This is regarding the Development Roadmap item: Officers and Ship Promotions, Flagships and named fleets

Obviously for Officers it would be cool to have some race specific Unique portraits that can be assigned to various stations of a flagship with some combat effect

Named fleets lends itself to some fleet specific perks like seen in Rome 2 and Attila but I would rather just have a simple sticky name for them for some role playing effect but nothing else (to not offset balance)

Flagships are tricky as almost no other 4X game has done this (probably due to balancing reasons).
I would suggest that this system (if considered) is implemented carefully to achieve following goals:
1. Do no give advantage to players over AI
2. Do not encourage massing of capital ships
3. Encourage the use of combined fleets with Destroyers, Cruisers and capital ships fighting together
4. Flagships advantages should not apply when ship is fighting alone so, that a single ship cannot steamroll (like we had in Galciv II)

Given the above there is only a narrow line of possibility:
1. All capital ships (largest carriers and Battleships/Dreadnoughts) have a unique ID in the pseudo DB of the game (something along this line should already exist due to damage persistence) - here the level of experience and bonus affects to fleet can be stored
2. Each fleet can only have one Flagship at a time which is marked automatically based on Experience level. If there are no capital ships in the fleet, there is no flag ship either
3. Flagships receive experience after each won battle based on: amount of enemy ships, amount of allied ships, relative threat of enemy (low threat enemy fleets should not yield considerable EXP to prevent farming) - This would encourage players to choose high profile targets for their best flagships
4. Flagship bonuses should only affect elements of a fleet that are not capital ships (including flagship itself), civilian ships, bases or planetary defenses. This is to encourage:
- Having one capital ship per fleet (amassing capitals do not yield stacking bonuses and EXP is not won for all other capitals other then the current flagship
- Building Destroyers and Cruisers and assigning these to fleets with at least one capital ship in order to take advantage of the bonus provided
- Grand Strategy Role-playing: each capital is unique and this is reflected in their mechanic. If one deviates from this mechanic, the bonus does not apply e.g.: massing battleships and sending them without escorts to attack is a waste (no EXP and no bonuses apply)
- Discourage turtling, as planetary defenses and bases do not yield EXP nor receive bonuses
- Taking out the flagship first is of high priority, to remove the bonus from other fleet elements

These could be flagship bonuses in accordance with the above
- Destroyers: Increase to shield recharge rate (so that their survivability increases dramatically)
- Increase to Cruiser speed (so that they can engage sooner and flee faster)
- Increase Heavy Weapon accuracy (increasing overall combat effectiveness of heavy Cruisers and tactical ships)
- Slowly Repairing (Reproducing) lost small crafts (considerably increasing effectiveness of smaller carriers)

There is also a way to make each capital ship stand out with relative low effort: by dynamically assigning a marker (logo) to each capital ship when produced. A good example is the Human Carrier (seen below) with the number on its top:
By having these numbers displayed on all Human capitals and having them being unique to a given game, these ships can be memorized and identified with relative easy. If it is a running number, the value already tells a lot about the ship e.g: 01 will probably be very experienced and the player has a good chance of even remembering where it was produced this being their first capital

If there is a table containing a row for each capital, the reference to these numbers can be stored with ease without having to redesign ships or touch colors or textures.

Unique name (label) can be given to each capital ship and stored in the table the same way so that when producing the ship the GUI designates the ship as "Battleship", but when finished and hovering over it, it can reference the label given to it by the player form the table: "Executor"

Just so you know, you can already rename every last ship you build. My games routinely end up with every dedicated warship and scout with a unique name, although I no longer even try to bother with assigning names to my vast fleets of civilian trade freighters. Or, for that matter, my armed merchants carrying surface units that get retasked as civilian freighters if they lose their payload.

Yes that is true: This can be used as the label I was referring to and it isn't even used as a reference for refitting so it serves this purpose well.
This was just an example though of how this table can be used.

Unlike the renaming of systems, never used this option exactly because of how it is displayed: only when the ship is hovered over, or selected for details does it become visible - which is fine as labels go, but is not suited for rapid identification.

