Suggestion for introducing Asymmetrical warfare in Aurora

[Garfunkel]

What's the problem with the current mechanics (and changes/features added in C#) that we're trying to fix here?

It is already possible to get stealthy ships through a defended JP. Jump distance is a thing and you can get to decent amounts relatively quickly if you then use small sized self-jumping ships with thermal dampened engines and cloaking device. They might avoid notice altogether or they can be far enough that they vanish out of sensor range quickly. In contract, you can also do it the brute force way, jumping in a dozen really fast ships via bunch of squadron jumps and then have them disperse, hoping that the defenders can't catch them all until they can vanish from sensors. If they have some PD with them, it is possible to stop small missile salvos. Depending on comparative tech levels between the opponents, either (or both) approaches can range for easy to impossible.

I wouldn't want to introduce a feature that makes either approach an automatic success. Plenty of German submarines were sunk when they tried to sneak past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, to use the most famous example.

Now, I've personally never tried either approach seriously because, honestly, there is nothing for such raiders to do aside from reconnaissance. Outside of multi-faction Sol starts, convoys almost don't exist and even when they do, they are seldom crucial - because mass drivers are a thing. As for scouting purposes, it is very much possible and both approaches work. I guess with C# allowing orbital bombardments without missiles, we could use beam armed ships to bombard unguarded colonies into dust and hope our raiders have enough MSP to cover the 1% malfunction rate but that's pretty grim and certainly not something that would go with every game play style.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

What's the problem with the current mechanics (and changes/features added in C#) that we're trying to fix here?

It is already possible to get stealthy ships through a defended JP. Jump distance is a thing and you can get to decent amounts relatively quickly if you then use small sized self-jumping ships with thermal dampened engines and cloaking device. They might avoid notice altogether or they can be far enough that they vanish out of sensor range quickly. In contract, you can also do it the brute force way, jumping in a dozen really fast ships via bunch of squadron jumps and then have them disperse, hoping that the defenders can't catch them all until they can vanish from sensors. If they have some PD with them, it is possible to stop small missile salvos. Depending on comparative tech levels between the opponents, either (or both) approaches can range for easy to impossible.

I wouldn't want to introduce a feature that makes either approach an automatic success. Plenty of German submarines were sunk when they tried to sneak past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, to use the most famous example.

Now, I've personally never tried either approach seriously because, honestly, there is nothing for such raiders to do aside from reconnaissance. Outside of multi-faction Sol starts, convoys almost don't exist and even when they do, they are seldom crucial - because mass drivers are a thing. As for scouting purposes, it is very much possible and both approaches work. I guess with C# allowing orbital bombardments without missiles, we could use beam armed ships to bombard unguarded colonies into dust and hope our raiders have enough MSP to cover the 1% malfunction rate but that's pretty grim and certainly not something that would go with every game play style.

I never said it would be automatic (at least not in its current iteration). The idea here was to come up with a sustainable idea of an asymmetric warfare model that is better than what we currently have. One of the biggest problem with the current model is that you can reasonably get in but not out, more or less so it basically become a suicide mission.

Now.. against the AI it might not be a huge issue as it is not the best at defending JP all that much, but not everyone play only against the AI all the time.

I know that Steve have said he might like some sort of submarine or cloaking mechanic, I also know he has toyed with the first idea that I suggested as well. So this thread is about discussing that.

I don't think it is useful to just dismiss either idea just becasue one like the status quoe of JP defense is king and always will be, there are nothing that say that things could not change and new mechanics added for an even greater experience.

I get that some people are entrenched in the idea that it is boring with raiding enemies the likes if U-Boats or that ships potentially could bypass jump points. I know that Steve had som pretty interesting ideas in his Aurora II project of ships able to travel without jump gates. I actually think you could have both systems in a game and make it work if you are creative enough. But currently I'm more interesting in the U-Boat idea as it it quite interesting from a story perspective.

There is nothing particular wrong with how Aurora work right now and I never said so, but the current version don't have U-Boat like warfare or a very good system for something like it.

