Additional category needed for ship designer and fleet templates

[lGSMl]

Right now what is represented as ship "role" in design screen is not a role, it is a hull type. I can make 10 different frigates for different tasks - that would be 10 different roles, but game does not support it per se. From this comes the limitation of fleet template - it does not allow two different designs of same hull.

Can we please have:
1. What is currently represented as "role" renamed to hull, or ship type, or something like that
2. New category added - real "role". Allow to edit/remove roles. Make role-X-hull a unique combination.
3. Fleet template made of role-X-hull listings, not just hull.
4. Fleet template locked on specific design removed. Very rarely it makes sense to create template with "Frigate v5" only designs. With real roles it will be redundant.
5. Automatically take latest design for hull-X-role combination.

E.g. in the end I should be able to create a fleet of:

x5 "long range missile frigates"
x5 "dogfight ion frigates"
x2 "close-range battleships"
x1 "artillery battleship"



another threads on same topic:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=380967
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=380953
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=380917
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=381024
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=381190
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=381237

[robban73]

+1

[Emperor0Akim]

This.

OVER
NINE
THOUSAND
TIMES

THIS!


http://www.orionsector.com/pages/se/ima ... reate1.jpg

sorry, couldn't resist

[Almora]

+1

[KarayaMan]

Indeed!
+1

[100thMonkey]

This!!! Absolutely this!!! An infinite amount of times: +1

Erik, Eliott, PLEASE implement this!!!

[baldamundo]

Yeah this actually would be great. And it would allow way more creativity. E.g. you can outfit a military ship to have survey scanners if you wanted an exploration ship that can defend itself, but afaik there's no way to have it use the exploration ship AI to auto-explore.

I think in general the changes from DW are good in putting some constraints & variation on hull types - i think it does give more depth & texture to it - but the big advantage of the old one was you had the total freedom to tell the AI to use whichever type of ship you wanted for that role. Which also matches pretty accurately how ship classifications work in real life. Over the last few centuries words like "frigate", "destroyer", "cruiser", etc have shifted pretty wildly and been used to refer to totally different sizes of ship!

I think your proposal here combines the best of both systems?

[Harrish]

+1

Would make the military side of the game so much more interesting and fun

[lGSMl]

added few more links to similar requests to the original post and bumping this

[stww2]

I like this idea. Even just implementing part of this and allowing for the fleet templates to specify different designs/classes of the same hull type would be very useful, I think. From what I've seen so far, trying to field different types of escorts/frigates/destroyers etc is a somewhat of a hassle, at least if you them to be in fleets, and the changes suggested here would alleviate that.

[Badbonez]

I think the problem is that when creating a fleet, the game design forces you into using the premade ship types (Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, etc.) in the left had fields. Instead, just get rid of the left hand fields. The right fields would be drop down boxes listing every active military ship design you have. Every time you add a new ship, another field is automatically added to the list.


Here's a lame illustration:

[lGSMl]

I think the problem is that when creating a fleet, the game design forces you into using the premade ship types (Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, etc.) in the left had fields. Instead, just get rid of the left hand fields. The right fields would be drop down boxes listing every active military ship design you have. Every time you add a new ship, another field is automatically added to the list.


Here's a lame illustration:

that will make you to update fleet template manually every time you update design - as updating design right now is just creating a new one and deprecating old. That is why new category is required instead of just allowing to compose fleet based on designs.