Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Chat => Topic started by: Sarganto on February 09, 2012, 05:37:49 PM
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I am still playing my first game, about 21 years in now. And I noticed that it is simply too much micromanagement to play with the need for overhauls.
I have +10 grav-survey and +10 geo-survey vessels now and a few small battlefleets and I already feel that it is taking way too much of my attention. Not just the fact that you have to send your ships home for overhaul, but the sheer amount of malfunction messages that makes up 30% of my event-log.
I am now thinking about playing with overhauls turned off. I just noticed that you can turn it off at the first screen, even in a running game. What will the effect be? Does the maintenance clock just stop running and there are no more system failures?
How do you play? Do you always play with the need for maintenance or not?
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I like maintenance. I think it provides a layer of logistics that just makes sense. Not that it isn't tiresome at times, and I neurotically keep ships tours short, and all of them well-overhauled. Long range maintenance bases are a big priority of mine.
For surveyers-- I don't even care about maintenence, but I am not a quick explorer (been burned by bugs, so i explore very judiciously)
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I think maintenance acts as a good brake of runaway expansion (which is really bad btw). Its also fairly accurate.
Modern military ships are very complex, and take a lot of constant repair, replacement, and maintenance to keep functioning. Starships would be no different.
You can safely run the clock up on most vessels. I routinely run the clock to 6 to 8 years on survey ships with little ill effect. Start pushing double digits, and things get a might bit more risky though.
It can be a chore, but no more that planning fuel and supplies. It also gives you a reason to build out some of those colonies for a purpose. :)
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I think maintenance acts as a good brake of runaway expansion (which is really bad btw). Its also fairly accurate.
Modern military ships are very complex, and take a lot of constant repair, replacement, and maintenance to keep functioning. Starships would be no different.
You can safely run the clock up on most vessels. I routinely run the clock to 6 to 8 years on survey ships with little ill effect. Start pushing double digits, and things get a might bit more risky though.
It can be a chore, but no more that planning fuel and supplies. It also gives you a reason to build out some of those colonies for a purpose. :)
I get the realism, I just feel it is way too much micromanagement and too much of a chore to handle it. It simply doesn't add fun for me.
A different thing is fuel. I really like managing fuel and missiles. But unlike maintenance, I can automize fuel up to a certain point and don't get spammed with messages.
I also build supply colonies for refueling and storing missiles. But thinking about maintenance as one more tedious think to take care about is simply not fun for me.
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When you design your ships the more engineering you build into them the longer the lifespan each ship will have before needing to be overhauled. You can design your Geo survey vessels as commercial which will remove breakdowns and the need for overhauling on those ships. Grav survey ships are military and sadly must be maintained as such.
Ships in orbit of planets with sufficient maintenance facilities will not incur breakdowns and I think they don't even age. So your defensive fleets will stay current. Your attack fleets will likely spend much of their time in orbit as well so they shouldn't be much of a problem either.
I like the maintenance aspect, and not just for realism but it forces me to design ships that are well-rounded. Grav and Geo ships are long duration mission ships which can be a vast distance from home and it's fun to design them accordingly. I was just updating my geo survey ships last night and envisioning the Enterprise while I did it. Capable of extremely long duration with enough fuel and maintenance for years of operation and defensive systems with a little bit of offensive firepower for targets of opportunity.
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I get the realism, I just feel it is way too much micromanagement and too much of a chore to handle it. It simply doesn't add fun for me.
A different thing is fuel. I really like managing fuel and missiles. But unlike maintenance, I can automize fuel up to a certain point and don't get spammed with messages.
I also build supply colonies for refueling and storing missiles. But thinking about maintenance as one more tedious think to take care about is simply not fun for me.
If the message spam it the big killer, have you considered opting to hide maintenance failures in the event window? The upside is no more maintenance message spam. The downside is the risk that you'll loose track of which ships are running low on maintenance supplies. I frequently use event filtering to block out new officer spam.
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You could just overbuild the engineering spaces on all your ships. xD
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I just noticed that setting the check mark at "no overhauls" has no effect on a running game. Or at least it seems like that. Maintenance clock is still running and still having all the failure messages :(
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Question:
Why is it so crippling? Whats the makeup of your empire?
Personally, my first wave of colonies are all mineral based, then I start specializing worlds. Planets with low accessibilities but nearly every mineral become maintenance bases-- even if that means maintenance ships and automines, with fuel stockpiles. Every one of my systems has at least one Ship House, with enough maintenance facilities to keep at least system defense boats up to spec.
As such, I never really have run ins with maintenance concerns except for after long training missions. It takes a MONTH to bring a ship out of overhaul early. Woah! As such, I don't like long downtime, so they all get overhauled as a fleet on a return from any sortie (fix the micrometeorite holes, crew shore leave, etc)
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That is pretty much my tactic too, if they leave their home ports they get overhauled when they come back. Micromanaging is just something you have to get used to in Aurora
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I don't know if checking the "no Maint" button during the game changes anything, but if checked at the beginning your clocks keep ticking but no failures ever occur. You can roleplay the need for maint and such or you can just ignore it and build huge ships with little engineering spaces and never worry they might break.
Mark
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I don't know if checking the "no Maint" button during the game changes anything, but if checked at the beginning your clocks keep ticking but no failures ever occur. You can roleplay the need for maint and such or you can just ignore it and build huge ships with little engineering spaces and never worry they might break.