I do agree that such a system should not make JP defence obsolete, I don't want that. But I don't agree with some of the comment it can't be done as the cost of drawbacks from what has been suggested is huge, both from a logistical, industrial and research perspective. The benefit of Stealth scouting should be powerful when you consider the costs involved. Building a substantial fleet of cloaked ship would be very costly if compared with a conventional fleet, I don't think it would be viable if you had two powers of equal opportunity opposing each other, even if one side could cause some mayhem at the beginning of a war the other would likely win through conventional means in the end.

The feeling I get from some of the answers are mostly one of emotion and not rational. I respect if some people don't want to deal with raiders in their backwater or that they don't want to deal with a defence in depth system.

The cloaking system that I suggested so far could be defeated with a good enough cover of DSTS and patrol ships in important systems. You might need to put some research into anti-cloak technology but I don't think that would pose a huge issue.

I'm pretty sure there are those that would like to deal with a U-Boat like strategic warfare in addition to what Aurora offer today.

If you are just categorically against asymmetric warfare I respect that but I don't agree with that notion.

I think the discussion is better to keep in the direction of what to do to get that feeling IF Steve would find anything remotely like that to be interesting in the future.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

The need for depth charges, which are unreliable, and sonars, which are unreliable, have very significant tonnage implications against any fleet trying not to leave themselves wide open to stealth ships. If the implications weren't serious, then the capabilities of stealth ships aren't very serious either (read: impotent).

You mentions some concerns that I thought about too, such as dodging missiles. There are several ways you can deal with that. It might be that engaging the cloak will take some time or you could slightly change how missiles behave if a ship disappear. Missiles would go to the last know coordinate of the target and stay there, any missile with a depth charge warhead will detonate and if a ship is revealed it is attacked by missiles that self detect using passive or active sensors. Disable the cloak also make the cloaked ship defenceless for at least a 5 sec turn after the cloak is gone thus vulnerable to really close missiles attacking them in the next 5 sec turn with only CIWS being able to hit them.

For any significant measure of range of missile combat, that's more than enough time for a ship to get out of autodetection range of any sensibly sized re-locking onboard missile sensors, as they can't hope to be reliably trying to intercept a target that literally vanished. Considering that you'd be able to break aggro with several hundred points of warhead this way, it seems quite abusable, kinda similar to how AI fires on targets it should know are capable of escaping the edge of the firing envelope trivially. Not good.

You could also streamline it more and simply say that a ship that is spotted can be lit up by active sensors. Once you know what you are looking for it can't hide anymore. So, if a ship already is lit up by your actives would not benefit from it's cloak anymore. It would have to get out of both passive and active range before the cloak will have any effect again. This would fix the dodging missiles effect and make spotting finding them allot less micromanagement heavy using "depth charge" warheads.

Whether you're actually in range of a ship's actives is privileged information, you can only find this out based on the alien race's tech level, firing behaviors, and EM signatures. Is the stealth module just going to expose the information needlessly?

The attacking the weaker opponent is completely a moot point because smashing through the JP using regular means would still be the cheaper option in that case anyway and just attack normally with your fleet. Also consider all the research you spend on using for the cloaking system to begin with that could be used for other things.

Though... using a cloaking system could still be an option for the one who wishes to explore that path for role-play reasons... it would be a nice story element.

Consider: an  NPR with cloaking technology and aggressive ramming behaviors. There is no sane reason why that race would not be abusing the cloaking tech at every moment available to them.

I really don't see many scenarios where the cloaking system would be OP. What size and cost it would be is a balance issue, but I would assume similar to the current cloaking technology perhaps. We also have to understand that Aurora is foremost a role-playing sandbox game. The AI will only do what it is programmed to do. The AI would not be programmed to flood you with cloaked ships, only use them for scouting and raiding purposes. What you as a player use it for is up to you.

You don't need to convince me to convince you to make your own game, the tools like that exist out there. You're not steve, though, so "i declare balance and design issues in suggestions unimportant" is not so relevant here.

