C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions

[Jorgen_CAB]

Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster (haha).  Been reading through a lot of this, but not all, so apologies if it's been discussed.  Any chance for a 'disable missile tech' option at campaign start? I love me some Star Wars, and would love for NPR's to play by the same rules - beam weapons only.  Maybe have such an option also boost beam ranges and whatnot to keep the game smooth.  Possible/thoguhts?

Amazing game, Steve.  I've been (im)patiently awaiting C# version for a while haha.

Steve have said in a previous comment that the way the AI is coded it is not possible to remove missile technology from the game. The player have to simply ignore it for their own RP which is the only solution for now. Perhaps something that could be done for the future though.

[L0ckAndL0ad]

Even in that case, I doubt the battleships could just drop by any shipyard at any time and have the guns fitted. There would need to be some scheduling and preparation work.

Of course. The same applies to the situation when you need to make repairs (after combat) and replace damaged equipment. Fortunately, in Aurora, you don't need a shipyard tooled for specific design to be able to repair ships. Only big enough and of the correct type.

Alternatively, allowing shipyards to be able to refit ships it was tooled to build previously (for example, the last 2-3 tooled designs) would also work, I guess.

My main point is that there needs to be a better way to make small refits without having shipyards sitting there idly just to preserve such capability.

You'd also need a slipway that's large enough to fit the ship and a shipyard that can handle the components.

That's what I said: on any appropriate shipyard, in terms of size and type.

[SevenOfCarina]

I have a minor request : can we please remove the gender of commanders from their stats? I'm not aware of the exact algorithm Aurora uses for naming commanders, but while it does an okay-ish job with Anglo/European names, it absolutely butchers the naming conventions followed by other cultures. It's like half the women get unambiguously male names, while a quarter of the males get unambiguously female names, and it really breaks my immersion when I see that 'M' next to 'Lieutenant Katie Stanton' or 'F' next to 'Scientist Roger Mansson'.

Fixing it will require some way of cataloguing and gendering names, which I don't think is worth the effort. It's just easier to remove the classification entirely and leave the gender of commanders ambiguous/use gender-neutral language wherever it comes up.

[xenoscepter]

Or, you know, just make the name/gender/pronoun fields editable?

[Father Tim]

I have a minor request : can we please remove the gender of commanders from their stats? I'm not aware of the exact algorithm Aurora uses for naming commanders, but while it does an okay-ish job with Anglo/European names, it absolutely butchers the naming conventions followed by other cultures. It's like half the women get unambiguously male names, while a quarter of the males get unambiguously female names, and it really breaks my immersion when I see that 'M' next to 'Lieutenant Katie Stanton' or 'F' next to 'Scientist Roger Mansson'.

Fixing it will require some way of cataloguing and gendering names, which I don't think is worth the effort. It's just easier to remove the classification entirely and leave the gender of commanders ambiguous/use gender-neutral language wherever it comes up.

The name files are already segregated into last names, female first names and male first names.  The 'F' or 'M' is dictated solely by which file the first name is drawn from.

You can easily edit the files to remove (or move) the names you have a problem with, and then share the edited files here.

[SevenOfCarina]

The name files are already segregated into last names, female first names and male first names.  The 'F' or 'M' is dictated solely by which file the first name is drawn from.

You can easily edit the files to remove (or move) the names you have a problem with, and then share the edited files here.

Are you sure you don't need designer mode to access the name files?

Even if it you could, though, there must be thousands of first names - it would take literal days to sort through everything, especially since you'd need to cross-check against online databases to gender names correctly for cultures you have minimal knowledge about. It's far simpler to just remove the gender field, and it's not like it serves much of a purpose anyway.

[xenoscepter]

What if I wanna play a Matriarchal Society? Or a society which only assigns military roles to men? Seeing, "M" or "F" in the commander tabs would be far, far easier than having to sort through my commanders manually by name. I've had upward of 200+ of them in some games. I think a girl named Roger is definitely weird, especially if Aurora is auto-generating them, but removing the gender field is the wrong solution.

I think it should just be turned into an editable field. If I want to RP a machine race, or a Bug race with Male, Female and genderless Drones that would be quite useful. Or a faux-Star Trek future utopia where humans transcended the idea of gender via trans-humanism. Or a pseudo-Amazonian / Drow culture where men are lower-class and only women hold positions of power. Maybe with the Gene Modification Centers serving to change them into Females, but with genes specifically designed for certain worlds or deep space, making them less likely to rebel and still being second-class.

