At least during the initial stages of the game, when experimenting with tweaking a single ship, I very rapidly found myself desirous of wanting to:
Save certain orders for a specific class of ships (One does not want plasma gunboats engaging fighters, nor does one want point defense frigates deciding to go tangle with cruisers. Ever. It’d be nice if ships could be ‘rezzed’ with saved default order sets for their class.)
Save fleet formations to be loaded ‘en bloc’ (I really don’t want to have to recreate multiple formations of an identical type every time I start a new battle. It’d be nice to be able to ‘load standard escort frigate formation one’ then tweak it around if needed.)
This last is especially useful if one is fine-tuning. Save and load your entire fleet, make a few adjustments, watch it blown to confetti, load it again, make different adjustments. Lather, rinse,repeat.
I definitely second this - the option to save a fleet after a successful battle, as well as to go back to the design screen from ‘admit defeat’ to tweak the same fleet you used, would be really great.
Just as a quick clarification, rather than the ‘save deployment’ and ‘load deployment’ of the entire fleet, I’m discussing the ability to save and load ‘subformations’. I.E., ‘I want my standard echelon formation of frigates here.’
default orders per design sounds like a great idea. As usual, its 5% actually coding work and 95% gui interface code stuff to get it done, but it’s on the list now!
I was actually thinking about this in bed trying to get out of bed this morning.
Some kind of editor that lets us do formations in x number of points - five thousand, ten thousand, etc - and then use those formations EXACTLY like fighters are used now, would be super excellent MEGA BADASS.
In fact, if we could put down individual fighters with such a formation, it would be HYPER RADICAL BADASS.
We just need a ‘zoom in’ to view a small portion of the game setup area, a way to ‘break’ ships in/out of a formation so we can move them/change their orders individually, and a way to edit individual ships in the fleet. Something where I can click on the deployment screen and swap the torpedoes for fighter missiles in my two ships on the flanks, for example - really minor edits that don’t feel like they warrant a full new ship type.
Edit - before I forget… AUTOSAVE PLEASE. D:> I keep forgetting to hit ‘save’ for my fleet and go into battle and lose it.
Yeah, seconding the desire for an autosave. Or just make the fleet layout screen remember the state you left it in. Quite a few times now i’ve started a battle, remembered that i’ve cocked up the orders and wanted to go back and tweak, but i have to start again from scratch.
And yeah, default orders for ship designs would be a godsend.
One other (minor) thing about orders - i suggest grouping the prioritisation orders for fighters/frigates/cruisers together, have one popup to edit all three simultaneously - at the moment its a bit long winded opening each order in turn to change the parameters, and generally if you want to change one of them you will want to change all three.
Just throwing my support in for changing orders for certain ship designs. This game pretty much begs for fleet-composition experimentation, and something like that would help a ton when testing things out.
Edit: Oh, something else I’ve been wanting. A suggestion for more orders that kinda goes in tandem with this. I love that we can choose orders for the ships, and I’d love to have some more order options in the future. For example, “Hold position for 30 seconds” – which could be useful in so many ways. Or “Destroy shields first” – which could tell shield killing ships to bring the shields down on a ship, then switch targets to another nearby shielded ship.
Eh, I’m sure you have many more/better ideas already. I just love building a custom package of orders in games that allow it, kinda like constructing my own AI out of an easy to use kit.
A couple of other things I’d love would be to be able to save a deployment along with the variants, so if I tweak my variants later for other fleet deployments I don’t lose the old ‘perfect’ version. I’d love to be able to rename individual ships by typing in a name, and it’d be really great to be able to add notes to the deployment which - when the deployment is issued as a challenge - come up like a ‘briefing’ during the deployment phase of the person playing the challenge.
Edit: Custom ‘lose/win’ messages for a challenge would be great, too.
Saving formations would be fairly nice. maybe have a ship building screen, a formation screen, and then a battle screen. I know it is another big step to get to playtime, which may not gel with some audiences, but I think it would be a very useful and versatile step. I have a cruiser/escort/formation set up that I often just duplicate as many times as i can fit it into the current battle cost wise. This would streamline that effort.
You probably wouldnt even need a separate formations screen, you could just select a group of ships on the deployment screen, and click a ‘save as formation’ button.
Saveable fleets! It’d be great to be able to carry things forward to the next battle. That way, there’d be a sense of continuity between maps, and it’d probably encourage the use of custom-named ‘favourite’ ships that’d become a priority for tweakage.
The click/drag thing for building ships is ok for singles, but when making a whole flotilla it can be a bit slow. Maybe some way to toggle a mode where you can select a ships and click to place (shift-click?).
Also, would be nice to duplicate (ships, orders and all) a set of ships by selecting them and control-dragging.