Wingmen commands

It's the player's fault if he groups dissimilar objects together.

Yeah, try to tell this to the guy who just accidentially ordered a wingman 3 systems away to stop mining and is losing 10k credits a day until he gets back there.

I actually tried that route first (easiest to code), but the bug reports rolled in until I had the wingman lock down while mining etc.

I also liked the multiple message idea, but my fear is that the one critical message ("I can't do that order I am out of fuel") will be lost because the messages are text, and there is only 1 line of display. If they were true audio, it would work. The one negative message would force the player to go back and look - who said no?

Perhaps a limited set of audio responses, just enough to communicate "yes", "no", "I am done", and "I am dead", or so is essential.

We have all the complexity of an RTS game, but lack the overhead view and the selected unit sensitive menu items.

I'm not sure if it is possible, but how about the following solution:

You can have as many wingmen as you want in a group, as long as they're the same kind. That way you can't make mistakes as described above, but stil have more than 8 wingmen under you command.

I still fail to see how the player being stupid is not the player's fault. It's tacitly obvious that there is no ambiguity. If you issue an order to a group, all members of that group should perform that order unless they are physically incapable of doing so. If the player is grouping together dissimilar ships, he is either doing so for a reason or doing so because he doesn't know any better. In the first case, it's odd to prevent it, and in the second case, all that takes is a little education.

I will, however, mention that if a mining ship ceases mining because he is a sector away, it would be a bug because the game doesn't have any means for that mining ship to execute the orders he is given. For instance, "Formate with Me" doesn't work on a ship in a distant sector, last time I checked, so if the ship cancels his existing order without being able to perform the new order, it is indeed a bug. Putting in some "no cancel" conditions shouldn't be too difficult...

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I think this issue addresses the scale and type of gameplay you're trying to provide: Huge fleet admiral, or small scale operator.

A large scale fleet type game would mean spending more and more time managing fleets, as well as developing assets, defending money-making enterprises, and planning large scale operations. I'm not sure this is the interface for that type of game, nor is the playing field necessarily big enough. This game operates from a cockpit of a ship. I personally much prefer the intimacy and immersion offered by operating from a cockpit, and having to make decisions, and make strategic moves from that type of interface, and from that scale of information. Having only nine possible additional wingmen slots, introduces an interesting limitation to the game and will create strategic and gameplay style options all its own. It also makes the types of commands and communications between the wingmen more interesting.

I see this as a very positive development in the gameplay, not a limitation at all. For those who want to manage huge fleets, there are many other 4x games (online and not) out there to satisfy.

Hot4Darmat has a very good point. I don't think we are ever planning on making the player into a fleet admiral, with dozens of ships under his command. At best we are looking for the player to reach 'Pirate Lord' or 'Mercenary Captain', with a large handful of ships under his command. Being forced to communicate with each ship individually would help emphasize that scale.

And actually, we haven't changed the hard limit on ships at all. It was set at ten ships previously, and would remain ten (or maybe nine) afterwards. What we really debated when planning this new route was whether limiting the groups to a single ship each would cause problems or disadvantages from a command point of view. We figured for the main part no, except perhaps, when engaged in combat. At such a time the player might want to make quick commands to groups of ships. Thus we imagined, that if it was deemed necessary, we might add a special combat commands menu, from which group commands could be issued to all ships in the immediate vicinity. Example: All attack my target, All defend my target, All defend me, etc.

I'm not afraid to admit at all that I'm looking for the player to be able to acquire assets, build space stations, destroy space stations, and actually alter status quo. Having a perceptible effect on the game universe is generally a major requirement of any freeform space sim. Frontier: First Encounters gets about as exciting as a tonsillectomy as soon as you can afford the most expensive ship. Elite is the same way once you hit the Elite rating and have nothing left to accomplish. The idea is to keep the player interested for as long as he can possibly be interested; as soon as you run into an upper limit of some kind, you've effectively ended the game, since you can't get better than the best. If you have 4 mining ships and 4 patcoms (to guard the miners) in your employ, would you consider giving up those mining ships in order to start blowing up enemy space stations? I would probably just quit after coming to the conclusion that I couldn't really do anything more: I would "win" the game because I would have reached the pinnacle of sustainability and progress. I imagine I'm not alone in that idea.

I think saying that quantity is exclusive of quality is completely silly; no offense intended to any of you personally, but I just can't swallow that idea at all. The quality of any unit is directly (possibly logarithmically) proportional to the development time spent making units have better quality. Just because the player can have more than eight ships doesn't suddenly mean the development time making ships more intimate is somehow reversed. They're the same ships and the same code; there are just more instances of them at the given time. Assuming the program is being developed properly, one ship is no different than ten ships in terms of scaleability. Having ten ships in your fleet means that your ten ships are just as intimate with you -- each with a different personality, each handling in its own way -- as one ship would be.

If I were to wager a guess, the problem here is that the current development is focussing too much on the "group" as a tangible object with a Borg mentality -- one body, one mind, one soul. It should be treating a group as an intangible object that contains tangible objects, and each of those tangible objects should be the ones you interact with, with the group as a scaleable means to interact with them simultaneously.

It takes a little more time to make a game scaleable than it does to program restrictions, but the difference isn't serious. The interface can handle it: comm chatter can be spaced out, ships can all respond in turn, ships can give their yeas and nays at will, etc. When it becomes too much for a player to manage in a single group -- for instance, if one command has two dozen fighters all yapping their affirmations and insubordinations -- you downscale your fighters into separate groups, consolidate those fighters into a larger vessel, or remand those fighters over to parking until you're ready to use them.

Ideally, you assign your groups from the very beginning into groups of appropriate size and makeup to assure that you have no limitations. A good player will use all of the groups he has to distinguish between his elements and sections. Vessels that should be on standing orders are assigned to groups separately than those who should be tagging along with the player, and those are separate from those vessels which the player wants to leave behind for a while. These are the basics of management. Players who don't like or are confused by that level of management can willingly choose to have just one ship per group and keep things manageable for themselves. Players should also be discouraged from assigning many ships to just one group instead of making use of all of the groups available, and should be educated that dissimilar ships won't always function as intended if they are lumped together as a group.

The only real constraint on the numbers involved should be the physical limitations of your computer system (or, given the lack of features to detect system capabilities, the minimum requirement system) and your ability to control them as a human player using the interface you have available; anything else is arbitrary.


I hate 4X games, by the way. The "Exterminate" part in particular. It's only the "Expand" and the "Explore" that I like. Roughly correspondingly, I love roleplaying and simulation.


Phew... that was a long post. I think I need to hunt down another girlfriend.

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"Important Note to Purchasers: This is a 100% matter product; in the unlikely event that this merchandise should contact antimatter in any form, a catastrophic explosion will result."