Easier Fleet Splitting

[eleazar]

I'm following the development of Beyond Beyaan because it's a 4X game also inspired by MoO that seems to be making some good decisions.

I read this line:
"All ships will be selected by default, similar to MoO 2. Deselecting them will remove them from the current fleet when you issue movement command, again, like MoO 2."
And suddenly i realized that i have been finding myself trying to do that. It's pretty logical and bypasses a step (or two) if you want to split a fleet.

I wouldn't want all ships in a fleet should be selected by default.

But if you do select part of a fleet, and then select a new destination, it would be convenient if the selected ships split off from the current fleet, forming their own.

[Geoff the Medio]

Does this essentially mean remove "fleet" as a distinct concept for the player, and just having a list of ships (per empire) at any location? Move orders would be issued to all selected ships, and they would then move together at speed of slowest ship selected when the move order was given?

[eleazar]

Does this essentially mean remove "fleet" as a distinct concept for the player, and just having a list of ships (per empire) at any location? Move orders would be issued to all selected ships, and they would then move together at speed of slowest ship selected when the move order was given?

That's what they do in Beyaan apparently, but that goes beyond what I was proposing, and beyond what is useful if we indeed want to have large numbers of ships. It could be annoying if you have a large number of ships organized into fleets, and they they all clump together just because they were in the same system -- perhaps being repaired.

My suggestion is simply an easier way to divide a fleet ( or to make a new fleet, depending on how you look at it). Having multiple discreet fleets in the Same location is useful for us, IMHO.

[Geoff the Medio]

My suggestion is simply an easier way to divide a fleet

So does that mean you want the act of issuing a move order to separate selected ships into a new fleet if anything other than all or none of the ships in a fleet are selected?

[eleazar]

My suggestion is simply an easier way to divide a fleet

So does that mean you want the act of issuing a move order to separate selected ships into a new fleet if anything other than all or none of the ships in a fleet are selected?

Exactly.

[Bigjoe5]

My suggestion is simply an easier way to divide a fleet

So does that mean you want the act of issuing a move order to separate selected ships into a new fleet if anything other than all or none of the ships in a fleet are selected?

Exactly.

I've found myself wanting/expecting this to happen as well.

[Zeraan]

Glad my ideas are helping you resolve yours

How it works in my game is:
There are "Fleet" class that stores a list of ships, the destination, maximum speed (slowest ship's speed), etc. Each instance of a fleet class must have at least 1 ship, otherwise it gets discarded.

When you select a location in the galaxy map, it looks for all fleets in that x,y position, and creates a new class named "FleetGroup" that stores a list of fleets in that position. Selecting one fleet in the FleetGroup class generates a new instance of "Fleet" called "fleetToSplit" that is basically a copy of the selected fleet.

The UI then refreshes, and lists the ships from the selected fleet. If "fleetToSplit" have the ship in its list as well, then have it selected in the UI. Deselecting a ship in the UI removes the ship from "fleetToSplit", then refreshes the UI to reflect the change.

When you're done selecting ships, you right-click on a location in the galaxy. When this is done, fleetToSplit is now added to your empire's list of fleets as a new fleet, and its ships are subtracted from the selected fleet. If no ships remain in the selected fleet, discard it.

During turn processing, if more than one fleet from your empire is in the same location, and they don't have any movement commands, they are merged together into one fleet.

I used to have stacks of ships, but I decided that I want to focus on fewer ships, so I changed to the current system. The previous system worked in a similar way, but instead of having copy of ships, it have a list of "ship designs" in a dictionary, along with an int value of the amount of that ship is in the fleet. Splitting the fleet consists of subtracting that int value.

I don't know if this helps, but I thought I'd explain how things are done under the hood