Inter-planet movement logic

[Admiral]

Hello x4000 and all,

I recall reading a thread several days ago about setting preferred interstellar routes, and how to implement that. I had a simple idea (from a user perspective rather than an implementation perspective).

Looking at the galaxy map, each planet has a wormhole link shown as a line. This line is usually white, except when you are hovering over a planet in which case all that planet's links turn thick and yellow (helpful to the unaided eye) or when routing ships.

What I suggest is, when nothing else is selected, allow a wormhole link (the line) to be clickable, and allow it to have the following states (that particular link):
a) Normal (white) - current routing logic
b) Preferred (green) - prefer to route ships along this link in the routing logic
c) Disliked (yellow) - prefer not to route ships along this link in the routing logic
d) Disallowed (red) - don't allow ships to transit this link in the routing logic

Of course, that makes your routing logic that much more complex, but as it is it seemed that your routing logic got a few updates (preferred routes through owned starsystems, etc.) recently, so I thought this might be a good time to bring up this idea.

An additional enhancement might be to have a "show other specified player's routing preferences" option, and even a "use specified player's routing preferences" so that, if desired, there could be a central "routemaster" player.

Cheers!

[x4000]

Very interesting ideas, but that all gets very complex very quickly... main thing is also that it can be quite hard to click little lines like that.  I'm planning on implementing this through cheap-to-place ships that you can more easily manage through the galaxy map.  Aside from that, I don't really expect there to be too much ongoing management with the wormhole paths (you can always give a wormhole path command manually if need be, just holding Shift and clicking multiple times).  This is another incentive not to have your production facilities too far from the front, I think....

I'm going to start with a simple approach based on what Blam Stokel had suggested, and we'll see how that does, and if there's anything more needed at that stage.  I don't want to make the pathing logic too complex here.  It's already reasonably complex as it is, but adding preferred paths instead of just blocked ones would be a real challenge to make act gracefully, I think.  The main thing is that you either want ships to currently use a path, or not, I think.  But we'll see how it turns out, and go from there!

Thanks for the thoughts on this!

[Admiral]

Although the wormhole lines may not be clickable, it might be worthwhile coloring them differently depending on the presence of those "route control" ships you have posited, to provide an "at a glance" understanding of the constraints in the galaxy (universe?) map.

Good luck, and thanks...

[x4000]

Oh, definitely -- I plan to make those turn red.  Thanks!