Ideas for More goodies

[Taqwus]

A tougher addition -- more adaptive unit strategies.

A problem right now is that a ship can only have one strategy, chosen before battle, such as "Optimum Firing Range". Depending on circumstances, this strategy may be completely futile -- perhaps the ship's weapons are too short-ranged or too weak to hurt another ship, in which case it is better to either a) ram, or b) run.

For instance, a small fleet of 3 high-tech, well-armed cruisers may be best off using OFR against a large number of low-tech beamers, especially with regen-shields and a mobility advantage. But, the same cruisers may be vulnerable to a large number of missile ships -- getting close to a pack of 25 CSM-V cruisers may be a lot deadlier than to 100 Anti-Proton cruisers.

Implementation, of course, might be devilishly difficult. One might perhaps define an ordered list of conditionals (e.g. "Fails to damage enemy vessel in first ## of turns", "Enemy vessels fail to damage me in first ## of turns", "Ship has sustained ##% damage") which, if triggered, lead to alternate strategies (e.g. in the first case, switch to a Don't Get Hurt strategy, or perhaps Kamikaze; in the second case, perhaps an 'Aggressive' strategy striving for Point-Blank; the third may lead to a Maximum Firing Range strategy).


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Fionn]

I'd love to see fleet strategy scripting. It'd be a tricky feature to add but being able to constuct a library of self-scripted strategies to use alongside the standards like "Optimum Firing Range" would be a marvelous way to really get inside and personalize the way the fleets act even when using one of the auto-resolved combat options.

It'd also be a first, unless you count Origin's Omega from the '80s . . . and I think I'm the only one who actually played that one.