Official Suggestion Thread for 5.14 or later (inc Spoiler)

[Steve Walmsley]

Just 2 little things that sort of disturb the immersion for me - stupid, but perhaps easily fixable?

1) Fighters, depending on how they are set up, can have from 15-30 people. Somehow that seems... like a lot of people on board for a hyper-fast tactical attack craft, but maybe that's just my sensibilities.

I have heard this suggestion before and rejected it on the basis that the same rules should apply to fighters as any other ship. However, Symon mentioned this same issue to me the other day as well and he had a very good rationale for changing it. Ships are out on patrol for months at a time and therefore need three shifts or more plus a lot of ongoing maintenance. Fighters are only dispatched on missions lasting several hours and therefore should have need for only one crew shift and less of an ongoing maintenance requirement. This seems a perfectly reasonable argument, so if a design qualifies as a fighter in v5.20, it only requires 25% of the crew of a normal ship (fractions rounded up). This gives the NATO fighters in my current game crews of between 3 and 7.

Steve

[symon]

Excellent! It occurred to me later that if it was easy to do, you might want to shift some of the 'missing' crew to the hanger. Failing that, upping the manning requirements for the hanger might be an idea.

[UnLimiTeD]

Something I have discussed a while back, and now finally refined enough to suggest it here:

An Overhaul of Orbital Combat.

I feel the limit of 1 apm for beam weapons is rather arbitrary, and not even useful from a gameplay perspective, making it too easy to use them against thin atmospheres, and impossible versus thicker.

The full suggestion, with a small discussion, and summary, can be found here:

http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2559&p=25369#p25369

I changed the first post to contain a summary of everything important.
It's still rather long, and extremely complex, but that can hardly be a counterargument in this game

[Elouda]

Something I have discussed a while back, and now finally refined enough to suggest it here:

An Overhaul of Orbital Combat.

I feel the limit of 1 apm for beam weapons is rather arbitrary, and not even useful from a gameplay perspective, making it too easy to use them against thin atmospheres, and impossible versus thicker.

The full suggestion, with a small discussion, and summary, can be found here:

http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2559&p=25369#p25369

I changed the first post to contain a summary of everything important.
It's still rather long, and extremely complex, but that can hardly be a counterargument in this game

This looks pretty interesting. I agree that there needs to be a little more diversity in energy weaponry for orbital bombardment - as things stand now, I'm faced with either reducing their earths atmospheric pressure or having everyone develop meson cannons only in my multi-nation campaigns. This would bring some more variety and make a range of weapons viable.

[Erik L]

Posted in the 5.1 thread by me.

Hostile transit detections tell you which JP they are coming from.
For terraforming, add an option to level a gas to a percentage of atm.

[Morrigi]

Make plasma torpedos available without taking them from the spoilers, just at a high tech level.

[lastverb]

Well, Im back after a while have few things to catch up so I started a game to see those spoilers. For now 2 sugestions:

a) Make "Increment length adjusted as a ship is withing firing range" a pulse length adjustment - we alredy have firing and radar contact breaks so i think this one is useless.
It just make me to pass 3 ingame days with 1minute increments and it dont seem to end so ill start new campaing. There is no shooting between nprs (there were 3 days ago) - I passed 30sec just to see if next increment will be 30sec too - it passed full minute on next.

b) Final resolution solution - so far there is one - GimeSpace Desktop Extender because sdesk cut windows to max res, but it make You furious with moving desktop every time your mouse is near desktop edge.
It seems like a problem to hd desktop users. 16:9 (1600:900) and 16:10 (1680:1050). Because aurora dont use windows that width and need more height the solution would be simple: new hd version with some button lines vertically on the side rather than horizontaly on the bottom. Windows that would need adjustment (for 900px height):

Commanders (F4) - both bottom button lines are not visible
Class Design (F5) - most bottom line not visible (possible moving top bar to the side)
Battle Control Window (F8) - cutting some text areas or moving top bar to the side are the only solutions
System Information (F9) - bottom line not visible
Task Groups (F12) - both bottom lines not visible
Intelligence/Diplomacy (ctrl+F5) - moving top bar help with all tabs at once

Lower resolutions (1024:768) would need almost whole game reconstruction - too much effort, and dont know if any1 still using that. You should also put the link in the instalations: http://sites.google.com/site/gimespace/

ah and the crew change on fighters should also change crews on gunboats (same reason) to something like 50% (<=1000 tons ships check?)

[Morrigi]

Allowing ships larger than 1000 tons to be carried like gunboats would be awesome. It would give awesome RP potential, and open up new ideas for designs.

[Steve Walmsley]

Allowing ships larger than 1000 tons to be carried like gunboats would be awesome. It would give awesome RP potential, and open up new ideas for designs.

You can already do that. You can put any ship in a hangar if the hangar is large enough. Its especially useful for making repair ships that take damaged ships into an internal bay or for motherships that will reload box launchers on large vessels.

Steve

[Erik L]

Allowing ships larger than 1000 tons to be carried like gunboats would be awesome. It would give awesome RP potential, and open up new ideas for designs.

In the Bureau of Ship Design, page 2, about half-way down you'll see a post titled "An exercise in curiosity".

The ships in that thread are from a 3.x or 4.x game, I don't recall which. This was when maximum missile size was also 24.

[iamlenb]

Hello,

First Post.  Been loving the game.  I have no life anymore, thinking up stuff for new ship designs as I go about regular business.  Anyways...

I'd like to have a bit more functionality in the ground units section.  I'm currently cursing how Marine units don't have an appropriately sized HQ to transfer to small assault boats easily.  And how it requires a population center to transfer a ground unit from a captured ship back to the Troop Transporter.  I'd be pleased if these issues were addressed - it's by no means game breaking, but it feels a bit ... incomple ... not finis ... not quite perfect!

Also, little niggling things like remembering settings in Events window, clickbox positions, and such.  I'm sure they only stand out due to the amount of time I'm spending on this incredible game.

Thank you Steve and best of luck/skills with your gambling,
Len

[dooots]

Limit the resource modifier for home world resources to greater then or equal to 1.  Did a conventional start and only had 10k neutronium and mercassium and didn't find any in system.  I know conventional starts are supposed to be harder but that seems to be a bit extreme for a game where you only start with 1 shipyard and 5 research labs.

[wilddog5]

A task group order to alow a tanker to take fuel from a target fleet

This is to alow the semi automated transfer of fuel from a harvesting fleet to a planet. eg

Get fuel from harvesting fleet
Standard transer to system X
Unload 90% fuel to planet X4
Standatd transfer to system Y

Having this set as a cycle order would alow the tranfer of fuel to go much more smoothly it could even have a conditional version like the minerals do (when fuel = X Litres)

sorry if this has allready been posted  :?:

[Shinanygnz]

I'd like to be able to give or sell my old freighters and colony ships to civilian lines instead of just giving them a cash subsidy.  Pretty please.

Stephen

[welchbloke]

I would like is some kind of range facility on the F3 screen.  Select 2 objects and a read out gives you the range between them.  Also, the ability to set up range rings around objects with a user definable radius woud be nice too.