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.

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.