Furball

I am still working on the new technologies for the Interstellar era of the game. But I thought I would post some screenshots to show the progress. Here is a sequence of shots showing an attack run by two fighter wings against some enemy ships.

(Click the images to see larger versions)

In the first frame, I have launched two fighter wings (Beta wing and Gamma wing) from the carrier. Each "wing" consists of three ships. Their mission is set to attack and the target is an enemy capital ship. Once you have set their orders and launched them, the the fighters are autonomous -- they fly and fight on their own.

In the next frame, we see my enemy has launched two of his fighter wings to intercept mine. When you select an intercept mission, there is no need to set a target. The fighters will launch and engage anything that is coming toward your fleet with a priority on enemy fighters.

Next, my attacking fighters have been engaged by the enemy's interceptors. On the initial pass, his two fighter wings managed to destroy all three ships in Gamma wing. They then set off after the remaining Beta wing.

My fighters have reached their target with the enemy interceptors close behind.

My fighters fire on the enemy capital ship and turn around to head for home.





As they turn for home, they are once again vulnerable to the enemy interceptors. The enemy manages to take out one of the three fighters in Beta wing. (The graphics don't yet reflect that there are now two ships instead of 3).

The two ships left in Beta wing are home free as the interceptors are forced to return to base to refuel.

So there you go, a quick little engagement. Again, the only commands I issued was to set the mission for the fighters to attack and click the launch button. The only commands my opponent issued was to set the fighters mission to intercept and click the launch button. Everything else was handled by the fighter AI. I think this is more realistic than directly commanding the fighters, and will not overload the player when there are dozens of fighters in the battle.