I'm really glad you guys are pleased.
Without getting into TOO many details in advance of something you can play:
1. The whole thing with upgrading ships and "not having max flak units too early" or whatever is not something you need to worry about. The max mark level is currently 7, as you might recall, rather than 5 as in the first game. Most of the tech types only have 4ish upgrade levels to them, and some of those get stupid expensive toward the top end of them, science-wise. Some ship classes benefit from multiple tech types, so having two "first unlocks" on two techs as a cheap thing can get certain ship classes to mark 3 pretty fast.
That's exciting and all... but with a lot of ships that means it's impossible to get to mark 5 or beyond with just global tech upgrades, and/or that it would be inefficient to do so. Since there are a bunch of variants of things like grenade launchers, some of those actually benefit from different tech upgrades, too -- there's a variant that is more of a Light class ship, aka more of a glass cannon, etc. So you wind up with your glass cannon grenade launchers upgraded a bit differently from your grenade launchers that are more traditional, or more tanky, or vampiric, or whatever. So in other words, despite the techs being global, you're going to wind up with different ship lines having different mark levels in different fleets. This fleet has vampire grenade launchers that are only mark 3, versus the glass cannon grenade launchers in that other fleet are mark 5.
And that's BEFORE you get into fleet-specific upgrades, which is one of my favorite meat-and-potatoes things in this new update. Being able to have a fleet fight for a while and gain EXP, and then you say "cashing in that EXP, plus maybe some science, OR just a much larger amount of science, makes all the ships in this fleet, regardless of type, get +1 to mark." So you might have an experienced long-term fleet that you've got some emotional attachment to and have named, which has seen a lot of combat and has glass grenade launchers at mark 6, unlike all the other fleets which are still at 5.
So there's a much more sophisticated resource allocation issue at play with science, as well as where and when you deploy which fleets and how you upgrade them, than might be evident from just scanning the document.
2. And that's before we get into other fleet-specific upgrades, such as "hack a thing here in order to increase the ship cap for some or all lines in this fleet, and/or to add some dyson ships into this particular fleet." So other ways to upgrade fleets is very much part of the plan. You'll actually likely be juggling upgrades a lot more continuously over time than you were previously, despite the simplification in mechanics. And despite the reduction in number of options per decision point. My hope is that sometimes you find yourself choosing to use fleets in certain "non-optimal" ways from a purely military standpoint in order to train them up and gain EXP for making them more useful later.
3. Scouting: those are some interesting ideas, and I might go with some of that. The main thing is that I want to keep it simple, because frankly there's going to be plenty of other things for you to think about. And there are some newer thoughts about missions and objectives (kind of a "quests" system that aren't even in the documents you saw there that I think will both provide middle-term goals for players who want them, a bit of narrative spice, and take the place of what would otherwise be some resource-juggling for things like monitoring systems. I'm less interested in resource juggling than I am in investment strategies and how those pay off long term (or blow up on you), and providing remediation options for poor or wise investments.
Overall I've been thinking a lot about both positive and negative feedback loops, and the first game managed those pretty well kind of by accident. But in this game, there are more opportunities for positive feedback loops with some of your fleets becoming stupid-powerful, if you want. You having technologically outclassed the AI with a fleet or two is very much a possibility, and you're running around stomping their mark II stuff with a mark VII fleet. But that sort of positive feedback loop can actually be a trap, because it can lead to your other fleets being too unpowerful to properly defend when a CPA strikes, or it can lead to things that zombify your units being uncannily dangerous because only your one fleet is even able to deal with the mark VII ships you accidentally just gave to the AI. Etc.
Anyway, I think there are a lot of very interesting ramifications to these systems that folks haven't seen yet, although I'm glad you're seeing the first wave of interesting ramifications. A lot of the secondary ramifications I didn't realize until I had been in the code for hours and was kind of confronted with it in a concrete way, and then I made design adjustments to augment those further to make them even more interesting. So they wouldn't be found in the document, and they're not the sort of thing you'd be likely to think of until you actually get a hands-on with it (hopefully next week sometime!), just because The Game Is Big (tm) and there are cascades of effects from all this.
