Yikes, this has turned into a really complex and confusing beast. I am very happy so far with the improvements, but I need to publicly brainstorm the details. Simply put, the orders system in Gratuitous Space Battles was a mess, and I needed a much better one, PLUS I wanted to add new orders to take into account the new gameplay style of Ridiculous Space Battles.
In GSB there was a whole bunch of orders, and they all apparently pretended to work together to come up with an opinion on which ship a weapon should target. Orders are per SHIP, not per weapon, which frankly is a whole other story, but I think it would be stupid overkill to have the player assigning different orders to every weapon. My whole unique selling point is BIG fleets with LOTS of ships. Anyway, the original game had orders like Attack Fighters and Co-operate, but it was never clear how they all worked together.
RSB introduces three new orders entirely. Raider (race ahead of the fleet up to a given distance to engage enemies) which is used by Fighters, Last Defense, which concentrates fire on the enemy ships that have got the furthest through our lines, and Breakthrough, which is for punching a hole in enemy defenses, and only fires on ships right in front of you (or in that row anyway).
Here is my new current implementation:
So the big things here are categories, color coding and priorities. OH YES. To explain, this ship has one ‘Special’ Order, which is to engage enemies at 2 squares range. Thats a movement order, so independent of all the targeting stuff.
The next order is ‘co-operate’. Its one of a class of (blue) orders I’m tempted to call ‘Discriminators’ or ‘Tie-breakers’. There can only be ONE of these (Co-operate, Vulture, Retaliate, Breakthough or Last Defense), and essentially they are used at the end of the process to choose which out of a series of potential targets is picked.
The Green and yellow orders are Target Criteria. They describe a target size class or a defense status (shields up, or shields down but armor intact, or down to naked hull). These orders are special because they are in priority order. (I realize now I should show the numbers!). So when the ship decides who to shoot at, it first builds a simple list of all enemy ships in range and fire arc, that match any of those criteria. (You can delete one to make the ship NEVER target those ships). Once that list exists, it then goes through the target criteria from top to bottom seeing if any ships meet that criteria…
And this is where I have a decision to make…
I can either stop the processing once it has one or more targets, then pick the best using the discriminator OR I can then keep filtering down through the list as long as I have 1 or more targets and THEN use the discriminator. I cannot decide which. Are you confused? I suspect so:
Example 1: Using the above orders, I scan my target list and find 4 cruisers and 12 frigates in range. All of them have shields. Cool! So I stop there, and evaluate them all using Co-operate, firing upon the one that is the most under fire right now.
Example 2: I scan my target list and find 4 cruisers and 12 frigates in range. All of them have shields. The NEXT criteria is Fighters. There are none in my list so I ignore. The next is armor. All 16 have armor so again I ignore. The next is Frigates. Wait! only 12 are frigates, so I prune the list. The next is Hull, all check. The next is cruisers, none found. I finally use co-operate to evaluate which frigate to fire at…
Is this dilemma even making sense, let alone deciding on a system? Its very involved. My game IS a complex strategy game, but I don’t want to rely on crazily complex tutorials. Now to be fair, Gratuitous Space Battles had a completely opaque system that nobody understood and was poorly explained and it sold a bazillion copies, so maybe I am overthinking it. But I would like to do a MUCH better job… I know SOME players would be happy to literally write code to control this stuff, and might suggest I add conditional clauses and other complexity but I think that makes the game seem more like work and less like fun…
Looking at it now I KNOW I need to add priority numbers to those yellow/green strips. Maybe they should be called Filters now Criteria? Who knows. I may need to think about this a LOT.
By the way add the game to your wishlist :D Or pester a news website to cover it! Or share a screenshot somewhere you hang out. That stuff all helps :D.