[professorpicke]

Missile agility as it currently is just a way to squeeze out extra hit chance by guessing/calculating the optimal ratio; it's unnecessary complexity.  My suggestion is to remove missile agility, or add it as a research line that flatly buffs missiles for missiles built with the technology.

[Mini]

There is some choice to be made, since if you use agility then your engine is going to be smaller and therefore the missile slower. I do agree that the current implementation is too opaque, maybe reducing it to a simple toggle, trading a percentage increase in missile size for increased hit chance (with tech improving the increase to hit chance) would be better.

[Jorgen_CAB]

There also is a problem with agility in that it increase the chance of AMM to intercept enemy missile over time that does not scale well with the other sides ability to avoid being intercepted. So, the current agility ,echanic will make AMM intercept enemy missiles of the same technology more or less 100% every time eventually making missiles as a weapons almost useless at some point against someone with the same technology level.

For that reason I always just set the agility level to a certain level in my games when I play multi-faction games in such a way that AMM have roughly a 30-40% chance to intercept enemy missiles of the same technology level. Of course the AI are restricted to use agility like normal but I'm not too concerned about that.

I would like to see agility being redone so that it scale better in general. I still think there is a use for agility as a concept as I don't think that a missiles speed should be the only thing that govern how good it is at hitting something or avoid being hit. The problem is that speed is both a factor of hitting and avoid being hit where agility only allow you to hit more easily. In my opinion I think that both of these should do both things they just should do it differently. Let's say that speed is about 75% of the missiles defence and 25% of its ability to hit while agility is 75% ability to hit but also about 25% of the ability to avoid being hit. I mean... speed of the missile effect thing like the time you have to intercept it from the time you detect it and how effective area PD can be against it. Speed is a very strong attribute for the missiles defence in many respects, the chance to hit a missile and the chance for a missile to hit something should be reevaluated in the future in my opinion. Make agility the primary source for a missile to target something and speed is its main defence but both values should apply to some degree in both calculations. This would then make both values roughly equally important and balance each other out over the course of an entire game.

[The_Seeker]

There also is a problem with agility in that it increase the chance of AMM to intercept enemy missile over time that does not scale well with the other sides ability to avoid being intercepted.  So, the current agility ,echanic will make AMM intercept enemy missiles of the same technology more or less 100% every time eventually making missiles as a weapons almost useless at some point against someone with the same technology level.

For that reason I always just set the agility level to a certain level in my games when I play multi-faction games in such a way that AMM have roughly a 30-40% chance to intercept enemy missiles of the same technology level.  Of course the AI are restricted to use agility like normal but I'm not too concerned about that.

I would like to see agility being redone so that it scale better in general.  I still think there is a use for agility as a concept as I don't think that a missiles speed should be the only thing that govern how good it is at hitting something or avoid being hit.  The problem is that speed is both a factor of hitting and avoid being hit where agility only allow you to hit more easily.  In my opinion I think that both of these should do both things they just should do it differently.  Let's say that speed is about 75% of the missiles defence and 25% of its ability to hit while agility is 75% ability to hit but also about 25% of the ability to avoid being hit.  I mean. . .  speed of the missile effect thing like the time you have to intercept it from the time you detect it and how effective area PD can be against it.  Speed is a very strong attribute for the missiles defence in many respects, the chance to hit a missile and the chance for a missile to hit something should be reevaluated in the future in my opinion.  Make agility the primary source for a missile to target something and speed is its main defence but both values should apply to some degree in both calculations.  This would then make both values roughly equally important and balance each other out over the course of an entire game.

I find the missile calculations to be unsatisfactory in general, factors such as target aspect, size, and acceleration aren't taken to account in the game, but are far more important than target velocity for real missiles.   It's really easy to throw a dart at a 70mph train and hit it from directly in front of it, it'd be much harder to throw a dart and intercept a 70mph curveball at a right angle, but both of those scenarios would be equivalent in aurora because only the target's velocity and the dart's unmaneuverability are accounted for.

