Author Topic: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions  (Read 345054 times)

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Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1515 on: November 09, 2019, 01:23:13 PM »
If possible a Ship Mass driver Module would be grat :) make mining ships so much easyer to handle  ;D


I've been lobbying for the opposite for quite some time.  I think Aurora should remove mass drivers entirely and move everything by ship so my -- and Xenoscepter's -- privateers and pirates and militia and such have much more to do.  As I understand it, mass drivers were only added because the AI to handle civilian freighters wasn't up to the job of regular mineral collection.

But if Aurora is going to keep mass drivers, it desperately needs to make their packets detectable & stealable in deep space.  FAC squadrons with big nets to come along behind them and scoop 'em up, or freighters with oversize doors to fly in front of them and very slightly slow down so the minerals load themselves.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1516 on: November 09, 2019, 02:11:02 PM »
If possible a Ship Mass driver Module would be grat :) make mining ships so much easyer to handle  ;D


I've been lobbying for the opposite for quite some time.  I think Aurora should remove mass drivers entirely and move everything by ship so my -- and Xenoscepter's -- privateers and pirates and militia and such have much more to do.  As I understand it, mass drivers were only added because the AI to handle civilian freighters wasn't up to the job of regular mineral collection.

But if Aurora is going to keep mass drivers, it desperately needs to make their packets detectable & stealable in deep space.  FAC squadrons with big nets to come along behind them and scoop 'em up, or freighters with oversize doors to fly in front of them and very slightly slow down so the minerals load themselves.

I agree... a way to interact with them and an option to play without them where the civilian ships move minerals from civilian complexes automatically to the closest colony. The production could still be somewhat abstracted and the cargo on ships going between colony and base should then load based on the type of minerals complexes produce.

It is sometimes interesting to play campaigns where you imagine a world where mass-drivers moving minerals is not a thing.
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1517 on: November 09, 2019, 03:46:51 PM »
Okay, but now you have the situation where a guy whose job is supposed to be fighting is worse at it than a guy whose job is cleaning the gunk out of the soup nozzles.

What we've seen so far from Steve's AARs (admittedly quite a small sample size) is that dedicated boarding troops tear through defending crew at a ratio of 80 or 100 to 1.  If we make defenders any weaker, they are going to inflict zero casualties.  We're already at the point where 90% of attacker's casualties are from the drop attempt rather than fighting on board.

To be fair, in Steve's AAR the attackers seem to have a significant tech advantage. They also tore apart actual ground troops with vehicle support. Assuming equal tech the fight between boarders and crew might be less one-sided.
 

Offline SerBeardian

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1518 on: November 09, 2019, 09:25:55 PM »
Not sure if already mentioned, but I would very much like to be able to self-destruct missile salvos from the main system map, since trying to figure out which set of 10 mines out of 300 identical ones in the system is the one that just blew it's load all over the enemy fleet from the "missiles in flight" screen is pretty much impossible.

Having mines sitting there that you think have payload but don't is rather dangerous to your empire security.
 
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Offline Nori

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1519 on: November 10, 2019, 06:22:27 PM »
Any of you play that old 4x game Stars!  ?
The way they did mass drivers is each tech allowed you to send packets at a specific speed (and the recipient needed to be able to handle that). So maybe you could send at what was in the game warp 10. You could intercept them by going faster, or simply intercepting from the side or in front. Worked pretty well I thought.
 

Offline clement

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1520 on: November 11, 2019, 06:42:47 AM »
Any of you play that old 4x game Stars!  ?
The way they did mass drivers is each tech allowed you to send packets at a specific speed (and the recipient needed to be able to handle that). So maybe you could send at what was in the game warp 10. You could intercept them by going faster, or simply intercepting from the side or in front. Worked pretty well I thought.

Yes Stars! was a great game.
Their mass driver implementation was interesting.
I liked their build queue system. You could queue up a certain amount of each building as recurring each build cycle and then put extra build items behind those and all excess build points would go to the extra items once the recurring items were done.
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1521 on: November 11, 2019, 04:54:45 PM »
Yes Stars! was a great game.
Their mass driver implementation was interesting.
I liked their build queue system. You could queue up a certain amount of each building as recurring each build cycle and then put extra build items behind those and all excess build points would go to the extra items once the recurring items were done.

This seems like it would differ from Aurora's implementation in that the player has to do the math instead of the game.  Instead of setting 10% of your production to build more mines, 10% to more factories, and 10% to research facilities, you'd set it to one mine, one factory, and one research facility per production cycle. . . and then realize that that leaves no excess production since a research facility is twenty times the size of the other two.  You'd also have to figure out when your production capacity doubles and change all the numbers.  Aurora makes this a lot easier, but still suffers from the problem.
 

Offline MultiVitamin

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1522 on: November 12, 2019, 01:32:02 AM »
Actually, would it be possible to make research trees for the Ground Force components? Just generic ones to increase their effectiveness, number of shots, etc? Or maybe make it so that we can design them?

