A little light bulb went off in my head while I was typing definitions for "task force" etc. in my recent reply for the sub-pulse thread - what's the game-playing motivation for the 50% loss of training points? Reading the wikipedia page on "Task force" (to try and remember whether force or group is bigger), it mentions that a task force is a temporary formation, i.e. that it's very much a "mix and match" organization. The current mechanism where changing Fleets causes a 50% cut in training just doesn't feel right - for one thing, if you change back 5 seconds later (due to an "oops") you instantly have a 25% reduction. I like the the need for an explicit investment in training, however - early on I tend to do a lot of training, until I hit a fuel shortage and training grinds to a halt. It seems like TF should be able to accrue training benefits while they're deployed as well. In addition, the need for a flag bridge means that most of my Aurora-TF actually behave like fleets - some Admiral and his staff are parked at Sol while the ships are 5 systems away. Finally, once a ship in a TF has gained training points, it never loses them, even if it's tied up at the dock for 5 years. I think the core issue here is that training tends to be "all or nothing" - if the Admiral doesn't have a training bonus, then no points are accumulated, if the TF isn't "on training mission", then no points are accumulated, etc. I suspect another core issue is having trouble defining "deployed" ships. I think that the maintenance rules have set things up so that the deployed definition is easy - a ship is deployed if it's not in orbit (i.e. if it's accruing time on its maintainence clock). How do following suggestions sound?
1) Training rots, e.g. set things up so that e.g. 50% of a ship's training points will vanish over the course of a year. This will force training to be an on-going effort, rather than "train up at the beginning, then let them sit".
2) There's a spectrum of accrual of training points to offset the rot. Best is explicit training exercises - they should accrue at e.g. 4x the standard rate. Next best is "on deployment", which means time not spent in orbit (or maybe not spent in orbit of a maintenance facility). The base "on deployment" accrual should probably be equal to the rot rate when the training level is 50%, to indicate that coordination gets better as the deployment progresses, until it saturates at a steady-state value (50%). Next best is "in orbit" - this should probably offset the rot-rate at e.g. a 25% level. Worst should be "in overhaul or refit", which should not accrue training points at all (so rot takes over). The various rates should be balanced so that a 1/3 deployed, 1/3 overhaul, 1/3 working up cycle results in an equilibrium training level of about 50.
3) Admirals, staffs, and flag bridges should make accrual more efficient, as opposed to "all or nothing" - let me call Admiral+staff "TF commander"
A TF commander in another system shouldn't contribute at all.
A TF commander on a ship without a flag bridge should contribute at a reduced rate (e.g. 25%) - the reduction needs to be pretty severe in order to make flag bridges pay off. The other option is that any TF without a flag bridge has a severe penalty (e.g. 25% or 50%) to the "effective" training points of all ships, e.g. a ship with a training rating of 96 would be treated as only having a rating of 24 (even though the ship's actual rating would still be 96) - I think I like this second one better.
A TF commander on a ship with a flag bridge is the best at providing training bonus.
One glitch that I've found is that it's impossible to move TF commands between worlds if you don't have any flag bridges in your navy. It seems like an admiral should be able to embark on a ship without a flag bridge; it should just impair his command efficiency.
4) Ships don't lose training points by transferring between TF - instead training points are lost through rot. This is basically an "avoid micromanagement" suggestion - since it's too hard to track when TF organization changes then changes back (e.g. should all ships in a TF lose 50% when the admiral changes?), simply forget about trying to track it and assume that ships will tend to stay in the same TF anyway in the course of a deployment. The reason this change is important is that I find the existing behavior pushes me in the direction of treating Aurora TF more like USN fleets than like USN TF - I suspect others feel the same pressure.
5) If there's no Admiral+Staff assigned, then the senior officer among the ship commanders becomes the TF commander. This is again intended to push TF in the "mix and match" direction - if you're sending a detachment into a system, make an ad hoc TF and assign the ships to it (without paying the 50% penalty) for the time that they're in the system.
So I guess there are three core ideas here:
1) How well a ship works within a TF doesn't depend on which TF it's in (hmmmm maybe the TF training rate should have multipliers based on a log scale of how many ships are in the TF during training, e.g. 1-4 at 0.5X, 5-8 at 1X, 9-16 at 2X, etc.).
2) The base training rate of a ship is modified by whether or not there's a Flag bridge in the TF and in-system, and possibly whether there's an actual TF commander present, and possibly by the TF commander's command rating (e.g. 0.5X penalty for no flag bridge, 0.5X penalty for no explicit commander present, i.e. TF commander is senior ship commander, +TF commander's bonus as modifiers)
3) TF training rating is always gaining due to what the ship is doing and losing due to rot.
John
