For those who want to get to the topic title's point, skip the TT paragraph below.
TL;DR version also at the very bottom of the post!=========================
Hello, all! I'm new to AI War and while I'm no stranger to 4X games, I could say 4X it is not generally my mainstay for being an armchair general. To be honest, AI War had caught my interest a long while back but the idea of juggling things like economy, tech, military tactics felt very daunting, despite my having played Sins of a Solar Empire for quite some time with an acquaintance.
The game really sucks... you in. AI War is an amazing game that has the 4X feel I've been looking for - an intelligent opponent that continually tries to outsmart you forcing you to coordinate, adopt new strategies, and make use of every single option that is presented to you. I've only played singleplayer so far and only with a difficulty 6 opponent but I'm very excited to see how the action turns out in multiplayer soon enough. I'm hoping to properly introduce the game to my co-workers.=========================
After having played the game so far, I must say the overall learning curve and control scheme feels a bit like Transport Tycoon Deluxe. (I play OpenTTD quite a lot.) The amount of interface options and shortcuts have given me a lot of options for controlling my fleets effectively.
However, I do have a few issues and, for all I know, these may just be purely based on my play style.
During the game, I do like keeping my fleets always at full ship cap - reinforcing my fleet's losses is always the first juggle I do as soon as I finish off from a wave of defense or offense. I am rather obsessive-compulsive in keeping my ship numbers up and each individual type carefully distributed into their respective fleets. However, I've found myself doing the following in a repeating, rather unexciting cycle:
- Factories closest to my last area of action have ALL ships and starships set to cycle production but are paused.
- As soon as my fleet returns to home territory or finishes off an AI attack wave, I unpause my production cycle to fill up my slots.
- If a fleet has seen too much action, it likely lost ships of more specific types. If one fleet grouping has more bombers than the other, for example, I'd micromanage keeping them all in balanced strengths by sending more bombers to reinforce fleets lacking them in quantity.
- After collecting the new ships into a the fleet, I restore my fleet grouping (CTRL+#).
Given this moveset I'm following to reinforce my fleets, I've encountered a few problems.
- When on offense, it's actually extremely difficult to maintain command of my ships while juggling factories in another system to produce ships and move them toward the fleet currently in-action. (I should really do beachheading and mobile factories more to fix that, no?)
- When a fleet has suffered too much to the point of destroying its chemistry (all the bombers exploded but all the planes are still around, etc.), it becomes a test of patience to properly distribute different ship types to my different fleets because I'd still like to maintain each fleet having an equal distribution of ship types. (Having just 2 groups to look at is still manageable but I'd actually like to have more groups active on patrol or offense.)
- It's tiring to turn my production facilities on and off and fine-tune production for ships that are missing from specific fleets.
- There are times I actually forget to turn-off a factory and find out my reinforcements are coming from the opposite end of the galaxy. (damn it!)
Given those issues, I'd like to propose a complementary fleet management scheme that lets you do less of the button-pressing and more of the floating piles of metal blowing up other piles of metal. It doesn't need to be a new window or a UI element but I currently have very little idea on how to execute it physically.
I'd like to propose the idea of self-reinforcing fleets. A self-reinforcing fleet memorizes the total ship counts for every ship type it is was initially assigned to. The idea here is that whenever a self-reinforcing fleet loses a ship, the factory closest to the position of that fleet begins to build a new ship and sends it on a direct route to the fleet it is intended to join. I can order a fleet to 'auto-reinforce' resulting in nearby factories to queue up ships on its own as soon as an empty space is available for any nearby self-reinforcing fleet. The factories will continue to build and send more ships for as long as the fleet sustains more losses. I can also turn-off 'auto-reinforce' to stop the ships from being bottlenecked by enemy defenses that properly succesfully pocketted my fleet or intercepted my reinforcement routes.
Given such a scenario, we get the following benefits...
- Less micro-management. No need to regularly check up on the fleet's ship counts to see if it's missing too much of a specific ship type.
- ... And as consequence, no need to rally fleets together just to pick them apart and keep their ship type numbers evened out.
- We can have a simple control for production without having to switch between different planets.
- You can keep observing your offensive fleet's actions while reinforcements enter the planet. Maybe it's just me, but I get scared not looking my fleet for just a second while it's on an AI planet.
- Fleets continually get reinforced even while on defense and when moving between territories without having to build reinforcements somewhere along their route to rally up with.
Given those benefits of course, I do recognize some problems as well...
- It's near impossible to auto-reinforce a fleet you've sent into deep striking. Is there going to be a method to automate planet jumping with transports as well? Probably not.
- It's a shortcut feature that may add more screen clutter (auto-reinforce buttons, toggles for factories that can or cannot auto-reinforce, etc.)
- Not everyone is as compulsive as I am in keeping fleet numbers up and balanced ship type distribution like all the time...
- Mobile factories already provide some level of quick reinforcement.
And that's my thought so far. Apologies for the tl;dr but I hope it's worth the time.
TL;DR version (for the record):
Let's have a button to have fleets get filled up with new ships from factories as soon as they lose them in battle.