I have a few suggestions for making the management of trade ships easier. First, let me say that the system is already very user-friendly. Self repairing alone saves a lot of time and micromanagement. I often leave fleets untouched for the better part of a century. Four aspects of the system could be improved IMHO.
1 - offer to automatically combine fleets protecting the same trade. Most of the work I do is trying to catch the main trade fleet when additional ships are going to join it. When I assign a second fleet to protect a trade node that already has a fleet assigned, I'd like a popup or a button to check "Automatically combine with other trade fleets?" If I say yes, then the first time this fleet and the other one protecting the same node are in the same sea zone, group them up into one fleet.
2 - I'd like to see trade fleets temporarily dump badly damaged ships rather than lock the whole fleet. Pick them up again when the main fleet gets back to the partial fleet and the latter is repaired. Or at least give me a notification option. This is especially an issue when I capture some crap Heavy Ships with my trade flotilla of awesome. A hundred undamaged state of the art trade ships sit for months while a few out of date heavies repair. If there was >50% difference between the least damaged and the most damaged, or >75%, split the fleet. This could use a variation on the routines that accomplish #1, where the repairing fleet would be given orders to join up automatically with the main fleet when it hits 100%.
3 - Please give a "dock up in wartime" option. For trade fleets, some need to be protected in wartime, I'd like to check a box to automatically dock for the duration, and return to patrol after the war is over. I often forget to do both. This could be an option for all patrolling fleets, since some pirate-hunters aren't up to the task of fighting real enemies.
4 - automate upgrading ship types. No, I don't mean give me a discount for scuttling hundred year old hulks. I'd like to upgrade ships in a trade fleet to the newest model, designate ports along the trade route to build the ships, and have them autobuild like those event ships that come at a discount (or the one crappy ship that comes at a huge premium). When the fleet is in the adjacent sea zone, the new ships go out to meet it and the old ones are disbanded. This might seem too complicated to be worth the effort, but the AI does something similar for its own fleets, just let me borrow whatever that mechanism is to save me the trouble of rebuilding my trade fleet five times every game.
Failing #4, two options would get most of what I want. First, let us separate obsolete ships of a certain type (alt- or control- or shift- click on the ship icon the way we do now to separate all of a ship class)(if there's old and really old, the first split gets anything not top of the line, and each successive split would remove progressively older types). Second, a rally point would be good, and it would be great if the "point" could be a specific trade fleet. Then I trash the old ships, build new ones manually, but they rally to the new fleet without me having to order twenty or fifty ships and try to catch a moving trade fleet to combine them (Q "Wouldn't it be easier if you weren't so concerned about not missing one months trade power" A "quiet, you").
No, I'm not lazy. I just want the computer to do things for me so I don't have to do them myself.
1 - offer to automatically combine fleets protecting the same trade. Most of the work I do is trying to catch the main trade fleet when additional ships are going to join it. When I assign a second fleet to protect a trade node that already has a fleet assigned, I'd like a popup or a button to check "Automatically combine with other trade fleets?" If I say yes, then the first time this fleet and the other one protecting the same node are in the same sea zone, group them up into one fleet.
2 - I'd like to see trade fleets temporarily dump badly damaged ships rather than lock the whole fleet. Pick them up again when the main fleet gets back to the partial fleet and the latter is repaired. Or at least give me a notification option. This is especially an issue when I capture some crap Heavy Ships with my trade flotilla of awesome. A hundred undamaged state of the art trade ships sit for months while a few out of date heavies repair. If there was >50% difference between the least damaged and the most damaged, or >75%, split the fleet. This could use a variation on the routines that accomplish #1, where the repairing fleet would be given orders to join up automatically with the main fleet when it hits 100%.
3 - Please give a "dock up in wartime" option. For trade fleets, some need to be protected in wartime, I'd like to check a box to automatically dock for the duration, and return to patrol after the war is over. I often forget to do both. This could be an option for all patrolling fleets, since some pirate-hunters aren't up to the task of fighting real enemies.
4 - automate upgrading ship types. No, I don't mean give me a discount for scuttling hundred year old hulks. I'd like to upgrade ships in a trade fleet to the newest model, designate ports along the trade route to build the ships, and have them autobuild like those event ships that come at a discount (or the one crappy ship that comes at a huge premium). When the fleet is in the adjacent sea zone, the new ships go out to meet it and the old ones are disbanded. This might seem too complicated to be worth the effort, but the AI does something similar for its own fleets, just let me borrow whatever that mechanism is to save me the trouble of rebuilding my trade fleet five times every game.
Failing #4, two options would get most of what I want. First, let us separate obsolete ships of a certain type (alt- or control- or shift- click on the ship icon the way we do now to separate all of a ship class)(if there's old and really old, the first split gets anything not top of the line, and each successive split would remove progressively older types). Second, a rally point would be good, and it would be great if the "point" could be a specific trade fleet. Then I trash the old ships, build new ones manually, but they rally to the new fleet without me having to order twenty or fifty ships and try to catch a moving trade fleet to combine them (Q "Wouldn't it be easier if you weren't so concerned about not missing one months trade power" A "quiet, you").
No, I'm not lazy. I just want the computer to do things for me so I don't have to do them myself.
