FreeOrion

All hail my radical new idea!

Okay, so we already have colony ships and transport ships so how about another type as well.

I was playing 0.3.13 when I forgot completely about ship fuel and ended up having both my scout ships stuck out in the middle of nowhere just sitting around until my supply range reached them. Then I also thought how this would work in a military situation. So much of a wartime plan goes into ensuring adequate supplies and a lot of it boils down to convoys braving the elements and the enemy submarines to reach their comrades.

So my proposal is that we have a supply pod ship part, just like the colony pod and troop pods. A fleet containing ships with supply pods would have a little button on the fleet selection box which when pressed would instantly consume one of the supply ships and restock every ship and fleet in system with ammo and fuel. Of course each pod only contains so much, so refilling your golden armada is gonna take quite a few of them, and the ships themselves also have limited fuel themselves so you can't simply send them across the galaxy (unless you take a lot and periodically use a few of them every few jumps to keep the fleet fuelled)

What do you think people? Is it pointless? Or is it revolutionary?

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

That would be a helpful add on, I could see myself creating large supply ships with only supply pods on it, it would be a helpful tech to research I like it.

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"People are stupid, they will believe in what they want to. But sometimes you must use people to achieve your goals no matter if it is for bad or good, for patriotism or treason"-The BlackHole

This sounds like it would break any fleet distance limits due to fuel, and would require a lot of micromanagement to control. In particular, how much fuel does one pod contain, and how is that fuel distributed to ships at the location of the pod when it's used?

More likely, we'll make all ships very slowly regenerate fuel, so that after 10 turns or so, you have enough extra fuel to make a single jump, which should let the player get a ship back into supply range if it's just outside range.

Each pod would only contain about five points of supplies. When consumed the ship with the pod(s) would instantly disappear and those five points would be distributed evenly among the ships in the system. It would start on any ship that has zero fuel and give it one point of fuel. If every ship has at least one point of fuel it would then make sure every fleet has at least one point of ammo for every ammo-using ship in the fleet. Then any leftover points would be used to ensure every ship has two fuel, then two ammo etc. until every ship has full fuel and every fleet has full ammo.

Priority for fuel would be given to ships with the largest capacities. If there are still points left over after everything has been restocked, then they would be converted to a negligable amount of trade or minerals. Obviously the supply ship itself would still have its own limited amount of fuel as well. In addition, its impossible to use just a few pods from a ship with many, the entire ship is always consumed.

Perhaps to use this, there would be two tiny icons next to a supply ship's fuel amount, the first would just consume that ship, the other would consume either all the ships in the fleet or enough to supply every ship in the system. Supply ships cannot be used during transit, but they can be used if there was a combat in system that turn. When a supply ship consumed the effect is applied that turn so ships can move immediately.

Oh yeah, and supply ships cannot be used if the system is within supply range.

EDIT: A supply pod should cost more than a troop pod, but less than a colony pod.

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

I also think this would be better to abstract out. Just assume that the current fuel range limit already represents something like this.

Why not just prevent the player from being able to send the ships out of supply range?

In either case I think an extra visual indicator that a ship is leaving supply range would be nice. Perhaps the fuel supply number could flash red, or more prominently the direction vector from the fleet to the system might change colour when the player mouses over or selects the out of range star. Otherwise I suspect we may find some new players getting frustrated unnecessarily if they keep accidentally sending lots of ships out of range.

Because the player can have good reasons to send out ships out of supply range.
- colony ships don't need to go back, creating colonies out of the current fuel range is not that uncommon
- military support might be needed somewhere out of fuel range
- an aggressive explorer might be willing to strand ships to expand his known space

I agree about the visual indication.

Also, it's impossible to do so. A ship could be "in range" one turn, and then the next turn an enemy could block a supply lines, making the ship no longer able to access supplies from the same location.

So what do you guys think? Do we have a winner? Obviously this is just the initial proposal so there will still be revisions before we can put it in, just like every tech it will develop.

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

No; as I wrote before:

You're trying to undermine / break the intentional limits of the fuel system by adding a micromangement-intensive and unusual system. Multiple wrongs don't make a right.

Well, back to the drawing board for me I guess...

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

Wait a minute, how about this then. I just reviewed the 0.4 Design Pad and thought about this:



In this case, how about instead of fuel and ammo, a single supply pod simply refills a fleet's stock of ammo (to an extent, more ships need more ammo obviously). This way you can use a disposable Supply Ship as your "one-way-shuttle." Simply build a ship with a supply pod, send it off to some desperate squadron in an enemy system, double-click a "consume" button next to the supply ship's fuel rating and your fleets in that system get 10 points of ammo distributed to them.

This way, the supply ship simply provides a faster way of distributing ammo that you would otherwise have to use fresh combat ships for. And it won't break the game's fuel/supply system.

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

The point of that excerpt is that we don't need keep each ship's ammo stockpile separate like we do for each ship's fuel supply, because the consequences of sharing ammo are much less than those of sharing fuel. In theory at least, players will probably not feel the need to micromanage by shuttling ships around in order to avoid ammo limits to the same degree they could with fuel. For ammo, the player can just send the ship back to a supplyable point and get resupplied there. (Whereas with fuel, sending the ship back to get restocked wouldn't let it continue travelling from its original furthest reachable distance with a refilled fuel tank.)

This is *not* a justification to intentionally break the supply system for ammo by actually making supply ship for that purpose. (And that is what you're proposing to do...)

Well, from what I understand in that case. You're saying each fleet carries the same arbitrary amount of ammo. That sounds really strange to me, I was under the impression that a fleet's stock of ammo was directly linked to how much ammo the collected ships would need to expend in a typical series of battles.

All I really wanna say is don't shelve this idea straight away because I think it would be useful. Perhaps we can revisit it when v0.4 comes out and we see how much ammo ships carry and then use. Then we can adjust the idea.

Besides, its not quite micromanagement. The supply ship needs about as much management as a troop ship or a colony ship, not to mention it functions very similarly, just with a different purpose.

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

No...


Not really. Each ship part that uses ammo has a capacity that determines how many missiles / fighters / whatever it carries. Each ship carries at most as many missiles / fighters as all its parts combined when fully supplied. Ships within a fleet redistribute ammo in some reasonable manner that's to be determined.

Yeah, that's what meant (And that's what I agree with)

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?