ever played Risk 2? All the move and attack orders are given beforehand, then the units move. Makes for some interesting three-way battles between different sides.
Giving a ship orders to not fire on armed ships might be easiest. If a ship is not shooting anything due to its weapons all having been destroyed, the ship would be ignored by all of your ships with these orders.
At the end of the battle (when the victory screen pops up) all surviving enemy ships will be assumed to be captured. Just abstract it away…your ships have guns. Their ships don’t have any guns. Your ships then can at their leisure force the other ships to surrender or be destroyed. Presumably they would surrender rather than be used for target practice. This can all be handled behind the scenes after the battle is finished.
To prevent a situation where a battle will become stuck you can add in a ratio of firepower to victory.
If all of your ships have this order to capture enemy ships, which means ignoring all ships that have no guns, and the other guy builds NONE of his ships with guns for some insane reason, the fight will never be completed and so you’ll just get stuck.
There is currently a ratio for surviving hull strength as a victory condition. If one side has X times the strength of the other side they win. Add it in with guns as well. If one side has X times the number of non-destroyed guns, they win. This would prevent that possible deadlock.
It would also be cool to see an order like “capture vs destroy/sabotage”
Basically if you set your boarding party as sabotage they would go in and blow stuff up to make it easier for you to kill the enemy vessel. Could be nice to order them to target certain modules also… take out enemy engines or shields.
As for the campaign it would be nice to have something dynamic. So captured ships in one battle are there in the next… though since its alien tech you are not able to repair it or use it as efficiently. It would be interesting to see damage to your ships have a certain percentage carried over to the next battle (if your playing as rebels). And if you are playing as Fed and ships get heavily damaged they have a reduced moral… which would give a percentage hit on weapons/speed/hp.
It would be nice to have a branching campaign (take away repeatable missions). So that if you lost a battle it would change your outcome. It would make winning and losing much more important in a single mission… though more info on the enemy would be needed so that you wouldnt put the wrong ships in deployment. This would add new faction attribute “Intelligence” to the campaign; basically the more Intelligence the faction has the more info you know about the enemy in the deployment phase… rebels would virtually have none while the others have more.
My ideas seem extremely complex so I doubt it will happen… though maybe not completely outside the realm of possibility?
For the Campaign, I could really get into something like a severe limit on your ships.
You choose a faction and you get about 5000 credits to spend on any Rebel Hulls and modules and only that. Any captured or disabled ships that you battle are added to your fleet as noted.
This is beginning to sound like Mount and Blade. Perhaps you should also have to recruit crew instead of automatically having Larry, Curly and Moe in your crew modules (say you start out with 500 ready and willing people and if you want more, you have to find them)
Eh, all these ideas are good, but i am a bit worried that it would sort of take away from the GSB ‘feel’ in a sense. I think capturing ships is a great idea, by there are many ways to do it.
One way that was previously mentioined was that all ships that werent destroyed would join you at the end. That is a good idea, but currently your ships keep firing after the 10% mark. Not sure if that would affect the coding, but you could get into some continuity problems (wait, i destroyed all of their ships, now i have 3 more?).
The other idea was the bording module, but for balance issues range would be a big problem.
The idea i like best is the destroying guns idea. I also like that weapons would do less damage (in order to effectively target the guns), but it is a nice idea. However, auto repair systems could be problematic, maybe whenever the guns on a ship are destroyed by an ‘disable’ ship they cannot repair? Thoughts and ideas are welcome.
Repair modules can only fix modules that are damaged but not destroyed. If the module is completely destroyed repair modules cannot fix it.
well, shows how muchi know. I must have been extremely lucky then, my repair modules repaired a (i thought) totally destroyed fusion beam. must have been on the edge of being destroyed.
If it has even 1 hp it can be repaired back to full. If it ever hits 0 hp then its gone forever.
thanks, totally did not realize that. back on point though, would the ship weapons fire only at the gun turrets when they are within range, or when the enitre ship is in range. presumably the individual harpoint, but it may take a bit of extra coding. Also, there needs to be an order not to target disabled ships, since currently your ships keep fighting untill everything is so much dust (though there was one funny encounter where i won 14% to 9%, and they had a cruiser left that proceeded to demolish my entire force. i still got the win but it was hilarious since every one of my ships was dead and theirs had maybe one beam weapon left.)
The campaign currently changes the way ships behave in campaign battles, so that everyone stops shooting at that point, so this isn’t a concern 
sounds great. i am really glad that you have evidentally put a lot of hard work into this. So Far, it sounds great!
Whilst I really like the core idea, the methods being proposed seem a bit too involved for my taste, personally. There’s already so much going on in GSB, I don’t think adding a whole slew of new orders and/or modules is really the way I’d like to see it done, though I’m aware I could well be a minority on this point. Probably my choice would simply be to have certain battles offer a ‘spoils of war’ of a set number of enemy hulls and modules, and winning the battle granted you the spoils. Or maybe the spoils would only be eligible if you beat the battle within certain parameters.
hmm, i hadnt thought of that. i really like that idea, though i think that there should be some loot granted if you beat the mission, more if you do really well (maybe 60%+ left) and even more for say, 80% left. a good analogy is actually a rather old nintendo DS game called Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (which was actually really good), where every mission you had a ‘sin’ requirement that made you want to literally kill the enemy 2 times over to get the highest sin. if you failed you dont get an item and are almost certain to die in the next one (more powerful enemies), but if you beat it by 200 points or so, than you can get amazing items. i dont think that there should be a punishment, but there should be a reward beyond bragging rights for doing well.
Actually, an idea i had was that you start out with less than stellar modules (cruiser armour 1, turbo shields for freighters, lol, etc.), then when you beat the mission, you get a new module. by doing well, you get a better one, that you can then maybe use in your ships to get the best one. Just an idea, but i dont think it would be too hard to incorporate into the existing Fleet HQ system
This seems like a very cool idea to me. Perhaps impose some kind of supply limit on the number of hulls, so that players can’t completely negate racial disadvantages by filling their fleets with different types of ships.
Of course, it would be kind of neat to have a few scenarios where the limits were completely gone, just so you could have fun with completely ridiculous fleet combinations. 
hulls idea is excellent, as for messing around (always fun) that would also be nice, for instance, i am trying to beat the current scenerios with only fighters on all difficulties. So far, i am only doing well with the Swarm