In order to easily identify specific ships, an option would be of course to have various color scenes vignettes and whatnot but having seen the way ship hull paints are combined together in the game that seems like a huge work. Unlike putting dynamically generated numbers on the ships

As far as general identification of Flagships and EXP level goes, the existing best practices should still hold up: Flagship is always on the right hand side, icon marking it on the top left corner of the ships image and on the right or bottom: display EXP level, but the specific ship also needs to be identifiable easily when searching for it through the fleets menu. Dynamically generating the number on the ships hull can do that (until the image becomes too small to read due to fleet size)

We need to assume that a player can have dozens of Capital ships spread out in up to a 100 fleet so it wouldn't even be a far fetched idea to have a sub-menu of the Fleet report, only showing capital ships for this function. In my current play we have 114 combat ships in 24 fleets and 8 of them are capital ships though it is till only mid-game and I try to produce as few as possible as I prefer to use combined fleets.

If the number is not suitable, there could be decals that could be assigned to the ship, though this would require a lot of decal art and for each race (for AI no issue though: assignment can be randomized per default when Flagship function is activated - just need to make it sticky)

After further thoughts a capital ship list in fleet menu seems like the most versatile solution. Not optimal for any scenario but most useful considering all the possible scenarios (large and small maps, combined and capital only fleets) - in case auto-numbering or visual ID not possible. Just do not like the idea of tacking on new GUI elements for each function. CIV has done that a lot in the past with its expansions and it is both a messy proposition and foments the segregated spamming of game mechanics. Ideally all solutions should be integrated within existing GUI elements and mechanics - this makes their interaction with each other more organic

In the broadest sense, a flagship is just the ship in the fleet that has the commander aboard. In MOO2, the admiral characters were assigned to specific ships, so it did have flagships in a certain sense, but it was the characters that gave special abilities to the fleet, rather than the flagship itself. You just wanted to put your commander in the most powerful ship available, to minimize the chance of his getting killed.

Having persistent named fleets would be one way to allow formation configuration. It could also possibly be used to have multiple "squadrons" within a fleet, each with its own formation and possibly group movement. But it would need to be implemented in a way that was fun and not a micromanagement hassle, which is easier said than done.

Unit experience is a minor feature, but one I really enjoyed in games like Age of Wonders. I think crew grade could help with player attachment to veteran units, but I think the bonuses need to be modest: to boarding combat, damage control, perhaps targeting. This is also an opportunity to introduce some minor distinctions between different races.

I'd very much like to have multiple selectable marking schemes for each hull, though this is a pretty big job. Having dynamically-generated hull numbers would, I think, be mostly meaningless for every faction except the humans.

Yeah I see your point with the numbers: you would basically have to use different kind of numbers for different races (Roman, Arabic, Chinese etc) or worse yet: create new alien number sets, but who would be able to read all of them then...

So how about a capital ships window then which would display the Officers, Fleet Name, position, status and Label of all Capital ships but no other ship (as most of them also do not have these values anyhow). This would keep the list relatively short and useful

Haven't played MOO2 myself but the concept described seems very bad from a strategic sense. Sure the player has more attachment to the admiral and maybe to the ship itself as a direct effect but this has exactly the wrong effect: the already strongest ships in the game get even more stronger and I can only imagine the balancing nightmare in early-game. If you restrict the Flagship mechanic to capital ships, the whole mechanic only comes in mid game - so the bonus provided to the fleets can be balanced out with numbers. This is of course a decision of which direction you would like to take the game: grand strategy or role playing. I myself would like to see the first (not a fan of Warcraft 3, MOBAs and the likes, was even somewhat disappointed in XCOM as I wasn't going around naming all of my soldiers in the original: just gave them the occasional role specifications when they became extremely good in something like: Sniper, Assault, Demolition etc). Sending dozens of no-name soldiers into their alien demise was another kind of fun and gave a strong sense of realism. There was EXP but no here effect

Naturally it would be cool to have EXP for all ships, but I would suggest to circumvent the whole issue of balancing (it would make the game ridiculously easy for human players as the AI cannot be tough to preserve ships) and only implement this system for capital ships (and not mobile admirals) due to the reasons listed in the beginning.

