Ship Design

Well... you can't really compare the two.

GalCiv designer are more for show while Stardrive is a tactical tool. In GalCiv you create actual ship models... where you place modules and weapons have no impact on the ships performance so you can just clamp equipment wherever you choose and even hide them so the don't show on the actual model if you don't like it ir just want the stats.

It is much harder to create new ship models in GalCiv and is almost it's own game within the game... or rather art  studio...

I agree that it is a bit clunky.  There are a couple of things that should be done to the designer to make it an easier tool to use.  However, I wouldn't say it was unintuitive, but rather that it tries to give you as much freedom in design as possible by giving you a blank slate.  This is in fact it's great strength that it gives you this freedom (only constrained by the limitation of parts) to create whatever you want.

However, the game is still lite on explaining how things work.  For example: the placement of ship equipment doesn't matter and in no way will impact the performance of the ship.  So weapons will fire in all direction regardless of which why you face them.

So I sort of agree on 2 out of 3, which Meat Loaf considers 'aint bad'.

I would of course welcome improvements like adding a scroll bar to the parts list on the bottom and making the controls work with keyboard, etc,etc.

Beyond this I much prefer the GCII designer over the Stardrive method. GCII makes you feel like you have created something. The Stardrive system is just plugging in various modules on a bunch of squares that might wind up looking okay but there is no design to it . It is just telling the game what you want on the ship and the game designs it.

BTW, Stardrive 2 looks like a pretty good game. It is eerily like GC  and Orion, in many ways. I may give it a try as a second choice game