This has been one of my most anticipated elements of the new game. At this point, I'm mostly concerned that I'm going to spend more time building ships than I will playing the game. I spent hours doing exactly that when I was a kid. The chance to do it again, with the pretty 3D graphics for the resulting shootouts, instead of my imagination, is something I'm really looking forward to.
One question, although I think there's only one logical answer: I assume the cosmetic aspects of the design won't influence it's combat effectiveness? For instance, on your Shining Knight, would it be just as effective with those two missile launchers if they were mounted on the wings, or aft-facing? In other words, is it possible to make a certain technology "less effective" by putting it on a badly-designed ship?
Yea the design itself visually makes no difference. It's just eye candy.
So someone not into the ship design can literally in seconds zip through and just double click on the weapons, engines, defenses, life support, etc. and the game will automatically try to place them in reasonable places.
But I can honestly say, even having played the game over and over and over, that I almost always sit down and spend a lot of time designing ships.
For example:
You can't really tell from the screenshot but I probably spent 30 minutes making this ship. It's a HUGE ship. And using the middle mouse button you can rotate it around.
But in battle, the only things that matter are those stats.
However, the weapons do fire from where you placed them:
As for Kobra's question on AI cheating:
At most levels the AI is penalized. But at "intelligent" they are playing their best game with the same resources. You can set them players to above intelligent and at that point they get free money so that people who are really good at these games continue to be challenged.
That said, the AI will be regularly updated at least for the first year, probably more (We updated the original for 2 years). Even since we went to manufacturing, I've updated the AI. When I play the game, I'm playing in the debugger so when I think of a new trick or strategy or see some weakness, I can put it in.