Some things will also be horribly suboptimal at first because science costs will be off, or we need to add in more ways to do upgrades that are planned for 0.900 but won't be in 0.850, or whatever else. So big grains of salt on the 0.850 version, which will only be about 70% of the vision for 0.900, if that.
4. Starships are gone and are just Frigates now, aka a bigger version of Strikecraft. They are useful as midsized things that fight, but they're just "big ships that go in a fleet" now. So when they get low on health, they just die. The Factories (formerly docks and starship constructors) auto-build things for them.
5. Flagships (which are basically Golems or Arks) can't die, they only get crippled. At lower than 10% health they can't have replacement ships produced for them anymore, nor can they shoot their weapons or use other special abilities. You don't get just one Ark type anymore, and so there's no swapping out a centerpiece unit for a fleet; work with what you find, or choose something better. You might have 4 different Arks, or 3 Arks that are identical but have different fleets; their role is very different. You need to take them back to somewhere to heal them, or heal them in-situ with combat engineers if you have a fleet that has those.
6. Factories can't send from afar, only for the planet they are on or adjacent planets. So any sort of complex automation for them is not required. They also automatically build for all the fleets you have that are on that planet or adjacent to it, all at once, every ship type at once, so you don't get choices on what they build or how other than how you position your fleets and docks. You can turn off a dock, but that's literally the only control that you have over them. I don't have any intention of giving players finer control of them, because that gets into a bunch of micro and interface fiddling that is daunting for new and long-term players, and sometimes limitations in control actually cause interesting gameplay circumstances.
For instance, in the first game one thing you had to do sometimes was control a planet in an inconvenient place because it had an Advanced Factory that let you build mark 4 ships. In this game there isn't any mechanic like that, and hasn't been for a while. That kinda made me sad a bit. But the logistical issues that AFs caused in the first game were a huge pain and not worth the trouble.
What is NEW, however, is now you'll have an incentive to sometimes hold an inconvenient forward planet so you can put a dock or five on it and thus get your fleets supplied from right there. So those sorts of decisions of how to handle refleeting are now things that are essentially related to territory capture and holding, which of course comes with the aggro of the AI (via AIP and how they handle reinforcements), and this creates interesting situations and opportunities, plus implicit reasons for having multiple fleets at multiple parts of the galaxy, versus just one bottleneck.
It won't stop a turtle from doing what a turtle does, but it's like putting out a little feeler planet that you use as much as you can, but that probably dies a lot. It's not quite a whipping boy, but it's in that vein. It's certainly expendable, and likely to get attacked a lot more frequently. Unlike with AFs in the first game, there's no risk of a permanent loss with that sort of forward position, which is good. So in some ways this is more like a beachhead from the first game.
The nice thing is that none of this really requires any one way to play: you can still take few planets and fight smart by really focusing on upgrading just a few fleets and using them really well, or you can take more planets and more fleets and upgrade them more broadly, and you've got more of a large logistical challenge rather than a smaller guerrilla forces challenge. One player might have a tiny ship cap of really advanced stuff because of their choices, while another has 10x or 20x the ship cap but only at an average level. I have a feeling it will be months before we see all the different ways that players can exploit this.
Anyway, so a lot of the UI concerns that people are naturally going to have about "I want to automate this and that xyz ways" are now something I'm hand-waving away with "nope, sorry, the 'UI' for that is how you choose to expand your empire now, and where you put docks and fleets." Which if you think about it makes sense, because it gets back to the core ethos of spending aggro/AIP in order to gain new things. And to the core ethos of "what is going on is evident on the game map, not in a billion submenus." Even though in some ways there are more submenus coming up than the first game had or this one had previously...
7. The concerns about fleets and control groups are excellent ones, and are somewhat addressed in the minutiae of the document, but a lot of things relating to control groups in particular are things I discovered answers for during implementation, and am still shaking out some details on. I think you'll be pleased with the results, but basically none of that stuff is a concern because of the nature of the implementation. This is one of those areas where I think it's best if you just actually see it in practice once we get there, over the next few weeks, because me trying to describe it is pretty hard versus just getting to see it in practice.