In a sense, each capital ship would have an admiral who collects experience but being tied to the ship resolves a whole bunch of micro-management and development issues: how/when to move the character, how the effects are transferred, exploiting the system (taking out the admiral before overwhelming force arrives, moving them across the galaxy in a few turns...), and how would the AI be able to manage the system...

It would also make refitting capital ships a sensible thing to do, though I have to admit refitting is already a very fun and streamlined mechanic but all the better if you tie in new mechanics into existing ones instead of implementing brand new ones (mobile admirals)

We could still have gunner, security, engineering first officers and others that can be assigned to various stations of any capital ship, and they could give minor bonuses to the ship itself, but the admirals experience should make the fleet better and not the ship itself (they manage the fleet and not the ship, that is what the captain is for).
Again: not a fan of any bonuses given to capitals to avoid single ship steamrolling the map. In Galciv you could wipe the map clear with a single ship if it was slightly more advanced due to accumulating EXP effect - so what was the point of producing smaller ships or any other ships for that matter?

Would advise against the marking schemes: table of capital ships seems like a more versatile solution with MUCH less implementation effort and if you really want to produce new schemes and models, star bases and fortresses can always use some faction specific love

Also: Super weapons like Super Dreadnought and Mobile Planetoid should not be classified as Capital Ships nor receive any fleet bonuses

This is as they are already overpowered as is without any significant weak-points (armor, shield, PD power + the function of destroying planets: they have everything). They should rather function as a special asset of a fleet which is valuable enough in itself without the need to allow them to gin EXP, fleet bonuses or special characters to buff their systems even further

From a game-dynamic perspective this is necessary in order to have the ships providing the fleet bonus somewhat vulnerable and not have the capital ships made obsolete when super weapons are brought to the field

In MOO2, the "ship leaders" (admirals) could be assigned to any ship regardless of size, and the bonuses mostly applied to the entire fleet. So there was no issue of making capital ships more powerful. We might add ship components that you could add to a ship specifically to improve its functionality as a flag vessel (flag bridge, escape pods), but otherwise a flagship is just an ordinary ship that happens to be carrying a flag officer.

Another way to do it is to abstract it and just have the admiral assigned to the persistent fleet and not have to worry about which ship he's actually on, and do away with the idea of flagships altogether.

It goes without saying that if we added characters, there would need to be an associated "character pool" UI. I don't think there's any need for a list of flagships, because a list of characters gives you the same thing (a flagship only exists as such if there's a character assigned to it).

In MOO2 there were also separate "colony leader" (governor) characters that you could assign to colonies, but I didn't find this very compelling. I think it would be better to have multirole characters that you can assign to any task (science leader, adjutant, leading a fleet, doing espionage, trading, forming a mercenary company), though some will be better at some tasks than others.

I think trying to model multiple officers per ship (navigators, weapons officers, etc.) is much to fine a level of detail for a game like this.

Arioch wrote: It goes without saying that if we added characters, there would need to be an associated "character pool" UI. I don't think there's any need for a list of flagships, because a list of characters gives you the same thing (a flagship only exists as such if there's a character assigned to it)

If the Characters are assigned by the player there needs to be a UI for their pool yes, but if they are automatically assigned to Capital Ships after they hit Level 1, there is no need for it. They would be a parameter of the capital ship itself, in which case the list of capital ships already contains the list of admirals as an attribute and since it is based on a type of ship, it can be a part of the existing Fleet management UI - integrated fully in the existing GUI

Let me give a few examples of what I mean when I say the concept of admirals (whether assigned to a fleet or manually to any ship) is problematic:

If the player has 110 ships, and the most powerful ship is the first Battleship that has been produced, where will the admiral be placed?
The trivial decision makes the decision mute. The same decision is done each time a new larger ship is produced

OR:
If the player has 2 fleets:
First one contains 2 Destroyers
Second one contains 2 Battelships
To which fleet will the player assign the admiral?
The answer is always going to be the second fleet as any advantage the admiral might give will benefit that construct more, thus again: mute decision, but even worst: what is the incentive for the player to produce anything other then the biggest ship currently available?

