Making empire management massively easier: Fleet Plan and Mini Rally bar, plus small tweaks
Stardock Forums
Fleet Plan:
A window located at the top of the empire tree now separate from the empire tree entirely, when clicked on gives you ten fleet slots. When you click on a fleet you are treated to a ship building interface, the first ship you build being designated as the fleet leader.
When the fleet is created its given a random name which you can change like everything else.
Upon creating the first ship in a fleet, you must pick a rally point.
The main advantage of the fleet plan is that any ships lost will be automatically constructed from the most appropriate factories, and if there is an idle ship not belonging to any fleet it will be rallied to your fleet instead of a newly constructed one. Such fleet behavior can be turned off.If you dont want ships to automatically build, you can turn it off as well.
Some people will argue that "select all factories" from the search bar already accomplishes this, but it does not. You have to configure each rally for each planet manually which is a pain and then what do you get? A bunch of ships on multiple planets that you have to micromanage wasting precious time.
The mini rally bar:
An icon next to the search icon that when opened gives you options like colonize, capture extractor, build starbase and perhaps more.
Selecting a command such as this will either cause the closest navigator/colonizer/constructor to go to the place you indicate and perform the command, or a new ship will be built from the most appropriate factory and do the same.
Such fleet behavior of already constructed ships doing the indicated tasks instead of newly constructed ones can be turned off like above in fleet plan.
There would also be a ship build button that sends the quantity and types of ships to a specific gravity well in addition to automatically selecting the appropriate factories for you. This is helpful because you no longer have to micro manage specific planet factories or rally points anymore.
Other potentially useful commands that could be added could be for example build starbases on all owned planets, or send colonizers to all owned/logistic filled but not owned planets.
Some people would argue that this feature is not worth the devs time because it sort of already exists, but for example, if you wanted to send small fleets to two different planets that are being attacked, instead of having to wait while your dinner is cooking and then having to manually split the mini fleets evenly and then send them off to their respective planets they do so automatically, preventing you from wasting time where you would have neglected research, economy, and your main attacking fleet in that time. This also useful for managing deep space construction frigates and scouts and colonizers.
The following is a list of mini features:
Flag planets as danger zones: When a planet is flagged as such, ships will find alternate routes if possible.
The ability of the player to mass scuttle is desperately needed.
There should be an option to have resources become consumed according to their build rate and gradually. Often times youll forget to research or build something because when you were about to you didnt have the immediate resources and this fixes that problem.
When you build starbases there should be a ghost at the selected build point even before the constructor arrives. This way you can select the upgrades you want before its built. Like above, this feature would prevent players from forgetting to make important decisions that they simply forgot to make while waiting for them to be able to have been made.
Also an option to disable or greatly loosen fleet formations, seeing that ships almost always overreact to not being in formation by a small amount. Seeing as this could potentially defeat the purpose of fleets altogether, this behaviour would only occur during battle, or when enemies are close by.
An option for fleets to have their carriers wait by the edge of the gravity well, or avoid enemies automatically.
There needs to be an option in the the user interface menu that makes it so the empire window doesnt constantly auto expand and/or scroll down. This annoyance of the window ultimately keeps me from using it, where if it did not do this it might have been pretty useful.
The user interface option to treat planet logistics and tactical slots like strike craft construction. For example, left clicking on an already built structure in the logistics menu will scuttle it and loan the planet the logistics slots so you dont have to wait until its scuttled to build your replacing structure(s). Fleet plans could also function like this.
Reply with your own ideas and criticisms and I may place them here.
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