It would appear, unless I've missed something, that the only way to see how well a battle is going is to watch the Planet tab and observe how the Strength and Unit Count numbers move, coupled with the visual feedback of seeing your Metal deplete and icons winking out on-screen.
That's okay, for a very high level of information, but for me it lacks information at the ship line level, i.e., how well is 'that' ship line doing in this battle compared to the others.
Then I thought about what kind of info I'd find valuable, and how much of it is necessary (and practical). One value per ship line seemed like the best option, that reflects, in real time, how effective a ship line is doing. What could that number be? For example...
* KDR (Kill Death Ratio). A value representing the average number of kills this ship line has made versus the average number of ships lost from this line.
- Would misrepresent the usefulness of melee and self-destruct lines.
* Effectiveness. A value representing the average damage inflicted for the ship line against the average damage sustained.
- Would fit most ship lines but for the suicide units the value would be a misrepresentation (as suicide units usually take vast overkill damage to ensure a death).
* Efficiency (Economic). A value representing the sum of build costs of all ships killed against the sum of the build cost of all ships lost from this line.
- A value used IRL, would only work here if the AI had finite resources – which they don't.
* Efficiency (Worth). A value representing the average damage inflicted against the cost to build one member of the ship line.
- Goes some way to correcting where Efficiency (Economic) falls down in this game, and, crucially, might actually give melee/suicide lines a representative figure.
There are pros and cons with them all, and this is not an exhaustive list – just a starter for ten.
How persistent should the value be? The simplest answer to that might be that the value is reset when you load the ship line into a Flagship. That way you can collect effectiveness information about your lines for as long as you leave them in battle.
Where would you display this value? The Planets tab would be ideal, in each icon, but this is where it gets tricky because the Planets tab does not respect ship lines; it merges all ship /types/. Fleet information could hold it, alongside each ship line entry, but this would be sub-optimal in terms of presenting real time, overall performance numbers all in one place. Maybe some sort of Planet tab adjustment could be made, such as showing the average for all aggregated ship lines.
Frigates & Turrets? The question begs on whether Frigates and turrets should have such a value at all, but if so would the same calculation for ship lines fit all (most?) Frigate and turret types? Probably not.
I'd find this kind of information useful. There's a lot going on in AI War 2 and it can be very difficult to see where things aren't going as well as they could be. If you could look at the Planet tab and you see a very low Efficiency value for a ship line the player would then perhaps be prompted to look at the Resistances (R) information for that line, see if some nemesis ship types are present, and then adjust how the poorly performing ship line behaves; be that Hold, bulk move to another region, halt reinforcement, move in ships that are strong against the nemesis type, etc.
