In anticipation of getting the beta, I’m replaying though GSB 1, and seen some areas that could be improved in GSBII if they have not already been implemented, I suggest these to help streamline the deployment process.
Have in-game folders for your races ships
When dealing with anomalies or races that have a specific counter, I’d like a place to put all of the different loadouts of my ships. So when you go into the deployments screen, you select your folder such as “Standard build”, “No shields anom”, etc… and it only loads those ships to your selection bar so you don’t have to sort though every ship you made for that faction.
Allow a way to quickly add fighters in non 16 squads
So when making fighter escorts for my ships, a full 16 squad is overkill, but you have to use the slider for every squad, and that can be tedious on larger maps. I was thinking you can right click on your fighter icon to change the number it gives you when you pull a squad out. Like 16, 12, 8, 6, 4, looping back to 16.
Sub-Deployments
In battles I prefer to make my frigates work in teams to enhance their survivability. I typically use frigs with shield piercing weapons at the front, followed by armor breakers in the back. I might even add a layer of pure tank frigates in the front for big battles. I was thinking you can click and drag a box over a portion of a fleet you want to save and drop it in the sub deployment zone to save it for later. With this you can highly modularize your fleets and cut way down in the build time as you no longer have to build a fleet from scratch every mission.
The sub-deployments thing is definitely a good idea, the problem is just getting an easy-to-understand GUI in there that understands how to do that. a hotkey that just duplicates the current selected ships is not as simple as it sounds, because ships cannot stack. hmmmm…suggestions are welcome… and be aware that it is not a simple matter to just suggest ‘find an empty space in the deployment’ to place them…
Part of me wonders (and this would be code hell…) about allowing you to save selected ships as a new icon on the LHS just like a ship design, and thus drag-and-drop a sub-formation. This would be awesome, and also a nightmare to code…arghhh…
Did you watch the video that was linked? If you haven’t, the way KSP did it might clear things up a bit. As for the Icon, to keep things simple why not keep it generic and have a small space for what name they put at the bottom so they can tell them apart, and have their description they put for it pop up when moused over?
Now I understand if you can’t use this idea or have to put it on the back burner if it eats up too much dev resources. After all, this would likely classify as a “Nice to have” feature.
I think we could change the color of the lines, and give the ‘leader’ of the formation a logo next to the ship (like a blue heater shield). the ships directly conect to that ship would have white lines but other formations connected to it would have blue lines
I fully agree with the sub deployment thing !
Here is my conception of how it could be implemented (click to enlarge):
When two ore more ships a selected, the save button is enabled, clicking it displays the save popup
Representation of the sub deployments, drag and drop
For the code nightmare, i really don’t know what going on under the hood but if you can store relations/orders between ships, you could spawn them if you have the space and the cost/pilots of the sub deployment
As another suggestion, I think it could be great to duplicate ships on deployment fleet, unless it’s already possible ?
I’d love to implement that, its stuff like this thats making me panic and push back the release date AGAIN!
The tricky part is always making the GUI work. Change your version of the game to run in a window at 1280x768 res (minimum spec). Now check out the deployment screen… There isn’t much room there!
Instead of putting the representations of the sub deployment, you can just display names/minimal information and display more infos on hover in a tooltip.
Ok I got this in and working yesterday night. Hurrah! The way it works is as follows:
There are those two new buttons shown. When you select more than one ship, the save button lights up, You can then save this sub group to a file, which you can name (obviously). All the sub groups get saved into the same folder on the hard drive.
You can at any point click the load button, and pick which file you want to load in. If none of the ships are applicable to this mission (wrong class type or race), then they will just get skipped.
The new ships then appear exactly where they were when you saved them, so you might need to clear room first. It works with all orders, formations etc. Any links to other ships that are not selected when you save out a sub-deployment simply get ignored, so it should be pretty much idiot proof.
I’#ve tested it a bit, and it is actually pretty cool, especially for building up grand deployments
The load dialog also lets you delete any files in that folder, so you can prune old sub deployments you don’t use any more. Right now my only concern is that it may be confusing to the player knowing the difference between 'save/load subgroup (which can be applied to ANY scenario) versus Save/Load the whole of THIS deployment for THIS scenario…
Ok this is in the new build today (1.18) but I did notice a few bugs and annoyances if you are loading a sub-deployment saved from a different scenario with a different deployment area, which I will have to give some thought to…
Let me know if the new system is useful or any suggestions you may have for improvements.
Cheers
