Setting the ship behaviours on the hospital ship seems a bit back to front to me, you would set your fleet in an aggressive or defensive mode, and if aggressive they would go in "balls out" and never retreat, or in defensive mode they would conserve their health, so that if they get to a point where they've taken too much damage they would begin their retreat to the nearest Hospital ship beacon. The ships would only peel off from the main fleet if they are at their damage threshold, whether you want that to be set by the player or not I'm not sure.
Here I'm thinking mostly of what would be most easier from an interface standpoint to control. If you don't want do have your fleet retreat to the hospital ship, don't bring the hospital ship to the planet is my reasoning. Basically the idea is that the hospital ship would be the one monitoring the fleet ships at the local planet, and would issue "overriding recalls" to ships that it wants to bring back for repairs. It just seems simpler to use this way, IMO.
Having a "Hospital" or "Rescue" ship available, could also dispatch small pickup drones, say up to 4 per rescue ship, that would jump start engine damaged fleet ships.
Why not just use engineers for field repair here? I guess maybe it would be better to have ships that are more like space "tow trucks," I could see where that could be useful.
Obviously this all needs a cost to pay, and balancing this into the current mixture will need to happen. But this mechanism does mean, you can provide fleets with almost kamikaze like aggresion - fight to the death, as well as defensive configurations, supported by the costly rescue ships that will try and keep the fleet ticking over and the losses at a minimum. The defensive behaviour gives the fleet a much better chance at holding a place, and sustaining a ship based blockade. Not quite sure how you marry the aggression/defensive behaviours with the attack-move and roam beahviours. They all seem to do different things, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Yep, all definitely considerations with something like this. I think there's an existing niche here to fill, though, so hopefully it won't cause too much balancing trouble. The main thing is that this hospital ship will be expensive in a number of senses (metal/crystal and knowledge), so it will be preventing you from using those resources for other things. We'll see how it plays out in practice, it will definitely require more than average playtesting.
I do like the idea of battlecruisers with fleets of fighters and bombers, where the main ship would provide a defensive protective mechanism for them to retreat to - in a similar way to the rescue ships. Since fuel consumption is not factored into the game as far as I can tell, then fleets of fighters and bombers can just roam endlessly, so theres no real advantage to having a battlecruiser as a mere staging post for their attacks.
I experimented with fuel for a while, but it turned out to be more a frustration than anything else, and it was too complex for new players. At some point in the future, if I can come up with a good model for it, I'm not opposed to having a start-game toggle that's something like "Require Fuel" or something. But at the moment, I'm not sure what sort of strategic elements it really adds, aside from just one more thing to manage and one more weak point.
The idea of the giant transport ships (battlecruisers as you call them), would be that they are not offensive at all, they are just a big armored shell that lets you take a fleet of ships past some big obstacle that you normally couldn't pass. For instance, sneaking lower-level ships through a system with a bunch of ion cannons without them getting shot up. Or as another way of getting past a clump of permamines, that sort of things. It could also be a way to move friendly fleets through enemy territory relatively unmolested, and that's a big issue in the 4player game that I'm playing right now (there's an Advanced Factory that is way off, around 12 hops from the main front, but is only 5 hops if you cut through some big and enemy planets). Without a transport ship, those forces have no hope of making it through, so they have to go all the way around.
Something I thought about as well, does the game have a "shielding ship", sort of a mobile version of the shield equipment deployed at harvester sites or your command stations? A ship who has a radius of force field protection that could be used to fend off some attacks, and other ships could hide under the safety of its umbarella.. I remember seeing these sort of ships used in the Nexus - Jupiter Incident game, and wondered if a similar sort of ship would be useful as an extra ship type for the future?
Yep, that's already there, actually -- the Mark III Force Field Generator is mobile, albeit slow. It's also got the largest protection radius of all the force fields. It can be a challenge to keep all of your ships under that while they are moving, though, so the idea of the transport ship is that it's easy on-the-go protection, but is not useful for anything beyond shuttling your stuff past enemy forces (which is useful).
