[Here is the issue]
In very rare cases (meaning "I have been trying for weeks now to catch this bug in suitable save games for you guys"), ships with special skins (e.g., ships from QUE barter missions or captured/boarded ships) revert to the player's default skin.
- I only observe this after having changed the equipment of a ship in an Equipment Dock. Obviously w/o touching Paint Modifications. I cannot say for sure if this also applies to Wharfs/Shipyards, since I rarely use them for this task.
- I also assume it is related to giving equipment orders to multiple ships at once, since it "feels" like I only observe it in these cases.
- This even seems to happen if you add multiple ships for equipment changes at once but then treat them as individual tasks and not as a batch-task (e.g., every ship treated one-by-one in the list, instead of using the batch task 2x Nova Sentinel).
Unfortunately, I did not catch a save game directly before giving "change equipment" orders, but I can provide one where two identical ships have just finished their change equipment task and are now sitting in the MIN Teladi Equipment Dock in Bright Promise; (JDM-268) in my game. These are both QUE barter mission rewards: two Nova Sentinels (EPP-492 and CMU-196) which both had the QUE livery "Cold Metal" before the change equipment task.
Since my memory is still fresh, I can say that I selected both ships in the map interface, right-clicked the Equipment dock, and selected Upgrade/Repair. In the Upgrade-Interface — in an effort to avoid what nonetheless happened — I intentionally did not use the batch task (2x Nova Sentinel), but selected each Nova one after the other and slightly adjusted the equipment to my liking.
The astonishing final result: One ship came out as expected with changed equipment and the paint job "Cold Metal" untouched. The second Nova (in this case "Cold Steel #01 - Nova SE (EPP-492)") came out with changed equipment but defaulted back to my empire default skin.
You can see in the save game that the box to NOT change the paint mod when the default skin is changed is still ticked (and was before the change equipment task). I also assure you that I did not fiddle with default skins for the past few days in this playthrough. I am sorry that I cannot provide a more clear and straightforward analysis/savegame, but my hope is this might still give you a chance to look into this. I will continue trying to get a better savegame in the meantime.
[Link to save:] https://limewire.com/d/osFjn#xMosAmUUN2
Again, I would like to make a case to re-evaluate how skins are handled in-game and if there is not a better way to tie paint jobs to ships directly so they can be "refunded" upon an unintentional paintjob change, thus avoiding these issues. This may also allow players to change default skins/unlocked faction skins (rep 27+) on a per-ship level w/o a workaround.
