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Author Topic: Merge/restore CR after retreat  (Read 649 times)

Morbo513

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Merge/restore CR after retreat
« on: October 25, 2019, 01:20:37 AM »

In short, between phases of a battle the player (and enemy) would be given the opportunity to "merge" the CR of surviving ships. Handwave is that crews, munitions and supplies are re-shuffled to a few ships to keep them viable, effectively mothballing those ships that the CR is sourced from. The efficiency of these operations would be influenced by skills, officers, the presence of logistics ships and spare crew available. This would be less efficient overall during the transition between battle and disengagement attempts, as opposed to fighting another battle.

Calculating it to me seems like it'd be a pain - of course 5% of CR from a frigate would not equate to 5% CR on a cruiser. There would be a cap to how much CR can be restored too, again influenced by hull sizes, crew, skills, logistics etc.

The aim is to make CR a little more elastic, because it's often the deciding factor in whether you win or lose; Who has the most ships that outlast the oppositon. If you burn through the majority of your fleet's CR without decisively winning or at least being able to cleanly disengage, you've already lost, likely to the extent of being wiped. This would allow the player to beef back up a small handful of their ships, crash-mothballing the rest to potentially swing the battle, or at the very least restore some ships back to the point they're able to provide some cover a disengagement.

I was also thinking about the ability to restore a portion of CR to ships at an exponentially higher cost than it would take "naturally", again up to a cap. I've always looked at the retreat scenarios as the pursuing fleet catching up to the fleeing fleet after some time, some of which could reasonably be spent by both sides in patching up what little they can. 

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SCC

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Re: Merge/restore CR after retreat
« Reply #1 on: October 25, 2019, 03:18:59 AM »

It's possible to defeat stronger forces, even while facing PPT/CR concerns. You have to either corner camp for easy full retreats, pay close attention send ships to retreat manually when needed or use Automatic Orders for having the second option fully automated. That's avoiding the issue, though, with the issue being that battles are too long or PPT is too low.

Morbo513

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Re: Merge/restore CR after retreat
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2019, 05:29:11 AM »

It's possible to defeat stronger forces, even while facing PPT/CR concerns. You have to either corner camp for easy full retreats, pay close attention send ships to retreat manually when needed or use Automatic Orders for having the second option fully automated. That's avoiding the issue, though, with the issue being that battles are too long or PPT is too low.
My point is retreating currently gains you nothing. It only preserves that ship - in its current state - for the next phase of the battle, if there even is one. In reality, that time off the playing field while the rest of the battle plays out would be an opportunity to address battle-damage and fatigue on those ships to whatever degree possible.

 Maybe the suggestion could be simplified to "Retreating refunds some CR per-ship"; maybe "...dependent on time spent off-map; Full retreat  > engage restores flat 15% (or +75% of remaining?) CR for Frigates, 10% Destroyers, etc; Full retreat > disengagement battle refunds 10, 8 etc". I'd prefer if it were fully tied to the rest of the game's systems though.

But in other words, it would reward conservation of your fleet, making retreat more of a tactical decision than simply whether the ship in question is too damaged/low CR to be of any utility for the rest of this battle.
Giving Frigates a bigger bonus to restoration than other ship classes would also help alleviate how the "meta" is currently stacked against them. Assuming you have spare crew, logically it'd be a lot quicker to cycle them in and get the ship back closer to full working order than it would be for a ship requiring several hundred crew. It'd give players a much greater incentive to hold onto a few since, while they are the quickest to get picked off or forced to retreat, they're also the quickest to press back into the fight, extending frigate support beyond the first few minutes of the first phase of battle they're deployed in, without the player having to sacrifice fleet cap and supplies/month that would currently be better spent on heavier ships.
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