4.0 First Impressions

[Erik L (OP)]

We really don't have "General Discussion" forum for Aurora... But.

Looking at the ships created by the game for initial start up. Damn. They are some huge ships. 18k ton Cruisers? One thing I did notice was a lack of support ships. No colliers or tankers were created. Is this an oversight in the automatic ship creation routine?

Also. When asked for automatic opponents, maybe a selection for how many would be nice.

[SteveAlt]

We really don't have "General Discussion" forum for Aurora... But.

Looking at the ships created by the game for initial start up. Damn. They are some huge ships. 18k ton Cruisers? One thing I did notice was a lack of support ships. No colliers or tankers were created. Is this an oversight in the automatic ship creation routine?

Ship size will vary between different NPRs. The starting designs also cover a wide range of possibilities and both players and NPRs may not be able to build the larger designs at first. NPRs will also upgrade their designs as new technology is developed and will build the larger designs once they have sufficiently upgraded their shipyards

Also. When asked for automatic opponents, maybe a selection for how many would be nice.

At the moment it is just one, although that NPR can discover and activate more. For the intial release I didn't want to over-complicate but I will add the option once I am sure everything is working OK with the first one.

Steve

[Sotak246]

My first impression is, wow.  Thanks for all the hard work and the new version.  The only problem now is, I just bought Total War:Empire, I am so conflicted as to which game to play more    Good job.

Mark

[Hawkeye]

First impression: Bloody hell, well done Steve!!

I have just made first contact with the first computer controlled NPC which blew one of my survey ships right out of the sky. And I can tell you, the command staff at home is quite worried. Human tech is Pulsed Nuclear Drives, Visible Light Lasers, Level-2 Sensors, High Density Duraium Armor, so generally Level-2, I´d say. The enemy ship came at me at 6.200km/s and blasted my GE away with 20cm UV-Lasers.
A massive military buildup and R+D program is going on right now, but I am not sure it will be enough.

Thanks for making me sweat!


Hawkeye, Germany

[waresky]

LOOL Hawkeye:)..
am LOST (TRULY LOST) in deep re-organisation on "Steve's Campaign" game..
FIRST Impression?..AWESOME.
Am with paper and pencil and take a report from SINGLE Admiral in every damned Solar System...probably every Admiral think.."WHERE lost OUR REAL Chief.,Steve???"...ehehhe...when am found an DUMB but VERY DUMB Commander lost in space with...25 "FUEL HARVESTER BASES" at 1km/s who try to reach unknow destination after 5 (FIVE!!) jump point...when am tell him "WHY DAMN U TAKE OFF WITH MY BASES!?!?!" her answered politely abd candy..:"Steve gimme order..then WE've obey"..

[SteveAlt]

LOOL Hawkeye:)..
am LOST (TRULY LOST) in deep re-organisation on "Steve's Campaign" game..
FIRST Impression?..AWESOME.
Am with paper and pencil and take a report from SINGLE Admiral in every damned Solar System...probably every Admiral think.."WHERE lost OUR REAL Chief.,Steve???"...ehehhe...when am found an DUMB but VERY DUMB Commander lost in space with...25 "FUEL HARVESTER BASES" at 1km/s who try to reach unknow destination after 5 (FIVE!!) jump point...when am tell him "WHY DAMN U TAKE OFF WITH MY BASES!?!?!" her answered politely abd candy..:"Steve gimme order..then WE've obey"..

Oops! I meant to order the tanker. Might have taken those fuel harvesters a while

Steve

[sloanjh]

One impression I have is that I LOVE THOSE PESKY CIVILIANS!!  When they built their first freighter, I stuck a colony on Mars just so it would have someplace to dump infrastructure.  The colony now has a population of over 3M, and most of the transport and all of the infrastructure was produced by the civilian sector.  This has the right feel to it - the government opens up a new colony, then the civilian sector jumps in to colonize it.  This makes me a lot less concerned about the increase in freighter size (and lowering in efficiency) in store for 4.1, especially if the civilians can be convinced to transport factories and mines.

An idea on that: have each colony have a page (similar to the shut-down-industry sector page) which allows a commodity (factory/mine/pop/....) to be "needed", "frozen", or "surplus".  Civie ships would try to pick up commodities at surplus worlds and transport to needed worlds.  If there were a wealth field as well (the wealth paid to the civie per hold of good delivered, equal to the sum of the source and destination bonuses), then that could be used to drive civie trade - the civies would look around for the nearest place they could make a profitable run in the least time.  This could even set the civies up to deliver automated mines to mining colonies.

John

[xtfoster]

One impression I have is that I LOVE THOSE PESKY CIVILIANS!!  When they built their first freighter, I stuck a colony on Mars just so it would have someplace to dump infrastructure.  The colony now has a population of over 3M, and most of the transport and all of the infrastructure was produced by the civilian sector.  This has the right feel to it - the government opens up a new colony, then the civilian sector jumps in to colonize it.  This makes me a lot less concerned about the increase in freighter size (and lowering in efficiency) in store for 4.1, especially if the civilians can be convinced to transport factories and mines.

