Wow so this still isn't fixed? I assume they just do not know how or it is hardware specific related?

I just dont understand how the main thing that sets this game apart from other "4x" space sims is the customization of ships and races and then the battles that you can get immersed in.

Noticed that even this latest expansion the battle viewer and weapon fx are still on year 2002 levels. Along with if you make a race and make a ship set with custom ships they all still fire red dots at each other the player stuff works fine but AI does not work... Very disappointing that these "expansions" are not really improving the game in that aspect.  The game really needs a true freshen up at this point. New FX new(deeper) tech tree fix the red ball problem. I still do not understand why we do not have a 5ish dollar DLC that adds onto the tech tree with better assets and fx, everyone would buy that, every galciv game does not need the exact same weapons and shittier fx. Modding can only take it so far and all the other issues make the 100s of hours modding seem worthless. 

I keep buying the game to support in hopes that they can have the funds to actually take galciv3 into being a true 2017 now to 2018 game but instead we keep getting meh dlc branded as expansions. 

just stinks

I've posted about this on the discord a while ago. I get around it by not building from default ship listings, and just equipping my ships manually. I prefer this, because the default designs pretty much never meet my needs based from the default blueprints.

Support is going to see if they can track down your ticket for me so I can check it out, but I'm not sure what you mean by this.

This is what I see:

Can you show me, or link a save so I can checkout the issue you are experiencing?

Also, as a reminder, please create topics like this in the support forum.

So basicly, if you use non default shipstyles/shipsets (through xml like GRM) all the pre generated ships will fail to have any weapon GFX and will default to a "red kinetic blast" effect. IF you create a new design/loadout and place a weapon on the ship, this does not happen and we get the correct GFX.  So 90% of the time any AI faction that has a custom shipstyle/shipset will always have this effect when played through the battle viewer. I say 90% of the time due to the AI taking advantage ofplayer made designs/loadout that were created when said player used said faction.

I am not sure if this effects shipsets made with the ingame designer, I have never made one to see, prefer xml modding

Alright well im not sure if anyone posted the solution to this issue but after much messing around i figured out what is causing the red ball issue(for me) and there is a way to avoid/fix it though its takes a ton of work and is just really silly how this is still an issue i cannot imagine how this is not fixable on stardocks side.

Its not so much of a bug but more of how the game is programmed / byproduct of the game dealing with how to animate a weapon that is not there and seems 100% intentional as a fix for that.

Now this is not 100% accurate since my game takes 4-5 min to log in and log out on so testing every instance is tough, but it is close for me at least, either the devs know this and cannot fix it or maybe me bringing this up will allow them to roll out a fix.

The issue that i can tell is how weapons are decided when they are animated. It appears to be handled differently between ships built and saved vs templates that have weapons assigned to them in blueprints. If the template used in a blueprint does not have a weapon actually placed on it in design the game will default to the red ball because if the design does not have a way to animate the attach rather than crashing i assume this was their work around. And this worked in early galciv3 because your only real options were to #1 use all the default ships and races which all where setup to animate or #2 use your own designs that are almost always saved with weapons on them to build.

The problem came to when modders replaced the hard coded races with their own. Most of those designs where not made within the game so they all lack weapons attached to the template so even though the game assigned weapons to them in the blueprints for some reason they do not work.

So the fix is ( i am not sure if there is a better way but this works 100% for me and it is tedious as heck).  You have to change each ship one by one IN the game ship designer.

So lets for example take one of the Star Trek ship that airmaster made either off a mod or off the workshop.  Almost all his ships do not have a "weapon" component on them so when assigned either through xml or within the in game race creator you get a red dot.  So you go into the game having console up works to do this quick so you fastunlock and finish a shipyard and go into your designer. Now what you do is either find that design either within an existing design and "use design" or just by itself. Either way you strip it down completely of all its components either way you are basically have the empty ship then at that point you go to the equip and you add a weapon(s) where you want them, I just use the best beam weapon now please note it doesn't matter what weapon type you put on, if you use beam weapon for everything when the AI race makes the ship using the blueprint it will animate w/e weapon it is equipped with. 

Now the best part about doing this is the weapons will ONLY animate from the where you put that weapon. So lets say with our star trek ship we only want the ship to shoot from one spot you just put 1 beam weapon where you want it to shoot and boom no more dozens of beams shooting at once. So it is great for endgame ships where you have like 20+ doom rays and it turns into just a spray. The ship will only animate 1 laser beam for all those shots. Or you want your kinetic ship to just shoot 5-10 shots instead of 50 at end game the amount of weapons you place determine that too so less will animate less but still do same dmg.

But be careful most ships are mirrored and it will mirror the weapon placement.

Now finally you save the design as a SHIP TEMPLATE name it something that reminds you of what you want to assign it to and then save. Now boom do all the ships you want to animate how you want them and go reassign them to the blueprint or match them up in the race creator in game and now they will animate the actual equipped weapon.

So anyways that is the fix at least in game. So far i have spent days doing 100s of ships i have downloaded over the years and so far all of them work and animate when i play against them and when i use the in game blueprint ships. If would be nice if stardock would find a way around this but i assume that since blueprints do not physically put the weapons on the template in the same way us putting them on the ship in the builder it made issues for them.

I actually didn't know that would work for a template file... Thank you

But sadly it's far too assinine to do on thousands of designs lol.

Weapon components should never have been physically assigned to the model in my opinion .

But here we are.

Its not something that can be "fixed"(its not a bug to begin with)

If you dont tell the game where to animate the weapon effects from,

then how should it know?

The only thing they can do is to change that one effect depending on what weapon the ship

has.

Yeah i guess the bridge is if there is no where to animate how and where is the red ball coming from? In search of the easiest fix could it just instead of the red ball where eever it is coming from just animate the weapon type that the game internally names the ship, the game already outputs names based on beam missile and kinetic so it is possible the game knows the loadout like Corvette Destroyer Battleship etc and could animate the appropriate weapon in place of the red ball.

But anyways i am just happy i can manually make my favorite designs animate the correct stuff so i just wanted to share for anyone like me who missed the general knowledge when downloading mods and ships from the workshop. The game is much more fun when the AI is not shooting red balls at you.

Or just animate from the center of the model if missing components. It's almost like the exact placement of the weapons has almost no visible difference from that anyhow