Is there provision in ship roles for multiple ships fulfilling a single preference? Eg, if an outpost is really short on gear and can't even field a medium combat ship, it falls back even further to a pair of frigates, for instance. Or a strike force would prefer to have several frigates and fighter wings, but has to swap in a couple of fast destroyers in a pinch.
Based on how it appears to be set up, that might already be possible; see the "1" next to combatMedium.
Based on how it appears to be set up, that might already be possible; see the "1" next to combatMedium.
I think that 1 is the "weight" of the choice, not the number
For fallbacks, there's only one option, so there's no weight needed - it is indeed a quantity. So yeah, it can work like this, except for the case where you're going from a small to a medium ship - it currently would just swap out one for one, not two for one. Might need to think about that at some point.
To help make the sector feel busy and make it feel alive, I'd like to see lots of 'individual' transport and courier style ships. People still need to travel from planet A to planet B whether on a high speed transport or a bus, and people need the stuff express delivered in un-catchable millennium falcon archetypes.
Hmm. More civilian traffic in general sounds good.
So instead of the ring of space junk, why not make a dynamic ring of civilian ships orbiting the planet and stations whos size increase and decrease depending on market stability that trade fleets emerge and vanish from and to.
Also can add a simple visual indicator of how well a planet is generally doing.
I've been thinking about adding some ships to the orbital junk (it's not strictly junk, btw - more like smaller stations, satellites, etc). It'd just take more coding than I want to devote to that right now. Having a ring of ships in orbit that represent the available ships is a *really* interesting idea, though. I'll definitely keep it in mind.
- Question about procedural vs. handcrafted: AFAIK most of the Sector is going to be procedurally generated (maybe exempt from core worlds etc.). If you say something is "handcrafted", what does that mean in this context?
Does it "just" mean that you teach the algorithm a lot of special cases? For example, an event or a (set of) market condition(s) generate a fleet profile with ship roles defined specifically for this event/condition. Or do you really mean to assemble certain fleets by hand and script their behavior? (But how would they fit into a procedural world? That would only seem to make sense for things so small or so enormous that they are independent from the state of the sector, or things coming in from the outside...)
Both/either; a special case in an algorithm or "manually" assembling a fleet is pretty much the same thing. As for being "handcrafted", as I mentioned in the post, nothing is entirely one or the other. To your example, one of the stages in a food shortage event generates a relief fleet. That's a mix of handcrafted and procedural, but it's more "handcrafted" than it would be if the event simply generated a trade fleet, renamed it, and used that instead. Or, for example, there might be a special fleet that needs to be in existence at the start of the game, and factors into the backstory.
- Something else: Can you already share anything about the way fleets with no (necessarily) clear destination behave? I.e. explorers, tech mining fleets, pirates, headhunters, freelancers, maybe patrol fleets. Do you plan on some kind of search or roaming algorithm? Or will the destination be made up (pseudo-) randomly before the fleet is even generated? Maybe with waypoints?
Generally, the approach is to generate the assignments for a fleet when the fleet is created, and the assignment involves a final step where the fleet goes somewhere and despawns.
I just recently added the ability to attach scripts to fleets (and other campaign entities), though, and that's been useful for creating a higher-level assignment AI for fleets. For example, patrols will only get an assignment to orbit their source world initially. Their script will then wait until they don't have any assignments, and will generate a new mission for them - for example, something like "patrol around comm relay for 30 days, come back and orbit for 6 days". Fleets without assignments patrol around the system they're in - this is very much an implementation detail, though. Fleets need assignments to do something meaningful, but there's no reason for them not to have assignments at all times.
- Putting fleets in orbit sounds neat, visually. What happens if it is are attacked, anything special about that? Modified CR, loot or even combat scenario? Support from the planet?
For now, same as always. Except for trade fleets not having trade goods on board until they finish loading
(Re: support from the planet: maybe later. I've been thinking about this on an off, can't wait to actually get to it.)
However, I have a kinda off-topic question: will the NPC ships' loadouts be generated in the same way as fleets? I mean, I can beat any ship with closed eyes mainly because I know all the loadouts by heart. A more or less random loadouts would bring an immense depth to combat, players will actually scan ships first to see what's going on, we will have to adapt our combat techniques to different fleets even if they belong to the same faction, etc.
I know what you mean. Dynamic loadouts are another thing I'm really looking forward to adding (or at least trying, though I suspect it'd work out nicely); probably around the time autofactories/blueprints/ship production/etc exist.
My only question is how well this works with multiple mods in play; it looks like you'd need a way to specify "Add this ship to Escort Medium with this weight", so that the final escort medium ship role is a merged conglomeration of multiple mods...
There's file merging, same as with everything else. A mod could add ships to a specific faction's role, to a default role, etc.