Got most of the “issue commands to individual turrets” done in Tactical mode. I always wanted the player to have control over individual turrets – to allow a scenario where the player might tell 2 turrets to attack an enemy to the right and 2 to attack an enemy to the left – or whatever combination of turrets and enemies based on the actual battle scenario. I think this gives an added layer of control and strenghtens the RTS game play. So now when the player selects a ship or a station that has turrets – the turrets will appear in tactical mode, when the player clicks on a turret or turrets (player can chose multiples via holding down the shift key) and then issue orders like normal (right click on an enemy target) to the turrets. The other options that now become avaiable to the player after selecting a turret or turrets is making that turret a primary weapon meaning that if the fire trigger/button/etc is pressed the turret will fire when under the player’s command. The final option with turrets is to set their “roles” – if you recall turrets can be set to be missile defense, offense and a few other roles.

Basically just like you can order ships and tweak their AI and orders in tactical mode, you can order turrets. Hopefuly I’ll be able to balance out the gameplay that this is actually useful to the player, I have to make sure that fights last long enough and are strategic enough to warrant this.

Now I’m turning my attention towards putting in more visual feedback in tactical mode, so if a ship gets hit or a ship explodes, I want the player to see some little damage pings or what not in tactical mode, making it a lot less dry and a lot more informative than before – where a destroyed object would simply dissapear in tactical mode.

Another cool thing is that these changes will faciliate easily putting in other “tactical objects” – for example navigation markers and objective markers/highlights. The ETA for iteration 12 is the end of the upcoming month – so the end of June. Looking forward to it!