While the combat parts of battle remain good, I feel the engage and pursuit/retreat scenarios have gotten a bit stale by themselves.
To spice things up, I propose three-ish new scenarios: breakthrough/intercept, double breakthrough, and raid/defense.
TL;DR: civvy ships are no longer safe. Yours or theirs
Pre-Combat Dialogs:But first, how to get to these scenarios. The first dialog options for a fleet encounter would show “Open a Comm Link”, etc. A new section of dialog would inform you whether the enemy is engaging aggressively, defensively, or disengaging. Your options would be the following, depending on the enemy’s stance: “Break Through” or “Pursue”; “Engage”, “Intercept”, or “Harass”; and “Disengage” or “Leave”.
This would allow for all the options we currently have and the new ones I propose.
If the result is a double breakthrough or breakthrough/intercept scenario, a ship picker dialog opens so you can pick which ships to commit. It also shows which ships the enemy fleet is committing. The AI can change its lineup in response to which ships you have selected.
A ship that is committed to a breakthrough or intercept scenario loses one deployment’s worth of CR even if it is never deployed. In addition, ships the with the “Civilian-grade Hull” hullmod and ships that are mothballed or otherwise too low on CR cannot be committed to a breakthrough/intercept.
The dialog finally moves on to the “Transfer Command”, etc. section as it is now.
Breakthrough/Intercept Scenarios:Double breakthrough is like a normal engage scenario, except both fleets can try to “break through”: to escape some or all of their ships across the enemy fleet’s side. Ships can still retreat off their own fleet’s side as normal.
In a breakthrough/intercept scenario, the attacking fleet tries to breakthrough as above. The defending fleet has the advantage, however, since they are allowed to deploy frigates at the sides of the map, like in a pursuit scenario.
Ships that break through can be used in a follow up raid/defense scenario. They retain their current peak time remaining and CR in the raid scenario – it’s one deployment, which also means they only pay the CR cost for deploying once. This will encourage attacking ships to actually break through instead of trying to wipe out the other fleet.
Raid/Defense Scenarios:TL;DR: civvy ships get autodeployed so watch out
In the raid/defense scenario, up to half the deployment points available are reserved for the defending fleet’s civilian and mothballed ships. The rest of the points are distributed as normal.
The attacking fleet can deploy ships that broke through in the breakthrough scenario, and, from those, they can deploy frigates at the sides of the map like in a pursuit scenario. Attacking ships can retreat by escaping off their own side of the map. Maybe they can retreat off the sides of the map in addition to (or instead of) their main side.
The defending fleet starts stationary about a quarter or fifth of the map away from their own side. If the player is defending, then ships the player chooses to deploy start in front, and the automatically deployed civilian ships start behind. The AI probably always deploys as many combat ships in front as possible. Ships deployed after the initial deployment burn in from off map as usual.
The automatic deployment system will trickle in more civilian ships from the defending fleet’s side as reserved points are freed by civilian ships escaping or being destroyed. In addition, the defending fleet can deploy extra civilian ships using the non-reserved deployment points they get, if they so choose.
The defending fleet doesn’t have to kill or drive off all the attacking ships to win. They can escape the raid by retreating across the attacking fleet’s side.
Miscellanea:If both sides break through the other, I recommend forcing the player to pick which raid battle they personally command, if they choose one at all. The other battle is auto-resolved conservatively.
You get at least partial salvage (booty, yar) for any ships you destroy while breaking through or raiding, even if you retreat back to the campaign map afterwards. You get full salvage if you win, of course.
Spoiler
Sorry for the length, tried to shorten it as much as I could.
Revised: 8/19/2017