As a thought experiment: how might one do this without introducing an additional control specifically to resume course?
Have the marked destination show up near the edge of the screen with one of those bubble-arrow UI thingies that indicates there's a thing off-screen that way. Then the player can just click on that to resume course.
Hmm. Gets weird when it's around the lower-left of the screen. Works in combat because the UI is set in a bit from the edges, but the campaign UI wouldn't look good if you did that. Nice idea, though - possibly a fixed button somewhere (with a shortcut) would do the job. Which is sort of the same as a dedicated control...
1. Does this mean that SS is going to stay really focused on just one Player Fleet? I'm not really seeing much there that suggested that we're going to finally see some larger-scale gameplay.
For this release, yeah. Beyond that, we'll see(tm), though if we were to have outposts, then it'd probably make sense to have more than one fleet, though how much control you have over any hypothetical extra fleets is an open question. Current answer would be "minimal".
I'm not sure how this map goes one way or the other on this - I think it's flexible enough to handle whatever is needed with a few adjustments - a new filter mode, etc.
2. Exploration sounds fun, if there's a point to it. In the current build, there largely wasn't; trade didn't work well to encourage long journeys and only Bounties got me to fly my fleet anywhere unusual. What's the sales pitch on exploration rather than sitting around? Weapons, ships or other gear we can't get otherwise or greater challenges or caches of trade goods all sound like good reasons; so would, "because you want to build your mini-empire away from the explored / occupied hub eventually". Or both, preferably. Or perhaps it's time for a long-term objective in this sandbox?
This is a great question. The reasons that you'll want to explore should ideally be many; let me list a few:
1) Getting a leg up in the early game - finding some easy salvage, etc. An easier alternative to fighting (and finding) pirates, and scaling up from there.
2) Later-game challenge, but that's all I'll say here because spoilers
3) Missions! Which would hopefully work to get you to go somewhere, and then run into interesting things to do on the way, ideally turning a "go here to finish mission" into something with a lot more branching.
There's also:
4) Finding planets for outposts
5) Finding things that improve your outposts
But as outposts aren't going to make it into this release, these are unfortunately not much of a reason. This is a bit of a problem - rather, it's just going to be a rough edge in this release. All the planet surveying stuff, and any exploration-related rewards that would tie into it, don't have a purpose just yet.
Will probably rig up some temporary stop-gap rewards to make it a tad better for now, but, yeah. The idea is that exploration eventually builds into higher-level gameplay, so *just* exploration without the higher level stuff won't be quite as appealing. Hopefully, the other reasons to explore will be sufficient for the time being.
3. I like the Burn concept, except that I don't think it'll work unless Fleet AI deals appropriately. I.E., "I'm a giant Pirate fleet currently chasing some lame AI thing, Player fleet will become intercept-able if they don't dodge within 10 seconds and can't dodge me at all in 15; time to chase Player Fleet". Right now, this mainly seems like a way to avoid having a Fast Travel system and mechanics to obviate the Boring of Travel and I think it'll be abuseable by players who figure out how to use that high speed to catch things with huge fleets, once they figure out the mechanics; I suspect long fast swings past Systems will do it pretty easily. I'm really glad that the Boring of Travel keeps getting worked on, don't get me wrong; I just want to emphasize that this is probably one of the bigger issues with Fun if the SS universe is getting vast in scale.
I get what you're saying, yeah. Will need to playtest more to see how exploitable it is, my guess is that if a fleet sees you coming and runs at *anything* other than a vector directly along your current flight path, you won't be able to engage them. Was also thinking (just yesterday, actually) about whether or not SB being on should prevent you from being able to engage for a bit, but this might not be needed. There's also potential for some anti-SB abilities (e.g. "drive interdictor", etc).
It's a question of having time to get to everything; focusing on the most important things right now - "having faster travel" is 100% necessary. The fleet AI being able to use this ability or understand how to take advantage of it, and other abilities that play around this, while potentially very interesting, is less important.