Large Fleets

[Baron Munchausen]

Combat improvements needed:

1) Some sort of "initiative/impulse" system to prevent the huge imbalances of "I go You go" combat. This could also be used to give smaller ships some advantages in combat so they are actually worth building in the late game.

2) Seperate settings for automated movement/fire-control so you can use partial automation and still control one aspect or another of your fleet manually.

3) Much more flexible fleet/formation/squadron controls. Either have definable 'squadrons' with seperately definable orders as others have mentioned, or expand formations to be vastly more flexible with some sort of 'script' language. More basic strategies are needed as well, of course. Also, some sort of 'macro' storage would be useful. If you want your 20 missile ships to move closer to a planet, fire, and move away in a single turn you have to manually click on 20 ships and repeat this 20 times! It would be so much easier to click a "define macro" button and 'teach' the ship its macro, then click it and touch a hot-key after that.

4) Speaking of individual ship controls, the control panel is inadequate. If you have a planet with dozens of WPs, or satellite group of 20 or 30 sats, you can have 100+ weapons to control on a single panel. What if you want to fire only a few of them at several targets? You have to click ALL of them off by hand! Argh! Why can't there be a single "global toggle" button that flips all weapons to 'selected' or 'not-selected'??? You could turn them all off with one click and then re-select only what you need. And there also ought to be a display of your multiplex ability and how many targets this ship/unit stack has fired on so far this combat round.




[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 15 October 2001).]

[Instar]

Well, if you made a giant formation, then when it tries to turn around, they spend forever going to the other end of the line... that really should be changed, so a fleet simply changes the order of ships to maintain the best most efficient movement style.

[capnq]

quote:

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It would be nice if each race had their own formations.txt data file.

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That seems terribly redundant. There simply aren't that many useful formations; there would be very little variance from race to race.

------------------
Cap'n Q
My first mod! Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[CW]

For my fleets, especially the 200 ships ones, the only useful formation that I've found is Wall, but I only use it to define my ships' starting positions. When the fight begins my ships are told to break formation and follow their own orders.


[This message has been edited by CW (edited 16 October 2001).]

[Commander G2]

Ships milling around doing nothing? I have never seen that happen when playing strategically with large formations. The AI usually plops the extras out as clumps out on the wings. For warp point battles, they are just a big blob in the center. I have been at war in a PBW game with another player who typically has much large fleets than me, I can say for a fact that when he has 60 armed ships they are all doing something. Otherwise, my smaller superior ships would be cleaning his clock every time. You must be refering to tactical combat for moving them.

I do agree that independentaly orderd squadrons within a fleet would be great. It would be nice to have missle ships that hang back and beams that close to either point blank, short, or optimal. Then I would also want a squadron of boarding ships that would target the 'biggest' enemy ships. As it stands today, you can only orchestrate separate orders on defense as an attacker cannot make multiple fleets conduct their movement simultaneously to resolve at the same time.

[Testosteronos]

quote:

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Originally posted by Commander G2:
Ships milling around doing nothing? I have never seen that happen when playing strategically with large formations. The AI usually plops the extras out as clumps out on the wings. For warp point battles, they are just a big blob in the center. I have been at war in a PBW game with another player who typically has much large fleets than me, I can say for a fact that when he has 60 armed ships they are all doing something. Otherwise, my smaller superior ships would be cleaning his clock every time. You must be refering to tactical combat for moving them.

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I didn't say they do nothing. There is only this "big blob" you described. The ships in the back just do nothing meaningful because they get no chance to get to the front!(and that, of course, because there's no formation who can handle large fleets effectivly)

[capnq]

quote:

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Ships milling around doing nothing? I have never seen that happen when playing strategically with large formations.

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I've seen small and medium sized formations frozen in place because the leader can't figure out how to move around an obstacle. The worst I've ever seen was an incident where an intercept occurred with the fleets starting at bottom center and bottom right corner; the center fleet leader turned toward the enemy, then one entire half of the formation hung up against the edge of the map trying to wheel into position, and pretty much stayed pinned there until the other fleet closed and damaged the fleet leader enough to make it retreat rather than advance.

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Cap'n Q
My first mod! Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"