Thanks, but this isn't a usable ship builder, you can't create a custom ship with a granularity of 1/2 units. In galciv3 we had an actual usable builder offering a granularity of up to about 500 units so a very custom build could be arranged, this was a major part of galciv3 and i'm stunned that it's been nerfed like this.

It seems they want to simplify it to address some concern over time expense but the obvious way to resolve that is to build a working upgrade/auto builder, the one in gc3 wasn't bad but it did leave room for improvement. That way those that don't like to fiddle around with ship configurations don't have to, and those that live for it can.

Separating the ship designer from the ship builder might be pertinent at this point, the ship designer to me covers the aesthetic builds, i never used that because it's just meaningless aesthetic, but the actual guns/engines/shields etc were the builder components that do have a huge impact on the game. Those are the bits that no longer work because the granularity is 1-8 slots where as before it was +500, so you could tessellate an extremely deliberate build for a very specific strategy.

Endless Space is pretty good for tactical design, choice of weapons or engines, long distance ship once free lanes are researched and you have a hero who can multiply them, but it's also a bit different, more prefab, scratching different itches to galciv, galciv was always a more open graph to fill with whatever joy you wanted, aesthetically ugly but also completely 100% freedom. 

If i were to simplify something in galciv, and i don't in general ever want this for any game because the concept is absurd, but if we're measuring by overproduction / complexity as a metric then i'd simplify the planet map, opt instead for the ES2 style of just letting folks drop whatever they like on a planet, you already have base resource factors, contributing planet resources and citizen training so not much need for surface configurations after all these mechanics are put together. I mean are you really NOT going to build that extractor on top of that exotic resource?  tetris/adjacency bonus configs feel more tedious/fomo than fun most the time and almost always result in having to tear everything down at some point and build it back up to support a superior civ that is no longer scrambling,  but dumbing down the ships is weird, that's how logistics and tactics are teased out in the "active layer" of the game, whereas planets are passive and for some reason have tonnes more control (the argument that planets are passive is supported by the fact that you can entirely automate them), that just seems like a recipe for a super boring game (and it is at this point it's like watching paint dry, absolute glacial pace of game, by the time a ship arrives at destination i have no idea what i sent it there for lol, i started writing down goals lol!  whereas in previous galcivs i strive to research engines and hulls to speed things up). 

I mean if somebody could explain how it makes sense I'd be welcoming to try to understand it, but nothing about reducing ship configuration diversity/complexity by reducing build weight granularity to single digits makes any sense to me for this game, it all but destroys the active layer of the game by creating a monolithic homogenous set of ships you'll endure for 300 turns+.