Fleet Action Feedback/ FAQ/ wishlists

[Ben Zwycky]

Though we have spent a long time discussing and developing the Fleet Action system of play, no system is ever perfect, some things may not be completely clear from the documentation, or from your unique perspective you may just notice something or have some ideas that haven't occurred to us.

This thread is for your questions, overall impressions and suggestions. Please bear in mind that your suggestions are unlikely to be implemented, especially not straight away, as many alternatives have already been considered.

Please take a look at the following three items before asking questions, as they are likely to be covered or explained there:

The Fleet Action Handbook. This document lists the latest version of all the rules and procedures for taking part in a fleet action season.

The Fleet Action Sample Season. This document is an example season containing many different situations that can arise, showing how the system works and flows in practice.

The Fleet Action Sample Season Map animation is an animation showing the situation on the game map as it changed over the sample season, with additional highlighting of the changes that occurred, helping people to get oriented with how the game map module shows the latest tactical situation.

A few starter questions and answers that may be particularly pertinent to those undecided as to whether to get involved:

-What is the difference between Raider Fleets and Military/Insurgent Fleets?

This info can be found spread across several sections of the handbook, but to put it all in one place for clarity:

Raider Fleets cannot use carriers (just like you can't have access to a carrier as a raider in SP), so their fleet forces will be at a disadvantage when facing military or Insurgent fleets in straight combat in space (all else being equal, which it doesn't have to be ), but are still stronger than defensive militia forces

Raiders cannot issue the Signals Intel order, but they can issue the Sabotage order (to disable enemy cloaking devices) and only raiders can issue the Raid order (to harvest enemy supply lines and deny them the ability to reinforce their lines)

-How would I set up a Raider Fleet to participate in a Fleet Action Season?

First of all, let's make it clear that the participation of a raider fleet in Fleet Action is in no way official recognition of that fleet, there is no binding commitment of it's members to that fleet, and they are not blacklisted from joining an official fleet at a later date, it is just a (hopefully fun ) way for non-fleet people to get involved in MP activity with the official fleets.

What you'd need to set up a Raider fleet for Fleet Action is at least 4 players, a name for your fleet and a designated spokesman/leader to tell us what your fleet is going to do in the mission orders thread.

-Why doesn't the map module work in my browser?

We are aware that the map module doesn't display correctly in some browsers, with different issues in different browsers (instability when scrolling in IE, connecting lines and mouseover images and links non-functional in Firefox). We got this module as is and don't have the programming skills to reengineer it, and though it has it's problems, it does the job very well and we've been able to modify it to suit our needs. In Firefox, the mouseover system ownership images and planetary data links work fine in all quadrants except the Terran quadrant, and those work in the Terran quadrant in IE no problem, so I just use IE to look at the terran quadrant (no scrolling necessary) and Firefox to look at the situation elsewhere, which doesn't seem like too big a hassle to me. If it does to you, and you can build us a bug-free cross-platform set of modules to do the same job or better, we'll happily switch over to that and give you a medal, probably

- What do the medal images look like and how are they awarded?

In a word, awesome thanks to Eclipse, but don't just take my word for it, take a look for yourself. These will be displayed on your individual stats page in the Fleet Action Players module if and when they are earned. Details on the requirements for each medal can be found in the handbook.

- Is there any way to get involved somehow even though I can't meet up with the rest of you online?

Ideally we'd want everyone to be able to take part in MP matches of some kind, but that isn't always going to be possible. If you want to get involved in MP, then please take part in this poll, telling us your availability times in the thread. The more people that do, the more likely we can find ways to get you all involved in something.

If there is enough demand, then ways of offline participation via SP missions can be arranged. We've thrown around some ideas in this respect, some of which wouldn't be too hard to set up.

Okay, that's all I could come up with off the top of my head. If anyone has any other questions or comments, fire away.