Gazz wrote:It's not impossible to find a workable solution, though.
Say, your researched upgrade is indeed automatically applied to all your ships... but the research cost of
getting to that point scales with your number of ships so the cost
stays relevant.
It wouldn't matter a great deal if you researched hyperdrives on day 1 or day 100. In both cases the cost could be equally painful.
Don't get too hung up on what
didn't work.
i wouldnt bind the research cost to player property, instead i'd try to increase research time + cost for further advanced software / "addons" to already researched software. and i wouldnt automatically let them be installed to any ship, but accociate the research tree to stations (equipment docks / HQ / etc) or race. for example, argon reseach tree is completely independent of player-research tree, at all argon docks you can install all (to argon) available softwares. once argon has reserarched another new technology / software, a hidden timer starts (say 20 hours + random value), after that period the technology will be available to ALL other races, doesnt matter if you've have it already or not ...
the managemnt issue: how to manage 1300 ships ?
maybe if argon has finished researching a new software, player gets the message as soon as one of his/her ships sees an argon dock next time. now you know that there is new software to install. how to do it / command you ships to install it ? a global menu, "management tool" or property filter menu, that has all the necessary utitities / functions to manage the whole game.
---> properties
------> ships
---------> equipment / software
------------> install missing / new software (among other entries, like "find" features)
---------------> select ships and software ... filtered list appears ... select all ships ... checkbox "SINZA" & "NAVIGATION" for example ... OK
then each selected ship will automatically find the next dock to upgrade itself. as an interrupting command, when done, each ship will resume its actual task ... there MUST BE such a global mamagement tool anyway, otherwise how would you manage 1300 ships + stations + personal ? nobody (no player) can do that without helping tools ... and siince egosoft has improved the user interface quite a bit, i dont think its that difficult to script such a tool
another thing to add would be queuing commands together, so that you can say: first go dock over there, install this and that, buy something, then fly over there, wait for this object / event to happen, then return home IF (statement) OTHERWISE do that ... thats also part of (micro)management, creating simple logic without having to script it via external tools (notepad, Visual Studio, etc)
grouping ships together, for example a trade convoy and several fighters which not only follows the convoy + waits for enemies, but flies in a "intelligent" formation to better protect the space around the convoy ... also part of (micro)management
loading / saving ship settings is another management area .. being able to copy the setting of 1 ship and applying it to a group of other ships saves you a lot of time .. and frustration! those menus dont have to be scattered all around the game, just merge them to 1 powerful tool to better "communicate" with the game ...