I've been seeing some questions about some of my new features, the option to have the AI design ships for the player, and auto launch.  So I'm going to go into a little more details about these new features than the change log went into.

Auto Launch

I'll start with Auto Launch because it's the simpler feature.  We had the auto launch feature in GalCiv1 before we added rallypoints.  It does just what it says: it launches all of your ships as soon as they are built.  We didn't add this option to the interface for GC2 because we figured the rallypoints would cover this need. However, you have to actually set a rallypoint for a planet,  and sometimes that's more than you need.  Since the game automatically selects the next ship with moves left, having all your ships auto launch can be extremely useful. 

But what about when you're at war, or you're building up for war? You don't want to leave your planets undefended.  That's what the slider labeled Min Defenders In Orbit is for, it specifies the minimum number of defenders that must be in orbit before the ships are auto launched.  If the number is zero, all ships auto launch as normal.  If slider is all the way over to the right, it will only auto launch ships when the orbit is full.  However, if you switch from building war ships to constructors, it will still launch the constructors. 

Then there's the option to keep transports from launching.  That's fairly obvious; you may not want your transports to be auto launched because you may want to keep them protected in orbit until you have enough ships to send it with a fleet. 

The option to make rallypoints follow the same rules as Auto Pilot makes rallypoints check the above options before auto launching the ship.  However, if this option is ON and Auto Launch is OFF, your rallypoints won't work, which is why it automatically turns off if you turn Auto Launch off.

These options are fairly easy to implement, so it wouldn't be hard to add a few more if you guys can come up with additional options.

AI Designed Player Ships

This option is OFF by default.  It's intended for people who don't design their own ships, so if you design your own ships anyway, you probably won't find this too useful.  It can be enabled or disabled at any time in the game from the Options menu.  Currently, it is set to only update the designs every 48 turns (a game year) after the first update.  So you can manipulate this by keeping the option turned off until you have the techs that you want in your first set of designs, then turn it on and let it design ships for you.  Or you can trade for all your weapons techs in a single turn. 

When this option is on, there is a button on the Ship Yard screen labeled Focus.  If you set the sliders to 20 % Beam, 20 % Missile, and 60% Mass Driver, the AI will attempt to arm the ships it designs using those percentages.  If you don't have the techs to support this focus, it does the best that it can.  It does the same for the defense using the defense focus sliders.  If the AI can't design a better ship than its previous design, it won't save the new design.  It will also only obsolete ship designs with the same weapon focus; if you focus on Beam first and then switch to Mass Drivers, it won't obsolete your Beam ships because you may still want to use them.  This means that you may have to do a little more work to clean up your list, but it's better than putting too much in control of the AI, because then you feel like you have to fight the AI for control of your own empire.

For the actual hull, the AI uses the ship templates specified in the ship style.  I went through and changed all of the descriptions of the core templates to show which ones were designed for beam weapons, etc, to demonstrate that the first heavy fighter template is used for ships with a beam weapon focus, the second for missiles, and the third for mass drivers.  Previously, you could only change what ship style you were using if you were designing a custom opponent, but I changed it so that you can design your own ship style for your race as well now.  This will only be noticeable if you have this option on. 

We do not disable the core ships or user defined ships because the AI does not design all ship types for you, and it would cause problems for the campaign and random events to remove the core ships.  So these designs will still show up in your list unless you filter them out.  You can also obsolete ships to remove them from the list for the course of the game.

If you have any questions or suggestions about these new options, this would be a good place to post.  Bug reports on these two features can go here too.