"Wait a second" command

[derb]

When you have ships a little distance from each other and you want them to combine into a single fleet to attack is there any way to ask the ones in the lead to wait while the other ships join before moving forward? If not, there should be!

[construct]

do ya mean in tactical or stratecical combat or in the normal game before you attack ?

greets

construct

[dogscoff]

I would love to see this (outside of combat). It would make queueing orders so much more powerful if you could say

move to X
wait 1 turn
load troops
move to Y
drop troops
repeat

I also hate the way your orders are erased if the ship in question runs out of cargo space and is ordered to pick up more.

Finally, I would love it if the "resupply / repair at nearest" orders were resolved at the time they are carried out, not the time they are issued.

And don't get me started on boolean operators for order queues... Just imagine things like

"IF (sats on "planet Y" >=300kt) AND (supplies on "Ship Z" >=2000) AND (Enemy presence in system A = "NONE") THEN load sats (Ship Z, Planet Y)"

Think I might have to wait for SEV for that one=-)

[oleg]

Yes, it would be really nice. I hate that I can not order ships to get repaired and come back to front lines. As it is now, ships with stacked orders of "repair" and "move to" will come to the spaceyard and promptly, without staying even one turn for repair, turn back.

[PsychoTechFreak]

1) Another nice feature would be if you could delete orders in the order view row-wise, e.g. by clicking on the line. As it is now, you have to delete the whole order, and reprogram it from scratch.

2) If you pick multiple ships (with shift) to give them orders, you just can move and warp IIRC. It would be nice to release all orders that could be possible with all of the ships, e.g. transfer/load/unload/launch/recover remotely. This is a pain in the neck in PvKs proportions mod, when you program the repeat orders for 20 starliners/pop shuttles.

[rdouglass]

Along that same line, I personally would like to be able to build 'canned' strings of commands (of course with the proposed boolean logic). My idea would be something along the lines of this:

Build a list of commands that set a minefield to the maximum allowable mine count. For instance:

Lay Mines; IF Supplies < x THEN GOTO Closest Resupply ELSE GOTO Closest Mines (for pickup); LOOP UNTIL MaxMinesInLocation

Call this command something like "Maximize Minefield". Then select a ship (probably MineLayer for this command), then select the "Maximize Minefield" command, then click on the sector.

That IMO would be a cool addition to the below ideas....

[ 24 April 2002: Message edited by: rdouglass ]

[Gryphin]

I agree with all of you. I would love to be able to do most of it. It would be great if a few people became gurus at it and would upload their "Rules". I feel there needs to be one very important feature of these rules:
A non programer must be able to copy and paste the rules into an easy to determine sequence. I have heard the word "Boolean" befor but despite my best efforts and that of friends I have never been able to use it. I can only loosly follow from your post what you mean.

[rdouglass]

I know this is OT, Boolean operations generally solve down to Yes or No questions. IIRC there are only a handfull of boolean operators

NOT, OR, AND, FALSE, TRUE are the ones that come to mind offhand...

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

---

Originally posted by rdouglass:
I know this is OT, Boolean operations generally solve down to Yes or No questions. IIRC there are only a handfull of boolean operators

NOT, OR, AND, FALSE, TRUE are the ones that come to mind offhand...

---

"Boolean" refers to George Boole, a British mathematician/philosopher who invented this type of logic. Besides TRUE, FALSE, AND, OR, and NOT it also incluses XOR (exclusive OR) and > (greater than), < (less than), >= (greater than or equal to), <= (less than or equal to), <> (not equal to), and yet more operators.

And yes, this could get very complicated for the 'layman' gamer. It would be nice to have a 'game scripting engine' for dedicated geeks to tinker with but it would also need a nice simple interface for the ordinary gamer to be able to use it or else the geeks will have only themselves to game with.

[derb]

In answer to "construct" I mean in "strategic movement" not during combat turns. And I wouldn't want to pause an entire turn - just one or more "movement points" so ships from different locations would arrive at a single point at the same time even if they were not exactly the same distance from that point.