You've got a particular scenario in mind here that you're not describing clearly enough to discuss. In particular, why one would deselect empty ships isn't clear.Tortanick wrote:[If you] disallow ships from sharing fuel, [then] if you have different groups of ships that you order to meet up and form a fleet, then they'll all have different amounts of jumps left. Depending on the UI either a player will start having to manually deselect the empty ships, or order an attack and realise too late that only half the army is attacking a fortress.
But regardless, even if there isn't fuel, there will need to be ways to deal with ships that have different max speeds travelling together. Currently, a fleet travels at the max speed of its slowest ship. If we had fuel, then a fleet would stick together, and would take as long to get to its destination as it takes the slowest ship. If we had some ships completely incapable of getting to a destination, but others able, both in a single fleet, then we'd probably make it impossible to order the fleet to that destination.
If you're talking about ships at different locations all being ordered to converge at a location, there's no expectation there that they'd all arrive at the same time, is there?
I'm confused... do you want captured colonies to give supply quickly, or not at all?What I meant that if you say that you are supposed to supply you're invasion from captured colonies then it must be reasonably quick for captured colonies to start producing supplies. I think that invading players should need to send fresh supplies from home because using a captured colony would make the supply lines to short to be easily cut.Geoff the Medio wrote:If someone captures a single system near your empire but away from their base of power, you probably have a variety of military and nonmilitary means of taking it back or limiting its function in the short and long term. Also, resupply shouldn't be instant: it should take several turns to replenish, during which counterattacks could occur. Also, having a source of supply does not mean that there is a repair base available; the latter could require more significant infrastructure investment that wouldn't likely be done easily or quickly at any captured border world.
If a battle was close enough to sources of supply, you could supply a fleet from "home". But if you wanted to persue an ongoing war far away from your supply lines, you'd probably want to establish a closer source of supply by planting or capturing a colony.
If you planted a new colony, it would probably take a relatively long time to develop enough to start providing significant amounts of supply. But, if you managed to capture an already-developed system or world from an enemy empire, you'd probably be able to use some already-present infrastructure and start supplying useful amounts of supply quicker. Of course, you have to actually capture a well-developed foreign planet to do this, and protect it from counterattack, and hope it doesn't get disabled by nonmilitary means by the attacked empire.
Alternatitvely, you could yourself capture an already-developed planet from another empire using nonmilitary means, and then use that as a base for an invasion.
Also: English tip:
* "your" indicates things that belong to you, eg: "your house"
* "you're" is a contraction that means "you are". eg. "You are homeless."
It is a bit clunky, so if we can avoid it, I'd like to, but there are potential problems...eleazar wrote:...i still don't like the idea of an arbitrary threshold in whichever meter that makes the difference between providing no ship-supplies, and supplying a whole fleet.
This assumes that supply rate drops with distance, which hasn't been established (and might not be necessary)...I can accept that complete repair may take several turns for a large and/or heavily damaged ship. But it would seem rather annoying under ideal supply conditions for it to take multiple turns to refuel a ship or restock the missile rack. If it takes several turn to refuel at home then the diminished amount of supply available further afield would be crippling.
But what if, instead of amount of supply colonies can produce depending on their level of development, we have various levels of rate of supply, with colonies still producing infinite supplies each turn? A large colony could fully restock a ship in one turn. A smaller newer colony could only partially restock a ship. If a ship is in range to be supplied by multiple colonies, then the highest-rate colony does the supply, with no stacking (so fifty slow colonies supplying a ship are just as fast a one slow colony, which is slower than one fast colony).
"A well ordered empire" isn't always going to be the case though. Unless we specifically design resource sharing to avoid it, there could be situations where two colonies that can't share resources are both able to supply a single fleet.This complication seems to be based on different starting assumptions than i am using:Geoff the Medio wrote:If we limit how many supplies a single colony can produce (other than none or infinite) then we could have situations where separate colonies are able to both supply some ships, and individually supply some other ships [and complications trying] to figure out the optimal supply distribution pattern.
* The total supplies produced by a PSR network of colonies is added together and can be distributed by any or all of the member colonies or hubs. A well ordered empire will have all his colonies as part of a single (or maybe a few) PSR networks.
This would be fine if the non-optimal nature of the supply was predictable and logical to the player, but without specifically designing things to be that way, we might end up with it being essentially random to the player how much supply a particular fleet gets and whether and how much potential supply from various sources ends up being wasted due to non-optimal distribution. This screams bad design to me.* Complications (non-optimal distributions) only occur when the PSR network is fractured, and if they do, that's a logical consequence in allowing your supply infrastructure to be shattered.
I (think I) know what you're saying, but I don't think that fuel as we're planning it is well-suited to limiting both speed. We have ship speed for that, and fuel can limit range.Sandlapper wrote:I'm referring to limiting the advance of a ship/fleet by relative supply need, not by engine performance.If we want to slow down ships, we'd just make them move more slowly.
It's not just making large ships slow and short range; I want to be able to have "fast-long", "fast-short", "slow-long" and "slow-short" as separate speed-range combos. To do that, the things that limit speed and range probably need to be separate.I'm trying to acheive, by supply need\use, a concept of larger ship equals slow and short range by your suggestion here...