Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[bean]

I would really like to see a "wait until shore leave is completed" order. Right now, sending my explorer ships back for shore leave means either removing their auto-order or being interrupted every time, wait for shore leave to finish, and then remember to put the order back on. It would be very helpful to have an order making them stay here until morale is back up.

I send them in for an overhaul to solve this problem.  But it would be nice to have this as an option.

[iceball3]

I did think about that, but even that's not very logical.  If we assume that there's a giant cylinder of TN minerals that they eat from the top down, why the cap of accessibility 1?  That means the maximum concentration possible for any mineral is at most 9%, or at least 9% of the maximum possible concentration of TN minerals.  Why?  It makes very little physical sense, and even less when you consider how minerals run out at different rates.  If I have 100,000 tons of Accessibility 1 Gallicite and 10,000,000 tons of Accessibility 0.5 Duranium, it's awfully convenient that all of the Gallicite is concentrated in the top 0.5% of the column that's mostly Duranium.  If some sort of overall accessibility cap was implemented, and accessibility either couldn't sum to greater than 1 or could go above 1 and had to sum to less than 11, I would have less problem with this.  Also, I'm pretty sure this explanation doesn't resemble actual geology.

Well, it's worth assuming that trans-newtonian minerals are not part of actual geology, at least not the same geology that's governed by newtonian physics that we know of. Whether the stuff is actually physical as we recognize it or phantasmagorical in some manner depends on individual interpretations. Beyond this point, while the idea seems cool, you might be looking too far into it.

[theredone7]

I apologise if this has been mentioned before, I did a search but couldn't find anything.

One thing that bugs me about Aurora 4X is that a world, once completely habitable can have a pretty much infinite number of people and installations.   I'd like to see this capped depending on the size of the body, the landmass and how well the colony is doing financially.   The more the colony can produce, the more people and installations it should be able to support.   Financial Centres will assist with this.   A new colony should take more time to build their economic strength too, as a growing colony is more likely to be demanding goods than supplying them.   This should somewhat limit the installations they can have.   Once the colony reaches the point where it has a relatively well sized supply and demand economy, it should become a state (or if a capital, a homeworld) where such limitations should change accordingly.

It would also be good to specify how many land masses and/or islands a world has which could have positive and/or negative bonuses to production and/or colonisation.   For example, a water world with 90% water might have 400000 small islands, which may not be able to support a large number of people (e. g.  10000-25000 each).   Or a continent which may support 2-3 billion people.

This could also change the terraforming system, where a world has a variable temperature range (favourable at the poles/equator or unfavourable at the poles/equator, or a variant).   Landmasses may be partly or entirely in a favourable location for life, this could be calculated by having a temperature range for the world that changes based on latitude.

I could also go further in stating that certain minerals may only be available in certain landmasses, and installations would be placed on a landmass other than those which would reside in orbit around the world.  But I think I've asked for a lot already, and I would be incredibly happy with the above if they were implemented.

[83athom]

Not a good suggestion. "What does an open ended game that lets you have the freedom to do anything need? RESTRICTIONS, YES!"  (Erik, wee need a facepalm emote)

[El Pip]

I did think about that, but even that's not very logical.  If we assume that there's a giant cylinder of TN minerals that they eat from the top down, why the cap of accessibility 1?  That means the maximum concentration possible for any mineral is at most 9%, or at least 9% of the maximum possible concentration of TN minerals.  Why?  It makes very little physical sense, and even less when you consider how minerals run out at different rates.  If I have 100,000 tons of Accessibility 1 Gallicite and 10,000,000 tons of Accessibility 0.5 Duranium, it's awfully convenient that all of the Gallicite is concentrated in the top 0.5% of the column that's mostly Duranium.  If some sort of overall accessibility cap was implemented, and accessibility either couldn't sum to greater than 1 or could go above 1 and had to sum to less than 11, I would have less problem with this.  Also, I'm pretty sure this explanation doesn't resemble actual geology.

The giant cylinder part may not be right, but getting many minerals associated together and being mined at the same time is very like actual mining. Very rarely will a metal mine just produce one thing, it's almost always multi-product, often half a dozen or more. They're not always obviously related by their physical properties, the same mine can produce gold, copper, molybendium, lead and platinum from the same ore body.

If you imagine the TN deposits as being utterly separate and unrelated to each other, then I agree the current setup does seem odd. But if you imagine a planet's TN deposits as being a number of intermingled deposits, each one containing a variable grade of multiple TN ores, then I think the current system is close enough.

I see it working as your miners start on the best ore bodies, the one with the most amount of ores occurring together. When they are used up, they have to move to harder to work deposits (lower accessibility) with less concurrent ores (some minerals run out).

[theredone7]

Not a good suggestion.  "What does an open ended game that lets you have the freedom to do anything need? RESTRICTIONS, YES!"  (Erik, wee need a facepalm emote)

I can understand your opposition, but you could have just stopped at your first sentence, as I find your response quite rude.