If you want to slip past a JP with a larger fleet using cloaking devices they would not only need the cloaking device they also all need their own jump engine and they still would not be 100% to slip past, it would be very likely that at least one or more ship is detected. Once a ship is detected then the use of any "depth charge" would be disastrous to the entire fleet.

The main function of the cloaking system is to enable some asymetrical warfare, not to generally equip entire fleets with them (although it would be a story element for role-play to do so if you wish). The cost and opportunity would not make them worth it in the long run unless you already have a huge lead in both technology and resources in which case it does not really matter how you do it.

Except. They will need to get past the sensor buoys on the other side of the jump gate too. If the stealth is really strong enough to get 0 km from a target without guaranteed detection, then see the above point about ramming. If not, then necessarily shooting down things on the jump point from afar is necessarily announcing your entrance.

Some answers to your questions...

Let's assume that sonar is a module much like ECM or ECCM at roughly 250t that simply increase the chance of you finding a ship using your passive sensors. It would be a very minor tonnage requirement from a cloaking ship that would need both the cloak perhaps 10-25% of the ship total hull space and jump engine which also is about 10-25% of the ships hull space. If you also would like to add stealth hull it is another 10-25% hull space requirement. Heat reduction of the engine would be another big cost, especially if you also want a fast ship.
As you can see... it would take quite some tech research and resources to make these ships viable as main warships in any effective capacity. They would at best be diversions... perhaps they can be used to attack poorly defended support ships and other weaker targets.

Cloaked ships will mainly be scouts at low level and raiders at intermediary level and potential warship at very late game technology. Stealth scouting can be quite potent as information is key to any successful campaign but there is no certainly that it will be worth it, the same goes for raiding ships in this context. It could be worth it, but it might not... you don't know all the variables in each individual scenario.

I gave you an example that once detected it stay detected until you manage to get out of their active or passive sensor envelope. And to answer your question if you know... then I say that you don't... you don't know if the enemy actually see you through the cloak or not... you will have to gauge that based on their reaction to your movements... but they could trick you of coerce..
So this would work exactly the same as for any other sensor mechanic.

About an NPR with ramming behaviour and cloaking... then I say YES... that would be super cool feature. I would become paranoid as hell trying to deal with that. Super fun in my opinion... There could be some specific rules for how this would work specifically for NPR that could or would do that.

About role-play and balance or game features in general then Steve have said many times that fun beats perfect balance when it comes to Aurora. He have many times said that in SP some mechanics can be broken in fringe cases and you don't have to do them as the AI never do them. That is not me saying that... he specifically said that.
That does not mean that he nor me is not interested in balance because I know that he is, very much so. He might just no care in some situations and in some specific cases.

As I said I would not want to make cloaking a 100% sure thing, but it should be viable to slip ships past most JP defences unnoticed unless they have really good anti-cloaking spotting technology, then it might become difficult but not impossible. Ships then needs to survive inside enemy territory, perhaps several JP to get to a where they need to get and come back again.

The cost and efficiency of these ships should such that producing them to the point that you can use them as a main fleet should be the extreme and not the norm but not impossible given enough of a technological and industrial advantage. But such advantage would have yielded the same or perhaps even greater advantage with a regular conventional fleet but it would not have to be a given.

[Father Tim]

How exactly do you think the tonnage of this fleet is to be restricted to make it "small scale"?

If it costs the same in tech & resources to build one stealthy light cruiser 'submarine' as it does to build one superdreadnought battleship, you're probably going to assualt that jump point with dozen Yamatos rather than a dozen U-boats.

[Father Tim]

Updated list of cloaking systems...

1. The cloak will make the ship almost undetectable by passive sensors but there could be a small chance of enemy passive sensor to randomly detect the ship if it otherwise could. This chance would then depend on the difference in technology level of the competing factions knowledge of cloaking devices.

. . .

6. Active sensor can never spot cloaked ships.

I don't think we need point 1 if we have point 6.  A ship can 'disappear' from EM passives  if it stops radiating, and from most thermal passives if it drops to speed 1.  From my point of view, this gives us the bonus that being stealthy naturally makes a ship slow -- because it chooses to be slow.