This is further emphasized if EXP is brought into play: as larger vessels have better survivability, they will have better chances of collecting EXP and will also benefit more from them due to their higher starting attributes - this is what I meant under overpowering flagships (in my suggestion all capital ships and only capital ships are potential flagships)

That is why I suggest:
- If we have EXP: give it only to capital ships (also not for super weapons)
- If there are admirals, have them be assigned automatically to Capital Ships (thus no mute decisions, no early game balancing issues, no AI issues, no character pool/movement/assignment and UI issues, and no micro involved in moving the poor admiral to always the biggest and slightly more upgraded ship: from battleship to fleet carrier to super dreadnought to mobile planet).. If the admiral is tied to the capital ship, that ship will always be relevant and important, but it will also be something that can be destroyed with some effort
- If admiral bonus is given: give it only to ship classes below capital class: destroyers, frigates and cruisers. This way, all these ships stay relevant, while when applying the bonus to all types of ships, the opposite is true: only the biggest ship is relevant

Why not give admiral and/or fleet bonus to Super Dred or Mobile-Planetoid?:
- As they are in danger of outclassing everything else: producing these two in endless loop will no benefit the end-game. With added EXP and even fleet bonuses, producing anything other then these ships against each other would be a waste of resources
- They already have a unique role in the fleet without any further benefit: they can destroy planets
- They are the most generic art in the ship roster (since every faction uses the same design), and they do not carry over any faction traits, thus the end-game would loose all faction flavor (even Battleships would be obsolete)

Binding the admiral to Capital ships will make capital ships always relevant and making their fleet bonus effect only smaller ships will keep those relevant

Worst case scenario:
1. We receive an admiral, put it into a Destroyer
2, Wipe the map with 3-4 Destroyers at the early game as the AI does not utilize the farming of pirates and Harpies but the player will collect fleet bonuses with ease
3. Move admiral(s) into the largest ship available (micro managing for no particular reason) and not produce any other ship type
4. Amass all large ships in a single doom-stack to maximize fleet bonus (segregating them would not be optimal strategy)
5. Wipe the map a second time with the doom-stack
6. Admiral(s) end up in Super-Dreadnought or Mobile-Planetoid and practically become un-killable (they start form the back of the fleet behind HEAVY armor and an impenetrable battleships and Super-Dreadnought screen in front of them buffed with fleet bonuses

With my proposal, segregation of the fleet would be a must-have to even utilize the fleet bonus:
There would not only be no EXP to any other Capital Ship in the fleet other than the automatically assigned flagship, but they would also not generate EXP as they are not the ones commanding the fleet. Forming each capital ship into a fleet and assigning as many smaller vessels to the fleet as possible would maximize EXP gain and fleet bonus - this is something that is both more fun for the human and easy for the AI to utilize

Flagships I would love to see, named fleets could be used for flavor but less potential. Officer characters: agreed, not much sense in them, putting into planetary governor, scientist and whatnot role I do not find compelling. Flag modules sound great: How about a Flag Officer module that hosts an admiral on the ship and only available to capital ships? It would lead to similar result of admiral being automatically assigned to a particular capital ship but actually make the potential pool of flagship even more narrow and also make them somewhat weaker in combat as they would take up a System module space so perfect...

I have been mentioning combined fleets a couple of times due to how the mid to late game usually turns out

As seen below in an example at Turn 400, the AI already tends to produce mostly the largest hull available to it and concentrate them - now this does seem like a reasonable tactic on the surface as bigger is usually better (that is why these elements of the fleet should not receive any bonuses), but is also easily exploitable (cloaked leech destroyers, raiding, cheep PD vessels) and not very fun to fight against due to repetition. You can build highly specialized ship combos against the AI battleship type that can be produced way more efficiently but the resulting tactical engagements are repetitive and one-sided.

The early till mid-game has a great variety and balance of various fleet elements as with each hull our options are limited and the faction specific traits are shining bright, and I think that this needs to be supported beyond mid into the late game with each mechanic to keep both the strategic and tactical level interesting.

The player is already greatly tempted to spam the largest ship available, outproduce the AI and auto-resolve the battles: other options should be presented and not work against this goal

I'd really prefer that Officers be characters that can be assigned to any ship; if I want an Officer to lead my destroyer flotilla I should be able to assign them there, not be forced to wait on a 'big ship' to be built.

