Escape Pods and Surrendering,

21 minutes is a little quick to post a follow-up bump.

There's no way I can think of to add escape pods.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Ships are generally too disposable in the SE series to need a feature like this.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

In SE there isn't so micromanagement of crew...
Yes, it would be nice if before a spacefight you can choose to surrender or fight, like a little diplomacy, but, simply there isn't. You like realism? Good. Think that really your crew don't all dead, but many escape in escape pod, and then reassigned to a new ship. But not all on one ship, but in many, so, their experience don't count...

Research the technology for the self destruct device and put it on all your ships u dont want the enemy capturing your ships and if u playing multiplayer u definetly dont want your ships analyzed by your enemies.

having escape pods doesn't guarantee you'll survive the enemy anyway. If he's ruthless, he could just use your pods as practice for his gun crews. Then there is the age old tradition of slavery.

On the mechanics of doing it, yes you could make an escape pod as a unit type, give it some value (not sure what, but something worth going after a couple hundred pods) and make a component to give you the option to eject/launch the pod.

I don't quite understand why you would want escape pods. Unless the crew starts get RPG style statistics your crew are always free and expendable anyway.

Id be all for crews/captins/fleet admrials get expirance in the similar way to the total war series. It's automatic and doesnt require any additional management.

Maybe in SE6?

I wonder if you could make a unit such that it is your 'crew', 'Captain' or something like that and they would eject in the escape pod. Say, give them some ability to enhance morale, combat hit or defense.
Would look kinda funny 'building' your crew person with 'components' just like you ships.

One problem, a turn is a month or so... I don't think the typical escape pod is going to be able to keep survivors alive for more than a turn or two.
Also the likely problem of implementing the game mechanics to allow it, likely leading to needing to new components and ship types (rescue ships), how to deal with survivors, crew xp, taking prisoners, what to do with them... overall, it's an interesting idea with a potentially big snowball effect of required effort to implement.

Also, in the case of a colony ship or population transport, you then have to worry about how to save millions of civilian lives...
Or of if you want to 'save' the experience of the Master Computer of a ship.

In Master of Orion 2, there were escape pods for officers, but that was about it, only purpose was to keep you from loosing a highly experienced officer and their special bonuses.

There is the problem of simply handing over one of your ships to the enemy with a surrender.
No thanks, the fate of tens of billions of people is FAR more important than the lives of a ship's crew. No way am I going to hand over something that might give them an advantage to use against me.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It's a grim fact of life... ignoring it will simply cause problems of one sort or the other, or get your empire wasted.
Trust me, don't be worrying to much about the little simulated lives of ship crews, you'll just drive yourself nuts...

Myself, just to prevent my colony ships from being easily destroyed, I just keep them escorted, keep a 'scout' in the target system to look out for trouble, use armed/armored colony ships that carry sats, etc... or a cloaking device... many things can be done to keep them out of harms way, so you don't have to worry about loosing them in the first place.

Overall, people dying in space battles is realistic, it's not like the 'slapping matches' that occur in a 'space drama' setting like Star Trek or Star Wars or a situation involving a slowly sinking ship.
Realistically, chances are, when it is time to abandon ship, there will be too little or no time to acctually abandon ship, or simply no one left to abandon ship.

I, personally, like the idea of a surrender option or a surrender component. In most cases you wouldn't want to use it for the reasons stated above:

a) Surrendering a high tech ship gives tech to the enemy.
b) Surrendering a warship gives them guns to shoot you with.
c) Who cares about your crew anyway - they are mostly vapor anyway (Where did you come from...where did you go...where did you come from crewman joe?)

BUTTE

When it comes to watching x million colonists get vented into
space...clinging their little teddy bears...it does make me somewhat teary-eyed. It would be nice to enable colony ships to surrender - just to save their population (which can always be recaptured later). Creating a "surrender" button sounds like a job for MM...and one that probably won't ever happen considering how many existing features are broken and waiting repair. I wonder if it would be possible to create a "surrender" component though...probably not...but an interesting idea.