With this set up, I think a U-boat would look like:
-- a small(ish) ship, to aid long-term hiding from actives (when not actively cloaked)
-- with current TCS-reduction tech (assuming Aurora retains that)
-- with thermal reduction tech (so it's less painfully slow when hiding)
-- with a small and reduced-power active sensor / fire control (for killing commercial ships up close)
-- probably with sensor-equipped missiles for waypoint firing
-- with a self-jump-only jump engine
-- probably with CIWS for PD
-- with pretty good passive sensors of its own so it can find out what the heck is happening in the system
-- and that most commonly hunts traffic via their transponders, thus 99% commercial vessels

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Updated list of cloaking systems...

1. The cloak will make the ship almost undetectable by passive sensors but there could be a small chance of enemy passive sensor to randomly detect the ship if it otherwise could. This chance would then depend on the difference in technology level of the competing factions knowledge of cloaking devices.

. . .

6. Active sensor can never spot cloaked ships.

I don't think we need point 1 if we have point 6.  A ship can 'disappear' from EM passives  if it stops radiating, and from most thermal passives if it drops to speed 1.  From my point of view, this gives us the bonus that being stealthy naturally makes a ship slow -- because it chooses to be slow.

With this set up, I think a U-boat would look like:
-- a small(ish) ship, to aid long-term hiding from actives (when not actively cloaked)
-- with current TCS-reduction tech (assuming Aurora retains that)
-- with thermal reduction tech (so it's less painfully slow when hiding)
-- with a small and reduced-power active sensor / fire control (for killing commercial ships up close)
-- probably with sensor-equipped missiles for waypoint firing
-- with a self-jump-only jump engine
-- probably with CIWS for PD
-- with pretty good passive sensors of its own so it can find out what the heck is happening in the system
-- and that most commonly hunts traffic via their transponders, thus 99% commercial vessels

Yes, that is roughly the idea behind what I think they could look like.

These ships will need to have decently good engines (both range and speed), good sensors especially passives. They would also like to have stealth hulls too if possible but now we are talking about huge amount of research going into this...

I mainly imagine that someone would generally develop these if they have some technological superiority, or as a surprise against an otherwise equal enemy.

In anyway... your idea with the passive and speed is rather sound... keeping thermal low will of course force you to move slow so might be good in and of itself.

I still think that the cloaking would need "sonar" to pick them up together with passive sensors. One of the reasons of course is that we want these U-Boats to have a chance to silently slip past a JP.

The problem that I see is to make the detection system balanced in allowing them to slip past JP defended points at both directions without being too hard to find otherwise with the cloak on.

One way would be for ships to completely mask their heat signature for a very short period to become practically invisible, should then be part of the reduced heat engine technology. But this then would need to have some sort of cost and be a very limited ability. It could allow a ship to run at say 10% of it's speed for zero heat radiation for a short period of time. But now things become a bit complicated and I don't like that.

To be honest I don't have a good solution for this problem that is easy to understand and play with. I'm open to ideas...

[Paul M]

I have to agree with the people that say the game as it is in (6.10 at least) allows for solo jump stealthy ships that can via heat shrouded engines and reduced velocity escape detection without introducing anything new tech wise.  The NCN concluded that the cost of developing a useful (for the ship they wanted to install it on) cloak was too high for the moment and the research effort was better spent elsewhere...but with enough beating down of the minimum size and increasing the effectiveness of a cloak plus with a really long range jump engine and some luck you can get ships in...out is a different question but in for sure.

But why?  I mean this is the point where I hit a problem.  I have loads of experience from starfire...my empires routinely patrol their space, no colonized world doesn't have a DSB-Xr sensor network by the time it gets to small population.  Starslayer does much the same thing.  The risk of a sudden intrusion via closed WP is just too high.  In Aurora the NCN has defense bases on each colony, most times a brigade of light infantry, and all jump points have a sensor/comm beacon on them.   I have always had in my head plans to give colonies more defenses in the sense of anti-ship missile bases and more patrolling.  Those two I have no real need for and are micromanagement intensive but the patrol force exists to a degree and is being strengthened which is why implementation has been slow on my part.

