Feature Request

[zxanth]

Well, Im getting a little ahead of myself since first I want the game cleaned up (read fixed). I also want to add that I think this game has some wonderful potential.

In the Empire section it would be nice to have a place to enter the desired ratio of ship types to be built. Where you could enter a Size & Ship type (eg. PD, Troop, etc.) and a numeric ratio number. For example say I want 5 Destroyer PD ships for every 3 Battle Cruiser Long Range Attack ships and 1 troop ship it would look something like this
Destroyer Point Defense Starship 5
Battle Cruiser Long Range Attack Starship 3
Light Cruiser Transport Starship 1

The Ministers would then simply find find out what types of ships currently exist then place in the cue whatever kind of ship that fits that description. If the ratios are already correct then maybe simply pick a ship randomly off the list of desired ships and build it.

This would give the ministers better direction to what the player really wants their fleets to look like and relieves the player from going into all of the build cues and changing everything to his desired ships.

[Grumbold]

I think in a way the AI already does this, except that the "desirable ratio" is in a text file you have to unzip to adjust. The main problem comes when you only have a couple of ships of a size that the world thinks it can produce. It'll tend to pick a troop transport rather than nothing at all, because your superdreadnought battleships are just too big for it to handle.

The other problem can be with all the ministers seeing what is currently in the reserves and not considering what is queued. With 3 slots per world in the queues a shortfall of recon ships can suddenly turn into a massive glut. I'd prefer it for the advisors to only queue one item at a time and also count what is queued by other planets in their calculations.

I think we can expect some tweaks to this behavour in patches. Until then the shipbuilding queues remain about the most important thing to micromanage.