Sometimes you want to issue a challenge to yourself to pit your ship designs against each other, or to fine tune a fleet you use to create a challenge to others. However the current process of first uploading and then downloading this challenge is somewhat cumbersome.
A nice addition would be a ‘Challenge Yourself’ button on the Deployment Screen that after deploying one fleet allows you to immediately deploy the opposing force.
One problem with this is the selection of the race of your opposing force, but this might be solved by allowing you to change your race from the deployment screen.
It would be nice to have a sort of 2-player mode either on the same machine or in a LAN, that way you can play with 2 fleets without using the challenge system. Tacking on network code to this game wouldn’t be too difficult and you can replicate a fight on 2 machines using the same random number generator seed.
This is something I’d like to see. I often want to test out a new ship design just by deploying a few of them, then trying to counter them with various other configurations. Doing it through the challenge system is pretty clunky. Much better to be able to just hit a button and voila, my current deployment is swapped over to the opponent’s side and I can plunk down another fleet.
I try to emulate the same thing by issuing challenges to myself, and I agree, it’s silly to have to do this.
It would be nice to have a simple sandbox mode, where you could make two sides and let them duke it out. Not only would it be a fun toy, it would be invaluable for testing ship designs and deployments.
Also the current challenge yourself functionality requires that your computer is connected to the internet. This solution would give some challenge functionality to stand-alone computers.
The first player’s fleet is masked as “unknown”, the second player makes his fleet, and tada, they battle it out. Force each one to pick a different race then, so that they can’t see each other’s ships, or keep 2 different profiles, or something though.
And if we were to add some sort or Real-time challenge mode for Player vs Player to fight fleets against each other, it would be nice if they could talk to each other while watching the fleets duke it out. Some sort of text box would be cool.