I think I read elsewhere that one of the story point uses next release is to cleanly disengage from an encounter that is normally impossible to retreat from.
Oh, I've really only read one of the blog posts and it wasn't that one, sorry for not checking that before posting, that seems like it will pretty much completely fix the issue. In fact that's a really cool mechanic overall!
There's actually something fairly similar in already! If you destroy enough enemy ships and then retreat, you'll be able to disengage cleanly - the progress towards for this shows in the upper right of the screen during combat. So while it's not strictly "sacrificing" ships, it's a high-risk rearguard action that needs to do enough to disrupt the enemy and prevent them from pursuing. So: a different implementation of the same concept, I'd say.
Edit: which, right, doesn't really cover a case where you're very drastically outmatched - but, as Megas said, there'll indeed be a story point option that covers *that*.
That's true but I usually screw up on the retreat part although that is likely due to my love of using the chunky ships. One must pay the price for thiccness I suppose lol.
... thinking about it a bit more, you can do the same sort of thing by trying to escape, can't you? Setting up a rearguard of ships will let other ships escape much more easily, and "how many ships it takes to do that" doesn't have to be an arbitrary calculation, since they just have to do the job in combat.
You're right, while most of the times I tried doing that my civilian ships got destroyed by some flanking frigates in hindsight I should probably have assigned at least a destroyer or cruiser to escort the civilian ships.
You could also tie this into the use of Story Points in a future release. If you have cargo/fuel haulers, and you have available story points, you have a new menu option in the pre-conflict dialogue that would let you leave your cargo/fuel haulers behind and let the fleet escape without going into battle mode. This would resolve the conflict via menu and remove fuel/cargo ships from your fleet.
That would help balancing the story point mechanic I think.
Another thought I had on this was if you go into battle with Fuel haulers, you could make fuel haulers have a larger damage radius when they explode. Fuel is already used for orbital bombardment, why not ticking time bombs during battle?
Outnumbered? Last ditch effort, send your fuel haulers into the middle of their fleet! Enemy will think twice before popping one in the middle of their group.
That would be very fun indeed. Imagine doing that against a station, yeet a prometheus into the station while your ships cover it as it's being delivered, sounds very much like a luddic path "strategy" lol. Dunno about balance though.
Overall I'd say the story point mechanic basically fixes this and I do need to git gud at retreating battles, sorry for not reading the blog post before posting here and thank you all for the replies.
PS: Sorry if my formatting is bad, I don't use forums a lot.
