Sadly, I still don't get it. I will respectfully refrain from making further comments to prevent my ignorance from shining too brightly!

I'd love to play this game when it is complete. I want to be a Yellow guy.

On one hand you want to have the player design and build ships and on the other hand you don't want them to actually deal with ship assignment and use.

The idea is that the player can say "Yellow fleet will have all ships with anti radiation shields" and then send that fleet at the border with a race that uses radiation weapon and to say "Green fleet will have more weapons" and send that fleet against a weak enemy.

If the admirals (AI) were to build and assign these ships the whole concept of separate fleets would make no sense (because every fleet would be identical - except the perks of the admiral)..

Plus, where is the player's choice then? Deciding what kind of ships to build and which fleet should get them is an interesting & meaningful decision in my opinion.

Personally I would step it back further with abstraction.

You don't build ships, you build ship yards.

Each flotilla of a fleet is then assigned a 'doctrine', and have a status for how effectively they match their selected doctrine. (This can be faked purely with math, or calculated based on some internal 'ship' simulation that actually accounts for the ships and what kind of stats each one has)

Each fleet/flotilla then is seen as a size/strength rating, doctrine rating (How suited their ships are to their planned tasks, planet security, ground invasion fleet, orbital bombardment, space superiority, etc), and modernization rating.

player can adjust their fleets budgets from a unified management screen, choosing to allocate resources from your pool of ship yards to fleet maintenance, fleet construction, fleet modernization, or choose a special order of scrapping and rebuilding the oldest/most useless ships.

Fleets would self balance themselves towards their doctrines, trading 'ships' if one type would more closely align somewhere else, or ordering new ships from the fleet yards themselves.

Fleets/flotillas (and their commanding officers) would slowly gain general ability the longer they serve, and specific abilities in their selected doctrine. And these can also have a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic to them with various pros and cons, and possibly unlocking new ones as the game advances.

The doctrines mean that the player still gets to make important and meaningful choices about their fleets, but don't have to fiddle with spreadsheet style game play to do so.

Not exactly. I want the player to assign the ships on a strategic level, I just don't want to not make it low level regular chore.

The idea is that the player can say "Yellow fleet will have all ships with anti radiation shields" and then send that fleet at the border with a race that uses radiation weapon and to say "Green fleet will have more weapons" and send that fleet against a weak enemy.

If the admirals (AI) were to build and assign these ships the whole concept of separate fleets would make no sense (because every fleet would be identical - except the perks of the admiral)..
Plus, where is the player's choice then? Deciding what kind of ships to build and which fleet should get them is an interesting & meaningful decision in my opinion.

Well I guess what I was suggesting is that admirals have traits which determine what kinds of fleets they put together. The elite trait means they small numbers of the ships with the best tech, stealth means use fast ships, with stealth capabilites. Engineer might mean they favour drones or mines. Fighter ace would have more strike craft and carriers.

The player picks admirals from a pool or creates them to fit an overall style and strategy for a fleet. You could then have doctorines to give it situational purpose. Like Enemy of green, invasion force, defensive. The admiral will the refit the fleet as nessary you can stil send them out whenever you want but if you want to switch from defensive to green invasion force it might take 5 turns at a ship yard to complete the refit.

Each fleet/flotilla then is seen as a size/strength rating, doctrine rating (How suited their ships are to their planned tasks, planet security, ground invasion fleet, orbital bombardment, space superiority, etc), and modernization rating.

Fleets/flotillas (and their commanding officers) would slowly gain general ability the longer they serve, and specific abilities in their selected doctrine. And these can also have a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic to them with various pros and cons, and possibly unlocking new ones as the game advances.

The player picks admirals from a pool or creates them to fit an overall style and strategy for a fleet. You could then have doctorines to give it situational purpose. Like Enemy of green, invasion force, defensive. The admiral will the refit the fleet as nessary you can stil send them out whenever you want but if you want to switch from defensive to green invasion force it might take 5 turns at a ship yard to complete the refit.

I'm afraid there won't be too much to do in the game if I take this recurring decision from the player.

Also, if it's so abstracted, what's the point in analysing battle results? Since you can't quickly affect the fleet composition anyway.

To build a ship you go to fleet panel and click Build/Add (yes, inside a fleet, not a shipyard).[...]

Similarly, if you want to remove a ship from a fleet you click Remove and that ship will be sent back to the base (you can't send it directly to another fleet)[...]

This seems a bit confusing to me... If ships can only be built/added from within a fleet, then it feels a bit like removing one from a fleet without it being reassigned to another is orphaning it... where is it in the meantime? Is it available at the planet/shipyard in question if that location is attacked, or is it unavailable until reassigned?

To build a ship you go to fleet panel and click Build/Add (yes, inside a fleet, not a shipyard).[...]

Similarly, if you want to remove a ship from a fleet you click Remove and that ship will be sent back to the base (you can't send it directly to another fleet)[...]

