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Real-Time PA
I was thinking about how confused I get with my fleet ETAs. If it's ETA 8 in tick 1034 when does it land? What tick do I need my defenders to launch in at what ETA to catch my attackers? Etc. It's all so confusing.
The game knows how long each tick is, so my proposition is perhaps we could show ETAs in time rather than ticks. So if, in a normal hour/tick round, my hypothetical fleet was ETA8 to it's target, but we were at XX:45 through the hour, my ETA wouldn't just be 8, it would be 7:15.
If the tick speed was, say, less than 5 minutes we could also show seconds in the ETA. So in a 5 minute speed game with an ETA of 4, my ETA might actually display as 3 ticks, 2 minutes and 15 seconds or 17:15.
It could display like this: ETA 17mins 15secs / 3 ticks.
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Then I went on to think about how we could take this real time display further. Perhaps we could make combat take the full hour. We all know about ship combat initiative. Say there were 10 initiatives in a single combat, we could (in an hour tick) show one initiative each 6 minutes so that it appears combat takes the full tick.
This would also open up the opportuinity to bring in tactics per initiative, such as "agression" (whether your ships are all out offensive, primarily trying to defend themselves or a bit of both), "formation" which could affect their agilty and firepower, etc. You could set these tactics for an attack when you launch but if you are online during the combat tick you could change them after each initiative is calculated.
Another bonus to taking this approach to combat is that the intensive combat calculations could be spread across the whole hour (ot at least into 10 chunks across the tick).
I'd like to hear some serious players objective comments on this, but I think it would introduce a really nice extra side to the game without affecting the overall gameplay too much.
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