4.3 Suggestions

[Randy]

One thing that scares me about the CMC - and makes me ensure at present I would not want them:

Aurora is a finite resource game.

Witht the situation of you either pay for the CMC minerals, or permanently loose them, I know I would be sending the troops in every time a CMC was set up and expropriate it to governmental control. The potential loss of resources (or forced purchase at a time you may not be able to afford them) to me is not worth any potential benefit...

  If they did not eliminate resources, then it would be okay.

Perhaps this can be alleviated by including a geo team in the CMC that over time will keep it from permanently destroying minerals...

[SteveAlt]

One thing that scares me about the CMC - and makes me ensure at present I would not want them:

Aurora is a finite resource game.

Witht the situation of you either pay for the CMC minerals, or permanently loose them, I know I would be sending the troops in every time a CMC was set up and expropriate it to governmental control. The potential loss of resources (or forced purchase at a time you may not be able to afford them) to me is not worth any potential benefit...

  If they did not eliminate resources, then it would be okay.

Perhaps this can be alleviated by including a geo team in the CMC that over time will keep it from permanently destroying minerals...

This is a little like sending in the troops to control the Earth's oil resources so those pesky civilians don't use them. It is a finite resource too

However, I will make this an optional rule so you can turn them off if desired. Don't forget they only appear in populated systems and there won't be many of them so they are not really going to eat up the galaxy's mineral resources. Also, don't forget yopu can still establish your own mines on the same system bodies if you don't want to pay the civs.

Steve.

[SteveAlt]

My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians.  I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize.  The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians.  Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....

If you compare it to the real world, most of the world's strategic resources (Oil, Uranium, etc) are mined by civilians and them some of them are sold to governments. In Aurora, the governments have a much greater ability to mine their own resources even with the CMCs involved. If you want to be a slime ball , you can add your own mines and installations to the colonies that civilians establish. Anything your installations mine you will receive directly and you choose whether or not to pay for the civilian mining at the same colony. In terms of cost, you will be able to decide on a colony by colony basis whether you think buying the minerals is worth the investment. You will also get some tax income from CMCs when you don't buy the minerals.

Steve

[Brian Neumann]

A check box on the race screen allowing it to be assigned to computer control.  Or alternately a check box at the end of race generation that would allow me to create a race under specific conditions, but let the computer control it.   Currently if I want it to be a NPR I do not get any control over the makeup of the race.  I was interested in starting a multi government single planet start and could not find any way to make all three nprs using the same race, and all starting with conventional industry.

Brian

[SteveAlt]

A check box on the race screen allowing it to be assigned to computer control.  Or alternately a check box at the end of race generation that would allow me to create a race under specific conditions, but let the computer control it.   Currently if I want it to be a NPR I do not get any control over the makeup of the race.  I was interested in starting a multi government single planet start and could not find any way to make all three nprs using the same race, and all starting with conventional industry.

At the moment you can't have NPRs with conventional industry. There is no logic set up for them to handle that situation.

You can control the creation of NPRs though. If you set up the game with new races generated as NPRs then any manually created races on the F9 window will be NPRs

Steve

[schroeam]

How about adding scroll bars to the list of companies in the shipping line window.

Adam.

[SteveAlt]

How about adding scroll bars to the list of companies in the shipping line window.

There should already be scroll bars

In some versions before v4.26, the window was too wide so the scroll bars were cut off. Just to check this is still a problem, are you using v4.26?

Steve

[ShadoCat]

My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians.  I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize.  The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians.  Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....

If you compare it to the real world, most of the world's strategic resources (Oil, Uranium, etc) are mined by civilians and them some of them are sold to governments. In Aurora, the governments have a much greater ability to mine their own resources even with the CMCs involved. If you want to be a slime ball , you can add your own mines and installations to the colonies that civilians establish. Anything your installations mine you will receive directly and you choose whether or not to pay for the civilian mining at the same colony. In terms of cost, you will be able to decide on a colony by colony basis whether you think buying the minerals is worth the investment. You will also get some tax income from CMCs when you don't buy the minerals.
Steve

Yeah, but there is no in game substitute for TN.  The only reason that we still use oil is that it is still one of the cheapest energy production/storage mediums.  We have other options available.  

If you have a 1000 star game, then when the last resource is used, all you do is spend the rest of your time waiting for ships to rot.

Instead of using oil in the analogy, try using uranium.  If you dig uranium out of the ground, your allowed customers are very few.

[Kurt]

My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians.  I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize.  The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians.  Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....

If you compare it to the real world, most of the world's strategic resources (Oil, Uranium, etc) are mined by civilians and them some of them are sold to governments. In Aurora, the governments have a much greater ability to mine their own resources even with the CMCs involved. If you want to be a slime ball , you can add your own mines and installations to the colonies that civilians establish. Anything your installations mine you will receive directly and you choose whether or not to pay for the civilian mining at the same colony. In terms of cost, you will be able to decide on a colony by colony basis whether you think buying the minerals is worth the investment. You will also get some tax income from CMCs when you don't buy the minerals.
Steve

Yeah, but there is no in game substitute for TN.  The only reason that we still use oil is that it is still one of the cheapest energy production/storage mediums.  We have other options available.  

