I love SoASE, but I don't get to play it a lot. One of the things I often forget to do in multi-player is to take full advantage of the diplomatic ships. Especially on larger maps where there is lots of action and multiple teams.
I think it would be cool if I could que up sending diplomatic ships to my allies planets without having to do the micro-management of it. Here me out on this...
What if after you get the required tech, you could click on your allies plannet and choose the number of diplomatic ships to send there? Or you could click on their planet and a button could pop up on the bottom right which says
"Send envoy"
What would happen then after clicking that button is that an envoy would be qued at your closest factory and once it's finished it would automatically have a rally point of the planet where you clicked "send enovy". This would elminate me forgetting to send my envoy's to my ally b/c I get distracted by other things so I wouldn't have envoy's sitting around my factories. It would also eliminate the envoy's accidently going where I don't want them to go when I accidently click the wrong location or when they are built at a location that is qued to send ships into battle.
Of course if you wanted to build and move the envoy's like you can now, you would still be able to do that.
I think this would enhance the game for new people and would increase the use of the diplomatic features by people who are not experts or super great at the game.
The same could possibly be done with scouts but would require more testing...you could make it so that when you click on an enemy planet, a popup could come up that says "scout planet" and if I click it, it could result in a scout being dispatched from the closest location instead of me having to micro to find my scout(s) and then send them, or not finding any scouts, having to go back to my planet, click on it it, build the scout, then wait for the scout, then order the scout to move to the planet. Just clicking scout planet could result in the closest scout being dispacted, or one being constructed...this would take a little more working out than send envoy b/c would you want to send the scout from your fleet or build a new one?
Thoughts?