Mark
That you can't change it during a running game, makes me a really sad panda.
Guess I will have to deal with it in this game. I will go the engineering spaces overbuild way and just have large maintenance facilities everywhere.
But it is surely one micromanagement burden I don't necessarily need. It's not like there is no other micromanagement left...
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You can change everything else midgame I don't see why maint would be different.
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You can change everything else midgame I don't see why maint would be different.
I tried turning it off in the main screen, but I still got failure messages.
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Did you press Save?
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What happens if you turn it off, then overhaul everything so the clock is 0.0?
I think that even though it is turned off, any ship that has any clock progression will still be checked for failures.
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Have you considered that it might be time to retire your old ships?
I've never had a problem with maintenance. I tend to give most ships generous maintenance spaces, and they only usually last 10 - 20 years before being replaced by newer generations of ship. On one design made in a critical duranium shortage for one faction, I built a military freighter design with barely enough maintenance spaces for one failure (the faction only had a fairly small naval shipyard at the time, but needed to get some automines offworld ASAP), and just ordered them to resupply every cargo-trip cycle. When they were doing nothing in orbit of the planet, set conditional orders to resupply below 20%. I very rarely overhaul my ships at all.
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What happens if you turn it off, then overhaul everything so the clock is 0.0?
I think that even though it is turned off, any ship that has any clock progression will still be checked for failures.
If I remember correctly from when I tried it out a while back, in a game with maintainance switchd off, even for ships that have high accrued maintainance clocks, overhaul orders don't show up in the available orders unless you select the 'don't filter orders' option. If then given the overhaul order, the ship will get stuck in permenant overhaul state with the clock never reducing and being unable to recieve any orders. The only way to get them out of that state was to cancel all orders for the ship and then put the ship under repair at a shipyard.
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If I remember correctly from when I tried it out a while back, in a game with maintainance switchd off, even for ships that have high accrued maintainance clocks, overhaul orders don't show up in the available orders unless you select the 'don't filter orders' option. If then given the overhaul order, the ship will get stuck in permenant overhaul state with the clock never reducing and being unable to recieve any orders. The only way to get them out of that state was to cancel all orders for the ship and then put the ship under repair at a shipyard.
Running a game with maintenance turned off currently, and the overhaul option is there. It's just ordering ships to be overhauled does nothing but put them into the overhaul state. Doesn't reduce timers at all, and requires "abandon overhaul" order to get to normal operation.
I found this out after forgetting that i had maintenance turned off; i was in a habit of ordering overhauls whenever a fleet's duty finished.
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how do u cope with burning up all the fuel and mineral reserves with it on though ?
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There are ridiculous gobs of minerals everywhere, it will literally not be possible to exhaust them all, though finding good sites to mine can be difficult. In one game I have 62 ships in the 10k to 20k range parked over my capitol sucking down a lot of resources(12k of all types per year), but there are 4 thousand mines spread out over 5-6 mining colonies producing minerals for my capitol so despite having 3 full taskforces, I have quite the reserve of minerals and the ability to crank out ships should it become necessary. The mineral I have the least of is neutronium, at 128k in the stockpile, and the mineral I have the most of is Duranium with 1.693M.
What I lack at this level is cash, quite simply because I have enough resources to build way too much with 3000 construction factories, 400 labs, and 13 shipyards with 42 slipways between them.
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Sounds like those 3000 CFs should be cranking out Financial Centers.
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I'm wondering how you have enough people to run a place like that, good god...
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You can't use your manufacturing world to produce financial centers! Thats madness! You need those people manufacturing, not getting jobs in the financial sector. How will you ever get 6000 CFs???
What I do is plop about 100 million people somewhere and 200-400 CFs on a planet, dump in a buttload of uri. and corb., and let them produce financial centers forever.
If you want to ramp it up quick, of course use more CFs, but at 100 or so CFs they'll generally produce financials just a little faster than pop growth.
Instant permanent wealth growth. Any tapped out mining world gets turned into one of these. Its critical because once you capture a couple alien homeworlds, suddenly you have billions of slave er workers and mines to exploit.
A planet with a population of 250 million and a full workforce of financial sector will produce a buttload of wealth-- mine produces more than Earth with its population of 1.5 billion. Talk about wealth efficiency.
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I dunno about you, but I make my wealth off civilian shipping lines.
Judicious use of terraforming ensures that demand for infrastructure never falls below supply. (ie. I do not terraform colonies below 2 cost until they hit 400m or so) This ensures that infrastructure produced by terraformed high population worlds always have a market in developing colonies.
Not to mention, researching the wealth tech improves trade goods as well. Combined with affordable freighter and colony ship designs, all I have to do is plonk down a colony designation and 1 freighter-ful of infrastructure and the civvies do the rest.
Moving industry is also a piece of cake. I placed an order to move 100 maintenance facilities to a forward base and it got there in about six months...
Heck, by year 30, I abandoned my game because it was getting so slow with all the civilian traffic! More than three hundred one thousand ships spread over 8 shipping lines, all busy like bees shuttling stuff between my capitol (1b), research world (~400m) and manufacturing center (600-700m), as well as roughly 20 satellite colonies (10-100m).
Shipping line tax income was around twice my tax base.