[bean]

The giant cylinder part may not be right, but getting many minerals associated together and being mined at the same time is very like actual mining. Very rarely will a metal mine just produce one thing, it's almost always multi-product, often half a dozen or more. They're not always obviously related by their physical properties, the same mine can produce gold, copper, molybendium, lead and platinum from the same ore body.

If you imagine the TN deposits as being utterly separate and unrelated to each other, then I agree the current setup does seem odd. But if you imagine a planet's TN deposits as being a number of intermingled deposits, each one containing a variable grade of multiple TN ores, then I think the current system is close enough.

I see it working as your miners start on the best ore bodies, the one with the most amount of ores occurring together. When they are used up, they have to move to harder to work deposits (lower accessibility) with less concurrent ores (some minerals run out).

I'm aware that minerals may be mixed together in real life.  But in Aurora, each mineral is treated totally separately.  Why is all of the Gallicite mixed in with only 0.5% of the Duranium?  For that matter, when geology teams make discoveries, it's always, IIRC, of a single mineral at a time.  If the minerals behaved more like they were linked, I wouldn't have much trouble accepting this line of reasoning.
I agree that assuming each mineral is completely separate is probably a bad idea, which is why I'm leaning towards the idea of using a square root.  Mining on a body with a single mineral would be limited to about 3.3x the rate on a body with all 11 minerals, which would make work on those bodies with a few high-prevalence low-accessibility minerals significantly more attractive without breaking the game completely.  You'd get more in total from a body with more minerals, and it smooths out a lot of the weird spikes you'd otherwise see.

[Black]

Would it be possible to add No PDC filter to Individual Unit Details Window?

[Sematary]

I'm aware that minerals may be mixed together in real life.  But in Aurora, each mineral is treated totally separately.  Why is all of the Gallicite mixed in with only 0.5% of the Duranium?  For that matter, when geology teams make discoveries, it's always, IIRC, of a single mineral at a time.  If the minerals behaved more like they were linked, I wouldn't have much trouble accepting this line of reasoning.
I agree that assuming each mineral is completely separate is probably a bad idea, which is why I'm leaning towards the idea of using a square root.  Mining on a body with a single mineral would be limited to about 3.3x the rate on a body with all 11 minerals, which would make work on those bodies with a few high-prevalence low-accessibility minerals significantly more attractive without breaking the game completely.  You'd get more in total from a body with more minerals, and it smooths out a lot of the weird spikes you'd otherwise see.

In real life platinum is treated totally separately from gold, from silver, from iron, etc. I don't see people going out and getting gold iron rings for example. As for geology teams, we will assume you are recalling correctly since I don't remember either, and say as they map the planet they collect samples from all over and then spend most of their time in some sort of mobile lab that they analyze the material and due to the analyzing process and the way the human brain works they focus on one mineral at a time.

 Also, why are you assuming accessibility 1 is equal to 1%? You have used that in a couple of the previous posts you have made on this topic, and I think its weird since accessibility does not necessarily have anything at all to do with percentages. For all we know accessibility 1 is equal to 9.09% of the total composition of the world and if all 11 minerals are present that encompasses the entire make up of the world.

[bean]

In real life platinum is treated totally separately from gold, from silver, from iron, etc. I don't see people going out and getting gold iron rings for example. As for geology teams, we will assume you are recalling correctly since I don't remember either, and say as they map the planet they collect samples from all over and then spend most of their time in some sort of mobile lab that they analyze the material and due to the analyzing process and the way the human brain works they focus on one mineral at a time.

That's my point.  At the very least, we can be reasonably certain the deposits the geology teams find are individual, as there aren't other minerals added at the same time.

Also, why are you assuming accessibility 1 is equal to 1%? You have used that in a couple of the previous posts you have made on this topic, and I think its weird since accessibility does not necessarily have anything at all to do with percentages. For all we know accessibility 1 is equal to 9.09% of the total composition of the world and if all 11 minerals are present that encompasses the entire make up of the world.

I'm not.  I acknowledged that it could be as high as 9% but there's no logical reason why you couldn't have 18% Duranium in a given vein.  The 0.5% number is based on my 'giant cylinder of minerals' analogy, and referred to the fraction of the deposit of the first mineral that had the second mineral in it.

[DIT_grue]

For that matter, when geology teams make discoveries, it's always, IIRC, of a single mineral at a time.

That's the old mechanic. Since the changes, they only get one ground survey of a body; when they complete it, they reroll the same mineral generation algorithm for it as occured at system generation (though at reduced probability) and incorporate any improvements.

[db48x]

One thing that bugs me about Aurora 4X is that a world, once completely habitable can have a pretty much infinite number of people and installations.

