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Custom fleets were added by Chris to solve a specific problem, namely the lack of traditional RTS control groups you can assign to hotkeys, which made things like sending off a force of cloaked ships separate from its fleet or hotkeying your sniper separately impossible or unweildly, among others (see the linked issue for other things that were impossible or painful): https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=21640 If they were removed, another alternative to control groups would have to be implemented to solve those problems. Unless XP can be made really interesting I definitely vote for removing it altogether for mobile fleets. However here are some alternative ideas: - make it so fleet XP is attached to the abstract "fleet captain", not the fleet. So you could swap the flagship freely just like you can swap the ships. - add a new Command research category which controls the number of total slots per fleet you have, making so without research, custom fleets are initially less good than fleets you find on the map. |
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Chris wrote a huge post about the rationale behind custom fleets when they were introduced: https://steamcommunity.com/games/573410/announcements/detail/3032537193884066560 |
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The plan has always been to give regular Transport Flagships something nice when they level up. It just hasn't been done yet. |
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Discord discussion in general is majority against EXP seemingly. Seems to be little support for it overall in all the places. Some people kind of like it ( https://steamcommunity.com/app/573410/discussions/0/1693843461187093523/ ). |
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Copy-pasting this from discord: 4) Anyone suggesting things that are going to majorly redefine how the game functions is probably not going to get a very positive response to those ideas. I'm happy to revisit some things like Outguard, because they're underused and not very useful. I plan to expand EXP to be more exciting and useful. Interface things or balance things to fleets are things I'm certainly willing to contemplate, it's only sensible. But to do something like remove flagships, allow unlimited lines in fleets, or do other really extreme things that really change the game would absolutely a giant pivot for the game again. That's something I see no reason to do with so many people happy, and in general we'd have to have an overwhelming level of unhappiness from people for me to contemplate more than refining such systems. Part of going to 1.0 was to signal that those systems are now mature and "are what they are." They'll be balanced, but they won't suddenly go through another giant pivot like we saw during EA. We'd have massive riots if we started making major changes to the whole flow of the game in a post-release support update. Wow. |
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Also from me on discord, kinda relevant: Bear in mind that you can assign as many fleets to one control group as you want. So from a UI standpoint, that's what a control group is -- 1+ fleets. Fleets themselves are an operating unit that has its own fleet-wide bonuses, benefits, perks, etc. Even now putting raiders in a fleet gives a fleet-wide bonus, for example. Fleets are meant to be your primary unit of.... units. In some respects fleets were my answer to both "procedurally designed ships" and "hand-designed ships." I see fleets as basically being giant modular ships. That's how I think of them, as the primary chess pieces you move around the board. |
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Chris I linked to your rationale for these additions so the discussion doesn't start from scratch, but I'm confused by your comment about allowing unlimited lines in fleets being an extreme thing that would really change the game. For all intents and purposes, fleets already have unlimited slots because of the custom fleets! Nine fleets do anyways, which is a high enough number to lodge all your ship lines up to the endgame, especially if you put separate some fleet lines in the leftover transports to micro them. So giving every remaining flagship except perhaps officer fleets unlimited slots won't change anything to the gameplay, it'll just confuse players less and open up some UI possibilities. All ships in one fleet.png (125,116 bytes) |
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I think unlimited lines in fleets would change a lot more than that. For one, there's the whole 'one ship line of each type' thing that's been stated would be really problematic to change. It could become hard to find a fleet that could accept a new ship line if you had a lot of the same type. It would also greatly impact the EXP system, esp. if that does get enhanced down the road, vis a vis the whole balance issue with fleets getting more/less xp based on how many of them are around - that becomes a total non-consideration if you can just cram more lines into one fleet to get around it. |
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> For all intents and purposes, fleets already have unlimited slots because of the custom fleets! Nine fleets do anyways, which is a high enough number to lodge all your ship lines up to the endgame, especially if you put separate some fleet lines in the leftover transports to micro them. This is exactly the issue I'm having with custom fleets. Instead of playing with the cards you got dealt you make your own cards, breaking the system to a degree. Since Custom Flagships are so "powerful" or superior to normal transports there is really little incentive to use the normal transports at all. Maybe a solution would be to limit the fleet lines per transport/custom flagship to 4 and unlock all lines to start with to balance the clear superiority out? It would still allow for micro-ing and making custom control groups as one wishes. |
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I do think that fewer slots in the custom fleets is probably a good idea. I think I went overboard with the number of slots they have. I do want people to be able to customize, but not to obsolete the other fleets that people have. |
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I was thinking just 5, since that appears to be the absolute maximum a Fleet can have, and that's only on a few designs. Some Fleets only have 4 maximum unit types. I've also split up the Flagships a bit, so they have some differences. That's in my held changes. |
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There is definetly something wrong right now: The custom fleets are straight up better than the flagships we find in the beginning! They are either: Faster moving or cloaked They can get up to 7 different units from the start! The basic Transport flagship can only reach 6, and it needs to actually be getting shiplines from a hack, which is quite limiting. One could say, just keep 2 flagships together in a hotkey and you don't need to have 6 ships in one flagship. But that is reducing the XP gains. (EXP being a different subject) Things would feel a lot less "wrong" or "weird" if at the very least, they were equivalent to the ones found: There should be no faster flagships, I never wanted my flagships to be slower. A faster flagship to capture sounds like a good idea to make me prefer the ones I can capture. For the cloaking flagships, if you really want them: If all the built ships of a Transport flagship have cloaking, then the flagship could have cloaking. Only enable that for the basic Transport flagships and the custom ones, not for Golems and such. Alternatively, a Cloaking flagship that doesn't care about what it built (the current Stealth custom ones) also sounds like something that would encourage me to capture flagships. Side note: I read somewhere that we were limited in the number of custom fleets, but that doesn't appear to be the case. I just built Stealth Alpha 4 times in my game... |
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Yeah... Another thing that's wrong with custom fleets as a control group substitute it's that they give you an XP penalty. You'd like to micro your snipers and the official way to do that is to split them out to their own flagship, but you're penalized for it (before you were even penalized by the 7000 energy cost but that's going away). |
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With all the changes in 1.005, I think we at least need a restart to this conversation. But: generally speaking, now the custom fleets are not better, everything has slots, EXP is still near-useless for combat fleets but that's a temporary thing until perks arrive, EXP is not a thing for non-combat fleets anymore, and the penalties for multiple fleets are lower. Thanks to everyone for their feedback, this did help steer the design adjustments. |
- Anonymous
