Usability Improvements

[Catty Nebulart (OP)]

After playing with aurora for a bit I keep hitting the following pain-points. They are listed bellow in order of severity, with 1 being the biggest problem.

1) Why oh why do we need to turn hyper on and off manually? Please just give the option to auto-turn it on and off when outside the hyperlimit. or just auto-suppress it inside the hyperlimit.
2) Along the same lines use path-finding to find when it would be better to use the in system jump points rather than go in a straight line. - this is minor in comparison to the hyperlimit thing though.
3) Auto-Assign civilian administrators. Naval and ground force officers are done reasonably, so why not civilian administrators? it saves a lot of tedium when your empire grows a bit larger.
4) It would be really need if you could share your world infrastructure with any other bioengineered sub-races on the same planet.
5) It would be nice if you could tell your engineers to not dig up those historic districts :p Further it would also be nice if you could tell them to stop at 1 installation left.
6) A warning about idle factories would be nice. We get one for idle research labs after-all. Disable the warning when the industry is shut down of course
7) Being able to set a queue for terraforming would be nice, alternately just add a warning when terraformers are idle.

[Steve Walmsley]

After playing with aurora for a bit I keep hitting the following pain-points. They are listed bellow in order of severity, with 1 being the biggest problem.

1) Why oh why do we need to turn hyper on and off manually? Please just give the option to auto-turn it on and off when outside the hyperlimit. or just auto-suppress it inside the hyperlimit.
2) Along the same lines use path-finding to find when it would be better to use the in system jump points rather than go in a straight line. - this is minor in comparison to the hyperlimit thing though.
3) Auto-Assign civilian administrators. Naval and ground force officers are done reasonably, so why not civilian administrators? it saves a lot of tedium when your empire grows a bit larger.
4) It would be really need if you could share your world infrastructure with any other bioengineered sub-races on the same planet.
5) It would be nice if you could tell your engineers to not dig up those historic districts :p Further it would also be nice if you could tell them to stop at 1 installation left.
6) A warning about idle factories would be nice. We get one for idle research labs after-all. Disable the warning when the industry is shut down of course
7) Being able to set a queue for terraforming would be nice, alternately just add a warning when terraformers are idle.

1) The main reason is that I would have to check every hyper-capable fleet every sub-pulse to see if they are inside/outside the hyper limit. I would also have to go through every fleet in the game at the start of every increment and check every ship individually to decide whether to flag the entire fleet as hyper / non-hyper capable. So it's possible, but it would add to the length of each increment. Besides, you don't have to do it manually. You can set a waypoint and use the Enter/Leave Hyper orders.

2) This is not as easy as you think. I could check for an 'add in lagrange points' as part of the orders sequence but the LPs may not be in the same place when you give the order as when the fleet arrives in the system, which means they may no lonher be the quickest way. I could also check on a realttime basis but that means checking every fleet in the game on every sub-pulse to see if the current order could be better fulfilled by using LPs, and the player would need some way to override this if he didn't want a fleet to automatically do that.

3) With regard to system administrators, how does the game judge what bonuses you need for a particular colony? It's easy to figure out a terraforming ship needs a commander with a terraforming bonus, or a mobile infantry battalion needs a commander with ground combat bonus. Many colonies have a number of installations, all of which require different bonuses.

4) This might happen. I am looking at ways of separating industry from population but so far I haven't found anything I am happy with.

5) I may be being dim here but why wouldn't you want to dig up the last ruin? Is it for alien artifact production?

6) You would get a lot more warnings for factories and they that would clutter up the events window. My experience is that most players seem to always run their research labs and based them on few planets but many colonies have various factory types and players often leave factories idle due to resource constraints rather than just forgetting about them.

7) A 'Terraformers idle' warning is a possibility

Just a note here, which is directed to everyone not just the OP. I know I have answered this mail in full because I just happened to have the time to do it right now but most of the time I read the individual suggestion posts, think I will come back to them and never do because I forget about them. The best place is the official suggestion thread. I know it sometimes looks like I don't answer them in that thread but when I do have time I will work my way through that thread to look for good suggestions. It may be weeks or months apart when I do that, but that thread is by far everyone's best change of getting a suggestion implemented in the long term.

If anyone has a long or complex suggestion then perhaps post it separately but add a post in the suggestions threads with a synopsis and a link to the main post, so if I do forget about the main post I will link to it when I review the main suggestions thread

Steve

[sloanjh]

1) The main reason is that I would have to check every hyper-capable fleet every sub-pulse to see if they are inside/outside the hyper limit. I would also have to go through every fleet in the game at the start of every increment and check every ship individually to decide whether to flag the entire fleet as hyper / non-hyper capable. So it's possible, but it would add to the length of each increment. Besides, you don't have to do it manually. You can set a waypoint and use the Enter/Leave Hyper orders.

You don't have to do it every sub-pulse; you could limit it to checking whenever a new order is processed.  Let's say a cargo ship's order queue is "jump into Chicago" then "move to (population) Skokie".  When "jump into Chicago" completes, Aurora then checks the straight line path to Skokie.  If it crosses a hyper boundary, then Aurora inserts a (temporary internal, i.e. not usable by player) waypoint and inserts a "move to WP5" order at the beginning of the queue.  When WP5 is reached, the process repeats.  You'd probably have to turn this off or do something different for move/join/follow/... orders which target TG, but this would be a big improvement on the micromanagement front.

