Fleet Management

[Ktoff]

Hey Forum,

so i bought this game and i am loving it. Currently a couple of hours into my first campaign vs two Random easy @6/6 with an AI progress around 100. Not struggling (yet) but not comfortable either :-) so i guess it is the right starting difficulty

The one thing i find most tedious in the controls of the game is the fleet management. So obviously i am buidling my fleet up on several planets all the while keeping a garrison on endangered planets (though i am still not really sure what criteria the AI has for attacking me). These garrison needs to be replenished from time to time as attacks wear the defenders down and this is what sometimes can be a real pain: I want to get maybe 15 fighters 20 Bombers and 15 cruisers out of the massive fleet buildup and i have not found a convenient way to do this. Usually i either pick the desired number by zooming into the crowd and cherrypicking them or by moving the whole lot of fighters out of the blob then drag selecting the desired number, rinse and repeat for other ship types.

What i would really like is some sort of key+click = 5/10/20 ships or something to that effect. Or does anybody have a better suggestion to deal with this than i do?

Also, what about an AAR-sub Forum. The story of AI wars is rather sparse, but it might still be interesting to follow the games of other players and see their strategies. For other startegy games i always loved reading those.

Cheers,
K'Toff

[Revenantus]

Hey K'Toff,

With regards to your fleet management issues, there is something I can suggest; The L and Shift+L shortcut keys will select half and a third of the currently selected units respectively (rounding down per ship type). You can press them repeatedly to reduce the number of selected ships further. If you want to select just a certain unit type, you can double left click on that a unit to select all units of that type currently on the screen, followed by using the L and Shift+L shortcut keys to reduce the selection. Alternatively, to select all units of a single type from the current selection, left click on the unit summary button that appears to the right of the quick buttons.

I understand that this might not offer the quite fine control you're after, so I'll have a think about possible interface additions that might address that. If you have any ideas on this yourself, feel free to post them here or in the suggestions forum.

I'm happy to report that there is already an AAR subforum inside the meeting grounds forum. It's not been heavily used yet, but there might be some useful information in there.

Good luck in your campaign!

[Morthis]

I knew I should have looked more over the hotkeys.  I've been splitting up my ship types into little clusters when trying to split my fleet, and then dragging over them until I got the number I was looking for.  This is certainly a lot easier. 

[Ktoff]

Hey Revantus,

thanks for the answer, i hadn't found the L key :-) so this will help me a lot. This goes very much in the direction of what i was looking and might prove to be quicker and more convenient than a finer control i was suggesting. Until now i was mostly doing it like Morthis here. I'll experiment with it and report how i get along with it.

And now that i look properly at the forum i see the AAR subforum, thanks for pointing me to it.

Cheers,
K'Toff

P.S. Nice feature of the board to alert you if another reply has been added since you started writing your reply!

[MattB]

I had an idea while playing the other day which might help with fleet management.  The idea is to have explicit representation of fleets.  You create a fleet and set the number of each ship type that you want the fleet to contain.  As ships in that fleet are destroyed, they are resupplied by the nearest docks.  For each planet, you would also have a garrison fleet, which would default to free roaming defender mode, and would be resupplied in the same way. 

If you went this route, you could essentially eliminate manual building of ships entirely.  There would have to be some intelligence to the system, as well as some configuration.  Do you want to be resupplied while in battle, or have the ships warp into the closest planet so that you must retreat to be resupplied?

I feel like this system would eliminate even more of the micro, and allow/force the player to worry about more strategic issues.  It solves the original poster's problem with maintaining garrisons.  It makes the placement of docks more important (or at least highlights the importance).  It makes the player supply lines more explicit.  From the map view you could view supply lines.  If you have multiple fleets being supplied from the same docks that would cause delays in reinforcements.  You could have a fleet screen to look at how your ships are provisioned amongst garrisons and fleets, and adjust those provisions.

I'm sure there are lots of implications I'm not thinking of, and I'm not sure what the ui would look like exactly, but those were my thoughts on fleet management.

[laxrulz777]

I like this idea a lot

[MattB]

Looks like a similar idea is already in the works...

http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,245.0.html

I'm looking forward to how it turns out.

[JfpOne23]

Greets,

New player here too (just bought the game on Steam before the discount ran out), and yeah -- It would be really nice to have those newly produced ships organize themselves in tidy rectangles by type as they roll out of assembly instead of just collecting in a gigantic incoherent blob.  Perhaps this has already been brought up, and if so, please excuse the repeat.  Will take me a while to pour through the posts and get caught up.