Ta'Lon wrote:Micromanagement hell would be having to click on EACH individual ship in your fleet that you want to upgrade, WITHOUT having an 'upgrade all ships of the same type' option with the right click.
No,
that would be beyond the seven circles of micromanagement hell
The micromanagement hell I'm referring to is the need to send ships back and forth between the front lines and your drydocks and keeping track of everything involved in the upgrading process.
BTW, Galactic Civilizations is the franchise I was referring to earlier (upgrades take ships offline for a number of turns, the time required based on how close they are to your planets, and the extensiveness of the upgrade). That game allows upgrades anywhere. The right click in that game which brings up the popup menu that shows your upgrade options (and the associated cost), with the 'upgrade all ships of the same class' option included. It is quick, easy, and painless.
Ah, I see. You were just giving that as an example, not suggesting to do it exactly this way in FO.
And yes, I AM suggesting that ships may only be upgraded at orbital drydocks (or better). To be honest, most of my colonies that build ships end up having one of these anyways (it's fairly close to the top of my list of buildings to build), so I don't see the problem.
The problems with that are:
1.) In FO buildings are considered something special and rare, not something you build on all/most of your colonies. If one building turns out to be such a "build everywhere" thing, we consider that a design flaw and will try to fix it. We
do have some buildings ATM that have this problem, but these are not going to stay the way they are now.
Meaning, if drydocks turn out to be something players tend to build everywhere or even
need to build everywhere in order to play an optimal game, or just to avoid micromanagement, we need to redesign the mechanics that cause this kind of behaviour.
2.) As long as you only have few ships, sending them back every now and then for some upgrades isn't that big an issue. But as you build up your empire and get more and more ships, this becomes extremly tedious. I've played other 4X space games (Space Empires the most noteworthy example) which do upgrades exactly like this (requiring you to send ships to a drydock/space yard/whatever). It always gets beyond annoying after a while. Because once you have dozens or even hundreds of ships, the hassle of having to keep track of everything involved gets unbearable:
- You have to keep track of how outdated your ships are and decide when it's worth to send them back to the drydocks to upgrade them.
- You have to keep track of which ships are on their way to which drydocks for upgrades, which ships are currently upgraded where, which ships have been finished and ready to go back to which front lines.
- As you often cannot just send all your ships that need upgrades back at once (especially when currently in a war, which is a very common situation in a 4X game), you have to send your ships in batches (which further complicates the keeping track thing).
As I said, been there, done that. All that sending back and forth of ships and keeping track of everything gets to the point where it's no fun anymore, just a hell lot of tedious, annoying, repetitive work. Exactly the thing we do
not want in our game.
You could put a 'discount for upgrades' on ships at orbital drydocks (or better) if you wanted to allow simple shipyards to do the work. But I STILL think it should tie up the production cue/use production resources, otherwise it's a cheat.
I'm not opposed to require upgrades to cost PP, I'd actually prefer it this way too, provided we can come up with some ideas how to do that without getting into the micromanagement described above.