Well on the other hand having your fleets go snap, crackle and pop and then disappear like everything else would be quite an underwhelming letdown. When one of your more impressive allied fleets gets into a big battle, you'd probably want to watch it anyways, yeah? For battles that are more ones-sided you'd still autoresolve.
Seems like a real missed opportunity to not allow the player to see these fleets engage in real battle, again, if they choose to.
Yes, what you say is true, for a small segment of players who are trying to get optimized results in their games. Very likely, those guys will save-reload to get a result. However, you have to balance that with the joy that the average player will have just watching his faction's ships at work. Also, don't forget that being able to watch the battle grants the player a LOT of important information about how to improve their fleet.
In this case, I think the pros outweigh the cons, Alex. Please reconsider this. Thanks!
I feel like being able to join the battle alongside your allies is about as far as this should go. Being able to remotely watch battles your faction fleets are involved in raises the question of why you couldn't participate in it; I'd like to keep the feeling of the player being in a specific place, rather than entirely omniscient. In addition, ship AI is designed with one ship being piloted by the player in mind, so "you can watch AI vs AI battles" is not a feature I want to explicitly push. That's not an experience the game is made for.
Finally, this is very much something that affects most players, not just a small subset that really want to optimize. How much it affects any given player is going to be variable, but the rules of a game naturally shape the way the game is played. Putting in rules that encourage one thing and then expecting the player to do something else that's actually fun is bad design, period; thinking that this only affects the hyper-optimizer style of player is imo a fallacy. It's a pretty well known fact that given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out. (I'm not saying that there's nothing like that already in the game or that its design is perfect, but those are things to fix, not add more of.)
So, for several reasons, I strongly feel this would be a bad idea. Apologies!
Would be cool to watch a "simulated" fleet go against a "simulated" enemy. A "run in Simulator" button by the "Typical Heavy Patrol" thing would be very cool. Doesn't let you change the outcome of anything, but does let you test your theoretical AI fleet against an AI enemy and see how they preform.
Hmm, yeah. I'd been half thinking about that already; mostly it's just a pain (i.e. could be time-consuming) to implement. But something like "your flagship plus the sample fleet, vs the simulator" could be fun.
On a separate note about blueprint groups, now that you have an easy way of grouping which factions use which equipment, I'd like to point out something I've noticed in my multiple playthroughs over the years. In all this time, despite the steady increase of new factions, I've always felt there were only three "real" factions in the game: Tri-Tachyon, Hegemony and Independent.
The reason is actually quite simple: each of these three factions have a faction-unique technology tier. Pirates are a weak fourth, if you count damaged tech as a "tier". All the other factions seem like a slapdash hybrid of these three(four) factions.
I'm not suggesting that you create a tech tier for each new faction, but there are certainly some ways to improve uniqueness and faction identity. And now that there are blueprints that group technologies together, it opens the door for a logically consistent way to differentiate factions, and give each one something iconic, in the same way that the Paragon is iconic of TT, and the Onslaught is iconic of Hegemony.
A lot of blueprint groups can be common to multiple factions, for instance, a low-tech frigate and destroyer blueprint group can be shared across all the factions which use them as their workhorses. But you could also add a single rarer blueprint for the same faction with a ship that ONLY that faction uses, whatever kind of ship it may be. In fact, it need not even be a ship. It could be a weapon, or a hull-mod (although this is less visible in combat).
Therefore, with the addition of only a few new ship/weapon blueprints that are unique to each faction, you could give combat against each faction a very unique identity and feeling.
Hmm, I see what you mean. But if one faction was the only one that (say) had access to the Apogee - it wouldn't even be guaranteed to show up in every fleet, right? The Onslaught/Paragon stand out because they're the pinnacle of power and so they matter because they *will* show up in the most powerful fleets and will matter there. Smaller ships seem unlikely to have the same impact unless they're prevalent. Still, it won't hurt, and it's more or less how I'm going about things in revamping what blueprints are available to what factions. If the Apogee was the main Persean League cruiser, that might be enough to help them stand out a bit more.
I'm also hopeful that the doctrine settings will help differentiate the factions more. For example, if the Hegemony and the Luddic Church have access to mostly the same kinds of ships, but the Church favors larger numbers of smaller and lower-quality ships, with a higher proportion of carriers, that should be very distinct despite them potentially sharing most of the hulls.
Also: this is a small thing, but I think "low-quality ships" will feel a lot more distinct in the next release, because the orangy-red bars that show the number of d-mods are now shown in more places. In particular in the fleet tooltip, the interaction dialog, and in the combat map, so it'll be extremely visually apparent.
Nice upcoming features. I'm still not that excited about being a leader of a faction despite spending time in SS with Nexerlin. But, however; the idea of having a small quiet faction of my own just so I have a hideout, a vault, an auto-factory and a storage all-in-one and have it highly guarded seems worth the effort and then some.
*thumbs up* I'm personally partial to the idea of having my own hideout somewhere, and being able to crank out some equipment there really makes it feel more useful, doesn't it?