Command and communication

[Growltigga]

Apologies in advance for a long post

Command, control and communication have always been a big strategic bugbear of mine. With apologies to Starfire for blatant plagiarism of its rules, I wonder if anyone could tell me whether the following could be modded into the game (I don't think they could):

Communication

I never liked FTL communication. I like orders. You give a ship orders, it carries on complying with those orders until it does them or is told otherwise. Orders need to be communicated from command to the ship, for example, you order a survey vessel to go off and explore system X, its meets the bug armada in the stellar depths and naturally, wants to send word back to base to marshal the troops. How does it do it? In Starfire, Messages need to be communicated back to base, how this is done and more importantly, the speed at which this is done depends on your tech level:

at the basic tech level, you have to use a ship to bring back word so inter stellar communication is as fast as your ships go

a bit further up the tech level, you get courier drones that can be fired by your ships back to base (not vice versa) so increasing speed of communications (and primarily warnings)

a bit further on, you get relay buoys so light speed communication can be sent across system.; This means you would have to place chains of buoys between your worlds and warp points in order to relay Messages across the empire

The whole point of communication is that you cannot change orders until a setof circumstances has been comminucated to you, and you have sent that message back with new orders


Command and Control

Communication is obviously crucial when you have to give your vessels orders which will be complied with until told otherwise. Orders need to come from your imperial command and communication centres (ICCN) ie facilities built on worlds to act as communication and control nexii for the empire. Therefore, using the example above, the scout would have to send word back to the nearest ICCN that the bugs were coming. Once this message was received by the ICCN, it could then order 1st strike fleet or whatever to go and attack. 1st Strike fleet would then need to wait for that order to reach it before it could move off to the fray.

The whole thing would then come down to message speed and timing which in my view would make it a much more interesting game to control

You would need to be able to enlarge the strategy section to give ships stanrd operational procedures to comply with until your new orders reached them

Just some ideas, what does everyone (anyone?) think?

[ 24 January 2002: Message edited by: Growltigga ]

[geoschmo]

These are all valid points. I'm not sure there would be any way to make this an actual part of the code for the game though. (Some kind of delay beteween when orders are given and executed?)

You could certainly set donwn some kind of "house rules" for a multiplayer game. It would have to be an honor system though. Very tough to enforce. There would be no way to make AI players comply though.

We discussed some of this in the ROLE PLAY MOD thread.

It would all depend on the level of interest and cooperation from the players in the game. But if you could get some others of like mind to you, it could certainly be done in a game.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

With improvements in the AI it would be feasible to restrict when and how you alter the orders of ships and fleets. It would be much more realistic to have ships away from bases or colonies have to follow 'scripts' of some sort to simulate the loss of communications. But right now, the available 'strategies' are much too simple to support loss of control for long.