Civilian ship purchasing criteria

[scvn2812 (OP)]

What do the civilians factor in when deciding to procure a design? I've just rolled out a new generation of designs using magneto drives instead of the old ion drives and was wondering if I could get them to adopt the new ship designs faster (and thus get them to bring warm bodies and infrastructure out to my ill advised colonies out in the galactic sticks that much quicker) by creating a 1 cargo hold tramp freighter that can be mass produced quicker than the 5 hold freighters that are currently the standard. Or do they not mind spending more for the ability to carry larger quantities.

So, I suppose the question to ponder is, are the civilians just looking for cheap cargo holds or are they savvier than that?

[Girlinhat]

I don't think they're savvy -at all-.  They'll buy an orbital habitat if you put a cargo on it...  Or similarly ludicrous things.  But they won't build obsolete ships, so you can influence their decisions by making certain ships obsolete.

[Yonder]

They will buy any non-obsolete commercial ship with a freight bay or a cryo bay, and will use the ships for those purposes, ignoring any other components on board.

[HaliRyan]

Ships with luxury passenger modules too! 

[Person012345]

The only thing I have observed them doing in my games is buying the cheapest ship they can. I don't know if that was merely luck of what they've chosen to buy so far, or something else, but if you design a small ship with those parameters, they will buy it even if you have bigger ship designs available. They may also buy the bigger ones, idk, but I do know they'll buy the smaller one.

[metalax]

If they have sufficient funds to purchase all of your applicable designs, it seems to be random as to which one they will pick.

[Thiosk]

I've noted that they tend to avoid jump-capable ships when any other option is available, and tend to go for smaller ships. Its a bit out of control and the AI needs some ability to prune old models.  Before my last game collapsed, I was having a wonderful time with the civs happily buying 700kton freighters, each with 50 cargo holds and quite a few ciws, roaring through the sky at 5000 km/s.