover your own eventual colonies, but you NEED the focus on strategic resources early game.

Alternatively you can design a "Ghetto" Mining Ship, a military ship with a set of mining gear and cargo bays which, although useless for fighting will allow you to mine specific resources on demand.

Put Assault Pods on literally everything you design.
Not only is it very piratey, you can also get lucky and capture ships that come to harrass you.


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