What is Earth's population cap? The laws of physics don't seem to cause one; people don't suddenly become infertile once the population hits X billion. Perhaps there is a point where everyone feels too crowded, but most of the Earth is effectively empty; we're not anywhere near it today. The real limits are set by the fraction of land which can be used for agriculture, the amount of agriculture which can be accomplished without using arable land, and the number of calories you can get for a given set of inputs. Technology has given us such great improvements to the latter that we're actually not using all of the arable land that we could be, and we still have more food than we can eat. I think this is a situation where the trans-newtonian technologies that the game introduces have pushed the limits so high as to be entirely unknown.

The rest of your suggestion is asking for more simulation here and less abstraction, so I don't think a cap of any kind would be the right way to satisfy you. I think terraforming could be more interesting if it took into account more factors about the planet though, such as the hydrology.

[iceball3]

What is Earth's population cap? The laws of physics don't seem to cause one; people don't suddenly become infertile once the population hits X billion. Perhaps there is a point where everyone feels too crowded, but most of the Earth is effectively empty; we're not anywhere near it today. The real limits are set by the fraction of land which can be used for agriculture, the amount of agriculture which can be accomplished without using arable land, and the number of calories you can get for a given set of inputs. Technology has given us such great improvements to the latter that we're actually not using all of the arable land that we could be, and we still have more food than we can eat. I think this is a situation where the trans-newtonian technologies that the game introduces have pushed the limits so high as to be entirely unknown.

The rest of your suggestion is asking for more simulation here and less abstraction, so I don't think a cap of any kind would be the right way to satisfy you. I think terraforming could be more interesting if it took into account more factors about the planet though, such as the hydrology.

Indeed. We don't even begin to cover the more nutter things.
To elaborate?
TN powered hydroponic subterranean and layered farms.
Total urbanization of the planet.
Subterranean urbanization combined with high towers.
Etc.
The extreme form of this that comes to mind is the Warhammer 40k Hive Worlds.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

i think that sort of thing would be well suited to a major overhaul of how races work, actually.  The 'Carnivorous or Utopian race that has comparatively low populations before they feel crowded'  is practically a scifi trope by now, as is the 'Herd/hive race with huge crowding'.  There is, in fact, already a soft cap since population growth slows as population increases; it's just absurdly high in practical terms for an Aurora player.

I think wealth gain from pop should scale down with pop rather than being flat, in the same way that pop growth and manufacturing jobs do.   I would scale down my wealth gain from pop on the fly if i could...

One way to implement a soft cap would be to have a native 'carrying capacity'of a planet. Once exceeded, TN infrastructure is required to keep increasing population.  Any reasonable carrying capacity would be very very high in practical Aurora terms though, so.... *shrug*  probably pointless.

Indeed. We don't even begin to cover the more nutter things.

In Aurora terms a lot of that can/should require Infrastructure

[Nyvis]

What is Earth's population cap? The laws of physics don't seem to cause one; people don't suddenly become infertile once the population hits X billion. Perhaps there is a point where everyone feels too crowded, but most of the Earth is effectively empty; we're not anywhere near it today. The real limits are set by the fraction of land which can be used for agriculture, the amount of agriculture which can be accomplished without using arable land, and the number of calories you can get for a given set of inputs. Technology has given us such great improvements to the latter that we're actually not using all of the arable land that we could be, and we still have more food than we can eat. I think this is a situation where the trans-newtonian technologies that the game introduces have pushed the limits so high as to be entirely unknown.

The rest of your suggestion is asking for more simulation here and less abstraction, so I don't think a cap of any kind would be the right way to satisfy you. I think terraforming could be more interesting if it took into account more factors about the planet though, such as the hydrology.

Yep. Rather than a hard cap, having to take care of the hydrology (too many or not enough water = problem) and ecosystem (do I need to import species from earth? Is the local ecosystem compatible for humans, if life already existed), etc... Would be more interesting.
Rather than having a fixed population size depending on these factors, you could have a reduction to efficiency for the planet if those points are not fulfilled. Or a need for infrastructures to cover for producing food in an unsuitable environment (right atmosphere but no water, or no specie to cultivate, interaction between native ecosystem and terran crops...).

As a whole, I think terraforming could use more detailing for what happens once temperature and atmosphere concerns are addressed. For example, atmosphere without an ecosystem could degrade with oxygen turning to CO2. Pollution could also be an issue worth adding, requiring you to use terraforming installations and workers to remove dangerous gases from your otherwise breathable atmosphere.

Another thing worth thinking about would be alternative terraforming methods, like using ice asteroids to create an atmosphere and hydrosphere quicker than by adding gases manually, or introducing genetically altered flora converting gases (CO2 to O2 ...). Right now, terraforming seems to be too linear and straight forward. If a planet is colonizable, it is usually terraformable, and you always proceed the same way to do so. It reduces the thinking needed when choosing settlement targets since most worlds with the correct gravity can be terraformed to your specie's liking. Having to concern yourself with the existence of a magnetic field, the day length, seasonal variation strength, tidal lock, volcanic activity polluting the atmosphere, etc, could make it much more interesting and reflection inducing.