If the concern that Officers will by definition be better in a fleet with big ships, this is easily solvable by having the officer skills apply to different classes of ships; an Officer might have an ability to applies to Destroyers only, or Cruisers only, and forth so they aren't helping the Battleships at all (though as they level up Battleship level skills should be available). Officers should probably also have ability options that accentuate the racial flavor; Ashdar Colonial Officers should have access to carrier-boosting skills, etc. This also helps with keeping the fleet mix varied latter into the game, which I agree is a worthwhile goal. If your Officers are boosting your destroyers then it makes sense to keep building them longer, for example. So long as the Officers aren't providing some sort of flat bonus to everything it's entirely possible to have them make mixed fleets viable, rather than discouraging them. It's all in how the Officer abilities are designed.

Another concept might be that Officer abilities (or some of them) only work within a certain radius of their flagship; this might make a smaller, more maneuverable ship a valid flagship choice, as it would allow the flag officer to move around to where their abilities would be the most useful. A 'Flag Bridge' system in this case would do something like extend the radius the officer can effect, possibly making big ships better flagships in the long run, but only after you have access to the tech. This also mitigates the doom-stack, as huge fleets will never fit into the command radius and so some ships will never receive the Officer bonuses. A different but related idea would just be have the Officer abilities only apply only to the first # of a given hull type; if the abilities only work on the first 8 Destroyers, 4 Cruisers and 2 Battleships (additional hulls beyond them get no bonus at all) then that's the optimal fleet size for utilizing the Officer bonus. If only Officer can use their abilities in a fleet at once (based on rank) then having 2-3 fleets operating with 2-3 different Officers might actually be more effective than one giant doom stack.

One downside of a system like this is that it makes some sort of Fleet Formation planner HIGHLY desirable, and I still have no brilliant idea on how to make this work in a way that isn't really tedious.

If we make Officers multi-role (leading fleets, governing colonies, etc) then I'd definitely be generous with the number of abilities they have; in other games with similar systems XP limits usually mean you end up specializing anyway, so you de-facto end up with dedicated admirals, governors, etc. It might even make sense to have the leaders have an ability or rating in each area by default, and they increase their abilities in all areas as they increase in experience, so they remain flexible through the entire game.

I'm pretty ambivalent about the idea of individual ship XP in this game; ships come and ships go pretty easily, and tracking XP over dozens of ships without an easy way to tell them apart seems pointless. As an alternative, maybe there's just two experience levels; Regular and Veteran. Every battle, there's a chance that one surviving ship ship on each side will be develop a Veteran Crew. Veteran ships get a snazzy paint job or insignia (so the player can tell them apart) and some small fixed bonus. Making it random basically eliminates XP farming (though fighting more often of course increases your odds) and also mitigates the favor away from big ships, since the recipient ship could easily be a destroyer instead.

-Will

wminsing wrote:I'd really prefer that Officers be characters that can be assigned to any ship; if I want an Officer to lead my destroyer flotilla I should be able to assign them there, not be forced to wait on a 'big ship' to be built.

If the admirals are already available in the early game, they will give a clear advantage to the player: farming is much easier at this stage and the AI will never come close to anything an average player would figure out as soon as the advantages manifest themselves even if it would have advanced algorithms for ship preservation to keep its early game admiral(s) alive aka: they will die like flies in the early game AI destroyers and frigates

If we can chose where the admiral is AND the bonus only affects ships below capital ship class what is the natural conclusion?
Place the admiral into the cheapest transport or destroyer hull and move the ship in the opposite direction where the enemy is, as it will thus:
1. Be attacked last (does not need a resilient) and can still flee when all other ships have been lost
2. Collect the EXP if the battle is won just the same
3. The resource that would need to have been spend on a strong ship to protect the admiral can be sent on a line ship that will fight with no risk
4. Lead to capital ships be merged again together in a single fleet: there is no downside for amassing them and since they do not get any bonuses from the admiral, why would they fight together with the lower class ships when there is no mechanic to reinforce this behaviour for the player?