So for example there'd be a few fields

Type - Anti-Personnel, Anti-Vehicle, Bombardment, Anti-Aircraft, Autocannon, or HQ (CE would stay the same)

Size - (Light, Medium, Heavy, Super-Heavy, Ultra-Heavy)

AP - (Dropdown menu from 1 to 50)

Damage - (Dropdown menu from 1 to 60)

Shots - (Dropdown menu from 1 to 6)

CIWS - (Can be blank, choose from pre-made CIWS made for ships, just resized maybe?)

FFD - (Dropdown menu from 1 to 3)


And various research could upgrade the ranges of these higher and higher. Just a suggestion I thought of while anticipating the renaming of components when a unit is designed, thought of "why not just build the components with research to make them better, and have that be designable?". It adds a lot more variety and player decision making for Ground Forces, like when you design the weapons, powerplants, defense, engines, etc for ships, just not as intense. Also helps solve the "Can't think of anything for Ultra-Heavy" problem you mention about having a while ago in (I think) a different thread.

If no on the designing the components themselves, what about just research to improve components?

Actually thinking on this, if steve does add more esoteric components later, this might not work out. I also don't fully know all of the research techs already in place for ground units other then the bio-enhancements for infantry.
 

Offline SevenOfCarina

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1523 on: November 17, 2019, 10:13:01 AM »
Outside of population growth or worker shenanigans, Aurora appears to strongly incentivise having a single large colony over multiple smaller colonies, both to take advantage of strong leader bonuses and to minimise micro. Smaller colonies only really make sense to boost population growth or to act as forward bases, since having a large number of small industrial centres makes any ind of industrial growth an utter pain. Even with regards to resources, it's often best to dump all your mining complexes on that one world with ridiculous deposits at outrageous accessibilities.

As a way to make smaller colonies more viable (so we can all get a slice of that nice, thematic SPACE RACE!), I'd like to suggest that mineral accessibility on system bodies scale with the number of mines present on them, with a larger number of mines giving diminishing results on smaller bodies.

You might be able to accommodate, say, 1,000 mines on Earth without running into diminishing returns, but 10,000 mines may produce only twice as many minerals, so it would be better to spread this across ten Earth-sized bodies. For a system body with a smaller surface area, the limit might be hit much, much sooner. I'd anticipate that to balance this, accesibilities in general might need to be revised upwards.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1524 on: November 17, 2019, 10:52:10 AM »
This has already been addressed; planets now have a maximum population, which largely and linearly depends on surface area of the planet, with Earth having a max of 12 billion people.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1525 on: November 17, 2019, 07:19:22 PM »
This has already been addressed; planets now have a maximum population, which largely and linearly depends on surface area of the planet, with Earth having a max of 12 billion people.

I still think that having a diminishing return of mining efforts make sense from a realistic perspective. You can only have that many mines on a surface in order to access the easy deposits, adding more should not be that effective.

It would also insentience to spread out a bit more for more reasons than role-play. Sure, strip mining can lead to over consumption and sudden dips in the stream of important minerals which can become really problematic, but in general you want to strip mine every place before going to the next one unless you are pressured by other factors to start mining them or at least control them.

For the most part it probably also are very little incentive to use population for mining in the game anyway as population is too important for other tasks.
 

Offline Nori

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1526 on: November 17, 2019, 07:37:25 PM »
I'm not sure how it'll play out in C#, but in the VB version, I only used population for mines early on, or with colonies that didn't have dire need for the populations.

Quite curious to see how the C# changes makes that all play out. From Steve's comments it seems like Automines will be even more important.
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1527 on: November 17, 2019, 08:25:43 PM »
I still think that having a diminishing return of mining efforts make sense from a realistic perspective. You can only have that many mines on a surface in order to access the easy deposits, adding more should not be that effective.

Okay, but now we're arguing 'how many' is "that many".

Given that Aurora mines are fixed in size, "ten Aurora mine installations" can be defined as "one mine that is ten times bigger than that one over there."  If we define one Aurora automine as one hydraulic excavator plus two trucks plus one ore processor, it suddenly seems perfectly reasonable to have tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of them on Earth.  Given that a basic Aurora mine produces only ten tons of refined TNE per year (per mineral, yes, but I'm going to ignore that for now) it can't be that big.

- - -

Okay, sure, this implies that manned Aurora mines are insanely inefficient, but we already had that problem.  Fifty thousand people is larger than the population of Fort MacMurray, the city at the heart of Canada's oilsands mining region, and the source of over one-third of all of Canada's oil production.
 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1528 on: November 17, 2019, 09:33:51 PM »
I always kindof assumed that was just to create a mental image of millions of slaves laboring away in the mines, since some people like that aesthetic.  I also would also note that automines are almost always preferable however.
 

Offline Rabid_Cog

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1529 on: November 18, 2019, 03:05:06 AM »
I always thought of it that a "mine" is not just the bits that dig into the ground, but includes a significant chunk of supporting facilities like farms to feed the miners, schools, truck factories, workshops, entertainment and whatever else you need to have a minimally self-sufficient mining town. Low production can simply be explained by TN minerals being an absolute bugger to extract, perhaps only occurring in relatively trace amounts or whatever.
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