Is there a way to set a constructor (starship or regular ship) so that ships that come out will go to another planet? If so, how?
No, that's not presently a feature. A couple of other players have asked about this so far, and my response has been that the planets are just more separate than that -- think of them like islands in a multi-island terrestrial RTS game. However, this has been asked enough times that I'm rethinking my position on this, and have added this to my to-do list. However, there are certain limitations given the architecture of the game (see below), since it is really built around the concept that the planets are very separate.
If not, please add that as a request, with these considerations:
a) Which planet to go to
b) Where in that planet to go to
c) What mode (regular, attack-move, free-roam)
d) What group move (group or lone, assuming "group" is for all the ships in that constructor's queue). If not, always default to lone instead.
Being able to set a waypoint inside a planet is not something I ever plan on adding, simply because it breaks the separation of the planets model, and also would require me to pretty much recode half the command structure for the game (literally), unfortunately. The architecture prevents me from doing that, but even if it didn't that's not something I am real excited about doing just because I want this to feel like multiple separate smaller battlefields rather than one big one with a lot of choke points. These planets are lightyears apart, there should be a little bit of cost in moving from one to another.
The modes of the ships (regular, attack-move, or free-roam) can be set for ships coming out of constructors, but if ships are given a cross-planet move order then they always move in regular mode (otherwise they are unlikely to ever make it). So, only one of those can really be used at once.
Group move also isn't compatible with anything except movement orders that you give manually. If you think about it, those are the only times when there is any "group" in which to give such an order. In this example the ships are just popping out of constructors as lone units, so there's really no grouping there..
Although I certainly could destroy my 16+ constructors and move them all, I just prefer to leave them in one place and change my reinforcement point to the appropriate planet.
See, that's what I don't want people to be able to do too easily -- that makes it far too easy to defend your constructors. However, if you're okay with the limitations above, and the (potentially long) amount of time it can take reinforcements to make it to a distant front, then certainly you'll be able to play with all your constructors on one planet. But if you want them to be popping out in an appropriate mode, or at a certain location at a planet, you need front-line constructors instead.
I'm all for different playstyles, and this particular one has enough drawbacks that it doesn't make for too easy a turtle strategy, so I'm okay with the shift. I still don't think it will be the optimal approach against very high-level AIs or on large maps, but to each his or her own!
However, the real annoyance is for the Advanced Constructor (level IV) which I have to constantly check back for and tell them to go the right place every now and then.
Yep, this is the part that really convinced me. Having to babysit these is really annoying, I agree. Having the ability to at least route them to another gather point on your planets for better use will, I think, be really helpful.
I don't want to come across as a stick in the mud or resistant to new ideas with my above post, but the main reason I feel the way that I do about the separation of planets is that it increases the strategic options and the difficult choices players have to make. If it's too easy to turtle and just win from that position, then that becomes a defacto approach for a lot of people (myself included, actually -- I'm very much a turtle in most RTS games), and that just really reduces the strategic options available. While I am quite a turtle in other RTS games, in games like Chess or CivIV that don't really have such a concept, I find those to be a lot more varied and interesting.
So with AI War, I took great pains to make sure that there was no good way to play it too safe and still be completely successful. That's why the knowledge acquisition requires taking more planets, part of why the planets are so separate as they are, amongst a plethora of other design decisions in there. On the flip side, I also wanted to make it (like Chess or CivIV) comfortable enough to be stretched out like this, so that you don't get the unpleasant feeling of trying to defend forward mass extractors in SupCom, or something like that. So hence all the turrets, the tractor beams, and the gate-raids, and so on.
Everything is a balance, and letting the players protect their constructors too easily is something that can throw off that balance to a fair degree if it doesn't have a counterbalance in place (since having the AI raid and destroy front-line or near-the-front-line constructors is an effective goal for them). In this case, the sheer time it will take to route all the ships to your destination is the main drawback, but also the fact that they will all just be trickling into the destination planet in regular mode with no orders is the other thing that, I think, helps to keep this balanced.
Anyway, hopefully that gives you some idea of where I'm coming from -- I try to support as many styles of play as possible, as long as those styles of play don't lead to dead-end "best paths" that will reduce the strategy of the overall game. So I wanted to just explain my resistance to some of that (aside from the architectural structuring limitations, which are only limited because I went into the design with these assumptions in place), rather than just saying "I'll do this part, but no to the rest" without giving a good reason for it.
Thanks for the great suggestion, and thanks for playing!