This seems a bit confusing to me... If ships can only be built/added from within a fleet, then it feels a bit like removing one from a fleet without it being reassigned to another is orphaning it... where is it in the meantime? Is it available at the planet/shipyard in question if that location is attacked, or is it unavailable until reassigned?

In the Military base (or in the pool of reserve/unused ships). And no, it can not be attacked, it has no specific coordinates on the map, it's an abstract.

Technically, such ship travel time will be calculated by the distance of the fleet to the nearest military base (but physically it won't be there, actually ships won't have position, only assignement and "how long it takes for them to reach the assignement").

Interface wise I will probably display it as "Reserve" (remove = send to reserve; add = send from reserve to fleet; build = construct at reserve and then send to fleet).

Acharis, on 17 Jul 2014 - 08:13 AM, said:

Luckless, on 17 Jul 2014 - 12:15 AM, said:
Each fleet/flotilla then is seen as a size/strength rating, doctrine rating (How suited their ships are to their planned tasks, planet security, ground invasion fleet, orbital bombardment, space superiority, etc), and modernization rating.

I'm caucious about such mechanics. I mean, these are unique (and there already will be tons of unique things in the game) and somewhat confusing. Plus not so intuitive (especially combat loses & damages, everyone understands you had 100 ships, 25 got destroyed, 10 heavily damaged and 17 light damaged but if I were to try to explain it in some multi layered strength rating drop it would be confusing).

You can still keep track of the amount of ships in a fleet, even show it to the user, if you want to be able to know how many ships were destroyed. You could also let the user see how many ships of specific types are in each fleet (pre-defined or designed by the user). As long as they don't have to manually put ships in fleets, I think it avoids the micro-management that you don't want.

'Acharis', on 17 Jul 2014 - 08:13 AM, said:

The problem with such mechanic is you make a decision once (decide the doctrine) and then you don't need to do anything for the rest in the game. While, if you have new types of ships becoming available constantly (research), you have a stream of interesting choices on regular basis (I have researched multi phasing shields, do I want to replace my older ships? Or maybe replace only ships in my primary invasion fleet to cut on costs? Or maybe instead go for ECM refit?)

You can make it possible to change the doctrine at any point in time. Doing so will then slowly change the composition of that fleet.

As long as you can change the doctrine at any time the fleet is out of combat and even combine some doctrines the player still has the power to control and repurpose the goal of a fleet as they want it just takes time to reorganize and refit the ships.

The problem I've always found with manual refitting of ships in games is that is prohibitively expensive. You earn 15 credits a turn but to refit your cruiser with the latest tech costs 1000 credits or you can build new one of 5 turns at a shipyard. Its not till the end game when I can normally afford the refit cost and by then I don’t need to refit. At the start and mid game when it’s most useful I can’t afford to do it.

Letting the AI manage the fleets and shipyard capacity also solves the ships collecting dust problem. How many times have players built ships at planet for defence or as a deterrent and left them there to collect dust never being used and so far out of date that when they do get attacked that don’t last a round.

Your admirals could also gain experience, and over time acquire new traits, special skills, problems, and medals. It can also introduce new political and espionage game play elements.

What do you do if your best and oldest admiral is a drunken xenophobe who is always causing diplomatic insults to your allies?

Do you really trust the blue admiral to defend your core worlds after you just declared war against her people?

After a long bloody war with green you form a peace accord by marrying the Yellow admiral to one of their admirals and turn a border planet into a new neutral empire ruled by the former Yellow Admiral.

Getting rid of manual ship design and fleet control also opens up the possibility of moving away from the rigid tech tree to a more fluid tech web with advancement and counter tech possibilities.

Instead of just researching specific technology you could allow the research of counters. Your spies have information on Green’s latest shields with that info you can have your scientists designs a new kind of phasor that can piece through green’s shields. Giving the Green Enemy doctrine to a fleet will ensure they have this tech when it’s ready and will send Green into complete disarray when you launch your surprise attack.

You could also let the user see how many ships of specific types are in each fleet (pre-defined or designed by the user). As long as they don't have to manually put ships in fleets, I think it avoids the micro-management that you don't want.

But if you know how to make such interface I'm all ears :)

As long as you can change the doctrine at any time the fleet is out of combat and even combine some doctrines the player still has the power to control and repurpose the goal of a fleet as they want it just takes time to reorganize and refit the ships.

If all the doctrines do is give a fleet +10% or attack or +10% defence then they aren't really interesting or important. To be meaningful then the doctrine should significantly change the composition and purpose of the fleet.

But the problem with ship design and research is that MOO2 was the last one to make it interesting and important. In most 4x games all you do is every few turns open up the designer and increase attack or defence by +5% or gain a point of speed. Is that fun?

The thing that made MOO2 ship design fun was the special modules and weapons modifiers.deciding what combination of special abilities you wanted a ship to have and then cramming in as many weapons in the left over space. But that was generally not something change that often. You might upgrade the weapons when you researched new tech but you tended to keep the special for most the game unless something better came along.