A little experimentation around fleets movements on the campaign map, trying to ease the early game experience.
Maneuvering a fleet of torchships isn't mundane: make the wrong formation adjustment when changing direction and some of your ships get cooked by weapon-grade thrusters exhaust plume. While large fleets shouldn't be slowed down by their numbers, they should however be more cumbersome to fly around.
How does this translate:
- Fleets get a debuff to their acceleration the more ships they have, weighted by ships sizes.
- Ships that have the slowest burn of the fleet count double, as faster ones can leave more margin to the slower ones without holding them back.
- Emergency burn ability changes:
. dramatically reduce maneuverability,
. reduced CR impact,
. increase the speed by 4 burn levels instead of 5,
. last two days.
- Added Emergency maneuver ability:
. greatly increase acceleration,
. raise burn level by 7,
. large CR cost,
. small fuel cost,
. last only a quarter of a day.
So overall large fleets will get outmaneuvered by smaller ones even at the same burn, Emergency burn springs behaviors are less prevalent and you have more options to evade a pursuer or ambush a target. However AI fleets can't use the emergency maneuver ability yet.
It should work well with any other mods, however it require a new game and cannot be removed from an existing save.
Tell me what you think!