[Fyron]

Emperor's Child said:[
Is there a way to pre-load the standard designs into the AI file and guarantee they will not be changed during game play?

You could create the empire files yourself, then create the designs manually for each race. Then, you can load each AI empire you want in your new game and set it to AI control. After you start the game, you can go in and disable the design minister for every AI empire. This will prevent the AI from making any new designs. However, it is not a practical idea for anything but high tech start games. Letting the AI rely on the design creation file is much easier, since you do not have to manually create a few hundred designs for each race...

You can set the AI tags mentioned by Douglas as must have abilities, which would prevent the AI from designing the ship unless it can add some weapons of each class to the design.