Mod concept: Dynamic fleet packs

[Nukraine]

Hey guys. I came up with an idea for a mod that probably has been thought of before, but perhaps not as well fleshed out. To be frank, I'm not even sure if it's possible to do without extensive modification to the Defcon source code.

Essentially, there would have to be two changes that would go hand in hand with each other:

1) Ships would immediately change direction upon being given a movement command. Ships would move ultra-fluidly as if I had exploited the "stop ships on a dime" tactic Zoros Dog made popular. The purpose of this change will become clear after reading the second change.

2) This is the meat of the mod. Imagine I draw a square over a collection of ships, and selected, for example, five ships that as far as Defcon is concerned, exist in various packs of different sizes. If you press Ctrl + a number key, the selected ships become "frozen" into what I imagine Defcon would have to interpret as a new pack of ships. If I click the number on the keyboard, the new frozen pack would be selected and could manipulated as if it were a single unit, meaning holding shift and changing to bomber mode would apply to all units, as if it were a default Defcon ship pack. You could right click to move this pack of ships, and theoretically, moving one's entire fleet would require only several clicks. Step one would go hand in hand with step two because otherwise upon creation of the new pack, all the ships involved could have independent directions that would disrupt the formation after creation.

I feel like this would be an excellent mod if it could be created for several reasons. Maintaining fleet organization would no longer require many, many clicks when you already KNOW how you want your fleet to behave. There would no longer be any inherent disadvantage to starting out with single ship packs. One could easily hold a formation, break the formation apart and reorganize, and create new formations with relatively little effort. Naval battles would truly become more about priority focus, and positional strategy, versus babysitting all the ships to make sure they are behaving nicely. Retreating in panic wouldn't cause chaos in fleet formation. It would be very easy to theory craft with someone about the strengths and weaknesses of various formations. AND, I believe it would be practical to play comfortably on speed two for a majority of the game.

If anyone attempted to create this mod, I imagine there would be several immediate problems:

1) How would the newly created packs interact with land mass collision?
2) How would packs interact with small, or even large gaps such as the Bering?
3) Would default packs created at the start of the game need to be dissolved?
4) Should subs be included in the packs? It would slow down the rest of the ships.

Thanks for reading

[trickser]

About the stop on a dime trick:
I would like to see a better model for the inertia of ships. It should be impossible for them to turn on a spot. When approaching their target they should have to decelerate, and accelerate when they start to move. Only exception might be if they bump into land.

To fit into your idea and solve the bulge of fleet formation, I would suggest to temporally raise or lower the speed of some ships until the formation is reformed. But raising the speed might lead to exploits where you would reassign formations all the time to get the speed bonus.

While I certainly would like to play a mod as you suggested, dynamic grouping is pretty standard in RTS and would take away the oddness of Defcon.

[cza]

And while it would be nice to play even lazier Defcon, this would drain a key source of skill in the game. My navy, which was never great to begin with, has degraded as I've gotten lazier. Those who take the time to micro properly kick ass, as they should. While probably not the game designers' intent, I like to think of default ship movement as building in fog of war, difference in unit quality, etc. You must undergo much training and be a firm, great admiral to make them respond consistently.

[Nukraine]

@Trickster: I like the idea, and I do agree that stopping ships on a dime is kind of a silly tactic. I just figured that since it's already a pretty fundamental part of people's play style, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. I'm also not too sure how changing the very fundamentals of how ships move would feel to a lot of people. I also imagine a lot of time would have to be invested to make such a thing happen. Imagine 10 ships with independent directions were suddenly put into a control group and given a move command. They would have continue on their way, adjust their inertia and assemble, all the while proceeding to the target. How long would assembly take? Would it seem fluid? It's certainly doable, but I imagine it would be a hairy problem.

@CZA: I disagree that it would be "lazier Defcon". I find a lot of the time I know how I want my ships to behave, but I have to put SO much effort into actually keeping them structured in that way. I feel like such a mod would create very different, not lazy play. So much more focus into plane micro and general, clean ship maneuvers rather than relatively tedious ship micro when you already know how you want your ships to move. One of my largest deterrents when I try to play Defcon after not playing a while is forgetting all my strong fleet formations, stopping on a dime tricks, and how to keep formations in tact with order circles. Pretty silly stuff in my opinion, but necessary to remember.