An idea on that: have each colony have a page (similar to the shut-down-industry sector page) which allows a commodity (factory/mine/pop/....) to be "needed", "frozen", or "surplus".  Civie ships would try to pick up commodities at surplus worlds and transport to needed worlds.  If there were a wealth field as well (the wealth paid to the civie per hold of good delivered, equal to the sum of the source and destination bonuses), then that could be used to drive civie trade - the civies would look around for the nearest place they could make a profitable run in the least time.  This could even set the civies up to deliver automated mines to mining colonies.

John

In my current game, the pesky civilians have 3 freighters on the Earth - Mars run moving infrastructure and I have 4 on the Mars - Titan run taking the "free" infrastructure.

[Steve Walmsley]

In my current game, the pesky civilians have 3 freighters on the Earth - Mars run moving infrastructure and I have 4 on the Mars - Titan run taking the "free" infrastructure.

I am not sure what to do about the free infrastructure once I revamp the raison d'etre of civilian shipping (which I am in the midst of at the moment). I might make infrastructure either cheaper or easier to transport, probably the latter given the larger freighter sizes and the fact that transport requirements rather than cost seems to be the main restriction on infrastructure.

Steve

[sloanjh]

In my current game, the pesky civilians have 3 freighters on the Earth - Mars run moving infrastructure and I have 4 on the Mars - Titan run taking the "free" infrastructure.

I am not sure what to do about the free infrastructure once I revamp the raison d'etre of civilian shipping (which I am in the midst of at the moment). I might make infrastructure either cheaper or easier to transport, probably the latter given the larger freighter sizes and the fact that transport requirements rather than cost seems to be the main restriction on infrastructure.

Given my 4.0 experience so far, I would vote that the free infrastructure from civie freighters remain free, i.e. have it fall into the same bucket as "no maintainence requirements for civilian shipping".  The reason is "yet another thing that I don't have to micromanage in a colony".  At present I've got two populated worlds: Mars (pop 30M, cost 2.8 ), which the civies have pretty much completely colonized on their own, and Epsilon Eridani (cost 2.2), which is two jumps away.  The fundamental difference between them is that the civies can't get to EE, since I haven't researched jump gates yet.  At present, I'm leaving Mars on (civie) autopilot, and colonizing EE by hand.  The game-play tradeoff that I'm battling is when to research jump gates and build them - once I do, I can move the autopilot to EE; until I do I have to use military resources (including building and shipping infrastructure) to grow the EE colony.  pre-4.0, I would have had to bind a freighter to the Mars-Earth run carying pure infrastructure, then make sure that whenever I was running low on infrastructure that I scheduled some infrastructure construction in the queue.  I would have to do this check by hand, since there's no way to be notified when the infrastructure pool on Earth is running low, or to schedule some % of industry capacity to infrastructure production.  This resulted in a LOT of micromanagement of the production queue.  Now, I don't have to screw around with that, and can concentrate on trading off between building e.g. fuel factories or research labs.

To summarize, I think the current state of infrastructure (civies get/place it for free, but military has to build) is "just right" - it allows players to set up the environment (by declaring colonies and building jump gates to them) and strategic goals (by declaring whether colonies are sources or sinks) for civies to do the colonization, while still putting a cost on non-civie colonization.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

In my current game, the pesky civilians have 3 freighters on the Earth - Mars run moving infrastructure and I have 4 on the Mars - Titan run taking the "free" infrastructure.

I am not sure what to do about the free infrastructure once I revamp the raison d'etre of civilian shipping (which I am in the midst of at the moment). I might make infrastructure either cheaper or easier to transport, probably the latter given the larger freighter sizes and the fact that transport requirements rather than cost seems to be the main restriction on infrastructure.

Given my 4.0 experience so far, I would vote that the free infrastructure from civie freighters remain free, i.e. have it fall into the same bucket as "no maintainence requirements for civilian shipping".  The reason is "yet another thing that I don't have to micromanage in a colony".  At present I've got two populated worlds: Mars (pop 30M, cost 2.8 ), which the civies have pretty much completely colonized on their own, and Epsilon Eridani (cost 2.2), which is two jumps away.  The fundamental difference between them is that the civies can't get to EE, since I haven't researched jump gates yet.  At present, I'm leaving Mars on (civie) autopilot, and colonizing EE by hand.  The game-play tradeoff that I'm battling is when to research jump gates and build them - once I do, I can move the autopilot to EE; until I do I have to use military resources (including building and shipping infrastructure) to grow the EE colony.  pre-4.0, I would have had to bind a freighter to the Mars-Earth run carying pure infrastructure, then make sure that whenever I was running low on infrastructure that I scheduled some infrastructure construction in the queue.  I would have to do this check by hand, since there's no way to be notified when the infrastructure pool on Earth is running low, or to schedule some % of industry capacity to infrastructure production.  This resulted in a LOT of micromanagement of the production queue.  Now, I don't have to screw around with that, and can concentrate on trading off between building e.g. fuel factories or research labs.

