Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: July 14, 2020, 12:26:24 PM »A major obstacle, from my perspective, for any 4x game, is reconciling the roles of ship commander, fleet admiral, colony governor, and imperial leader. Each of these roles is inheritly separated spatially, yet each has independent agency. To simultaneously control all four in different spatial locations is fundamentally unrealistic, as any realistic method of communication can propagate at most at light speed. If fiction is permissable, then FTL communication may have a place.
You've hit the nail in the head here and this is also why your suggestion is doomed to fail with Aurora. If you want a 4X game that handles all four aspects that you listed above, then the mechanics (and the AI to support those mechanics) have to be built from the ground up. Master of Orion 3 tried really hard there, with somewhat competent fleet admiral and ship captain AI's as well as a decent colony governor AI, leaving the player to handle the empire level which was mostly fiddling with sliders. Realistic in a sense, perhaps even immersive to some but a critical and a commercial failure that only saw a minor renaissance after extensive modding. And that was a fairly sizable commercial studio with loads of experts with years of experience.
While I'm all for Aurora to grow more detailed outside the fleet combat simulation that it began as, as it has already grown tremendously, I suspect that this separation of different command levels alongside with adding communication lag is something that will never be included. In a sense, it would be an even bigger project than turning Aurora into using Newtonian/Einsteinian physics.