I’m not trying to negatively attack Cliffski and his deployments, but Expert difficulty deployments are really only hidden ‘once.’ You may not be able to see them on the deployment screen, but once in battle, it’s all revealed, and it’s always the same deployment. One can simply admit defeat, adjust their fleet, and give it another shot without breaking a sweat. The fix that occurs to me is relatively simple, but I’ll admit it can still be avoided with a lot more ‘admit defeat’ and start over cycles. Simply break up the enemy fleet into three or four formations (they don’t have to be Formations, but it’s the best word I can find), and have a simple randomiser to mix up the order of the formations. One time you might have ‘formation 1’, ‘formation 2,’ and ‘formation 3’ in normal top to bottom order. Another time could be ‘formation 3 - formation 1 - formation 2’ again, top to bottom. This would result in 6 different combinations, unless I did the math wrong (first slot has 3 options, second has 2, which leaves 1 option for slot 3.) Making four or more formations would increase the variety, but also the processing time. Again, one could cycle until they got what they wanted, but people might actually like this as well.
An ideal that i had once was muiltply delpoments and than it would pick one of then in random, that why there is four differant deploments but you never know what on it will be and it can even throw you off by replaying the one you JUST went at again too.
Combine these two excellent ideas and you get something of an “instant action” option.
A random combination of different groups (consisting of predetermined ships and orders) drawn from a small library of groups to assemble a randomized fleet and place randomly in the deployment zone. It would also be cool if we can add additional groups to the library or download groups created by others.
I think this is something like how the campaign is designed, actually… just on a smaller scale.
That also would ideal in sending challenges. It would give the challenger some more to chew on.
Berny
Fleets composed of random wings would be amazing. I think 1-2-3 wings with 3 wings is still too predictable since you always have the same ships, just in different places. However, 4 wings designed and 3 wings deployed gives you 4 different fleet compositions, and each of those compositions has 6 formations for a total of 4 compositions over 24 formations! Add a 5th wing to the designed category and the numbers continue to ballon at 10 compositions and 60 formations.