[dogscoff]

What areas go into peoples selection of prefered ship sets?

For me, visuals are most important. It has to look nice, otherwise you might as well just play with the game's standard sets all the time and change the AI files.

The next most important factor is continuity. There has to be a theme linking all the images together so that they are a coherent set, but on the other hand, each ship has to be distinctive. It's a fine line to tread.

Finally, I would say originality and ideas. I'm constantly amazed and delighted by the stuff people come up with. The whole point of downloading shipsets is variety, so it's nice to see something truly unique.