2) This is not as easy as you think. I could check for an 'add in lagrange points' as part of the orders sequence but the LPs may not be in the same place when you give the order as when the fleet arrives in the system, which means they may no lonher be the quickest way. I could also check on a realttime basis but that means checking every fleet in the game on every sub-pulse to see if the current order could be better fulfilled by using LPs, and the player would need some way to override this if he didn't want a fleet to automatically do that.

Same observation as for Hyper: make the decision once when the leg is being plotted, based on the assumption that planetary motion will be a small effect.  In general, a LP will either be tight-in to the sun, in which case it won't move much even if the planet makes several orbits while you're getting there or far-out, in which case the distance it moves is negligible compared to the distance travelled to get there.  I know that when I'm plotting by hand I don't take planetary motion into account.  Again, this probably shouldn't be turned on for TG targets.

3) With regard to system administrators, how does the game judge what bonuses you need for a particular colony? It's easy to figure out a terraforming ship needs a commander with a terraforming bonus, or a mobile infantry battalion needs a commander with ground combat bonus. Many colonies have a number of installations, all of which require different bonuses.

I agree.  I'm frustrated enough by the naval assignment algorithms not doing what I want - I don't want my governors regularly scrambled.  The one caveat would be if you allowed players to mark e.g. "mining", "population", "industrial" colonies that would look for the appropriate governator.

5) I may be being dim here but why wouldn't you want to dig up the last ruin? Is it for alien artifact production?

Because once the last ruin is exploited, the planet is no longer marked as having ruins and you lo....oh, you just said "alien artifacts".  Also, it's cool from a historical perspective to remember that the colony used to have aliens....

6) You would get a lot more warnings for factories and they that would clutter up the events window. My experience is that most players seem to always run their research labs and based them on few planets but many colonies have various factory types and players often leave factories idle due to resource constraints rather than just forgetting about them.

Agreed, but I still want to pull my hair out when I realize that I missed/forgot the message and have had 20% capacity on my homeworld sitting idle for the last 3 months.  Perhaps an explicit "Idle" build task that would consume capacity and so indicate "it's intentional that this factory complex is shut down - don't warn me"?

7) A 'Terraformers idle' warning is a possibility

Same suggestion.

Just a note here, which is directed to everyone not just the OP. I know I have answered this mail in full because I just happened to have the time to do it right now but most of the time I read the individual suggestion posts, think I will come back to them and never do because I forget about them. The best place is the official suggestion thread. I know it sometimes looks like I don't answer them in that thread but when I do have time I will work my way through that thread to look for good suggestions. It may be weeks or months apart when I do that, but that thread is by far everyone's best change of getting a suggestion implemented in the long term.

If anyone has a long or complex suggestion then perhaps post it separately but add a post in the suggestions threads with a synopsis and a link to the main post, so if I do forget about the main post I will link to it when I review the main suggestions thread

I'll post a placeholder in the official thread for this one.  Charlie did this a couple weeks back for one of his threads and I thought it was a good mechanism.  And you forgot to say "Please use the same methodology in Bugs too."

John 

[Marc420]

When giving conditional and default orders it would be nice if you could . . . .
1)  Save sets of commands to be easily reloaded later.
2)  Have some sort of default set of commands that would then be applied to each new TG.

I find myself going into new TG's and setting the same sort of conditional commands to refuel and re-supply.   The ability to save groups of these commands and then later load one of these command sets would be nice.   That would make it easy to have different TGs having different command sets.   Like one for combat ships and one for rear-area ships? Or, to apply one command set to all of your forces, just having the ability to save a default group of these conditional and default commands and have each new TG always start with these commands would a lot of clicking to set these on each TG.

[ollobrains]

saveable and loadable and even default orders for TG could be a good start.

[ollobrains]

After playing with aurora for a bit I keep hitting the following pain-points. They are listed bellow in order of severity, with 1 being the biggest problem.

1) Why oh why do we need to turn hyper on and off manually? Please just give the option to auto-turn it on and off when outside the hyperlimit. or just auto-suppress it inside the hyperlimit.
2) Along the same lines use path-finding to find when it would be better to use the in system jump points rather than go in a straight line. - this is minor in comparison to the hyperlimit thing though.
3) Auto-Assign civilian administrators. Naval and ground force officers are done reasonably, so why not civilian administrators? it saves a lot of tedium when your empire grows a bit larger.
4) It would be really need if you could share your world infrastructure with any other bioengineered sub-races on the same planet.
5) It would be nice if you could tell your engineers to not dig up those historic districts :p Further it would also be nice if you could tell them to stop at 1 installation left.
6) A warning about idle factories would be nice. We get one for idle research labs after-all. Disable the warning when the industry is shut down of course
7) Being able to set a queue for terraforming would be nice, alternately just add a warning when terraformers are idle.

Still applies pretty much

[Garfunkel]

Definite no to (3) and (6). I often leave idle factories here and there for various reasons and I definitely don't want the AI messing up my governors. (7) would be highly useful, that's for sure.