If the admiral is bound to the capital ship, the player:
1. Cannot afford to pull the ship back from the fight as it just has a too high combat value and costs too much to duplicate
2. Does not need to fear that much about the admirals safety - it is relatively safe and may engage with caution
3. Is motivated to have one, and only one capital ship in each fleet to max out the EXP gain and provide fleet bonuses everywhere
+ the AI can work with this system without extensive scripting

wminsing wrote: If the concern that Officers will by definition be better in a fleet with big ships, this is easily solvable by having the officer skills apply to different classes of ships; an Officer might have an ability to applies to Destroyers only, or Cruisers only, and forth so they aren't helping the Battleships at all (though as they level up Battleship level skills should be available).

That is what I suggest, but if battleships advance with EXP in any way, they will outclass anything below them. They simply have a much larger chance for survival (hence this is the point the AI should revive them and only in these vessels): any advantage accumulates in them and would probably yield higher net bonuses unless specifically nerfed compared to smaller ships but why do it in the first place then?

wminsing wrote: Another concept might be that Officer abilities (or some of them) only work within a certain radius of their flagship; this might make a smaller, more maneuverable ship a valid flagship choice, as it would allow the flag officer to move around to where their abilities would be the most useful.

A neat idea, but AIs tend to suck in these systems: in order to provide the advantage they need to stick close, but self-preservation is not their strong suite=easy targets

wminsing wrote: I'm pretty ambivalent about the idea of individual ship XP in this game; ships come and ships go pretty easily, and tracking XP over dozens of ships without an easy way to tell them apart seems pointless. As an alternative, maybe there's just two experience levels; Regular and Veteran.

Agree: individual ship XP would not fit the game due to scale and like the core idea.
Randomization of the reward might rub players the wrong way though: it would be a natural instinct to assume that more heavily used ships would get the reward

If only the admiral get the reward that it is clear: after each battle you can display the admiral, the combat statistics and calculate the EXP the admiral gets. The player has a sense of control over the reward with their decisions on both strategic and tactical level

If the admirals are already available in the early game, they will give a clear advantage to the player: farming is much easier at this stage and the AI will never come close to anything an average player would figure out as soon as the advantages manifest themselves even if it would have advanced algorithms for ship preservation to keep its early game admiral(s) alive aka: they will die like flies in the early game AI destroyers and frigates

Then spot the AI bonus admirals and bonus XP for them; the AI already gets to cheat somewhat with food and metal as it is. I don't think players will care (or really notice) if the AI gets to replace admirals easier. And the AI already does (or did) do a fine job of running from a fight it couldn't win.

If we can chose where the admiral is AND the bonus only affects ships below capital ship class what is the natural conclusion?
Place the admiral into the cheapest transport or destroyer hull and move the ship in the opposite direction where the enemy is, as it will thus:
1. Be attacked last (does not need a resilient) and can still flee when all other ships have been lost
2. Collect the EXP if the battle is won just the same
3. The resource that would need to have been spend on a strong ship to protect the admiral can be sent on a line ship that will fight with no risk
4. Lead to capital ships be merged again together in a single fleet: there is no downside for amassing them and since they do not get any bonuses from the admiral, why would they fight together with the lower class ships when there is no mechanic to reinforce this behaviour for the player?

Which is why I suggested Officer abilities work with a radius; that way it is impossible to hold the flagship back from the fight. So the renders points 1 through 3 moot. As for 4, players are going to concentrate force, that's a fact of life since it's a sound military principle. The only way to mitigate is hard limits (gamey and unfun) OR provide reasons to split the large ships up; which why I suggested either the radius (only so many large ships can cram into a limited amount of volume) and/or a limit on how many hulls an officer can effect at a time, so stacking all your big ships is one fleet is not making optimal use of multiple officers. Officers should absolutely be able to effect big ships, it would be weird and lame to have it otherwise. You just need to engineer it so that the doom stack isn't the most optimal setup 100% of the time.