So lets look at what the raiders could do...  Outside of providing real time data on the enemy they can do the following (and maybe more the more creative you are):  attack infrastructure (terraforming ships, fuel harvesters, yards, etc), attack civilian shipping, attack colony ships, attack resource carriers, engage military convoys and lastly attack colonies.   The trouble with this is that again assuming you are talking a limited number of raiders these sorts of things come down to: "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."

First the system you jumped into is a border system so it has defenses and a mobile force which would respond to this sort of attack plus most targets would be to some extent hardened.   The systems behind this one...the first time you jump in your raiders would likely be soft targets.   The NCA have a brigade of light infantry on all colonies so I'm dubious you could easily do a raid with troops...without using missiles to bombard them....and a lot of more developed colonies have fairly substantial point defense capacity so that bombardment would not be so easy.  Same same for just general bombardment...and for those without atmospheres....lets just say closing to beam range would be a bad plan.   At any rate attacks on colonies are going to depend on what the other person has for protection and it is a safe bet they will have something.

Attacks on infrastructure well this will work and work well the first raid.  Losing harvester ships and terraformers are annoying as all hell.  Worse so for people who don't build them on hulls but use some sorta tug to get them there.  But basically only the first time...after that they will be hardened...and if that isn't sufficient, then by the time after that forget it.

Attacks on colonization convoys would be hurtsome...as that is a lot of time investment in the stuff they are transporting but again only the first time as after that they will gain an escort.

Attacks on resource convoys are also annoying but given the usual stockpiles I doubt the loss of one or more resource carrying ships in a limited number of systems would be a significant impact on production.  I use ships more often than mass drivers to move things around...so yeah the NCN has raidable resource ships but again once and once only.

Attacks on civilian shipping firm ships would be more than possible and virtually impossible to defend against as you can never know exactly where they are going but the can at least be avenged by a patrol force.

Attacks on military convoys....this is dubious to be successful.  I can't think of any military ship I have that isn't armed except the very smallest support ship which would rarely if ever be by itself.  So what a few lightly armed ships could accomplish I say is pretty much minimal.

So basically what this causes is an increase in lighter hulls useful for patrol purposes.  It also increases micromanagement requirements...in starfire I automate a lot of this but that has its own drawbacks as you tend to forget what you have done and can also forget to keep it updated.   Just because it is a bloodly lot of work that is mostly not very fun.

The thing is raiding isn't bringing the raider anything, it is costing the raided empire something the first time then it costs them again when they have to harden things and it costs the player micromanagement to keep the hardening working and up to date.  But the raider gains nothing from the risk they are taking...this was also true of Uboats in WW2 but they were going for the strategic goal of cutting off the UKs supply lines...here I see no obviously similar strategic goal in general...baring a critical resource production centre being located in raidable range.

So yeah...a good idea in theory and works like spit in practice?   I'm likely being too harsh.  I know players in starfire who left behind raiders if they were forced out of a system to harass the advancing enemy supply lines so the concept has a valid use there even in Aurora...or more likely better there in aurora than starfire.   But unless you can get a lot of raiders into the enemies space and unless they are capable of somewhat serious combat even killing a fuel harvester group of 3 would likely drain their magazines...and fuel would ultimately be the limitation to maintaining a large raiding force in the enemy territory. 

Honestly raiding an advancing enemies supply lines seems far more a viable useful use of ships of this nature than any degree of basically infrastructure destruction...which largely comes down to annoying the other player once.   Unless you count the whole "divert construction into frigates" as valuable.

