You can do that the other way around. Make the relevant ships a priority and the fleets won't use the blueprints you don't want.That does not work. I can have Atlas and Prometheus not prioritized and my patrols insist on including them. Also, I want my battlestaions to use Tachyon Lances, but even if Tachyon Lance is the only one that has priority, my stations still insist on Autopulse if I learned the high-tech pack, ignoring my priority settings.
you actually can't inverse-ban blueprints if it's the only blueprints that fits a niche that the AI considers mandatory. Only capital ship you've got is a civilian capital ship? Say hello to your new civilian-only patrol fleetsThis is why we need a ban feature that effectively forgets a blueprint. As posted above, if player bans everything to try to break the game, then ignore it. Otherwise, honor it and do not use that ship (because we pretend we do not have the blueprint for it) and use only those that are not banned. Tri-Tachyon bans Gremlins from their fleets (with frequency modifier of zero).
<e>
<st>gremlin</st>
<fp>0.0</fp>
</e>
<hullFrequency cl="l-h-m" z="1788">
<e>
<st>gremlin</st>
<fp>0.0</fp>
</e>
</hullFrequency>Then there's the edge case of banning every hulls belonging to a role and there's no fallback anymore...
As a player who want to rely on faction fleets more during battle this would be the most desired option.This is for your NPC fleets, against other NPC fleets. Those fights are usually auto-resolved and loadout does not matter too much.
Not even asking for ship/fleet templates, just this option would help to keep production clearer.
For the window to list what roles each ship can fill so that it can be known which combat hauler or battlecarrier count as what would be desirable.
Guess more personalised options would be considered too strong in the hands of the player, however such an option may hopefully be available in the future, meaning i'll finally be able to fulfil my dream of Xyphos only battlecarriers and full ion/pd artillery overtaking the sector by having the enemy die of old age.
Player can sort of know what roles the ships are by using the filters, and knowing what ships fleets tend to use. It gets problematic for few ships that qualify for multiple roles, like Gemini. (Gemini qualifies as freighter and carrier. I would like Gemini as a freighter, but I do not want my war fleets to use Gemini.)Agreeing with all of your points.
The current priority system is usable, but hideously arcane and user-unfriendly. A blacklist or ban flag would be useful.
Also, it would be nice if priorities can be separated between battlestations and ships. (Outfitting a battlestation like a ship would be even better, but that is wishful thinking.) There are weapons I want on the battlestation that I would not want on ships. Thus, I set weapon priorities to what I want my battlestations to use because I rely on battlestations in a fight more often than random patrol fleet #N. However, it is nice to loot free weapons from your dead fleets that bravely fought off enemy raids.
Better organization on the doctrine screen would help with avoiding issues like disabling all ships of a given role. Since obviously the spawned fleets need certain groups of ships to fill given roles, showing those groups to the player in some way and telling them that a minimum of one ship from each group must be available for their settings to have any effect would avoid that problem.