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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Fleet movement working!

I had some extra free time, so I finished up the fleet movement and selection of destinations, as well as displaying current path of the selected fleet.  Fleets now move to their destination, and after arriving, if it's not explored, it is now explored.  So, yeah, the gameplay part is getting there :)

On a side note, have you ever experienced this when you don't have hyperspace communications:

"Hey, I'll send some of my warships to this system to protect it."
A turn later, you see the enemy sending ships to another system
"Oh snap! I want to tell my warships to go to that system after they've arrived at current destination to save a turn!  But I can't!  I have to wait until they arrives before I can issue orders."
If you were able to tell them to move on, they might have arrived in time, but no, your colony gets destroyed because your fleet arrives one turn too late.

So I've added the ability to tell your fleets to keep on moving if you want them to go to a new destination right after arriving at their current destination, as shown in the screenshot:


In this case, the fleet has already left Scietn (Yeah, a random name) heading for the orange star.  I want it to move to the rightmost star immediately after arriving, and made an order to do so.

Now this raises a few balance issues, I'm going to address the ones that I know of:

If the original system is unexplored, I'm going to say to leave it unexplored because your fleet didn't actually stop for a full turn there.
If the original system has enemy fleet, your fleet stops and engages in combat as normal.

Any other situations that I missed that might not be balanced with this change?  I can add an option to enforce "No Secondary Destination" or something like that to match MoO 1's gameplay.  What do you think?

2 comments:

  1. Oh yes, that was annoying in MoO 2. It made wormholes useless in mid game. There were a lot of situations where direct A to B travel would last 3 turns, same as using wormhole because of extra turns needed to travel to the one end of the wormhole and to fly away from the other end. And three step maneuver is three times more error prone (me forgetting what was I doing on galaxy plane after being buried for 5 minutes in colony management).

    As I understand you've implemented it with sort of waypoint system. Could you use that to make fleet stay a turn and explore system?

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  2. When I add Stargates technology, I will revamp the pathfinding so that it will find the shortest non-hostile route to the destination. So you don't have to manually go to A system with wormhole, then order it to go to B system on the end of wormhole, then order it to the actual destination. The game will handle it for you.

    If there's hostiles blocking the way (guardian, monsters, or other enemies), that system won't be considered in the pathfinding. Unless you press shift to ignore enemies and go ahead anyway (superior fleet for example)

    As for waypoint system, it's not how this current system works. But I can add it, and you can press ctrl to queue up movements. Would make exploring less tedious.

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