I would just avoid introducing technologies that have "game breaker" written all over them...especially for something that so far as I can see is hardly overwhelming in its obvious utility as proposed but the whole "unclassified titan scale warship drops its cloak next to your homeworld" is rather a different kettle of fish.  I do agree that from a story perspective such raiding is interesting...as it unlocks the whole "root for the underdog" theme but yeah...I am just unconvinced it is worth it in game terms.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I have to agree with the people that say the game as it is in (6.10 at least) allows for solo jump stealthy ships that can via heat shrouded engines and reduced velocity escape detection without introducing anything new tech wise.  The NCN concluded that the cost of developing a useful (for the ship they wanted to install it on) cloak was too high for the moment and the research effort was better spent elsewhere...but with enough beating down of the minimum size and increasing the effectiveness of a cloak plus with a really long range jump engine and some luck you can get ships in...out is a different question but in for sure.

But why?  I mean this is the point where I hit a problem.  I have loads of experience from starfire...my empires routinely patrol their space, no colonized world doesn't have a DSB-Xr sensor network by the time it gets to small population.  Starslayer does much the same thing.  The risk of a sudden intrusion via closed WP is just too high.  In Aurora the NCN has defense bases on each colony, most times a brigade of light infantry, and all jump points have a sensor/comm beacon on them.   I have always had in my head plans to give colonies more defenses in the sense of anti-ship missile bases and more patrolling.  Those two I have no real need for and are micromanagement intensive but the patrol force exists to a degree and is being strengthened which is why implementation has been slow on my part.

So lets look at what the raiders could do...  Outside of providing real time data on the enemy they can do the following (and maybe more the more creative you are):  attack infrastructure (terraforming ships, fuel harvesters, yards, etc), attack civilian shipping, attack colony ships, attack resource carriers, engage military convoys and lastly attack colonies.   The trouble with this is that again assuming you are talking a limited number of raiders these sorts of things come down to: "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."

First the system you jumped into is a border system so it has defenses and a mobile force which would respond to this sort of attack plus most targets would be to some extent hardened.   The systems behind this one...the first time you jump in your raiders would likely be soft targets.   The NCA have a brigade of light infantry on all colonies so I'm dubious you could easily do a raid with troops...without using missiles to bombard them....and a lot of more developed colonies have fairly substantial point defense capacity so that bombardment would not be so easy.  Same same for just general bombardment...and for those without atmospheres....lets just say closing to beam range would be a bad plan.   At any rate attacks on colonies are going to depend on what the other person has for protection and it is a safe bet they will have something.

Attacks on infrastructure well this will work and work well the first raid.  Losing harvester ships and terraformers are annoying as all hell.  Worse so for people who don't build them on hulls but use some sorta tug to get them there.  But basically only the first time...after that they will be hardened...and if that isn't sufficient, then by the time after that forget it.

Attacks on colonization convoys would be hurtsome...as that is a lot of time investment in the stuff they are transporting but again only the first time as after that they will gain an escort.

Attacks on resource convoys are also annoying but given the usual stockpiles I doubt the loss of one or more resource carrying ships in a limited number of systems would be a significant impact on production.  I use ships more often than mass drivers to move things around...so yeah the NCN has raidable resource ships but again once and once only.

Attacks on civilian shipping firm ships would be more than possible and virtually impossible to defend against as you can never know exactly where they are going but the can at least be avenged by a patrol force.

Attacks on military convoys....this is dubious to be successful.  I can't think of any military ship I have that isn't armed except the very smallest support ship which would rarely if ever be by itself.  So what a few lightly armed ships could accomplish I say is pretty much minimal.

So basically what this causes is an increase in lighter hulls useful for patrol purposes.  It also increases micromanagement requirements...in starfire I automate a lot of this but that has its own drawbacks as you tend to forget what you have done and can also forget to keep it updated.   Just because it is a bloodly lot of work that is mostly not very fun.

The thing is raiding isn't bringing the raider anything, it is costing the raided empire something the first time then it costs them again when they have to harden things and it costs the player micromanagement to keep the hardening working and up to date.  But the raider gains nothing from the risk they are taking...this was also true of Uboats in WW2 but they were going for the strategic goal of cutting off the UKs supply lines...here I see no obviously similar strategic goal in general...baring a critical resource production centre being located in raidable range.

