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As for why you get less exp per fleet it's to prevent arks/golems from just leveling up easily together. Otherwise, you'd end up leveling them extremely quickly. I wouldn't be to concerned with the current exp system anyways, as that's due for an overhaul.
But the constantly changing nature of what ships you want in a fleet for each given planet makes this completely impractical- even if you had enough resources, you'd never have enough buildpower-time to pay the swap costs. So the ship scrap on fleet change design decision fights the fleets = control group decision, and we all loose.
That's before we even get into the XP thing.
However, there's then also the case of things like the forcefields, as you mention, which this wouldn't help with.
I've noticed that control groups are tied to fleets. The question remains why they are tied, since this was a deliberate design decision by the devs.
It's worth pointing out, that with this design decision they are breaking a genre standard. This will make it, no doubt, harder for anyone coming either from the first game or any other RTS game. I'd be willing to bet that amounts to basically the whole playerbase.
The only upside I can see is that it makes transportation easier. It's very convenient to just press one button. But here must be ways to achieve this without crippling one of the most well established mechanics in the RTS genre.
And if there isn't, then for me personally that's still a horrible trade-off. I'd rather take less convenient transportation and have tighter controls during important battles.
it does streamline things a good bit in my experience, but I'd rather the old control groups form AI war classic.
To be honest, there are a couple of layers there, and some of those have to do with changes to build queues and where ships pop out more than fleets or control groups, but all of it is kind of related.
Having control groups that are something like "all of my bombers from these three fleets" is really a problematic thing, since bombers die and are replaced constantly, and it's hard for you to get them all selected properly if you're spread across multiple planets. So a menu-driven UI for that would be kind of a nightmare. Did you mean all of the bombers, or just the ones you happened to select at the time, etc?
The first game had a system where you could just say "everything from this factory goes to control group 3" or whatever, but then there were all the transit problems. And if that factory got destroyed, versus one next to it, it would mean that you'd have to redo your orders and the build queues were a pain in general.
In the new system, with fleets, any factories contribute to fleets that are near them in an equivalent way, partly so large ships don't gum up your small ships from popping out. But it also lets multiple factories, with engineers or not, contribute to multiple nearby fleets. Anything that pops out of a fleet is inherently that control group, so that works out.
Since you have some extra fleets around, you can just assign things to that as you wish. Aka, you can put in all your bombers or all your melee units into fleet 3, which is automatically a control group, and even name it "Bomber Fleet" if you want. Any factory will contribute to it, and you can move it around how you want. At this point, there's no real problem that I can see.
Before we brought back Eyes in the sequel, we also added in an EXP system. I'd been wanting a way to level up ships via EXP for a while, and the new fleet system provided a cool way to handle that that wasn't a case where you might lose your EXP when some random small ship dies (things are fragile, other than golems and Arks).
EXP and veterancy was something people had been asking for in the first game for what felt like whatever, I think based a lot on their experiences with heroes in Warcraft III. And I also liked the idea quite a bit.
But it became a problem where people could just grind out EXP and really game the system, and that was both boring and OP. So we made EXP and level-ups do less and less. Overall I shifted the concept to "okay, these don't level up, but you'll get perks you can unlock later." But I've delayed on implementing that quite a bit because ultimately that just runs into the same problems later on, by a different name.
So with EXP, one of the things that I wanted to use to encourage players to use fewer fleets in one place -- way back before we had custom fleets or the ability to swap around ship lines -- was the EXP going down based on how many fleets you have in one place. We based AI Eyes mostly around the same concept at one point, but then I think later we shifted that to the total strength instead IIRC.
Ultimately we don't want you to just make a big blob of all your ships and send them everywhere. The better parts of the design are those that exploit when you leave home undefended, like the hunter or the scourge. But limits on how many ship lines are in one fleet, as well as limits on how much EXP you gain if you have multiple fleets in place are designed to encourage you to not send everything everywhere all the time.
The unfortunate truth is that it actually hampers you -- psychologically, anyway -- from doing exactly what you describe (because of EXP penalties and maybe how the Eyes work), which is also in line with my goals (build a bomber fleet, use it independently of your artillery fleet and your fighter fleet as you attack). The new fleets system is actually VERY friendly to that sort of division of stuff, and makes it much easier for casual players to partake of that sort of thing since the interface somewhat leads you into thinking about fleet composition, and that composition is then stable until you choose to change it.