If the admiral is bound to the capital ship, the player:
1. Cannot afford to pull the ship back from the fight as it just has a too high combat value and costs too much to duplicate
2. Does not need to fear that much about the admirals safety - it is relatively safe and may engage with caution
3. Is motivated to have one, and only one capital ship in each fleet to max out the EXP gain and provide fleet bonuses everywhere
+ the AI can work with this system without extensive scripting

This system just forces a different set of rules for fleet composition on the player, and a fairly boring one at that. I want my fleet composition to be based on my technology and resources and not because I'm missing out on a 5% damage bonus because I decided it made sense to stick two battleships together. Plus being able to churn out heavy hulls late in the game is going to happen, and conflicts with multiple battleships a side will occur; it's better to provide positive reasons to keep small ships around than just penalize players for assembling a powerful fleet. That's punishing success and I don't think it's a great game mechanic.

Plus, with the current combat system, I am pretty sure I could assemble a Yoral fleet (for example) with enough torpedo throw weight to destroy any vessel of any size in the opening salvo; if there's only one big target I need to nail it's extremely doable.

That is what I suggest, but if battleships advance with EXP in any way, they will outclass anything below them. They simply have a much larger chance for survival (hence this is the point the AI should revive them and only in these vessels): any advantage accumulates in them and would probably yield higher net bonuses unless specifically nerfed compared to smaller ships but why do it in the first place then?

Yes and battleships are also expensive and take a lot of research and should outclass anything below them. If small ships need to stay viable then give small ships a reason to be used instead of punishing the player for investing in large ships.

A neat idea, but AIs tend to suck in these systems: in order to provide the advantage they need to stick close, but self-preservation is not their strong suite=easy targets

It's only an easy target if the flagship is marked in some way; but there is absolutely zero reason for this to be so.

The stronger solution would be to ditch the assumption that the admiral has to be on a particular ship at all, and just assume they shift their flag as the battle progresses. They would only be at risk of death/capture if their entire fleet was wiped out.

-Will

If the AI needs to be given handouts to overcome the rules that apply with the game mechanic, the AI is not using the mechanic right?
Its like playing chess against the AI that has 8 Queens (that can only behave as peasants

We can throw double or triple the amount of admirals on the AI? Sure, but they will still not last:
While it is true, that the AI does retreat from an overwhelming force, but it will send them to their demise against Harpy nests and stick around with its damaged ships until they are destroyed in the very first engagement. Just take a look at the AI fleet size after 100 or so turns: even with heavy metal bonuses, they often have 0-10 ships! Imagine what this would do with the progression of their admirals while at the same time, a Human player has absolutely no problem engaging dozens of Harpy and Pirates nests with the same admiral without loosing a single ship

Replacing the admirals for the AI would thus not improve their survivability, there would simply always be some AI admirals running around with 0 XP: Lets instead put them in a type of ship that is likely to survive at a stage of the game where they have some decent fleets: the AI does not have to learn how to keep them safe

Radius would be fine but has two mayor limitations:
1. The AI needs to be tough to use it which even CA needed a couple of Total War iterations to succeed in (and they have had some more DEV resources). Some challenges to overcome:
- Evaluation where the effect of the admiral would bring the best advantage in the given battle without putting the admirals ship in direct harms way unless there is not chance to win to maximize damage to enemy fleet (or flee)
- Re-evaluating the above after each turn and reassigning admirals ship while avoiding the ship bouncing back and forth between two scenarios
- Recognizing enemy action to target admiral and retreat if in danger
2.The mechanic is not clearly applicable for Human player: Even if the radius is displayed to have range: 8, what does this practically mean for the player? How can the player calculate the actual number of ships that can be covered to make an informed decision? It is nice for role playing an thematic in low-tech scenarios but is micro heavy and less fitting for grand strategy

Hiding the enemy admiral in the tactical battle would be impossible due to their behaviour and effects.
It would only give more busywork for the player to identify it, but it will be identified and taken out

If we are talking about shifting flag admirals, then we are at the concept of having the admiral being assigned to the fleet itself independently from its ships.
This change is of lower effort but also looses out on all the attachment benefits towards the capital ships (XP is earned by the fleet entity and not by ships ), and leave room for quite a few exploits that come naturally to humans like disbanding a fleet and re-creating it on the other side of the galaxy


