Special Fleets Thoughts

[FurretGoWalcc]

I should preface this by saying I am not quite sure where you would like receive feedback; I am assuming it should be here and not on Nexus. I also am not that familiar with the starsector auto-resolving, so I am speaking mostly from the feels here.

I am not a huge fan of the special fleets and their predominance in this mod:

1. Bypasses the issues of quality & ship production from the base game, representing the industrial might which the market could support.
2. Bypasses the logistical/managerial issues; no patrol HQs or military bases required for operation.
3. Fairly cheap, especially late game you can field a ton of fleets; it's somewhat silly. Where are all these ships coming from, where are the crew coming from.
4. It's a bit too much like how the player plays. The player's fleet is the proverbial 'hand on the scale' in the player faction's favor. We can win fights that on fleet strength paper look wildly against us, we can repair instantly at a dockyard, we can summon ships & armies out of thin air (storage and market), we can call by the grave our ships or our enemies ships to fight again. These concessions are made so the player can have reasonable fun, but extending that to other fleets doesn't fit in 4X very well . These special fleets are like an extension of the player's influence directed at range.

I would like to see a rework on the fleet system:
One rough idea is to piggyback off the existing concepts:

• Have worlds passively generate fleets up to some cap determined by their fleet size stat, with quality of the same, generated at a rate determined by the ship production commodity. These fleets by default will be patrol/policing mode, meaning the fleet is divided into small patrols focused on hunting pirates and protecting trade, but the player can “conscript them” into last-stand mode, forming larger defensive fleets like the core world fleets of the other factions.
• Maybe patrol HQ can only support these smaller patrols (and in a pinch consolidating the patrols into a larger blob), but the larger buildings can split the colony's fleet into multiple fleets; allowing for exerting sphere of influence beyond your system (raids/invasions/etc).
  • One caveat with this splitting idea may be that the colony's desire a certain level of protection with fleets; so if you 'pull the boys', the stability bonuses of the patrol HQ should disappear.
• These fleets could be ordered around using a similar system that is existing for special fleets- sending them around on the intel map- kind of like a galaxy-wide RTS.

What to do with special fleets:

• It is still a cool idea, and being able to create a goon squad that follows you around beyond your fleet cap is pretty neat. However, the number of special fleets and the max fleet power should be limited, and these fleets should be more expensive to maintain long term. They should be a sidepiece in the 4X game, not the main hammer for your nails.

[Histidine91]

Thank you for the detailed feedback! (Github is fine, although putting it on the offficial forum thread would generate more discussion).

I get where you're coming from on this, although I don't currently plan on any major changes.* Various comments below:

• One could argue that the player task groups actually violate the relationship to factional ship production less than patrol HQ/military base, in that they require the player to actually acquire the involved ships and loadouts through whatever means. In comparison, faction patrols are conjured from thin air for a monthly cost below what would be required to sustain, let alone buy, the actual ships contained in the patrol fleets (which in turn is justified by the fact that those ships are far less useful to the player than they would be if they could actually be put in the player fleet).
  • This argument breaks down somewhat in that task group ships can be revived cheaply if lost, with considerably less consequence than for player ships (albeit more than for NPC patrols). My defense is if these losses did have serious consequences, players would not entrust the ships they've lovingly collected to an AI fleet.
• Also because they're ultimately AI-controlled fleets, there's a strong limit to how much they can act as an extension of the player fleet. They can't do missions, they can't be trusted to win fights against superior opposition, etc.
• Special task groups were originally capped at one; IIRC I lifted this mostly as a convenience concession for players who wanted to have multiple fleets. Balance-wise, you could in principle make a player system hypothetically impregnable to outside attack which isn't great, but also I'm not sure the same thing can't be accomplished through other methods (such as the fleet request system or simply stacking defense/military industries) for comparatively less effort.
• On cost-related balancing factors, I'll take the easy way out and blame vanilla's colony system (which is generally considered to generate money too easily, but also being simplified in such a way that the logistical requirements of maintaining large navies aren't modeled)

*When originally implementing player special task groups, I'd considered a system where these fleets actually simulate crew/supply/usage requirements like the player fleet, and will periodically resupply themselves. But I chose to set this aside, as it involves a bunch of code for a feature that primarily serves to increase the management work required of the player.

On the proposed rework: I think the general expectation among the players is that Alex will eventually implement something in this vein, using the thus-far-disabled Orders tab in the Command screen. Corollary: The course of action I'm incentivized to take is the usual one of "wait for Alex to do it 😅"

• In the meantime, Nex's fleet request mechanic kind of fulfills this role, albeit largely without strategy-game-style management (can only request fleets to do a specific task, after which they'll disappear). This system probably isn't balanced either, though see above point about cost balancing.

Again, thanks for writing all that, it gave me things to think about 👍