8. Similarly, in terms of "embracing fleets all the way," I think most of that stuff is actually a bit to the side of where I've wanted to take this. There are a lot of knock-on effects of the current designs of fleets and factories and whatnot that the document doesn't make clear, because I didn't realize them until I was further into implementation. Some of those are discussed earlier in this post of mine, but there are others that are only going to become evident when you have your hands on it. Suffice it to say, I'm definitely embracing fleets all the way, but doing so without taking away things like the control of individual units; I think that people would just feel... as if they were behind a glass wall, if I did that.
One big thing that I am planning that I haven't mentioned anywhere yet, and which won't be in the 0.850 but will hopefully be in 0.900, is a revamp of the sidebar to not really show ship icons the way that it has been showing them on the Ships tab, but to instead show fleets. I haven't fully figured that out yet, but basically making things a lot more digestible in terms of "here's the status of my fleets as a whole, and how they are doing, and I can hover for details" is a big thing. And looking at ships as just being a part of a fleet and thus the core performance characteristics of a fleet as being more important than a specific ship line within the fleet is also a big deal.
Also... you aren't getting to design fleets, per se, recall. Not from scratch anyhow. So it's a matter of how you're capturing fleets and upgrading them, and then where you use them. If you have an all-bombers fleet that is powerful it's because you found that and upgraded it a bunch, not because that was something you set out to craft in a Legos-style fashion. From that vantage point, I have no intention of punishing you for having that style of awesome thing; some runs in a roguelike you just plain out get to be The Terminator, and there's a big satisfaction in that.
That's not to say that the AI won't have some responses to all that, but there will certainly be cases where a positive feedback loop in your favor makes you overpowered compared to the norm, and that's ok with me. The traditional style of game victory is then going to be pathetically easy compared to your usual fare for that difficulty level, and you might view that as a bad thing or as a good thing. Yay satisfaction of stomping the enemy.
EXCEPT. You all know that I love enticing players to engage in brinkmanship with themselves. And that's where some of the missions come in. Badger and I have been talking about various other alternative victory conditions for a while, and I've been toying with ideas on some very difficult and out-of-reach-most-of-the-time victory conditions that would manifest as missions that only show up if you've managed to get into a positive feeback loop of a certain power. Aka, you've been absolutely stomping the AI for a while and a "standard" victory is a given for you at this point. But the game has this option for a "super duper victory" that is suddenly within reach... and that puts you at risk of losing everything. Do you go for the super-duper victory, and the notch on your belt (and accompanying Steam Achievement of course) that this entails? Things will be very hard all of a sudden again if you open that can of worms. Right now you have the upper hand and could just got for an easy kill on the direct victory, whereas if you go for the super-win you might not win at all... but next campaign you might not be in a position where you can even consider this sort of super-win... and hence the conundrum and the brinkmanship.
Sometimes the answer isn't a carrot or a stick, per se, but secondary objectives that encourage you to risk everything that you'be built up if you're overpowered. Probably that stuff won't make it into 0.900, but I do hope for it to be in for 1.0 because I think it's really important. You getting overpowered should be a thing that is celebrated by giving you a chance to fly too close to the sun for some extra glory. It's not time to hit you with the nerf bat or get out a bunch of rubberband-AI techniques. You should be able to go on your merry Terminator-stomping way if you're satisfied with that. But look at this grail just out of reach... I bet you're a bad enough dude to rescue that president...
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Anyway! The document about 0.900 is kind of just the launching point for a lot of much more interesting things that aren't going to become apparent for another month or so, I expect. But it's laying the groundwork. And my hope is that we can get out of interface pain areas, and things that you want to automate, and things that are micro choices... and into areas where you're gobbling up systems and having to think about the long-term consequences of your growing power... and where you're trying to trascend a lot more than just a black and white "you win" situation. Giving you chances to get too greedy and accidentally hang yourself.
Lots of good stuff to come!
