I don't like playing this kind of game as an RTS, by the way. I played almost all of SPAZ without controlling anything but my biggest ship and not giving the others orders, leaving it to the default "follow me". But let's continue this SPAZ example, there was a tough fight against a Hammerhead in the storyline missions where I used precise fleet management to pull off an otherwise impossible victory. Had I run out of command points in SPAZ on that mission it would've been the crappiest moment in the entire game and possibly disappointing enough for me to stop playing temporarily to avoid getting frustrated.
Alright, let's discuss the SPAZ gameplay. In SPAZ, you were always limited to having control of 4 ships at most (was four, right?) so, yes issuing direct orders to them and being limited would be silly, but SPAZ was also a bit more arcade-like to me. It wasn't meant to be more in-depth strategy. It was always about blowing up more and more things. Also, when you lost in SPAZ, it was repair your stuff and stuff and try again. You never really had to rebuild your fleet or you lost a world or sector that might be your economic hub of your personal empire. Like Mount&Blade, losing means rebuilding. Losing in SPAZ was like, [CONTINUES = XX] or [QUIT]. You will and should lose in Starfarer sometimes... to me that's the fun, but I know it isn't for others, so let's move on.
Also, I'm still waiting for some comments on my suggestion. I've suggested that some of the more basic orders be CP-free... say, capture, assault, defend waypoint and possibly a few others. That way you can assign basic orders while letting the AI decide in it's own fashion what ships, when, etc. because pilot personalities that Alex would like to implement will surely have a major impact here. Removing the ability for the AI to do much of anything will make that feature practically pointless. I believe the ability to give general orders is getting punished for the design of the game to stay away from sitting at the edge of the map giving direct orders constantly to each unit. By keeping CPs for direct orders, such as you specifically ordering a certain ship to a task would be fair. Think Generals in an army. They'll give orders to the next officers down in the chain of command, and then those officers to their next subordinate and so on. The Captain is rarely issuing orders to each person directly... but this can be augmented by a character stat of some kind, etc.
Let's face it, if you were a hired merc pilot protecting, say... a merchant vessel... you might listen to his orders of protecting his ship, because he's paying your bills, but when telling you how to best protect his ship, I think you'll think you know better... this is why I'm voting for finding out if Alex has tried giving more freedom in the usage of free general orders while keeping a restriction that can be augmented with future character skills on direct orders.
Mount and Blade's system is immersive because the order for one individual to attack another specific individual in a medieval 120 v 120 would be near impossible to do. I don't mind limitations, just the artificial immersion breaking ones. I wouldn't mind if Starfarer's orders were similar to Mount and Blade's but could be issued without artificial limitations. You can also verify but as far as I know, the Tactics skill in Mount and Blade is only put to use when the number of units on both sides is higher than the maximum number of units that can be in a battle at once. The mechanic was put there out of necessity to balance a particular situation where current generation hardware was unable to handle the full battle.
I agree. M&B's system would feel silly if you could give specific individual orders in a medieval setting. Yes, tactics did do that and that's what I was referring to. It's a system to allow you to get an advantage against 1000 man armies if you had 100 crack knights. Fights were easy tramping 25 enemies at a time when I could field 60 of my heavy armor cavalry. If I actually had to fight all 1000 at once, it would be a hell of a fight and with enough archers, probably lose. Also, the game engine couldn't handle that many... nor were most battlefields capable of really supporting 1000's, but that's an artificial limitation regardless if it was because of the current generation hardware or a developer's choice. Artificial limitations are a part of every game, or why can't I just conscript my entire town's population in M&B? In medieval times many armies were levied by forcing people to fight... but they didn't include it into M&B, because sometimes you just shouldn't be able to. In Starfarer, you can't issue a billion orders, because you just aren't meant to.
CPs are definitely not a necessary balance mechanic. Difficulty can easily be adjusted through other means such as a difficulty level that gives a handicap to the player or the AI, found in most games.
Also, saying that all games use a similar mechanic seems a bit hard to believe. I can't think of a single one (note that even if there's a few, that's not the same as "most games"). Quite a few games leave it up to you to have the AI cheat or not, and an even bigger proportion of games have the AI play by the same rules without giving you the option.
Yes, you're right. I don't believe CPs are a balance mechanic. In fact, I've read from Alex that it is in fact to steer players towards the type of gameplay that the AI is designed to go up against, meaning you piloting your ship and the enemy AI fighting other enemy AI without the so-called RTS style orders. So, they're a means to steer a certain type of gameplay which games often use.
I also meant all games use gaming mechanics in various ways to give an AI an advantage and my topic there was on Control Points rather than Command Points. I got sidetracked and off-topic and for that I apologize. As for saying Command Points is on par with allowing an AI to cheat... I have that hard to believe. The AI is simply using the same AI your own fleet will use sans-orders if I'm not mistaken. It may not seem that way when playing these missions, but these missions are designed to be a certain difficulty. Deploy your entire fleet in the easy missions and I think on their own they could probably do pretty well against the enemy AI... and the enemy AI may be limited by CPs as well. Only Alex could say for sure.
Anyway as I said, it's a singleplayer game. I'd like to mod CPs out or disable them or cheat to have a ton of them. Hopefully that's possible because it wouldn't affect anyone else's enjoyment of the game or their playstyle. It also wouldn't require any additional programmation (other than a checkmark button in the options that disables them). It's not like asking for an extra feature.
I don't even care if it's not an option in the vanilla game as long as it can be modded, because we all know that would be one of the first mods to come out.
Well, we all know that modding does seem to be something Alex is going to fully support and I'm sure that CPs will be found or made moddable, either by Alex or some very determined individuals... and yes, it'd probably be the first mod at this current point in the game's development, but just because it would be the first mod doesn't mean it should be a feature if it would go against what Alex is trying to present. If he feels okay with it though, he will... but, I think that's for him to decide... and right now the CPs are letting him get you to play in a style he believes is best for what he's trying to achieve, and for that none of us can fault him, no matter if we agree with him or not.