Quote from: "sloanjh"

Question - how hard would it be to allow players to manually generate the NPR's tech, in the same way you can choose to manually choose tech for a player race?  A nice interface (both for NPR and player race) might be a dialog that puts up the possible random choices, and lets one push buttons to direct the research (rather than using the random number generator).

John

Absurdly easy.  When Aurora asks if you would like it to design the race automatically say no, then say yes to all the suggestions except 'Assign tech randomly?' and after NPR generation go choose the tech you want.  Aurora tracks the recommended amount of starting tech points and deducts the cost of each tech you instant research.  Alternately, randomly generate teh race as usual and then ad a few choice technologies.

Either way, after the tech increases you will need to update the auto-designed ships to use the new tech.

I think I didn't make the question clear - I was asking if this was an opportunity to get a coarser-grained interface for non-random tech generation.  Your workflow:

1)  Assign tech randomly - "no"
2)  Go to tech screen and pick individual techs

My thought:

1)  Assign tech randomly - "no"
2)  Go to new screen that has categories of tech, e.g. "engines", "missiles", "mining", etc. and select one of these.  Aurora then figures out the next exact tech to select (possible with some randomization, e.g. whether to work focal length or wavelength when selecting "lasers").  This would make directed tech generation much quicker, especially for e.g. engines and armor (since the name changes at each TL, they jump around on the tech list and are a pain to find).  In other words, one would never touch the "instant tech" button - instead one would click buttons on the "directed tech" page, which is more coarse-grained.  Note that I'm not advocating taking the "instant" button away, just adding a new screen to allow more coarse-grained selections.

My expectation is that this should be easy, since the the screen in #2 could just be used to replace the RNG that selects among the categories.

If it is as easy as I think it is, then this could also be used in "regular" research.  Instead of the player assigning a specific project (e.g. 2cm focal) to a planet's research, the player would assign a category, then Aurora would silently pick a particular project within that category and remember (but not display) it.  When the research was done, an event would be generated.  The player would only know how many research points had been accumulated, not how close to completion the next tech was.  I'm pretty sure I've played other games that work this way - the idea is that what comes out of basic research shouldn't be too predictable.  The granularity of the categories could even be one-to-one with the governor bonuses.

I was going to say that this idea would probably be too much work for Steve to do (mainly in prioritizing so that one tends to be at uniform levels within a category, e.g. aperture TL4 and focal length TL 4 rather than aperture TL6 and focal length TL1) for it to be worth it, but I suspect he's going to have to do something very similar any way for the NPR AI he discussed.

STEVE - in your prioritization weights within a category, you might want to give a higher priority to low-TL (i.e. cheap) projects than to high-TL projects (i.e. expensive).  Something like a weight that was proportional to the ratio of the cost of the TL being researched to the first TL cost would probably work.  In other words, if I were at TL1 in mining and TL4 in construction, I'd rather spend 18Kpts to bring mining up to TL4 than spend 20Kpts to bring construction to TL5; assuming TL1-->TL2 costs 3Kpts, then the weight for selecting construction would be (3kpts/20kpts) = 0.15 and the weight for selecting mining would be (3kpts/3kpts) = 1.0.  If you don't do something like this, then the odds are high of having research on one high-tech project lock up a research facility for years.  OTOH, from the point of view of variation there should be a bias towards a civ working on things it's already good at, so maybe you should use the sqrt of the ratio, e.g. sqrt(3kpts/20kpts) ~ 0.4.

Note that I would only do this for basic research.  Component design (e.g. 20cm UV laser) should be explicitly scheduled, since you know what it is you're trying to design.

John

Quote from: "Father Tim"

I think it's more accurate to say that for any tactic X in Aurora, there is a countermeasure Y which renders it ineffective.  Thus the only strategy that dominates is the old adage, 'Know thy enemy'.

To answer the original post, I generally go the 'no refit' route, though I sell or scrap truly obsolete wrships.  One of the major ways in which I seem to vary from most of the fiction here is the rarity with which I reassign shipyards to a new type of ship (almost never).  I typically have one freighter yard, one passenger (cryo transport) yard, one or two survey yards, one troop transport / terraformer yard (about the ony one that does get reassigned) and a handful of warship yards.  While individual designs get updated regulary - and the yards building them get switched to the 'new' version of the ship - I very rarely change the basic ship type.

I'm also fairly ruthless in enforcing a 'fleet speed' - every military design is forced to meet a certain minimum, and the fleet speed is periodically updated (increased) in response to other races' deployments.