EXP and bonus levels from that should also just go away in general. It's a nice idea in theory, but really all it does is add grinding. I wanted fleets to matter in the sense of "this is an older fleet, I'm fond of it," but that also came with major drawbacks to picking up new fleets late-game, which then felt pointless. The EXP system is almost entirely pointless at the moment in general, minus a couple of rare fleet types. The introduction of a Perks system would just devalue individual ships more, and make EXP grinding all the more important. So EXP, and the whole idea of Perks (which are not present anyway), and the EXP penalty for multiple fleets being in one spot, should all go away.
I also need to fix that bug where you can't assign a fleet to be no control group number. That's an annoying one.
Looking at how people play, what we want to encourage, and so on, I think that those simple changes would lead us to the best overall result.
Thanks for this very thorough reply.
I haven’t even considered that. I think because that’s simply an issue in basically every RTS – new units having to run to the front line and assigned to a control group. Or gathering at the base and waiting to be used.
As far as I can recall, In the first game I had control groups for a whole fleet and it's replacement assigned to the higher numbers (7-9).
The smaller numbers (1-4, sometimes 5-6) I would always use dynamically.
In a sense this gave me the advantages of both. Being able to quickly move many units at once, while at the same time having lots of dynamic control. (with keys which were always easily reachable).
I’m curious how you play with the current system.
For example do you seperate bombers, fighters, melee etc.? What do you think about wanting to use the forcefield differently later in combat?
And what do you do later in game, when you want two fleets for two fronts? (or more...)
Do you then have two bomber fleets, two fighter fleets, two melee fleets, perhaps additionally even two support fleets and two sniper fleets on top?
That would already be the whole horizontal range of the keyboard.
I'd much rather zoom in on a planet and quickly re-assign the first 4 control groups in a few clicks before giving orders.
Do you ever separate units based on which kind of hulls they're effective against?
Or do you limit yourself to a small number of fleets with maybe one special fleet and treat them mostly as a blob? Because then I could see why it would be a lot easier.
Very often I've seen heterogeneous fleets that are a good mix for attacking or defending or whatever, but which are not managed at a micro level. Aka, put bombers and raiders and whatever together for a strike fleet, and then move it to the enemy planet and put them into pursuit or attack-move mode.
Pursuit mode is INCREDIBLY smarter in this game compared to the first game, and so a heterogeneous fleet will appropriately divide up the enemy planet without you babysitting it or microing it. The most common form of micro I have observed is people setting some group of units to have a target priority for something that they want dead extra-fast and then letting it revert to the auto-targeting.
Very often people are tabbed away during battles, getting ready for the next battle or flipping back and forth between two battles, from what I can tell.
Overall you have more to manage in this game than the first one from a grand strategic sense, particularly if you have a lot of factions turned on, and so if you get focused down on battles you might optimize a particular fight but lose the war. Of course, with judicious use of pausing, or just keeping one eye on your notifications, or not having too many factions, that all becomes less of an issue.
I will say that my goal is always to support as many playstyles as possible, but the scope increase of what you as a player are managing often requires either a lot of pausing or some personal delegation to the AI, either way.
Though while my previous playstyle was likely more micro-intensive than average it rarely felt like micromanaging to me.
Compared to for example Warcraft or Starcraft multiplayer were one has to tell individual units to fall back when low on life, tell them to use special abilities, were factories can only queue 5 units and therefore have to be checked every 20 seconds, and a harsh cap on how many units can be selected at once on top of that. Lots of stuff that didn’t have strategical depth but rather required dexterity.
Whereas positioning entire squads, flanking, blocking the pathway to escape etc. were fun and had depth to it.
Doesn’t that clash and take away from the simulation of individual units, the plethora of unit types and the very complex rock-paper-scissor mechanics you have built?
I don’t want to sound harsh, but when I think of other grand-strategy games like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, they have around 8 unit types and I don’t think they would be better off by increasing that number tenfold and simulating each individual knight – while also entirely automating everything they just added.
If the end results are similar enough and in both cases mostly automated, would a player have reasons to care if the automated simulation is abstract and (comparatively) simple like in paradox games or complex and concrete?
Of course you don’t have to suit my particular playstyle and know better how the majority of players interact with the game. But to me it seems rather counter-intuitive to build a very complex RTS simulation, automate it, and then put the players attention on the grand-strategy aspect.