I really wish I could stage mock battles with my own vessels.
I got this game roughly a week and a half to two weeks ago. So far, I love it. My worst experience was getting all the windows to come up on my monitor, but that was not so bad -- I simply told my computer I actually had two monitors (which is not true) and then moved the windows over, then shut down the false monitor. I'm actually a little afraid of the v5. 70 changes because I fear they'll make the game harder to pick up and learn. However, I should get on to my topic.
I knew there would likely not be the option to do this, but nevertheless I proceeded to attempt it anyway. I designed and built ships carrying "dummy" missiles with no warhead, and practice anti-missile missiles to shoot them down with. After time I got the ships up and armed, moved them to some waypoints, and fired the dummy missiles. Unfortunately, I found no option that allowed me to fire my weapons at either my own ships or my own parasite vessels (such as missiles). I wish such an option existed.
There are a few ways to go about implementing it, and it depends on how realistic you want to be. The first option I see is to set up specific checkboxes that allow individual parasites and ships (and perhaps PDCs and planets) you control to show up as possible targets on the Task Group and fire control areas -- basically, anywhere you'd normally find an enemy target. If you attach an on-click warning on the checkbox that says, roughly, "Hey now, your own ships will show up as potential targets with this option selected," it will keep people from accidentally shooting at themselves -- or at least giving them no excuse if they do.
The other way I see is to add on to Task Force Training, in a way. Suppose you implement a new system of flags that marks ships as being on an "exercise", perhaps a "live-fire exercise" as well or instead. This will allow selected ships to not only fire upon others designated with similar flags as if they were enemy vessels, but also detect them with their passive and active sensors. As the player, you would naturally be able to see all of your vessels at once, but in this case your ships would not. Whether exercises count for training points in the way that standard automated Task Force Training does is simply a matter of what would be best for the game. The system works well either way. (Though as a player, I naturally would wish it did, as I want the game to be as big and encompassing as possible. )
The second method is my favorite idea, and it does not seem like implementing such a system would be so difficult. A menu window for configuring it all would certainly appear simple to the player. The player could designate individual Task Groups with certain flags, which can be thought of as teams. A "red team", "green team," "yellow team," and so on. Ideally you'd get to name the various battle groups whatever you'd like. Perhaps there'd be an upper limit to how many Task Groups can carry the same flag (and perhaps it could even be determined by Command & Control research) but certainly more than one. In the "Exercise" or "Exercises" window, as I name it, there'd be simple lists to designate who is hostile, friendly, and neutral toward whom.
The next question is whether or not these fights will be for real -- whether the exercise is Live-Fire or not. Like having exercises give training value to your Task Groups, the option of having exercises be Simulated or Live-Fire could be an *option*, meaning both exist in the game, or it could be forced to be one or the other. For my player ideals, both Simulated and Live-Fire exercises would exist.
Suppose the exercises were Simulated. What would occur would be that ships track each other using their actual sensors, but when they fire missiles, only a simulated blip representing the salvo appears. In all respects it'd have equivalent performance to the actual missiles you have loaded (or maybe your ships can shoot any missile their launcher could fire, whether it's actually loaded or not). In essence, you fire Fake missiles that deal Fake damage to a target's Fake health tracks (shields, armor, internals). If a target is destroyed in such a manner, it acts like a wreck for the duration of the current exercise -- or, said differently, it turns off its sensors and plays dead. I'd imagine FACs could return and embark in it but they could not leave again.
Simulating beam weapons is a bit more difficult. I guess it'd depend on RP perspectives if you think your technology can "simulate" lasers, mesons, and physical projectile rounds. Game-wise, I imagine it'd be easy to implement: the weapons deal Fake damage and have Fake HTK tracks, just like missiles and their launchers. (As it is, we don't have to worry about ammunition for kinetic "beam" weapons anyway. If we did, well, Simulated exercises would not use ammo. ) Simulated missile launches, by the way, would use up a Fake ammo count, too, and you'd still have to reload your magazines if you ran out, from a collier (or a colony!) taking part in the exercise.
Live-Fire exercises would be, essentially, fighting your own ships as if they were true enemies, but a question arises: should there be a limiter to keep ships from destroying each other, or having crew members die? It may be more prudent to leave Live-Fire exercises out, as AMM-, ECM-, and weapons-testing would be done perfectly with Simulated exercises. An idea to force Live-Fire exercises to exist would be to prevent certain weapons from being simulated; however, I believe having research options that "allow" you to simulate various beam weapons would be an unnecessary headache, and that they should not be added. All exercises WOULD use fuel, maintenance supplies, and time, however, just like regular Task Force Training.
I believe it would be best to include "Simulated" or "Simulated-Fire" exercises, but not Live-Fire exercises. I smile to myself when I imagine that high-powered microwaves could not be simulated, and that pretend fire-fights end up actually shorting out electronics and sensors. Still, we must keep the best interests of the game in mind.
Now, about exercises themselves. I believe different types of exercises could be implemented, something more than the simple "Us vs. Them vs. Them Too. " You'd select the type of exercise as you were establishing the various flags for your Task Groups, in the (so-called) Exercise window. The goal of these options is to control how the combatants behave. (I'll finish here before I mention possible AI-control during exercises. ) You'd have different options to select in the Exercise window for each flag and for each Task Group. Ideas I have now are simple, like "only use beam weapons," "only use missiles," "keep foes at X range or closer/further," "attempt/do not attempt boarding actions," "do not launch FAC," and so on. If you have two teams, and you set them both to use only beam weapons, then they'll have a beam weapon duel. But perhaps you don't want one particular Task Group on the team to suffer that limitation. In that case, you simply deselect it for that group. In essence, assigning a particular standing order to a team will assign it to each Task Group on that team, but technically standing orders are issued on a group-by-group basis. What these orders would do is deny you the ability to perform certain actions, although "keep foes at X range or closer/further" would be difficult to enforce in such a human-assisted control scheme.
Having the AI control one or more sides in an exercise could greatly ease things. Watching the computer fight itself always sounds like fun! But really, assigning one or more sides to computer control could make exercises more fun to play out, even if you're only really doing them for testing or RP purposes. In cases of AI control, the standing orders I mentioned last paragraph still work just fine. The downside is that the AI, as I gather from these forum boards, is stubborn and direct. The upside is you're playing with a computer and not entirely by yourself!
Finally I come to the most important aspects of implementing this system: the logistics of it in the game's design. Here's what I think works best. Please do not take my quoted sentence as literal -- the spirit behind the quote is what is important:
- Exercises can be canceled at any time, like Task Group Training.
- A checkbox in the Exercise window would read "Do not show exercise events in the event log" and would do precisely that. You will get an immediate "XXX exercise has begun" message (so that Aurora doesn't pause after the next five seconds) and an "XXX exercise has ended" message later, but nothing in-between. I wish the event log itself were more robust and usable (like not giving me errors when I set the messages displayed to 20 instead of 200), but that's another essay.
- When you select a Task Group participating in an exercise in the F12 Task Group menu, you see "THIS TASK GROUP IS ON A BATTLE EXERCISE", similar to the Task Group Training message. By the way, I really like how noticeable and succinct that message is.
- Exercises can be named, so you can have different exercises going on and distinguish between them in the event log
- The Exercise window would either be a button on the F12 Task Group menu or slaved to an F key that isn't yet used. I think the former option works better.
This post ended-up being about seven times longer than I originally set out for it to be. I get easily caught up in suggestions.