So yeah...a good idea in theory and works like spit in practice?   I'm likely being too harsh.  I know players in starfire who left behind raiders if they were forced out of a system to harass the advancing enemy supply lines so the concept has a valid use there even in Aurora...or more likely better there in aurora than starfire.   But unless you can get a lot of raiders into the enemies space and unless they are capable of somewhat serious combat even killing a fuel harvester group of 3 would likely drain their magazines...and fuel would ultimately be the limitation to maintaining a large raiding force in the enemy territory. 

Honestly raiding an advancing enemies supply lines seems far more a viable useful use of ships of this nature than any degree of basically infrastructure destruction...which largely comes down to annoying the other player once.   Unless you count the whole "divert construction into frigates" as valuable.

I would just avoid introducing technologies that have "game breaker" written all over them...especially for something that so far as I can see is hardly overwhelming in its obvious utility as proposed but the whole "unclassified titan scale warship drops its cloak next to your homeworld" is rather a different kettle of fish.  I do agree that from a story perspective such raiding is interesting...as it unlocks the whole "root for the underdog" theme but yeah...I am just unconvinced it is worth it in game terms.

Seems like some valid criticism of the value but I do think there are a few more things to consider in Aurora that could make them allot more effective.

You could have pretty long range raiders and if they can penetrate rather deep inside an enemy territory they could do allot of damage. They also could potentially hit places such as fuel harvesters, refuelling stations and things like that to disrupt military operations. Obviously if would have a consequence of the enemy responding to these threats but that is just the nature of war so no surprises there.

I'm not super worried about micromanagement as most patrol and things like that can be automated in Aurora so it is just a matter of setting them up.

I do know that some people don't like anything but large naval battles and to keep things simple, but I really enjoy to have to think more long term, plan for any eventuality and have the little things actually matter. I'm also sure I'm not entirely alone in feeling this is interesting.

What you describe as boring micromanagement I see more as realistic considerations and would make societies to focus on things a bit more realistic, and I find these things interesting and fun. So things are relative...

For example... Steve have implemented a rule where population need a certain number of PPV in system or they become unhappy... this is a reflection of what this system instead would simulate. If mining facilities, fuel harvesters or civilian chips gets attacked, destroyed and/or boarded by enemies then it should negatively effect population morale and thus you need to have the patrol forces there naturally instead of artificially.
I always find it odd that I need military patrols in my empire when I have no enemies and pirates are not really realistic at most stages either, at least not in all fictions that we dream up.


And as I have said now many times... it is certainly possible albeit very risky to get in to a system... getting out is nearly impossible with even a modest JP garrison.

The cloaking system should be a way for these types of ships to have a decent chance to evade and keep hidden and sneak up on enemy installation to examine them and the slip away again.

I also envision must raiders to be carrying beam weapons or even smaller beam fighters to do most of the combat work against civilian shipping and installations. Missiles would not be all that useful for long time deployment missions. Sure you could have cloaked resupply ships as well.

[Paul M]

I clearly was not making my point well.   I don't consider it dreary micromanagement, I think it is important and was pretty much the first person in our starfire group to do full scale patrolling of my space.  It is something you should do.  My point is that it becomes dreary micromanagement fairly fast...as you can't automate patrols except those that are one continuous loop Goto A, Goto B, GotoC, GotoA.  Which is what starfire assistant does...but starfire doesn't have fuel, maintenance supplies, maintenance clocks and so on.   So watching over 6 or so patrol groups will rapidly cease to be "fun" at least for me.   This is the reason people who do this sort of stuff for a living have staff officers (baring nutters like everyones favorite short Austrian corporal most supreme leaders don't care about things like that!).  Plus that is still not ideal as you expand and your patrols are set up one way...or hell you forget what you have patrolled and what not and so on.  To be clear the NCNs re-organization has a lot to do with breaking the fleet into a sol defense force, a patrol force and a combat force...and the patrol force would be four destroyer squadrons initially.  My main problem is lack of maintenance facilities and fleet bases and such. 

