Preparing space combat

On a way to implement space combat I have implemented conflict detection logic and unstubbed some parts of the game. Conflict detection is a mechanism for finding where and when space battle happens. Under the hood a fleet can have multiple waypoints and with advanced enough interstellar drive it can pass through multiple star systems in a same turn. If one of them happens to have an enemy presence, space battle happens and the fleet ends it's turn there. When the conflict begins is also important, it influences a turn limitation. If at the end of player's turn a fleet was 1 light year away from destination, traveled at the speed of 2 ly/turn and battle happened there then it would have 50% of maximum combat turns to resolve the fight. In case the battle doesn't end by then I plan to make persistent battles which can span multiple galaxy turns. I also thought about making a mechanism where a quick enough fleet can fight in multiple systems. For instance if a fleet finishes one battle quickly and is fast enough to travel to next star system it would be able to fight a few more turns there too. The problem is int that case conflicts wouldn't be isolated and players wouldn't be able to play each conflict to the end before moving on to the next one. It might work by making players play all space battles simultaneously, one turn at the time but that doesn't sound like fun. So I'll go with one battle per fleet per turn limitation and keep the idea in the drawer :). There is also a question of what to do with colony ships that retreated from the battle, do they try to reach a marked planet or do they go home and do what exactly? I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Next step toward space battles was making AI build ships so a player can have somebody to attack. In order to implement that I had to change how the game rotates players during the turn. So far I had a "current player" number and only one player could interact with a "game core" at the time. On the other hand AI was supposed to do it's work in the background. Since both AI and human player used the same means of communicating with the game core AI could only manipulate the empire of current human player so for a brief moment there was an AI which filled my building queues with random stuff :). To make AI independent I tossed the concept of the current player out of the core so from the it's perspective everybody is playing simultaneously and it is up to a user interface to worry about who has the turn. Interesting consequence of it is that Stareater is now very close to having hot-seat multiplayer.