I feel like I have something of a dilemma on my hands with this space 4X game I'm (slowly) designing. So far, I have the planet/colony management pretty well mapped out, and I have definite ideas about ship/fleet management. The question is how to join these two game aspects together in a smooth fashion. Regarding the former aspect, I've made a couple of threads in this forum about how things will go. Planets have production in three areas: research (advances technology), industry (builds stuff), and prosperity (grows population, improves environment, etc.). It's similar to the original Master of Orion in that individual structures will not be ordered; rather, population will be allocated to each production type and different planet-wide projects will be added. For this thread, industry is the production type that matters. Now for ship/fleet management. In nearly ever space 4X game that I've ever played (and I believe I've played nearly all of them!), it seems rather difficult to plan and build up space forces. Part of the reason for this is due to the fact that ships are typically built on individual planets. The other part is that there's usually no way to create "permanent" fleets out of the ships that are built. So I've decided to try to address these two issues. I'd like the main unit of management be the fleet, not the ship. Players would thus create and build/assemble entire fleets at a time, instead of order each ship in the fleet individually and then manually assemble them together. The question is how to fold this into the planet management scheme I've outlined. Should individual planets be responsible for building entire fleets? Otherwise, how should the ships that compose a fleet be distributed to the planets in the civilization? And how/where should those ships then be assembled to form the fleet? I have some inklings on how to proceed, but I figured I'd get input from fellow (strategy) game designers first. So have at it! :)

I think taking a note from the real world is likely your best bet.

On planets you build production centers, and then from a "military" screen you manage your fleets. Ordering up a new set of ships then automatically 'bids' to all your yards, and decides which can produce that vessel fastest and deliver it to the fleet that ordered it.

I would go a with a military screen as well where you can build and manage fleets. Creating a new fleet would consist of selecting the ships and formations that you want in the fleet and then selecting the shipyards to use and a rally point. The game would then take care of managing construction orders to those shipyards to build the fleet in the shortest time.

If the basic unit is fleet, you shouldn't really need to worry about individual ships at all right? You'll just have a build time for the whole fleet itself.

Maybe (depending on the fleet size) you could require a certain level of industry to be able to build a fleet. Any one planet may or may not have the capacity to build an entire fleet, but you could allocate capacity points from multiple planets to satisfy one build job. Those capacity points would be tied up until the job is done.
Then, you could have consequences resulting from building distributed vs. single-planet. Maybe some sort of penalty/benefit scheme favoring each in a different way.

Later, you could tweak the balance of those consequences to favor whichever you feel is more fun, challenging, or better for gameplay. It will inevitably push players to prefer monolithic industrial planets to take advantage of economies of scale, or well-balanced industry across the empire so losing a planet wouldn't be such a shock to your ability to build.

Just thinking out loud...

One way to do this is to manage your fleets by "units", example, Fleet or task force or flotilla... etc.

Basically you open up the screen you will see a list of this forces. To add ships to them simply select what ships to add, select what shipyards to produce the ships (example, all shipyards in a range of 20 parsecs, or, all available shipyards), verify the time needed, any build queue you need (destroyers Mk2 before Cruisers Mk 2), click build once the ship are built it will automatically fly from the shipyard to join up with the fleet.

If you want to add a level of management, give users a way to divide the stars into "sectors" (like a rear sector or a sector facing your most active opponent or a sector that actively create ships).

Then assign fleets to a sector and when you order ships for the fleet it will utilise all shipyards in the sector.

This gives your fleet management (or even your empire management) a kind of hierarchy for management purposes making it easier for players to manage things.

You could build a fleet from a planet and all idle planets around it will participate in the building by redirecting their production to the fleet building planet. The logic is that each planet builds a component and they are assembled at the main planet to produce a ship. If a planet starts building something else, then it no longer helps the fleet building planet. It would be easy to automate with no user interaction.

The advantage of this is in a standard 1 ship per planet rule, you cannot pool production values to speed up big ship building. The death star was most likely not built from a single planet, but from hundreds of planets. If your fleet consists of 4 battleships, then even if you have 20 planets, they will be useless and the fleet will take forever to build.

Good replies all around!