It is a reason to have a tool to set things up that is for sure.

My main objection is that military utility of what you can accomplish with a small number of raiders is pretty much zero...except for real time intel.   And the number of such raids you can accomplish is about 1 since no one is going to not do "something" about the raiders.   And even in raid 1 once they are discovered...they will be hunted down and destroyed.   I fail to understand how you could convince crews to do this unless their homeworld was under threat of saturation bombardment.  Ultimately fuel defines how long they can stay operational as they pretty much have to be constantly on the move so even if you have unlimited ammo for you beam weapons (and here I would definitely not allow this for mass drivers) then still at some stage the fuel bunkers have only fumes in them.

As for fleet sizes I am the first to say that above a certain number of ships battles stop to be fun in starfire.  I learned this from experience...between 6 and 20-30 ships they are fun after that they are pretty much not.  The 6 is a limit in starfire due to the lack of detail of the ships which makes a few ships against a few ships not so much fun (where as in Starfleet battles they are).   I don't object to it because it is small numbers of ships in the fight.   Though I will point out that slaughtering ships that can't fight back is about as fun as watching paint dry...and that is what engaging soft infrastructure targets would be...gankers in Eve love this sorta crap I don't understand the appeal.   heck starslayer and I are running into the limit with small craft/fighter/gunboats as well at some point they start getting into bookkeeping hell.

I really don't think the idea is a bad one...I just don't see how it translates to a game well.   Outside of some sort of scenario in something like the stars at war....there it would be fun and interesting.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I hear you...

I do agree that you do NOT want necessarily repeated micro for the sake of having them. But I don't think the solution to that is to give up but to the add the necessary support to fix that.

I do not agree that using raiding techniques would necessarily be a net loss as the pure threat of it will impact the way you conduct a campaign and even how you design your ships. How you defend trailing support forces, defend fuel and supply outposts and patrol core system from possible incursions. I also would like to stress that it is not all about raiding. Scouting is probably an even greater part of it and stealth strikes can be a third.

It will give more of a feeling of uncertainty and not all focus on just pure combat, it will change the character of conflicts in general.

I have played in a few multi-faction campaigns where factions quite often had forces in the same system and combat was allot more fluid than what you experience in a regular standard Aurora campaign, the need to patrol and have security forces and military bases scattered all over the place give the game a whole new character. I'm not directly after that, but the pure threat of enemy military vessels deep into your territory will impact more than just sending ships on patrol.

If you also tie it into population reaction of home territory being compromised thing cold be interesting from another perspective.

In my opinion having the option of cloaking ships might actually become sort of multiplier effect when handled correctly.


In general I do think that Aurora already have the tools needed for most patrol orders you need. You can have patrols move about and stop to refuel/resupply and wait for crew to rest properly. It also will be allot easier to sprinkle about maintenance facilities in C# to keep ships maintained even at smaller military bases. This means that a ship that stay in port to rest the crew will not have their maintenance clock run.

As you also can save patrol orders it is quite easy to take a ship off patrol and have them make some overhaul and then add that patrol order back to the ship.

So... a small patrol ship with a deployment time of say 15 days could be out on actual patrol about 10 days, then refuel and rest for 5 days. If it also have a maintenance cycle of say 2-3 years it probably could operate for about 5 years like this before it needs its first major overhaul. You generally would need two to three ships on on same patrol order to have ships constantly paroling the area, obviously depending on the area patrolled.

I also gave some other options earlier in the thread such as being able to assign a system as convoy zone for commercial ships and assigning escort ships to the commercial AI. The AI would then pool all transport ships with some escort for all travelling in the system. This could be set up using some AI logic.

The other thing probably also is that they will not need to be actively patrolled all the time. You will only set up patrols as you see that you need them.

I certainly don't think that the lack of automation tools is a good argument for not including it... I think the tools should be added if they are absent. I also think that Aurora will have most of the tools needed as is, but might need some additional tools to round it out. The new organisational view and use of ships certainly will help with organising fleets and patrols without going insane.