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[xenoargh]

Just some little stuff that hasn't gotten fixed since last I was here.

1.  Please add a UI element that sets autoTurnMode to TRUE.  Most players probably don't even know that feature exists, and it's really really nice.  I haven't experienced any bugs with it, so I'm not sure why it's not available to Average Joe yet.

2.  If there's anything that I get tired of having to do over and over again, it's giving the same orders to the same fleet elements every battle when I'm in one of the plateau points in the game.  As smart as the individual ship AI is (and yeah, the new fighter AI is very nice, props), ships left on their own aren't exactly using sound tactics at a unit level, so I keep having to do lots of manual hand-holding.  While it's fun playing around with the orders and finagling stuff, when you've done it 20 times it starts getting old.

So, I thought up a relatively-simple idea for this.  Grab a group, hit a button, and:

1.  If the group has a Carrier or Civilian ship, then all the ships would be set to defend it, automatically.
2.  If the group does not have a Carrier or Civilian, then the biggest vessel gets guarded.

I was thinking that the Order could be called "Group Guard" as that would describe the behavior pretty accurately.

While I'm on that subject, I feel like Carriers / Civilians are still getting too close to the action, and should try to keep farther away from combat ships... like, at least farther away than the nearest 5 enemy's non-missile weapons (to cover all the wonderful mod weirdness).

3.  Can we have a callout or some sort of event that happens at the end of battles between two fleets?  That's one of those relatively-minor things that can be used to do some pretty amazing stuff.  I don't know what all has been done modding-wise since I got busy with some other things for a bit, haven't had time, but it looks like it's apparently still impossible to directly access battle results.  Given that engine definitely has an event there, can't we get a callout where we can do things, like change the rewards players are given, chances of capturing ships, diplomatic events, that kind of thing?  Seems like that's the way to go.  I get the impression that various stuff's been tried with this area, given the current focus on the blog; as suggestion, open this area up to the modders and let a million monkeys take a whack at those problems; I feel like this is an area best left to experimentation on a broad scale, as practically everything we think about balance will shift pretty dramatically when the campaign exists


Anyhow, those are my thoughts about the state of play atm; looks like the big bells and whistles (animated add-ons and stuff) are in the game, I'm looking forward to testing them out at some point and playing out the campaign

[Gothars]

2.  If there's anything that I get tired of having to do over and over again, it's giving the same orders to the same fleet elements every battle when I'm in one of the plateau points in the game.  As smart as the individual ship AI is (and yeah, the new fighter AI is very nice, props), ships left on their own aren't exactly using sound tactics at a unit level, so I keep having to do lots of manual hand-holding.  While it's fun playing around with the orders and finagling stuff, when you've done it 20 times it starts getting old.

So, I thought up a relatively-simple idea for this.  Grab a group, hit a button, and:

1.  If the group has a Carrier or Civilian ship, then all the ships would be set to defend it, automatically.
2.  If the group does not have a Carrier or Civilian, then the biggest vessel gets guarded.

I was thinking that the Order could be called "Group Guard" as that would describe the behavior pretty accurately.

While I'm on that subject, I feel like Carriers / Civilians are still getting too close to the action, and should try to keep farther away from combat ships... like, at least farther away than the nearest 5 enemy's non-missile weapons (to cover all the wonderful mod weirdness).

You can select a group and just click on the ship you want protected, two steps. I don't see the advantage in a keypress.

[xenoargh]

Just would save time and fiddly-ness; because we can't control the layout of the incoming fleet, I often find myself having to sit there shift-clicking on fighters, etc.  I just find myself wanting some easier way to issue the same boring commands at the start of play; once we're past the opening, it's no longer boring, but having to set up openings over and over again gets dull, fast.

Another way to address it would be to simply put more space between the fighters, frigates and everything else, I suppose, so it wasn't quite so fiddly and was literally easier to drag and grab.  That would have implications in terms of tactical response, though.


Oh, and... this is probably the controversial one:

4.  Why is Manuevering Jets on a timer?  It works better as a toggled System that costs some Hard Flux to use.  Having to continually remember to hit the System key when it ran out was a real drag.

[Gothars]

Maybe you don't know that you can assign numbers to groups now. Select a group, hit ctrl+1 (etc). If you hit the number they will be selected and can be assigned with a click, no fiddling necessary.

In general I think the initial phase of an engagement should be less repetitive in the next version. Your fleet composition should be different each time, depending on the enemy.

4.  Why is Manuevering Jets on a timer?  It works better as a toggled System that costs some Hard Flux to use.  Having to continually remember to hit the System key when it ran out was a real drag.

The purpose of the jets is not to improve your overall speed but your agility for certain maneuvers. That they are useful to get faster across the map is a (imo undesirable) side effect that should mitigated, rather than emphasized. That will actually happen in the next version, coasting will be changed.

[Thaago]

3.  Can we have a callout or some sort of event that happens at the end of battles between two fleets?  That's one of those relatively-minor things that can be used to do some pretty amazing stuff.  I don't know what all has been done modding-wise since I got busy with some other things for a bit, haven't had time, but it looks like it's apparently still impossible to directly access battle results.  Given that engine definitely has an event there, can't we get a callout where we can do things, like change the rewards players are given, chances of capturing ships, diplomatic events, that kind of thing?  Seems like that's the way to go.  I get the impression that various stuff's been tried with this area, given the current focus on the blog; as suggestion, open this area up to the modders and let a million monkeys take a whack at those problems; I feel like this is an area best left to experimentation on a broad scale, as practically everything we think about balance will shift pretty dramatically when the campaign exists Smiley

I very much support this - it would make a whole bunch of modding things easier. I wrote a little script that checks what fleets the player has destroyed, but its both clunky and gets false positives in some situations.