So, I am currently playing a game where I am a large empire in a large federation that is effectively under siege by the rest of the galaxy near constantly. Over the past 40 ingame years I've been in situations where I've been in 4 simultaneous wars at once (over which I have very little control because I am literally never the "main defender", so I just have to ride each of them out). One of the enemies is a another federation that is flying around a fed fleet stack of 200k + another 100k of supporting fleets. I think I've easily built, lost and rebuilt 500k+ worth of fleets just in the last ingame decade, I've got something like 20 spaceports working constantly to replenish the cannon fodder, mineral income in the thousands and all energy being sold for more minerals to keep the war effort going. I've built a sensor array and I can see the AI doing much the same really, since it's also losing fleets in the tens of Ks. It's a trench war out there and it's not pretty.
Things that i would not be able to live without at this point:
1. Rally points. It still gets difficult when I need to replenish 2 fleets at the same time, but reinforcements arriving automatically at the front and merging right into a fleet that simply cannot be left sitting in a base even for a single month is a life saver.
2. Changes to core system limit mechanics. I'm running 12 core systems, each with several planets in it (one a ring world literally only for the purpose of 4 spaceports in one system), replacing losses requires me to constantly do math in my head to split up the work evenly between all the spaceports.
These two things are great, but at this point I spend more time paused than unpaused dealing with constantly replenishing the fleet orders. If we had a fleet planner that:
1. We could set specific ship design numbers per fleet that the planner then queues up at spaceports,
2. Allowed us to select the spaceports that we want to be used for building fleets (this way we can control the resource drain from war to an extent, if the planner always queues up only one unit at a time),
3. Allowed us to set priorities on which ship types will be built first, and
4. Would automatically prefer to use spaceports specialised towards certain ship classes to build those ship classes (e.g. spaceports with a corvette module but no other ship type modules would build only corvettes, spaceports with all modules would queue up any type, if demand was low then spaceports with fleet academy + engineering bay would queue up ships first, etc.)
...then the game would be one step closer to total perfection.
Please devs?
Things that i would not be able to live without at this point:
1. Rally points. It still gets difficult when I need to replenish 2 fleets at the same time, but reinforcements arriving automatically at the front and merging right into a fleet that simply cannot be left sitting in a base even for a single month is a life saver.
2. Changes to core system limit mechanics. I'm running 12 core systems, each with several planets in it (one a ring world literally only for the purpose of 4 spaceports in one system), replacing losses requires me to constantly do math in my head to split up the work evenly between all the spaceports.
These two things are great, but at this point I spend more time paused than unpaused dealing with constantly replenishing the fleet orders. If we had a fleet planner that:
1. We could set specific ship design numbers per fleet that the planner then queues up at spaceports,
2. Allowed us to select the spaceports that we want to be used for building fleets (this way we can control the resource drain from war to an extent, if the planner always queues up only one unit at a time),
3. Allowed us to set priorities on which ship types will be built first, and
4. Would automatically prefer to use spaceports specialised towards certain ship classes to build those ship classes (e.g. spaceports with a corvette module but no other ship type modules would build only corvettes, spaceports with all modules would queue up any type, if demand was low then spaceports with fleet academy + engineering bay would queue up ships first, etc.)
...then the game would be one step closer to total perfection.
Please devs?