Ophiuchus wrote:I hope you could rephrase that a bit so I understand better.
Ok, I'll try.
Because most of the things the player cannot control is "automated decision making", e.g. the random shooting in battles. Most of the time I have different priorities for the targets depending on the situation.
I don't think you can really compare that to your proposal of automated troop distribution. The one thing is a game mechanic that tries to abstract the myriad of decisions and actions taking place in a space battle, made and executed by a large number of beings who make up the crews of the participating spaceships. The random elements simulates all the complex (and partly unpredictable) things (tactics and counter-tactics, maneuvers and counter-maneuvers employed by all the combatants) which make up a space battle.
This is necessary and unavoidable, otherwise the combat engine needs to enable the player to make all the decisions of all the participants involved (from the fleet commander to the captains of the ships down to the gunners firing the cannons and the fighter pilots). Which of course is impossible (aside from creating something that nobody ever would want to play), so all games which contain (or are all about) space battles have to abstract and simulate those elements to a varying degree (depending if you make a epic strategic game or a highly detailed tactical game).
How and where you distribute your resources (like you planetary garrison troops) in a strategy game is a very different matter. That is a very strategic decision, which a strategy game like FO is all about, and automating such a decision isn't what we want. There are basically two ways to design game mechanics which involve decisions that might get too detailed for the player to handle manually all the time: either go the simulation way and automate things like you proposed (which makes sense for games that are designed to be simulations), or design the mechanic in a way that such detailed decision making gets abstracted, so no automated decision making is necessary.
For FO's design philosophy the second option has been chosen (eons ago by the ancient founding fathers of this legendary project, which we, their descendants, still respectfully bow to
). FO is deliberatly
not a simulation, but more oriented toward how board games work.
The other thing is what Mat already mentioned. The current combat mechanics are a stop-gap solution and definitely
will be replaced by something that gives the player more control. One of the many things in the queue...