This game reminds me alot of Galactic Civilizations, and the Sid Meiers games, with the exception that there is no "automate" button. :\



This would be usefull for, say, scouts. They can roam around and find planets on their own without you having to hold their hand. Automate attacks, kill anything that comes into a system. Automate colonization even, though you would have to be able to differentiate between planets in systems you already control, and new systems that nobody owns yet.



Not to say im lazy, but late-game huge empires are already hard to keep track of, why do i need to tell a scout to... scout? .png" alt="smiley: " title="" />.



Id like to see an "Automate..." menu or something. You click your fleet, click the "Automate..." button, and it brings up a window, asking you what kind of automation you'd like it to do. After you click it, the AI takes over and either scouts, fights, defends, colonizes(either planets or systems), patrols, ect.

Well remember this is an alpha stage game, not yet a game. Still useful suggestion for the devs for the future.



For now, the "collisions" of fleets is also an issue to automation since on one side it's hard to catch hostile scouts and on the other side your scouts will get destroyed on every single encounter with an AI (pirate or player) since there is no avoid combat/retreat option. Automation would be useless at this stage.

Why do you need to automate exploration, though?



Unlike Civ, there isn't thousands of hexes of fog to uncover. You don't have to make THAT many moves to explore. You're also hampered by wormholes and hostile territory, which is ever more the reason to manually control it yourself.



There is a fully automated ability for systems - in the empire management screen, far right, you can set it to prefer building types or balance. It'll colonize within system. If you want to colonize new systems, you have to do that yourself, but that's really something you *should* be doing yourself, anyway.



Auto-attacks on things entering your system - that I agree with

the path-finding coding would be interesting and probably really difficult to do as well (not that i know how to program or anything)

Its not about uncovering more map at the beginning, i actually like to do that myself, lol. But keeping eyes on parts of space that my planets cant see is what im talking about. Or just sending them for(and at this point suicidal, due to the issue that madgiraf pointed out) roams through enemy territory, just to see what assets they have where.



Honestly i could go either way on the scouting aspect of automation, im more talking about patrols and defenders.



Yeah, i know about the automated empire managment, though I think that needs to be balanced badly, being as I tell it to prioritize approval improvements, and it ends up doing the "50% of industry goes to dust" where there are other approval baised improvements left to build.



I dont know squat about programming either, lol. I just know what I like to see in games.

I think a nice way to implement automation without dooming your scouts would be a ship module that allows for ships to pass through a system without being seen/not having to fight or interact with enemy fleets. To limit exploitation it could be reserved only for the smallest classes of ship, or it could be a really heavy module that scales with class size (or both). There could even be a race with bonuses to stealth and limits to ship carrying capacity, so they have a hit and run stealth focus.

Actually, if you'll kindly direct your attention to the Games2Gether page (make sure you're logged in on the site, look at the upper-right hand corner), you'll see a vote taking place right now between three features, one of which is Auto-Explore. http://endless-space.amplitude-studios.com/Games2gether

jordanjay29 wrote:
Actually, if you'll kindly direct your attention to the Games2Gether page (make sure you're logged in on the site, look at the upper-right hand corner), you'll see a vote taking place right now between three features, one of which is Auto-Explore. http://endless-space.amplitude-studios.com/Games2gether

Although the vote is over, I should mention that the devs said that all of the options being voted on would be implemented, the vote was just which should be implemented first.

nefloyd wrote:
Why do you need to automate exploration, though?



Unlike Civ, there isn't thousands of hexes of fog to uncover. You don't have to make THAT many moves to explore. You're also hampered by wormholes and hostile territory, which is ever more the reason to manually control it yourself.



There is a fully automated ability for systems - in the empire management screen, far right, you can set it to prefer building types or balance. It'll colonize within system. If you want to colonize new systems, you have to do that yourself, but that's really something you *should* be doing yourself, anyway.



Auto-attacks on things entering your system - that I agree with

Dealing with wormholes shouldn't be too much of a hassle - after all, there already has to be some sort of flag to stop you manually sending ships through a wormhole before the required technology is researched, and that should be able to be incorporated into any auto-explore code. And if the auto-explore routine sends the scout into a system containing hostile forces, then that can't be helped. After all, the same issue exists even if you're manually controlling exploration.



I guess the reason I'd be interested in some sort of auto-explore feature is that while there may not be the thousands of hexes of a map in Civ V to explore, there can still be a large number of systems to discover. And keeping track of your scout ships can be something on an annoyance.