I've been spending a lot of time lately writing code to implement "fleets" into my project. Previously each alliance just had a general list of ships that were in the alliance, and each ship was pretty much independent. Now ships are organized into groups that move and fight together (==fleets).

The problem:
As fleets get more and more woven into the framework of the game, I'm starting to realize that it will be more trouble than its worth to also allow ships to act as individuals (ie: not be part of a fleet). I could make a one ship fleet, but as this still counts as a fleet, it would screw with the overall balance of fleets in the alliance (explanation: alliances maintain a preset percentage of "attack", "defence" and "patrol" fleets. for instance the empire might have 50% attack, 40% defence, and 10% patrol out of its total number of fleets)

I'm guessing that most of you guys prefer to move your ships around in fleets anyways, so this is probably a non-issue.

seeing as how i don't exactly have a question, i guess you can call this an update.

while fleets are essential, why not devide the ships themselves into roles, attack, anti fighter, troops, explore/scout, things like that. that way, when the faction is composing a fleet, the size will reflect it's compsition. i mean usually if i'm building a fleet of 10 isds, i need more anti fighter suport and troop sport to attact a given system, provided it is heavily defended

Why shouldn't alliances contain both ships and fleets? Alliances would contain individual ships and fleets would work only as some kind of containers.

This way it would be possible to manipulate with whole fleets and leave some ships independent at the same time. Hmm?

thats what I originally planned on doing, however as I was fleshing out the fleet coding it became practical to have fleets handle hyperspace travel and the transitions to and from hyperspace.
the break down of responsibilities is as follows:

alliance: handles economy (not yet coded), assigns missions to fleets and creates galaxy-strategy, creates fleets

fleet: travels to and from the location of each mission it is assigned, decides when a mission is finished, assigns targets to each member of the fleet for space combat. It is necessary for the fleet to handle target designation so that every ship in the fleet doesnt attack the same ship at once.

ship: handles sublight movement. chases and fires at enemy as necessary. launches shuttles (not yet coded), handles military behavior like scanning for smugglers (not yet coded).

The interesting thing about the game engine is that the alliance AI creates the fleets. Therefore it seems unlikely that fleets with only one individual will even exist, as they would be reinforced by the AI

Let's say that you can move ships through hyperspace individually, unless the ship is part of some fleet. In that case, you must move the entire fleet (or moving the ship moves the whole fleet), eg. fleet and its ships.

Or let all ships be part of some fleet - no matter how large the fleet is, and allow "unassigned" designation for fleets (so it won't mess up alliance stats), or don't count one-ship fleets into stats Maybe all ships could belong to those "unassigned" fleets right after their creation. The building process might be able to bring serious chaos into your stats too. I doubt anyone makes 10 ships at the same time at one planet and assignes them to one fleet, instead it's more natural to build 10 ships at 10 planets and create 10 one-ship fleets (at least until those ships reach the real fleets and join them).

How would this get along with your AI code?

sorry it has taken me so long to reply. real life keeps getting in the way of my internet time.




Due to the nature of the engine, ships have to be part of a fleet, as missions are handled by the fleet, and movement between planets is always a mission. This is necessary because coordinating movement between ships that were not in a fleet would be tedious (due to different hyperspace speeds, different locations, levels of damage or whatever). When a fleet enters hyperspace, it moves at the speed of its slowest member, like in Rebellion.





Although shipyards are not currently coded into the game, the process will probably be something like this: 1. The alliance AI builds a certain amount of ships based on its budget and needs. 2. When a ship is complete at the shipyard, it will be created in game and assigned a fleet. 3. the fleet will be given a priority order to visit the shipyard and pickup the ship. Although this will present the tactical problem of having a fleet leave the frontlines just to pick up another ship, it is quite a bit simpler than the alternative which would require a new ai behavior.

As far as the "10 ships built at one planet" question goes, I think Kuat Drive Yards would be more than capable of that. The game is structured a bit different from Rebellion. You are not a supreme commander, you are just a fleet commander, or in some cases just a captain. The game takes place sometime around the Thrawn era, and unlike Rebellion where you could have as many shipyards as you want, each alliance will rely on only a couple shipyards. In fact it is doubtful that shipyards will even be buildable. This is probably not a bad thing as the game is currently fully real-time.
Maybe I should switch to a 1/24 fast time clock. hmmm thats a good "forum question". I'll make another post