Engines Thread - Master of Tactics

Hello MoT! Some thoughts on ship engines. A few things I'm not a big fan of, and some corresponding suggestions to make them better.

Areas for improvement:

1. The empire menu 'upgrade engine' button and craft menu 'upgrade engine' button have differing behaviors, and allow a form of 'cheating'. The empire menu can upgrade fleets in warp, the craft menu cannot. (See below, I'll advocate removing both of these buttons)
2. Better engines take up more space. Makes it annoying to update craft designs. Also, combined with the above menus that allow one to upgrade engines, the player can 'cheat' by designing crafts with Fusion20 engines, then upgrading ships' engines once built. (Taking advantage of this dictates, in a sense, a form of micromanagement).

Suggestions:

1. Remove both 'upgrade engine' buttons, from the empire/craft menus.
2. Remove the configuration of engines from craft design. (Can maybe hardcode all levels of engines as taking up 5 units of space or something). Instead, all ships will have the best available engines at time of construction/retrofit (see more about retrofit proposal, below). Why? Really, because the only use I can think of for tweaking engines involves micromanagement. Oh, I'm building a colony ship that only needs to move 100 units on the map? Sure, it doesn't need good engines. But for battle ships, better engines are always better, and allow for better logistics on the galaxy map. There doesn't seem to be enough of a use case to justify selection of engines in the craft design process, only a use case for displaying what level of engine a craft happens to be using at the time. (Having ships automatically use the best available form of engine is, I think, a nice simplification, and implies that all engines take up the same amount of space - otherwise, craft designs become invalidated once a better/more space-consuming engine becomes researched. (I don't find the fact that better engines take up more space to be an interesting distinction in gameplay, so this would help))
3. Adopt one of two proposals for upgrading engines. First, simply upgrade all crafts' engines any time they visit a friendly planet. Second, and this is my preferred version, adopt the retrofit model.

The 'Retrofit' feature/model:A new option for ships/fleets located at a player's planet is made available - 'Retrofit'. What this does is upgrade every ship in a fleet to the latest design of each ship, at some cost of money/production. Let's take an example. I design a ship 'Missile Fighter', a Flyer30 with nothing on it but as many Missile6 parts as can fit. I build 5 of these and form a fleet. I then update my craft design for 'Missile Fighter', to make it a Flyer30 with Computer50 and as many Missile15 parts as can fit. Now my 'Missile Fighter' design is at V2. When I retrofit my existing fleet of 5 fighters [Missile Fighter (V1)], at the cost of time and production... (while being locked in the orbit of a planet, similar to the lock that occurs when a battle is going to occur? Production cost being the cost of making the new weapons/components, minus the time it would've cost to make any components that remain on the new design + chassis? Point being, certainly cheaper than building completely new ships, but also not free)...That fleet of fighters become a fleet of 5 fighters [Missile Fighter (V2)], updating their engines as well if any better engine tech has been researched.

Retrofit Addendum - Autoversioning ship version names:Each time a ship model gets updated, the game automatically registers it as a new version following some basic scheme (configurable by the user?), say [Ship Name]:V[Design Version #]:[Global Ship Counter]. So, with the example above, my ships would first have the names Missile Fighter:V1:1, Missile Fighter:V1:2, etc. After retrofitting, they would be Missile Fighter:V2:1, Missile Fighter:V2:2, etc. Once all that's done, supposing I build a new ship with the same design, it would be called Missile Fighter:V2:6. And on and on.

Discovering new engines is common so engine upgrade was a micro management eradication shortcut. Unfortunately - It also breaks the craft design model. Changing this to a ship / fleet refit has been on the agenda for a while. We must make upgrading very easy otherwise players will spend time refitting ships again and again (definitely micro management).

This change is unlikely to come out in version 1.07 but will need to be fixed before I release multi-player..... watch this space!