Some of you may know about aurora 4X, and that is pretty much my vision for fleet command without the shit ui and insane amount of micromanagement.
Task Groups and Fleet Command
This is my rough idea of the new fleet command window. At the bottom are a bunch of options for manipulating Task Groups, or TGs. Every ship starts in a TG called Fleet. TGs allow you to assign roles and specific orders to ships using preprogramming. The beauty of this method is that it results in very very little micromanagement in the battle itself.
Using the TG selectors, which are a dropdown menu, you can select for example the Fleet TG, which by default has the three ships you created the fleet with, including the flagship. You could then make a New TG, which would bring up a dialog box where you name and save it. The TG can then be selected with the B selector dropdown menu. From there, you can shunt ships back and forth between them as you please. Let's say every non-flagship ship in your fleet is a bomber.
The rest of the UI is as follows:
Repeat: Checkbox. Makes all orders in the queue repeat ad infinitum.
Cycle Orders X Times. X is a dialog box where you type a number. If for example you typed 3 and hit confirm, the orders in the queue would get duplicated in order 3 times.
Fleet Orders: These orders affect the whole fleet and override TG programming. This includes the conditional and standing, which are explained below.
Select all ships of selected type: Instead of manually clicking on your hundred tinybots there is an option that allows you to click one and it selects every tinybot in the taskgroup.
Move ships: Selected ships get shunted to the indicated task group.
Here is the task group UI:
If it wasn't explained above it will be explained below.
Orders:
Normal overrides standing, combat overrides, normal, and conditional overrides combat. Fleet orders trump all task group-level preprogramming.
Conditional: Conditional orders provide that when an event happens, an order is exectued. In the UI, there are two dropdown boxes, one select the condition, the other to select the order. For example, you could tell bombers, if the power drops below 20%, stay at 1500 m from hostiles. If your bombers are allowed to open fire they will move in, shoot, and then retreat to 1500m, effectively creating vicious hit'n'run ships.
Standing: Standing orders allow one to give a task group (more on that later) a default order. For example, you might program your mining group to mine the nearest asteroid when they become idle.
Combat: Combat orders are a special queue for task groups. These orders are activated when the task group or even the whole fleet is put into combat mode. You might put that bomber script in this section and set it to repeat. Or you could program your fighters to attack ships below 1000 mass only, but if there are none, you can tell them to attack all ships after that order in the queue.
Normal Orders: This is a queue for any order or set of orders, and can also be repeated and cycled x times. Unlike combat orders you cannot specifically activate these as they are active at all times. However, below each queue there is a button labelled "save as", and it takes the entire queue and saves it as a custom nameable order.
What should fill the orders dropdowns? Lots and lots and lots of things. An important thing is to give us manipulatable variables so we can tell our ship to run away at 3% power instead of 10%. Some quick examples:
Conditionals: (the bottom dialog box of the conditionals section is filled using normal orders)
Task Groups and Fleet Command
This is my rough idea of the new fleet command window. At the bottom are a bunch of options for manipulating Task Groups, or TGs. Every ship starts in a TG called Fleet. TGs allow you to assign roles and specific orders to ships using preprogramming. The beauty of this method is that it results in very very little micromanagement in the battle itself.
Using the TG selectors, which are a dropdown menu, you can select for example the Fleet TG, which by default has the three ships you created the fleet with, including the flagship. You could then make a New TG, which would bring up a dialog box where you name and save it. The TG can then be selected with the B selector dropdown menu. From there, you can shunt ships back and forth between them as you please. Let's say every non-flagship ship in your fleet is a bomber.
The rest of the UI is as follows:
Repeat: Checkbox. Makes all orders in the queue repeat ad infinitum.
Cycle Orders X Times. X is a dialog box where you type a number. If for example you typed 3 and hit confirm, the orders in the queue would get duplicated in order 3 times.
Fleet Orders: These orders affect the whole fleet and override TG programming. This includes the conditional and standing, which are explained below.
Select all ships of selected type: Instead of manually clicking on your hundred tinybots there is an option that allows you to click one and it selects every tinybot in the taskgroup.
Move ships: Selected ships get shunted to the indicated task group.
Here is the task group UI:
If it wasn't explained above it will be explained below.
Orders:
Normal overrides standing, combat overrides, normal, and conditional overrides combat. Fleet orders trump all task group-level preprogramming.
Conditional: Conditional orders provide that when an event happens, an order is exectued. In the UI, there are two dropdown boxes, one select the condition, the other to select the order. For example, you could tell bombers, if the power drops below 20%, stay at 1500 m from hostiles. If your bombers are allowed to open fire they will move in, shoot, and then retreat to 1500m, effectively creating vicious hit'n'run ships.
Standing: Standing orders allow one to give a task group (more on that later) a default order. For example, you might program your mining group to mine the nearest asteroid when they become idle.
Combat: Combat orders are a special queue for task groups. These orders are activated when the task group or even the whole fleet is put into combat mode. You might put that bomber script in this section and set it to repeat. Or you could program your fighters to attack ships below 1000 mass only, but if there are none, you can tell them to attack all ships after that order in the queue.
Normal Orders: This is a queue for any order or set of orders, and can also be repeated and cycled x times. Unlike combat orders you cannot specifically activate these as they are active at all times. However, below each queue there is a button labelled "save as", and it takes the entire queue and saves it as a custom nameable order.
What should fill the orders dropdowns? Lots and lots and lots of things. An important thing is to give us manipulatable variables so we can tell our ship to run away at 3% power instead of 10%. Some quick examples:
- Normal/combat orders:
- Kill selected ship
- Kill all ships in enemy fleet
- Kill enemy flagship
- Kill all ships above x mass
- Kill all moves below x mass
- Move to sector
- Mine sector
- Assume formation
- Open fire (ships can't shoot until you issue this order after all of their targeting programming)
- Hold fire
- Scan
- Jump to (sector)
- Unload cargo at (storage system)
- Obtain cargo from (storage system)
- Stay at X range from target
- Mine nearest asteroid
Conditionals: (the bottom dialog box of the conditionals section is filled using normal orders)
- If target is below x shields
- If ship power is below x percent
- If cargo hold is x percent full
- If target closes to x range
- if new contact in system
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