07-13-2018, 04:30 PM
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that a ship will only attack an enemy which it can itself "see".
If so, this does not seem lifelike. An enemy can enter your large trinary system and be detected by a city, but if your ships are patrolling at the other edge of the system, they won't go and help until their own sensors pick it up. If your enemy is in another system, even if they're wreaking havoc and it's only next door, that fleet won't do anything at all.
Should your empire share sensors? You would set a ship policy: "respond to threats within X radius". If an enemy is picked up by any means within X parsecs, the ships will try to intercept according to their officer's posture. This would increase the effectiveness of patrols and NPC defenders drastically, I believe, as well as suiting common sense.
(If we really wanted to go overboard, we could set weighting factors for combined hp of enemy contacts vs distance from current position. If a fleet of 90 billion hp is detected all the way across your empire, your ships will try to help. If it's only 2000 hp they won't bother. Or, conversely, a small ship might avoid contacts bigger than itself.)
If so, this does not seem lifelike. An enemy can enter your large trinary system and be detected by a city, but if your ships are patrolling at the other edge of the system, they won't go and help until their own sensors pick it up. If your enemy is in another system, even if they're wreaking havoc and it's only next door, that fleet won't do anything at all.
Should your empire share sensors? You would set a ship policy: "respond to threats within X radius". If an enemy is picked up by any means within X parsecs, the ships will try to intercept according to their officer's posture. This would increase the effectiveness of patrols and NPC defenders drastically, I believe, as well as suiting common sense.
(If we really wanted to go overboard, we could set weighting factors for combined hp of enemy contacts vs distance from current position. If a fleet of 90 billion hp is detected all the way across your empire, your ships will try to help. If it's only 2000 hp they won't bother. Or, conversely, a small ship might avoid contacts bigger than itself.)