Fuel Use

Would wingmen be able to 'auto' refuel, anytime a player docked with the appropriate station? That would take away any micromanaging problems with large fleets, and would make sense. Like you would really need to command every ship to refuel at the refueling station when they are all running on fumes.

The problem with auto refuel is that some ships could use large quantities of fuel. And they could quickly drain the credit account. The player could suddenly find themselves in a cash shortage and then all the wingmen quit.

The current design (which could be changed) is that a station that supports refueling would have a tanker you can talk to. You can ask it to refuel all your ships, or just specify which ships you want fueled. So it can be easy, or it can be as detailed as the player would like.

The player can hire a wingman tanker ship that does the same task. And extends the fleets total range. The player will need to pay upkeep for the tanker ship and pay its fuel cost. So that does provide a way to make fuel handling simpler (but at cost).

I guess we should try playing it and see what happens. It is very easy to add or remove refuel ships based on station type. So it would be worth trying both ways. We learned alot about playability after the last release went out.

Hmmm...I like the sounds of your solution. Fits in nice with how we have been doing things. Keeping the refueling as a function of a wingman also sounds like an easier solution then having ships dock to stations. Ties the station/tanker ship refueling together as well.

It would also be fun to give the player a highly explosive wingman to protect, hehehe.

I'm working through the station fuel tanker code at the moment and will keep the above comments in mind. It shouldn't be a problem to have a "refuel all" option and refuel on specific ships all done via conversation. At this stage I am looking at any refuel being a 100% top up, no partial loads.

Excellent solution. Nice and consistent with the existing feature of arriving at a station's zone, but having other ships in the vicinity that handle other duties. It all sounds good. Can't wait to see this in action. Should I add some refuelling type comments (requests and notifications) in the pile of dialogue stuff I'm building up?