There was something I forgot to mention in the OP. Production can be transferred from one planet to another. The idea here is to encourage specialization and economies of scale, something I've never really seen in another space 4X game. Some of you have already thought of this on your own -- I like that. :)

Okay so at this point, I'm leaning towards ordering a whole fleet to be assembled at one planet. I think there are two nice things about this approach. First off, it makes setting up rally points easier, because it's always the same as the planet where the fleet is assembled. Second, it plays in well with the aspect of planet management I outlined above. If you want to build your fleet faster, you can take industrial production from other worlds and export it to the "prime" world. What do you guys think?

As far as whether to limit which planets can build ships at all, by shipyards or some other means, is a secondary issue IMO. But to be honest, I'm not quite sure how to handle it. Any thoughts here?

Thanks again for your input!

I would recommend making both fleets and a looser grouping for transport purposes. To conveniently move ships from planet to planet and marshall a large fleet, I need to be able to group ships willy-nilly, merge them, break them apart, move them, etc. They would basically be an organizational tool for giving orders in bulk. But an active battle group might need to be flexible in different areas; it might allow you to specify positions of ships, sub-groups, etc, as previous posters said. This would be your "permanent fleet". Perhaps the fleet would be a specialization of the ship-group concept.

In this scheme, one would order a ship-group from the planet, which may or may not assemble it immediately into a full fleet. The group may instead be sent off to another planet to join with other groups to be assembled into fleets.

You could generalize the whole thing into just giving orders to entities; ships, groups, fleets, specific commanders, whatever. Orders would include both travel and battle instructions, and joining (and leaving) fleets. All you need is a way to keep track of and give orders to entities that don't yet exist. You would probably have a panel or screen where you can access all entities under your control, both constructed ones and ones that are "on order".

Curiosity: Are you taking relativity into account in your space travel?

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Original post by theOcelot I would recommend making both fleets and a looser grouping for transport purposes. To conveniently move ships from planet to planet and marshall a large fleet, I need to be able to group ships willy-nilly, merge them, break them apart, move them, etc. They would basically be an organizational tool for giving orders in bulk. But an active battle group might need to be flexible in different areas; it might allow you to specify positions of ships, sub-groups, etc, as previous posters said. This would be your "permanent fleet". Perhaps the fleet would be a specialization of the ship-group concept. [...]

I agree that, for user-interface simplicity, 1..* fleets of a particular species at a particular system should be represented by a single icon. You would have to click on or hover over the icon to display the individual fleets in that system. At that point, you could select multiple fleets to move together to a different location. Does this sound like what you're talking about?

On the other hand, fleet compositions would not be set in stone. The player would be able to move ships from one fleet to another (including an entirely new fleet). He'd also be able to combine entire fleets. This is more of an organizational aspect than what I describe above.

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Curiosity: Are you taking relativity into account in your space travel?

No, it'll be standard hyperspace/warp-drive FTL. While using only STL plus relativity would be a big plus on the realism side, I think it would sadly render the game virtually unplayable.

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Original post by RobAU78 I agree that, for user-interface simplicity, 1..* fleets of a particular species at a particular system should be represented by a single icon. You would have to click on or hover over the icon to display the individual fleets in that system. At that point, you could select multiple fleets to move together to a different location. Does this sound like what you're talking about?

Actually, I wasn't talking about UI at all, but semantics. And I wouldn't want all fleets in a given system to be grouped. If anything is grouped, I want to have been in charge of it.

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On the other hand, fleet compositions would not be set in stone. The player would be able to move ships from one fleet to another (including an entirely new fleet). He'd also be able to combine entire fleets. This is more of an organizational aspect than what I describe above.

But you might not want exactly that kind of fluidity in a fleet that's actually about to go into battle. I guess it depends on how much actual tactics play a role in the outcomes of battles. But you might want to assign ships or small groups thereof specific roles in the battle, and this would be fragile in the middle of this big fluid mass of ships that you want for just moving them around. Not every big group of ships has to be a fleet.

Of course, this level of control might be overkill if the whole substance of battles is just throwing big masses of ships at planets and blasting them.

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Quote: Curiosity: Are you taking relativity into account in your space travel? No, it'll be standard hyperspace/warp-drive FTL. While using only STL plus relativity would be a big plus on the realism side, I think it would sadly render the game virtually unplayable.

I don't think it would. The virtual timeline of the game would extend, something like a couple to several years for every real minute, but it could be fun. I actually had Ender's Game and its sequels in mind. Orson Scott Card paints a fairly compelling picture of relativistic space warfare that I would like to see captured in a computer game. Of course, it's a good read regardless. I'd recommend it and the series if you haven't read it already.