This strategy of designating yards for specific construction tasks sounds more efficient than what I am doing now.  Of course, it is hard to coordinate the activities of seven races, each of which has multiple shipyards.  Hmmm...I am going to have to think about this.  

Kurt

I have been thinking about your strategy of limited reassignment of shipyards, Father Tim.  I have long suspected that I do reassignments too much, partially because I have so much going on that planning ahead on a consistent basis for any one race is difficult.  However, after pondering this a while, it seems to me that you must have a lot of shipyards.  Perhaps more than most of my races have.  

Take the Alliance for example.  Before the latest round of tech advances and redesigns, they had the following classes in common use:
Large: BC
Medium: CA, Geo Survey, Grav Survey, colony ship, freighter, terraformer
Small: DD, assorted support ships (limited numbers)

I have found that a yard set to produce a colony ship will also be able to build a freighter (but not the other way around), so those combine to one yard.  To regularly build everything that they'd need, they'd then need at least seven different shipyards.  Hmmm...that's not too bad.  Still, shipyards take so long to build up.  To build a new shipyard, expand its capacity, and build it up to a reasonable number of slipways it could take a decade or more.  

Maybe that's the answer, instead of building more slipways, I need to build more yards.  I have to think about this.  

Kurt

The build points it shows on the "Fast OOB" window.  Do you know how much production that equates to?  Obviously you can use more or less as you like when creating a race, but is that basically the recommended amount that most people stick with?

IIRC that is 2x the total shipyard bp capacity for ships and equal for PDC's.

The build points it shows on the "Fast OOB" window.  Do you know how much production that equates to?  Obviously you can use more or less as you like when creating a race, but is that basically the recommended amount that most people stick with?

Quote from: "jfelten"

Quote from: "sloanjh"

Everything Kurt says about speed is my belief too.  Not only in warships (where the ability to run away is very important), but in survey and colonization efforts, high speed makes the game go faster.  My standard speed is about 6000 (forget the units) - a little lower for freighters and a little higher for colony ships.

John

I assume you mean later in the game.  I have trouble designing starting ships much over 2Mm/s.

Nope - right from the start.  I usually do a 10^9 population start (to speed things up), and in starting tech I concentrate on economic efficiency (construction, mining, etc.), engine tech, and armor tech (because armor also has a big effect on the engine/payload ratio, which in turn greatly reduces the size of the ship).  I typically leave enough points for rudimentary lasers and/or missiles.  On the stuff I'm concentrating on, this generally puts me at the tech level one below the 20K cost, which corresponds to Magneto-something-or-other engines.  Cramming 10 MHD engines into a 6K-ton hull gives you a speed of 6K, IIRC, with room to spare for a jump drive, two grav sensors, a decent amount of fuel and some sensors.

But you're right, ships with low-tech engines are sloooooooooow.

John

Ah, so far I've just used random starting tech which usually means pretty basic engines.

Quote from: "sloanjh"

Everything Kurt says about speed is my belief too.  Not only in warships (where the ability to run away is very important), but in survey and colonization efforts, high speed makes the game go faster.  My standard speed is about 6000 (forget the units) - a little lower for freighters and a little higher for colony ships.

John

I assume you mean later in the game.  I have trouble designing starting ships much over 2Mm/s.

Nope - right from the start.  I usually do a 10^9 population start (to speed things up), and in starting tech I concentrate on economic efficiency (construction, mining, etc.), engine tech, and armor tech (because armor also has a big effect on the engine/payload ratio, which in turn greatly reduces the size of the ship).  I typically leave enough points for rudimentary lasers and/or missiles.  On the stuff I'm concentrating on, this generally puts me at the tech level one below the 20K cost, which corresponds to Magneto-something-or-other engines.  Cramming 10 MHD engines into a 6K-ton hull gives you a speed of 6K, IIRC, with room to spare for a jump drive, two grav sensors, a decent amount of fuel and some sensors.

But you're right, ships with low-tech engines are sloooooooooow.

John

[quote="Steve Walmsley
If players are finding this is not sufficiently challenging, I could increase their size. Or perhaps even better I could add an alien pop size modifier to the game window as a difficulty modifier.[/quote]

I would prefer the size modifer option, myself.  Sometimes I play a game just for the challenge, and the ability to increase the size from the start would be great.  But being wishy-washy, I also play the occasional game to relax and like the lower pop sizes.

Mark