Silverware wrote:Well that is looking cool.
Although I am not sure why you have zones when you are also returning to fewer units.
There will be a LOT of AI ships, some enemy, some neutral, some allied. So it's not a traditional 4X where the biggest force dominates and ultimately wins, it's more about playing the part for whatever faction you picked. Whatever the prime directive of that faction, you'll be commanding a packet of ships, I wouldn't say more than 20 - but it's hard to put a number on it, you might prefer Carriers so then you'd have lots of Corvettes. The cap is going to be on Military Points (MP) rather than the number of units.
The zones are needed to crack it open and make it feel less restrictive. If you play the alpha how it is now, we have just one large map which ends up a grid spilling off into the distance. That's not particularly enticing really I found, because movement feels very very slow as you traverse it. The zones are smaller and will contain features such as rocks to mine, stations to trade with, celestials to scan and random encounters. Jumping between them is more invigorating, especially not knowing whats lurking in them and the pace feels quicker than flying round a huge arena (although actually the ships are moving at the same speed.)
Silverware wrote:Unless you intend to have multiple fleets of a few units...
But that then returns to the issue of individual ships losing character...
This is exactly the trap we fell into lol, we lost sight of the end goal. The focus became optimising to cram as many ships as possible into a scene and then all the wonderful stuff we had coded; subsystem targeting, elemental weapon damage, simulated projectiles, all of a sudden didn't matter.
This time; smaller more personal battles that allow the player to exhibit their own style of play and we break the game into manageable chunks that can be individually manipulated to bring greater purpose to the whole. Which incidentally is the unspoken proverbial golden key of the entire project; reducing complexity through modularity.
The solution is so perfectly suited it fits like a glove, which is why i'm coding 12 hours a day to make it happen!