Fleet building instead of indivudal ship building

Actually that's not what happens in a typical RTS, you still make a "fleet", you don't send out 1 unit on its own, you wait until you have enough to form an actual strategy, divide them in groups on your own, etc.

Fleet building would not be cheaper if you ended up creating the same numbers as if you had built it ship by ship... Hell, you still build it ship by ship, you just have a preset plan about how many to make. Price would be the same, and it's irrelevant in a game anyway.

That said, I want to see fleet building in a way that will actually help gameplay, not simply replace each "unit" in a given RTS with a full fleet, just for the sake of having more impressive looking battles while in effect you still are having a 1 on 1. Anyway, here's my idea:
With an empire as large as you can end up with in sins, individual ship building would at some point become an unecessary chore. This can easily be resolved by letting people make custom fleet presets for their factories to produce.

You would get a sort of "fleet designer" screen and assign to it the types and number of ships you want it to include (I want 1 carrier, 2 support ships, 1 battleship, whatever types there are) and you would call it, defender or whatever you wanted. From that point on you would save that preset and call it when you needed to build more. You could have many saved presets to match your offence and defence tactics, set each to a different planet or factory to be made @ the same time, etc.

When all the ships in the preset fleet were built they would be automatically assigned to the same group so that you can move them where needed all at once, without having to select them first.

Since the ships would still be built one by one (even if different factories make them @ the same time so it seems they are build 10 by 10 or whatever), and since it would take some precious time to complete a full fleet depending on the size and type of ships, if you found yourself in a desperate position you could take a half-completed fleet in combat. As soon as you gave it an order it would become a separate group while production of the rest fleet would continue as planned before that.

Steamlab

NICE
That would indeed be cool, and i also think something like that is going to happen

That's a really great idea, SteamLab.

although your forgetting the small detail about package discounts   
I personally think that fleets should become logistically less expensive and slightly faster to build with each individual unit in the setup, albiet not a steep logistics curve... and one with a low asymptote. but it would be a per unit asymptote so that it doesnt become null with larger fleets.

IF you build in fleets, then it should be that ALL your ships you requested to build are built at the same time. So if you have 50 ships in your build , you have 50 ships at 50% built , so none are combat ready until all are combat ready. But as compensation its cheaper then say building 1 ship to 100% then another to 100%.

..actually does seem awkward. I like steams idea better

Great idea SteamLab. Supreme Commander already has the basic functionality for this system laid out in that you can create a big, complicated build que from your factory and set the factory to automatically group all the units it produces. Still, being able to save your que or your "fleet scheme" would be really cool so that you didn't have to manually enter it every time...

How do I change my nickname here so that people call me Alex... My usual nickname was taken so I used my site's name (www.mod-hq.com)... a bit dumb in retrospect but meh... Glad you like my ideas.

hmm, actaully i prefer a much simpler system.

simply make a buildque. It would work like this:

click Scout 4 times
click Battleship 1 time
click cruiser 2 times
click support 1 time
click scout 2 times

click "repeat production" button in the que, to loop this production as often as you want. When resources run out, the factory setting will decide wether it will continue building something else (requiring other resources) or wait for more.

That can be an added choice but like I said when your empire grows, it will be very helpful to be able and save your fleet set ups and have different facilities in the various corners of the solar system/galaxy/whatever work on different fleets each without having to pick which ships you want every single time. You want extra defence @ planet x? Just set it producing your saved fleet "defender squadron" while other planets are working on "assault squadron" "bomber fleet" and "scout wing" as you are at the same time preparing for other things in other parts of the universe.

Would be nice if the set ups were transferable between games as well... Of course depending on your resources and empire development not all would be available @ the start of the game so the ones you are unable to produce would be greyed out or something, so you would have to make different saved fleets for the start, middle, and end of the game, or however many different "sections" you could divide a match in. It sounds like much, but I'm sure all it would take in the end is to play a couple of matches then create fleet setups as you dim necessary in your third play through (with each race).

What I like about yours is that you don't need to go to a "fleet designer" screen to make fleets. You could put the building que as you said then click save que or something. On the other hand, with a fleet designer screen you could maybe be able to set formation of the ships among other things. Carrier @ the center with support ships @ the front and back, etc.

How do I change my nickname here so that people call me Alex...

Click on My Account at the top of the page -> Stardock Account. Log in and then update the Nick Name field on the Vital Stats page.

Thanks

Would be nice if the set ups were transferable between games as well

what goes against one enemy will not work against another (unless its one of those manipulated gameplay styles, like frig rushes in HW2)
if this game truly sprouts from personal strategy, and not the "best option" the game presents to you, then this idea will fail.

