Fleets and Flag Ships
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Okay, after playing tonight I definitely found it to be a pain in the butt to move ships around later in the game when you have a bunch.
So here's what I was thinking:
Flag ship unit.
When you have a flag ship, you can move ships onto a flag ship and with a click combine them (and another click would uncombine them).
When you attack with the flag ship, it picks the best ship in the group for attack.
Downsides:
1) They only get as many moves as the slowest ship in the fleet.
2) On the defense side, the AI gets to choose which ship it wants to attack in the fleet OTHER than special ships (the flag ship itself, the freighter, or transport or colony ship).
Positives:
1) When you attack with a flag ship'd fleet, it picks the best unit in the group to attack. So they are quite formidable on attack.
FAQ:
No, there is no group bonus. Each ship is still treated as an individual unit.
What do you think of this solution.
Another alternative is to simply have it like it was in the OS/2 version: Put all the units on the same spot and group them together and send them to their destination. They're not combined but they fly together as a single mass while on auto pilot.
The reason why I think the flag ship method might be interesting is because in 1.x series we coudl come up with different types of flag ships that do give bonuses to fleets. They would be extraordinarily expensive and the technology would be much more expensive to acquire these better ones. But it would allow military oriented players a secondary route to take - rather than building battle ships and sendin gthem out, build fleets of fighters and battle hammers and send them out.
So here's what I was thinking:
Flag ship unit.
When you have a flag ship, you can move ships onto a flag ship and with a click combine them (and another click would uncombine them).
When you attack with the flag ship, it picks the best ship in the group for attack.
Downsides:
1) They only get as many moves as the slowest ship in the fleet.
2) On the defense side, the AI gets to choose which ship it wants to attack in the fleet OTHER than special ships (the flag ship itself, the freighter, or transport or colony ship).
Positives:
1) When you attack with a flag ship'd fleet, it picks the best unit in the group to attack. So they are quite formidable on attack.
FAQ:
No, there is no group bonus. Each ship is still treated as an individual unit.
What do you think of this solution.
Another alternative is to simply have it like it was in the OS/2 version: Put all the units on the same spot and group them together and send them to their destination. They're not combined but they fly together as a single mass while on auto pilot.
The reason why I think the flag ship method might be interesting is because in 1.x series we coudl come up with different types of flag ships that do give bonuses to fleets. They would be extraordinarily expensive and the technology would be much more expensive to acquire these better ones. But it would allow military oriented players a secondary route to take - rather than building battle ships and sendin gthem out, build fleets of fighters and battle hammers and send them out.
