Dilvish wrote:Auto-colonize? Auto-invade? These sound both boring to me, and handicapping -- Choosing when and how to do these is often (though granted, not always) an enjoyable tactical challenge; particularly the combination of when and where makes these extremely significant decisions; I cringe at the thought of throwing that away.
I'm not saying it should completely go away, just that it should be managed at a higher level than the "objects" level of the game. Suppose you have a three species empire. For each species in your empire you can choose whether to incorporate, ignore or eradicate the species. If they are incorporated as members into your empire then they are included in the colonization, ignored just stays on its own planet, and erradicated is slowly erradicated. By default newly captured species are in ignored and you can check the compatibility of them relative to your existing species before making a decision (which you only get to do once, you can't erradicate a member/incorporate a species you were trying to kill off). Various game mechanics present themselves here. You have to check if you need that species [they are good at production but I have a good production species], or if they colonize a new planet type [I don't have anyone for barren planets], or if they are in conflict with existing member species [adding Cardasians and Bajorans as members to your empire will hit Bajoran loyalty with a -100 penalty because of the Cardasian attempt to erradicate the Bajorans].
Each species has its own set of planets it likes and points for those planets. So 5 pts for a good planet 4 for an adequate, 1 for a poor and 0 for a hostile, -infinity for an inhospitable. Each species would also have a specials heirarchy. The tech focused species you might want to +3 for specials that benefit science and +0 for production benefit specials, but for another species in your empire that is production focused it is +2 for production and +0 for science specials. You can also pick out individual systems that you think are strategic and add a strategic benefit (whatever you want say +3), or dig into a particular planet and +3 that particular planet if you need to. There might also be some kind of +/- for the amount of total supply at that planet (as a proxy for proximity to other planets under your control), a +/- modifier for the presence of other colonies under your control in that system, or a +/- for proximity to a planet controlled by an ally or by a enemy, a +/- for each species (I need to balance my tech focused species against my production etc). All these effects get added together and the top ranked planets are identified and made visible (there would be many ties) for you to tweak the ordering. The system could even prompt the player to pick a planet from the top ranked ones whenever you reached the threshold for a new colony to be constructed. [Edit my point is to make the process of deciding where to colonize easier by consolidating all the relevant information in a single place, not to eliminate colonization as a decision. In other words this makes colonization MORE important to the game, not less.]
If people are really wedded to moving individual colony ships around I guess that could be kept within this same system (its just a big gui to manage the decision of where to build colony ships and where to send them once they are built), but in my mind thats just an annoyance. I would rather say that X,Y,Z are my priorities and focus on the important stuff like picking the right technological focus, monitoring enemy movements, putting my fleets in the right position, etc... and not spend all my time constantly checking if planet Zanzibar I has reached the population 3 level I need to build a colony base, and then remembering to forget to check Zanzibar the next turn because the two colony bases I need are now enqueued. That and trying to remember where I wanted to send the colony ship I just built at Bettleguse III.
A similar thing could be done for invasions, if there were an "invasion budget" where one has to prioritize the possible planets that could be invaded. My feeling is that invasions are a bit silly at the moment. To even get a ship into a hostile system, much less keep it there for 5-10 turns, one needs a doom-stack fleet. If you can get 20 ships in orbit over a planet (and keep them there) its not going to be that much harder for you to get some troop ships there as well. IMO it seems a pointless and unrewarding task to go pick the nearest starbase and produce 20x troop ships and then escort them over. Alternately just make the troops weaker but make the invasion action a non-consumable action. Then I can use a slot in my stronger ships for troops and use them over and over until I capture the planet.
Divlish wrote:Your vision really starts to sound like sim-space to me, with only a modest bit of significant decision making. Do you even plan to choose targets for the ships that you don't manage production of, or is that auto-selected along with the invasion targets?
I don't think of it as removing decision making because with the games I play (large maps, many planets per star) a lot of these are non-decisions and mechanical repetition, but have to juggle *way* too much information. With a large galaxy there is lots of space to colonize, and the top of my build queue is usually a couple of different planets close to different borders which are producing 99 repeats of a single colony ship and a single outpost ship.
The important stuff is getting the right fleet in the right place with the right fallback position and then moving them forward to take the next objective. Choosing whether to send the fast attack members of the fleet against the enemy scout or to focus on moving forward against the main objective. That is what I want to play.