People tend to have a personal playing style, why not make it easier for them to keep it? Besides, you won't just go wage war with one specific fleet you came up with, you will build many and combine them in different ways in actual combat. Wouldn't be that hard to edit them mid-game if the opponent happens to discover a strategy that exposes some weakness in your fleet set up rather than your combat strategy.

i donno, i think there will be too many spesific situations where different fleet combos/sizes become needed (after all at the very least, you will have 'attacker', 'defender' for each race and probably set up differentley against each other race, that alone is a lot of different combos, then add in different stages of the game...)

repeatable ques seems like the best idea, id also like to see the AI auto build, (say an option to turn a factory on auto-build), hopefully reduce the micro a bit so it dosent turn into a click feast.

A drop down menu with all your different set ups, even if they are many, is still faster than clicking to build this ship 15 times and that ship 5 times and a third ship 5 times to form a que that you can then repeat as a fleet (or even if you just click once then have to type in a number or whatever other way it could be done). And then you'd have to do it separately per factory/planet/whatever. Obviously anything involving such options would be considered an advanced gamer option so he should be able to tell apart all his different setups and select the appropriate one @ the blink of an eye.

Said drop down menu could even have a tree form (which in itself could be customisable too) to make it easier to better separate your attacking, defending, scouting, reinforcement, whatever purpose fleets.

if it can be done well (and I generally think just a customizable template will not be sufficient) then I would agree to this
otherwise it'll just be another annoying little object on the HuD that serves no particular purpose.

If you're reffering to my ideas I never said anything about customisable templates, what I'm promoting is full blown 'fleet designing'. From the numbers and types of ships involved to their formation if it's relevant in combat (I imagine it very much is). See my first post here for more details as there's no use in repeating.

I can see the profit in your idea, but I still think that the build X 5 times over would just be simpler and allow for faster response to changing battlefield conditions. the "build this alone" concept is to stagnant and fragile to be of real use in a developing battlefield.

If you think that would be useful there's nothing that stops the two systems from co-existing. I still think it's not any less cumbersome and in some cases more so to have to design your fleets from scratch in every game, in every phase, for every planet, for every factory. It sounds like something I'd use the first several times I played, then I would resort to the designer and keep a growing fleet set up database with builds for more or less any situation. If an opponent happened to do something I never saw before, and that something happened to exploit a weakness in the fleets I was using, then it would not take much to edit a few of them to include different formations and shit types, then proceed to them as new ones, while assigning them buildable to the different installations.

Also, an extra idea I should have mentioned earlier as it has been in my head. The way I imagine this, it would not be done say, click this planet, click this factory, click build, bring up fleets menu, select the one you want to build, repeat for every planet.

It would instead be like this. Click build, chose the fleet you want from the menu, then assign it to as many factories as you wish with just one click for each.

there needs to be a completely unique and fitting style that is faster than the multi-build technique but way more versatile than the "build this and only this until I say otherwise" technique.

I'm sure the Devs'll come up with something.

The fleet building is a Master of Orion 3 idea. I liked it than and I like it still, although the fleets were too uniform in MoO3. Meaning that individual ships had next to 0 AI of their own. Scout ships never did any scouting but simply stayed on the brink of the fleet even when two fleets fought and those scouts should retreat. So the only AI was fleet AI.

But I think there is no neccessity for real fleet building as such, as long as you can join the ships into a fleet and they act like it as well.

Since we are on the topics of Fleets, I don't know how Sin will divide areas in the Galaxy (ie, sector, region, solar systems?) But it would be interesting that each sector for example can be set to maintain a defense fleet. A player will set the strength of the Fleet ( X number of scouts, Frigates, Destroyers, etc) and the sector economy will automatically be divert to replace/repair units if the fleet suffer damages. This might take a lot of micromanagement off the player's hand.

On a further note. The defense fleet for a region can be set on auto patrol thru the region or spread out to defend the planets in the region based on the value (planet with higher value get the larger ships while small colonies would only see a destroyer or frigate once in a while) depending on the threat level.

but you end up diluted and then countering a concentrated enemy force would be difficult.

I think what you want is fleet order templates, which with a simple order would construct you a fleet that you want. I think this will be included in the game, you pretty much design these 'templates' yourself, asign a few planets to produce the ships, and they meet at a point that you order them to.

I think this way it would be simple and yet good enough to keep the game fun.

I'm not talking about your main attack fleets, but I would think that any empire would have some small fleet for rear area security against random events (if they are in the game) like pirates, meteor, space monsters or what not. It just save you time that after such an encounter, you wouldn't have to worry about repair/replacing ships if they would be automatically produced and put back into those fleets.

Another feature that I kinda wanted is some sort of auto refit as I spend a lot of time in GC II looking for my older ship to refit them everytime a new design is done. It would be nive that when you design a new ship it would give you the option of setting a auto refit spending that you bring your older ship of that class up to the current level. Don't know how hard this will be but I'm just throwing it out so we can talk about it.