[Garfunkel]

Wouldn't it be better that Speed is your chance to hit and Agility is your chance to avoid being hit? If both affect both, then it's just another Excel sheet where you punch in numbers and the macro tells you where the sweet spot lies. If they affect different things, then you would value them differently depending on what the purpose of that missile is - attacking other missiles, avoiding AMMs, avoiding PD, hitting planets, hitting ships, and so on.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

[QuakeIV]

I'm kindof in the remove agility camp at the moment, personally.

e: Not militantly so, I dont really care that much, but I can see the argument for just doing away with it.

[Zincat]

I'm kindof in the remove agility camp at the moment, personally.

e: Not militantly so, I dont really care that much, but I can see the argument for just doing away with it.

I am of the same opinion. It's just misleading and obscure. Not to mention, not really all that useful as it is right now. I'd simply remove it.

I'd simply balance hit chance against missiles based on velocity and speed. I don't really see much point in agility as it is now.

Not to mention, it has always bugged me a bit. I can imagine "agile" missiles.... but agile missiles should slow down their approach to targets, thus taking longer to hit them because the missile takes evasive maneuvers. It bugs me that the game does not model that, travel time is not influenced at ALL by these "evasive maneuvers". Since it does not model that, I'd rather simplify things and do without agility.

[amram]

Wouldn't it be better that Speed is your chance to hit and Agility is your chance to avoid being hit? If both affect both, then it's just another Excel sheet where you punch in numbers and the macro tells you where the sweet spot lies. If they affect different things, then you would value them differently depending on what the purpose of that missile is - attacking other missiles, avoiding AMMs, avoiding PD, hitting planets, hitting ships, and so on.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Agreed that they should see a change, right now speed is just the better agility, though depending on your tech levels, there may be better gains in improving one or the other.

Suppose we took the radius of a sphere representing the volume of an entity, using the targets tonnage as the "volume" value.  Divide the entity's speed by that "radius", and divide that result by 500 to compress the numbers a bit more, then in normal aurora fashion, truncate to one or two decimal places, lets go with one place.

Tons	"Radius"	Speed	"Agility"
2.75	0.869	80000	184.1
5.5	1.095	70000	127.9
11	1.38	60000	87
16.5	1.579	50000	63.3
33	1.99	40000	40.2
50	2.285	40000	35
250	3.908	30000	15.4
500	4.924	30000	12.2
750	5.636	20000	7.1
1000	6.204	20000	6.4
2000	7.816	20000	5.1
3000	8.947	20000	4.5
5000	10.608	20000	3.8

Note that 2.75, 5.5, 11, 33, and 50 are missile sizes 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, and 18 respectively.  If you do the math on sensors, an s6 must be 6*2.75=16.5 tons or the ranges don't match up for MCR against an S6 missile.

If your agility is more than 5 times higher than theirs, there is no penalty to the intercept, If not, then ratio/5 is the accuracy from agility.

So a 16.5t (s6) missile at 50kkm/s has little issue intercepting a 500t fighter at 30kkms, since its 5.19x more "agile", or 104% agile enough.  An s12(33t) missile at 40kkms would have some issues, being only 3.3x as agile, or 66% agile enough.  Take that 40.2 agility, divide by 66%, get 61 agility, hit that rating, you get 100% in this match up.  That means you'd need 20.8 more AGI, which at 200AGI/MSP is 0.104MSP per missile MSP, or 1.248msp on AGI to get 100% chance.



This means ASM's will pretty much never need AGI to get kills against ships.  At the same speed, just by virtue of size, an s6 has no penalty against anything larger than ~1000t, and s12 against 2000t.  If they are faster, no the same speed as that example, then the targets can be smaler to have 100% chance, with no additional agility.


So what about evasive use of agility?

Well, lets take an example of 2.75t(s1) intercepting 33t(s12), with speeds of 80kkkms and 40kkms respectively.  The ratio is currently 4.57, which means the AMM has a ~92% intercept chance.  Again, assuming 200 AGI/MSP tech, if the ASM added 1 MSP of AGI, then it adds 200/s12 in agility, which is 8.5 agility, lifting itself from 40.2 to 48.7 so the ratio moves from 4.57 to 3.78, which is a 75% chance.


If it worked like that, you could ignore it for ASMs, and possibly some AMMs, or add AGI to engage difficult targets, or even get into an AGI arms race trying to be agile enough to not get hit, while they try to be agile enough to hit — that extra agility eats into your fuel and/or warhead space.

Of course, that would muddy the waters a bit with respect to still needing an excel sheet to figure out optimal engine and agi combinations still, since both would still impact the outcome for intercepts.