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Suggestions / Pre-Battle Strategizing
« on: May 29, 2013, 11:07:51 AM »
As in the ability to, while travelling on the system map, give basic combat instructions to your fleet.
For instance; setting your fighters to hold position until an enemy is spotted. Or having the fleet (or a part of it) move together until an outside influence causes them to break formation. Or having ships retreat automatically if they take significant hull damage, their CR drops beyond a point, or certain vessels have been destroyed (or are in retreat).
There's an awful lot that could be done with such a system, and potential for additional depth between campaign/combat. The first example that comes to mind is better cohesion between your ships; allowing them to fulfil intended roles more reliably. Pretty much giving the AI a hand with figuring out what you want each ship to do.
For balancing reasons there should of course be a significant delay for the 'stratagy' to be propagated through your fleet's command structure, scaling with the size; letting small wolfpack fleets plan quickly while an armada would take some time to hammer out the details.
Though such a system shouldn't be able to do too much to avoid being too powerful. An example of a limiting factor could be to have 'slots' for event/action pairs (which may incidentally give a way to link it into skills by unlocking additional slots). I believe a similar-ish system is used by Dragon Age: Origins to good effect.
This is off the top of my head, apologies if it's a terrible idea or has been brought up before.
For instance; setting your fighters to hold position until an enemy is spotted. Or having the fleet (or a part of it) move together until an outside influence causes them to break formation. Or having ships retreat automatically if they take significant hull damage, their CR drops beyond a point, or certain vessels have been destroyed (or are in retreat).
There's an awful lot that could be done with such a system, and potential for additional depth between campaign/combat. The first example that comes to mind is better cohesion between your ships; allowing them to fulfil intended roles more reliably. Pretty much giving the AI a hand with figuring out what you want each ship to do.
For balancing reasons there should of course be a significant delay for the 'stratagy' to be propagated through your fleet's command structure, scaling with the size; letting small wolfpack fleets plan quickly while an armada would take some time to hammer out the details.
Though such a system shouldn't be able to do too much to avoid being too powerful. An example of a limiting factor could be to have 'slots' for event/action pairs (which may incidentally give a way to link it into skills by unlocking additional slots). I believe a similar-ish system is used by Dragon Age: Origins to good effect.
This is off the top of my head, apologies if it's a terrible idea or has been brought up before.