look at how Sin of a Solar Empire uses strike craft. Sure you can go in and directly manipulate each craft if you want, but they group them into squadrens. You can also go in and directly assign squadrons a particular target, but they allow you to assign them to a quick group (or just alt select to select all within a gravity well), and these you can assign to a particular target.

So, if you think about it, if you have an all carrier fleet (and I have :D ) you can literally be directing thousands of these strike craft. At around 6 craft in a squadron and a carrier controlling 2 to 3 squadrons, and having around 100 carriers, this is actually around 1,800 craft.

Now instead of needing the 100 craft, if you allowed ConCom ships and factory ships as the "Carriers", then you could have these thousands of strike craft at you control.

Some suggestions as to the type of strike craft (you don't want many types):
Interceptors: Good at taking out slow moving bombers.
Fighter/Bombers: Good at taking out ConCom/Factory ships, and Fighters.
Fighter: Good at taking out Interceptors.

ConCom/Factory Ships: Defence systems are good at taking out Interceptors and Bombers.

Now, instead of directing every single ship, you essentially direct the swarm of them. The player places a "tactical point" somewhere on the map and the strike craft fly there and take out any targets in their sights automatically.

There is a game called "Attack of the Killer Swarm" at the experimental gameplay project (http://experimentalgameplay.com). The idea of this is that you control a killer swarm by clicking the mouse at a point and the swarm flies there and throws a person up in the air to kill them. Each particle of the swarm is independent and moves by itself, just as each strike craft in my idea would.

Players would not be able to directly issue orders to a strike craft (or even a squad), but would control them on mass, and the ships would try to perform the best they could.

In a way it would be a bit like controlling a single ship where that ship had a lot of weapons that could fire. But, instead of the weapons just vanishing at the target, they would instead return to the ConCom/Factory ship for refulgent and rearming (and they would ahve a longer range, and could destroy each other).

Combat will not be about who has the biggest guns, but who has the greatest stamina and how much resources one is willing to risk for a particular objective or location.

I'm about to commit 4x sacrilege, but here goes: I think Master of Orion 3 was on the right track with its "task forces". Of course, as with everything else in that game, it was a good idea done horribly wrong.

Instead of first building your ships and then assembling them into fleets, I think it should be done the other way around. When I'm preparing for war with another civilization, why should I have to micro-manage every single ship that's built? Given X number of ship classes, I should be able to dictate how many fleets I want, what they consist of, and where they're located, all without having to submit individual build orders. The nice thing about this, IMO, is that building a single ship becomes a subset of this mechanic - in that case, I'm just saying to build a fleet of one ship.

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
I agree its an idea that has only been mentioned a few times, but it would be nice to design a fleet by selecting the ships and formations you wanted to make up that fleet and then select the shipyards you want to produce that fleet and let the game deal with the production queues for the individual vessels.

That's really what I meant - I just didn't go into that much detail. :P