Behavioral options for Autoresolve Thread - Solar War

Hi

I am very glad I found your little gem you are developping here! Your game features the best and deepest ship design I have seen so far. I love fiddling with components to get the most out of my ships, while remaining within the limits of mass, heat and energy

In terms of combat, I tend to autoresolve often, as battles with many ships would take too long, otherwise. However, for that I have to sacrifice any kind of influence. So I was wondering if some kind of behavioral policies could be introduced. Those policies/commands gould be given to the individual ships before starting autoresolve. Examples:

• Fire on the assigned target until it is destroyed. Then leave autoresolve to allow the player to assign a new target / give new commands
• Ranged attack: fire weapons but don't move (e.g. for missile ships, or if the fleet should wait until the missiles take out the most dangerous enemy)
• Close combat: move towards the enemy to maximize effeciency of low range weapons
• Target priority: selectable ship class (including missiles) to target with hightest priority
• Flee (move a way from the enemy)

Thank you very much for considering this and kind regards
- spitfire

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoy what is there of the game already at this early stage.

Fleets quickly becoming too large to fully micromanage are sort of a feature: The "intended" way to play large battles is for the player to directly command his biggest, most powerful ships, while placing everything else under AI control. That is what the Details screen for a fleet allows you to do, although currently you have to set up all of that before the battle. I am hoping to add more fine grained configuration options to that as well as allow some degree of reconfiguration or orders during battle.

I would rather work on making such a hybrid way of commanding your fleet work well and be fun than optimize for pure autoresolve mode. Autoresolve should be mostly for those situations where you have a large material advantage anyway and don't want to waste time with an easy battle.

Many of your suggestions would of course benefit both types of command. I especially like the idea of setting a "focus fire" or primary target for both Autoresolve and the automated support units. This would also be easy to implement since the AI logic already uses such a target internally. This would allow you to give a big boost in target value to the chosen ship, while still allowing far away units to take shots of opportunity at other targets.

Ah, I see, it seems these options in the fleet detail screen have escaped me so far. This AI-HI hybrid sounds very interesting, I am curious to check it out.

Thanks for your reply and of course the excellent work