I just got cruisers so I designed a normal fighting cruiser and then a variation cruiser that's a carrier cruiser, it has 3 fighter bays and not much else for weaponry. I have another destroyer variation I use for system defense in the traditional destroyer role. They can defend themselves pretty well against most space critters and they carry extra scanning equipment. I'm using destroyers in the exploration ship role and that's working well. Instead I just designed the private ships to be able to defend themselves or run away fast. I dumped the escort and frigate designs altogether because I'm not using those classes for escort missions. It takes a lot of time but boy it's sure fun being able to design your own ships because you can try out some crazy stuff.
It works great, but it means every time I get enough new tech, I have to go in and update all those designs. So I spent hours tweaking and redoing all the designs for these ships. I finally decided to just go ahead and bite the micromanagement bullet and turned on manual updating for most of the state and private ship designs. That means the AI will leave that ship alone and you'll have to make any future upgrades yourself, but custom designs are worth the extra time to maintain.
Sepiche wrote:You can leave on the general design automation, but to change to hydrogen: edit the design to what you want, then on the design screen click on Automatic under the upgrade column for that ship.