I started looking at how orders were given to ships, colonies etc. the way this was done before wasn't fully working smoothly, and I realized that it needed to be done in such a way that wouldn't require me to rewrite it yet again when I came to look at networking stuff.
so I got something that looked like it might work, and figured I might as well implement some network stuff to be sure it did in fact work how I thought it would, all good, got a server and client connecting and talking to each other, but to send orders I needed the client to know about some things it could send orders too, so then I got caught up in exactly what the client should and shouldn't know, and ended up doing sensors and fog of war.
it looks like I'm going round in circles, but really I'm just bracketing the target. there's a bunch of things that are tied together, and need to work well with each other, I change how one works, and end up having to make a change in another.
Or maybe a bit like this:
