fleets and motherships

[anon]

Hey everyone,

I got a suggestion! If you have two motherships in one fleet, and either your second or third fleet has no one in it, currently you can not move your extraneous mothership to that fleet, since that fleet is at base. I propose that we should be able to do just that.

Here is a situation in which this comes in useful: You bring a fleet of all your ships to a planet and attack. Now you see another planet in the vicinity which an offense would work better if you had two fleets. So you want to split your fleet into two fleets. The first step in this would be to move one mothership to an empty fleet that is not yet in use; then you can start moving over your other ships.

I think that this functionality makes sense. If a fleet has no ships in it, why should it even have a position? One time I had two fleets at a remote planet, and both fleets were pretty banged up from attacks. So I wanted to merge them into one fleet, so that they still had some attack power to inflict. Once I moved all the ships from my second fleet into my first one (to make an uber fleet one), my second fleet was back at base; I was not able to move ships back to that second fleet.

admin, do you think that we should be expecting this functionality? BTW, it should be easily programmable.

Thanks
-[Anon]ymous

[paul]

yeah, just what i missed yesterday:

used a fleet-tender to move with warp 8 and had to send one fleet home cause i couldnt move it to fl 3 ....

[admin]

actually we thought about this a time ago and we decided not to allow that, because there can be done a lot of nonsense with this option: imagine, there are kamikaze cruisers, doomstars and prophets standing around in space everywhere or you just fly to a planet, drop your stuff there, when he's not at home and save your mothership.... we have to think a bit more about the consequenses .... do you see?

[paul]

No, i don´t see;

1) there cant be more than 3 fleets
2) there must be a mothership to initiate using an empty fleet
3) fleets without motherships can only exist after battles or on the planet

so... if we accept this why can´t you move an extraneous mothership into an empty fleet ????

[anon]

admin,

Paul is right. Since you only have three fleets, it would be uneconomical to just leave a doomstar or a kamikaze floating in space; but if you could, so what? You'd be wasting a fleet, so it doesn't matter.

If you fly to a planet, drop off your stuff, and save your mothership, but it wastes two of your fleets! And even if you could do this, it makes sense. A mothership should be able to drop off its [war] cargo.

Without these feature, it is almost like a double standard. You have two fleets. One is a regular fleet, the other is just a mothership and maybe a 1/1/1 fleet (I do this sometimes). When I moved over the second fleet to the first, I was not able to move them back over. As you said, "we have to think a bit more about the consequences."

-[Anon]ymous

[paul]

hey hey,

I DO NOT WANT to drop off a fleet at an enemy,

i dont want fleets without a mothership,

i just want to move out the second or third mothership into an empty fleet

[anon]

Paul, no one ever said that you wanted to drop off a fleet. But the functionality would be nice, since it makes sense anyway. OK, so you drop off a fleet. Well, guess what? You are wasting TWO of your only three fleets, and this ditched fleet has no way to leave the planet if it needed to! When I say two fleets, I mean it; one fleet dropped off, the other one is the mothership flying home. So I don't think that anyone would do this unless they had a great reason.

admin, if you don't want to drop off fleets (by having a mothership ditch a fleet), then don't let us do that. Just program it so that if you have MORE than one mothership, you can move an EXTRA one to a spare fleet. I think that this is what Paul is asking for.

[RJSm1th]

Here, here. I agree, I have been cought out by this little issue myself. The fleet tender took the fleet to the area of the target nicely and I had thought to split off with the core jumper and the bulk of the fleet. Supprise I could not split the fleet, the oppertunity was too good to miss so I decided to go in with the tender, bad choice the cloaked fleet damaged the tender and kissed the entire fleet goodby. I had won most of the Class 1 - 3 battles nicely too...

[admin]

i got this serious concerns from a very competent player:

[Brask]

I think if you have two motherships in one fleet you should be able to split this fleet into two fleets.
If you have a weak fleet (with mothership of course)defending a sector and you want to increase the power of that fleet than you can take another fleet /with another mothership) and unite both fleets but if you want to get to another planet after defending your sector you have to go with the whole fleet (two motherships)and I think it is not right that way because sometimes it is useful to take a few ships away and not the whole fleet.
shortly speaking : I want to split a very big fleet which was two fleets before but it doesn´t work ...

[Lord Philemon]

I thought you should be able to split fleets, too as it seems unlogical that you can't just make up a new fleet somewhere in space. But I think the arguments quoted in admins post are very good.
I for myself rarely used more than two fleets to attack someone...so if you want to defend a sector you can also unite fleets, but leave a 1.1.1.1 fleet left and send it away for a certain time...

[limsky]

I agree with both sides. I face the same problem of splitting my fleet.
Allowing to split will have great impact on the game.
If this splitting can be limited to certain type of ships only. e.g. fighters, destroyers, cruisers and a mothership; then it should be OK. Maybe the engine should include another parameter -- splitable or non-splittable.

[limsky]

I have 2 suggestions:
1. Add a new feature into the MTWG. Let it be a mobile alliance base where alliance members can land on it to split/combine fleets. In this way you cannot split/combine your fleet whereever you like. You have to fly to the Mobile Base to do it.
Those ships that have its warp drive cannot be carried by motherships or fleettenders, e.g. Prophets.
2. Another idea is to allow players to establish a remote base at an unuse planet. Fleets can be splited/combined at the remote base.

[admin]

this "remote base" already exists: with the pioneer ship you can set up such a base and it is also possible to split your fleets there.

and the idea with the mTWG is nice...

the first idea with splittable ships, would create the same problems.