If you have a 1000 star game, then when the last resource is used, all you do is spend the rest of your time waiting for ships to rot.

Instead of using oil in the analogy, try using uranium.  If you dig uranium out of the ground, your allowed customers are very few.

Theoretically, your statement about the resources running out is valid, however, assuming standard survey luck, almost every player will discover truly tremendous amounts of TN resources in the course of surveying a relatively low number of systems.  The usual problem is that most of the resources, including the biggest deposits (usually in the 10-100 million + range) are at very low availability levels.  Assuming those sorts of discoveries, what will usually happen if a game goes on long enough, is that all of the higher availability deposits will be mined out, forcing the players to concentrate their mines on high volume/low availability resource deposits that will last for a very long time.  Depending on the size of the empire it might take a long time to run out, depending on new construction and such, but I'm willing to be that with a couple of those sorts of deposits most empires could keep running for longer than most people are going to run the game.  

Kurt

[sloanjh (OP)]

If you dig uranium out of the ground, your allowed customers are very few.

I think that's because it can be made to go boom.  Big boom, in fact

John

[IanD]

Paul M wrote
Also I am dubious there would be large scale adaptation to different gravity wells by most races without genetic engineering. A human born and living their entire life in zero G would likely never adapt back to 1 G living without major medical intervention but their children would.

I agree, which is why I suggested that there should be a permanent infrastructure requirement for low g planets representing facilities for the population to retain some higher g tolerance, or banks of uterine replicators kept under homeworld gravity to provide those higher g colonists. With the shipping companies its not as though it would cost the player time or duranium .

Paul M wrote
Its also important to realize that a lot of things are not easy to untrain and how you respond to your local gravity well is one of them

Which is why I suggested a tech to enable you to fight on higher g worlds, but this could easily give you a range of g conditions where you could fight with out (or with a reduced) penalty. For example if your home planet is 1g, then ground combat level 1 could give you the ability to fight on planets with a range .075-1.25g.

Regards

[Paul M]

*grins* Is my duranium position that clear *laughs*  Yes suffering through 3 duranium crunches tends to make me paranoid about the whole topic.

What I can't see happening is actually maintainly large numbers of say centfuges and the like to keep your colonists in G tolerance.  I read that the astronauts on the ISF spend 2-3 hours a day working out which strikes me as not something your average 9-5 employee at the local store is going to do.  It would cost a lot of money to keep facilities of this sort open and likely they would be only available to a small fraction of the population.  This is where my whole "no idea what it should cost" in game terms comes from.  Beyond that we seem to be agreeing with each other.

As for technology I'd say give the penalty at full and let the technology level modify this up to a maximum of reducing it to say 33-50% of what it should be.  This gives the overall problems of moving in an unfamilier gravity field.  But on the other hand I also think this is pretty nitty gritty detailed stuff but I don't see us dissagreeing on anything but the details.

I still would like to see can-cities or spun up asteriods (something that might make asteroids more interesting) as they could be then used for military bases and asteroid processing centres.

[IanD]

Paul M wrote
*grins* Is my duranium position that clear *laughs* Yes suffering through 3 duranium crunches tends to make me paranoid about the whole topic

I always go through a Duranium crunch or two :wink: .

this is pretty nitty gritty detailed stuff

Again I agree, but it is an (in my view at least) important detail. Would it be easier to colonise a planet with an atmosphere you can change in 20 years game time (or less) or a high g planet just within your racial tolerance that you can't change? At the moment it’s the latter. Steve said he wanted a more realistic game than Starfire . Nice to find we agree on so much

Regards

[sloanjh (OP)]

Which is why I want skewed g tolerance in the first place.

You can emulate a skewed g tolerance in the current game simply by moving the central value on the Race (ctrl-F2) screen.  

John

[Paul M]

One thing which might be interesting to consider is to adjust the manufacturing efficiency based on the gravity rather than the cost of settlement.  Infrastructure is more dependant on atmosphere anyway with the big questions: can I grow food outdoors, and can I breath this muck.

But for places away from your gravity sweet spot giving a lower manufacturing efficiency and birthrate are certainly realistic.  Say for for each 5% the planets gravity differs from your homeworlds you loose 1% manufacturing efficiency and x% birthrate.  You could use something similiar for ground combat efficiency.

I'd also add that lack of a hydrosphere should be a multiplier as well.  Water is vital to life.  I'd also suggest a variable amount for a biosphere either + or - in this case.  Egads consider that any PR will be NOT the friends of the Interstellar Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Non-Sentient Life Forms (ISPCNSLF) given our tendancy to "x"-form the atmosphere into leathal poison as far as the native non-sentient life forms are concerned.

Steve is probably either: (1) throwing up his hands in disgust or (2) rolling on the floor laughing I'd imagine.