I did your homework - Fleet designer implementation

[Bertie87]

Not sure why this is not in, should not be much harder than mentioned rally points. How this should work:

- Player clicks button "create fleet"
- Player optionally can input fleet name
- A window similar spaceport ship building opens
- Player queue ships to setup fleet composition
- Then player clicks button "select rally point for fleet" or "set base planet for fleet". To make this easier new ship type might be introduced "Fleet beacon" which automatically created at choosen planet and does not do anything except serving as mobile rally point, it does not participate in battles, cant scout, has no sensor range, does not take space in naval capacity, instantly get destroyed if appear alone outside empire borders but it is just optional
- click finish

For this to work a new mineral pool is introduced "Defence budget". Player assign minerals to this pool the same way as it done in sector manager. After this all unused spaceports(in sectors or not) begin queue ships(from bigger ships to smaller) for the fleet using minerals from the pool and send the finished ships to selected rally point or planet.

 

[Merak]

good idea but "should" be Easy to implement" is often harder to implement then we think.

 

[Wizzington]

It may surprise you to learn that the most time consuming part of a feature is not writing a forum post about it.

 

[Skaaros]

It may surprise you to learn that the most time consuming part of a feature is not writing a forum post about it.

Still it is a good idea

 

[Haldan]

ayy

 

[Wizzington]

Still it is a good idea

It is a good idea, but it would mean several other good ideas would not make it into Heinlein. I chose to downprioritize a fleet designer and implement rally points instead so that we'd have time for other things. It's something we can come back to later.

 

[Tim_Ward]

Problem with fleet templates is which space ports to use for which ships. You'd need a whole new UI for it, and if you're doing that you might as well use it for building ships on an ad hoc basis as well

 

[grandad1982]

@Wiz would it be possible to implement the same feature as in eu4 where you can order new ships from the fleet screen by pressing on the little + button? I appreciate you don't have time for it now but maybe in the future?

EDIT: as soon as i wrote this I realised that with many different variants of the same hull this probably can't work!

 

[HP Delron]

@Wiz would it be possible to implement the same feature as in eu4 where you can order new ships from the fleet screen by pressing on the little + button? I appreciate you don't have time for it now but maybe in the future?

EDIT: as soon as i wrote this I realised that with many different variants of the same hull this probably can't work!

You could do it pretty easily when selecting an actual fleet, since it lists every ship in the fleet you could just "+" on a ship of any class to order another one of those. Though honestly these kind of super-convenience niceties. Ship ordering is at worst somewhat inefficient, hardly a huge pain point. I can see why they wouldn't want to allocate a ton of resources to really push improvements in this area, it just really is not the weakest part of the game not by a long shot.

 

[PAwleus]

I don't think the main reason for fleet templates is convenience for players. Having fleet templates it's much easier, I think, for devs to expand on such things as fleet formations and fleet strategies and these could make a huge difference for players. Even now a player with a lot of effort could build some different formations based on wedge and form different fleet strategies depending eg. on how he approaches the enemy (whether he points the peak of wedge to the enemy or the side of it may change the outcome of a battle) but it's all very primitive especially in comparison with such games as Space Empires 5.