Hello, people. This is my first post on this forum.
I joined because I've been playing Aurora nonstop for some time now, and I talked about some stuff I'd like to see to people in the Discord channel and while some disagreed, they said I could post it here if I wanted. I understand if some of these suggestions are considered unbalanced or boring, but I'll share what I've been thinking.
Suggestion 1: Ways to get more accessibility out of 0. 1 deposits
Most systems I find have millions of tons of resources, which are basically unreachable because accessibility is 0. 1. I understand that the shortage of minerals and the steps you need to take to remedy them are part of the meat of the game, so I also think that simply being able to ignore accessibility wouldn't be very fun. An increase from 0. 1 to 0. 2 is already a 200% jump in productivity, so I think that anything more than that would be excessive.
But I'd like for there to be some way of making those deposits marginally useful. I'm thinking of something that's kinda like this:
-Have a tech that allows the building of a special mine, which would cost 180 resources for its manned version and 360 for its auto version. This is a mine with normal productivity except it counts a 0. 1 deposit as a 0. 2 deposit. Now, there could be additional constraints to using these, for example, they could be impossible to ship with freighters, necessitating the movement of factories or construction brigades. This tech could be called "deep core mining" or something like that.
or
-Simply having a single tech, that costs a lot of research points, that takes every 0. 1 resource and turns it to 0. 2. I think this would be simpler, but not as fun.
Suggestion 2: Population happiness mechanics
Currently, stability modifiers are penalties only, that is, if you fail to provide infrastructure or PPV to a colony, its productivity goes down, and taking in account the new rebellion mechanics, can rebel. My suggestion is to add a positive facet to productivity by adding a happiness modifier in addition to the stability one. This would involve some things like:
-Adding installations that provide happiness. Similar to infrastructure, there could be a "x% happiness at y installations per million pop", this would add an abstraction to deal with every day government stuff, but it would also let you roleplay an evil nation that doesn't provide to its population. These could be multiple types of installation like says schools and hospitals, but I think it would fit better the kinda minimalist tone of Aurora if you had a single installation type called something like "social installations" or even "social infrastructure". These would bring the population happiness to a x%, which could add like, a x/2% bonus to productivity, I'm picturing 50% happiness turning the production modifier to 125% or something like that.
-The rest of the happiness would be tied to the trade good system. More trade goods could be added, and the remaining 50% happiness could be proportional to "% of import need fulfilled", which would add a secondary reason for us to encourage civilian shipping in our systems.
Suggestion 3: Some optional alterations to the civilian shipping model
There could be some additional options like:
-Allowing which specific types of civilian ship can appear. You could have a different toggle for freighters, harvesters and colony ships, so if you want to control completely a sector in your empire you could do so, while leaving the rest for civilians. I know there's already an option to disable harvesters, so that's not that hard.
and
-Allowing player control of the civilian economy ships. This is mainly so I can feel contemplated when I want to RP centralized, command economies. Basically instead of spawning civilian lines, you could build freighters and use either default orders to automate or direct orders to allow it to ship trade goods from planet to planet. This would tie in with the happiness modifiers I mentioned earlier, as you could earn reduced or even no wealth from this government controlled shipping, but the happiness bonus could remain.
Anyway, this is probably way too much stuff to be talking about before the release of C#, so I think that even if these make sense, they shouldn't become like, a big priority, but those are things I'd like to see.