There is no penalization with the CS concept:
We are not taking away anything nor holding back anything that was promised, here is an example:
1. Building ships below CS (No bonuses no penalties)
2. Building first CS (No bonuses no penalties) Description of CS reads: when Flagship, can earn EXP and fleet bonuses. Bonuses can even be listed at this point)
3. Optional: Build additional CSs before first combat
4. First battle: bonus given to flagship text reads: +5% shield recharge for all destroyers in the fleet. Player know which is has exactly which bonus in what scenario, will forever hold their dear admiral in their heart and if possible, send out all the other capital ships to earn XP, and make a name for themselves among the stars

To clarify the concepts from a game-mechanic perspective:
Reward: Something (resource, lives, HP whatnot) given to reinforce optimal behaviour (in this case: combined fleets with Capital as well as escort ships).
Punishment (penalization): Something taken away to discourage sub-optimal behaviour
In the proposed concept, nothing is ever taken way: the potential for fleet bonus is not something the player had so it cannot be taken away
If the player is choosing a sub-optimal strategy, the bonus is not given (current game rules apply)

Is the player penalized when amassing battleships?
No: The battleships will have the same combat parameters as they had before, they will always have the same
The player can still group them together if the strategic situation demands it, and this can still win the battle for them. They will only loose out on the EXP this battle would have provided when commanding an actual fleet

The user would be rewarded for producing both CS and non CS and use them together
Is not penalized for amassing them together but neither is rewarded for it

Player is not punished for researching and producing CS either: CS is necessary to get the admiral and the fleet bonus, its a mayor temptation
Thus the player is even more rewarded then in the current system when CS is researched, produced and used correctly

As I mentioned, the AI already gets handouts regarding food and metal; there's little reason to not give them a handout with admiral XP if it comes to it. Players are unlikely to notice, and the point of the AI is to provide an interesting challenge, not necessarily to play 'fair'.

I think you'll find it's virtually impossible to balance the admiral abilities versus the power of the capital ships if you hard-link them in way that doesn't skew the optimal strategy one direction or the other. If admirals are too weak, stacking big ships is still optimal. If they are too strong, stacking big ships is never optimal. The sweet spot where it's situational is going to be a tiny target.

I hear you on the problem you want to solve (keep small ships viable later into the game) but I don't think this is the right solution to that issue; it basically says 'you've gotta use small ships or else'. It would be better to revisit ship cost, combat balancing and the weapon/defense model to produce viable small-ship builds that work in the late game. This is the positive method rather than the punitive 'you will lose out on XP if you do the smart thing' model of hard-linking admirals to the capital ships.

I also recall in earlier conversations on this topic that the Dev team has basically said they are ok if the smallest ships drop off the useful list later in the game. And there's something to be said for keeping the overall fleet size relatively stable and making individual ships stronger/more capable over time, rather than keeping ships weaker and having fleets balloon over time. If it's 80 destroyers or 20 battleships the 20 battleships appeal just in terms of less micromanagement. The game would need new UI tools to help reduce the micromanagement of the fleets if we expected players to churn out DDs the entire game. In this sense I see it like early of sail vs. late age of sail battles; the larger battles of the Anglo-Dutch Wars had 80-100 ships a side, while 100 years later the large battles tended to involve 20-30 ships a size; but those ships were bigger and more capable then their predecessors.

The other factor that the giant fleets of capital ships (and capital ships at all) usually only occur on the larger map sizes. Small galaxy games can often end before players get far enough up the tech tree to field large ships in any numbers, and so would be precluded from doing much with admirals if they are hard-linked to capital ships. The solution needs to work for all game sizes and difficulty levels.

-Will

If we are talking about shifting flag admirals, then we are at the concept of having the admiral being assigned to the fleet itself independently from its ships.
This change is of lower effort but also looses out on all the attachment benefits towards the capital ships (XP is earned by the fleet entity and not by ships ), and leave room for quite a few exploits that come naturally to humans like disbanding a fleet and re-creating it on the other side of the galaxy

That trick is easily solved by having a delay where an admiral is unavailable for reassignment for X turns after the fleet is disbanded (and taking Y turns to arrive potentially if the fleet is far out). The more I think about it, the better the idea of ditching flagships but keeping officers sounds, as it will contort the current economic and combat system less.

-Will