To summarize, I think the current state of infrastructure (civies get/place it for free, but military has to build) is "just right" - it allows players to set up the environment (by declaring colonies and building jump gates to them) and strategic goals (by declaring whether colonies are sources or sinks) for civies to do the colonization, while still putting a cost on non-civie colonization.

Thanks for that feedback. How would you feel about a small wealth charge for the civilian delivery of such infrastructure? No management required, it would just be taken out of your wealth stockpile.

There will be significant changes to trade in v4.1 which should result in extra wealth, as well as some really good reasons for pirates and raiders. It's detailed (but no management required) so I will cover it another post. I was planning on some form of contract system for civilian shipping that would require the use of some of that extra wealth but I am concerned about the micromanagement aspect. Therefore I was considering a small wealth charge instead for colony and infrastructure movements. Also, instead of the civilian sector selling ships to the military, I am planning to have the government be able to hire civilian ships for their own requirements. Need some automated mines moved and don't have any government-owned ships available? Then hire a few ships from Lefebure Transport Limited to handle it. The ships would act as government-owned vessels for orders purposes until you hand them back and each 5-day increment there would be a small charge. The civilian shipping line will worry about the fuel. You would even be able to hire friendly foreign shipping under this scenario

Steve

[sloanjh]

To summarize, I think the current state of infrastructure (civies get/place it for free, but military has to build) is "just right" - it allows players to set up the environment (by declaring colonies and building jump gates to them) and strategic goals (by declaring whether colonies are sources or sinks) for civies to do the colonization, while still putting a cost on non-civie colonization.

Thanks for that feedback. How would you feel about a small wealth charge for the civilian delivery of such infrastructure? No management required, it would just be taken out of your wealth stockpile.

There will be significant changes to trade in v4.1 which should result in extra wealth, as well as some really good reasons for pirates and raiders. It's detailed (but no management required) so I will cover it another post. I was planning on some form of contract system for civilian shipping that would require the use of some of that extra wealth but I am concerned about the micromanagement aspect. Therefore I was considering a small wealth charge instead for colony and infrastructure movements. Also, instead of the civilian sector selling ships to the military, I am planning to have the government be able to hire civilian ships for their own requirements. Need some automated mines moved and don't have any government-owned ships available? Then hire a few ships from Lefebure Transport Limited to handle it. The ships would act as government-owned vessels for orders purposes until you hand them back and each 5-day increment there would be a small charge. The civilian shipping line will worry about the fuel. You would even be able to hire friendly foreign shipping under this scenario

I don't think I'd mind a small wealth charge.  OTOH, I'm still advocating that the civies do things within their own economy (like make infrastructure and ship it and colonists to Mars) that I'm decoupled from.  Did you see my idea upthread on how to set up a contract system without a lot of micromanagement?  The basic idea is to set up a "fee for delivery" system - if you wanted to move automated mines from Pluto to the Eureka asteroid, you'd go to Pluto and set asteroid mines to "surplus" and assign a pick-up fee (of wealth) that gets paid for a "load" command by a civie freighter.  You'd then go to Eureka and set asteroid mines to "need" and assign a drop-off fee that gets paid for "unload".  The civie ships are then looking around for the pickup/dropoff pair that gives them the most profit for the time spent on the run.  The reason I think this would cut down on micromanagement is that you just set the state of the two populations and then go away - the system does the rest (assuming you've given it a big enough bounty, of course ).  You'd have to set a minimum profit rate, of course - any civie who couldn't find a route that will give him the minimum wouldn't instead do his own thing (e.g. deliver infrastructure from Earth to Mars).  This is in comparison to having to give detailed instructions to the civies to make 10 round-trips, carying 3 mines per trip, etc.  One way to set the minimum rate might be to say "10 infrastructure delivered to a colony world is worth X wealth" and have them pick a random colony run that they would otherwise make.  In fact, that might be good for the whole system - have the choice of a particular civie mission be random, with a weight determined by the amount of profit to be made on the mission.

Note that I view this as an idea for controling long-term flows of trade within the jump-gate network - for short-term, one-off sorts of things I really like your leasing idea.  In other words, I think the two methods complement each other - if you want to do something that needs micromanagement, lease a few ships from the civies.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

An idea on that: have each colony have a page (similar to the shut-down-industry sector page) which allows a commodity (factory/mine/pop/....) to be "needed", "frozen", or "surplus".  Civie ships would try to pick up commodities at surplus worlds and transport to needed worlds.  If there were a wealth field as well (the wealth paid to the civie per hold of good delivered, equal to the sum of the source and destination bonuses), then that could be used to drive civie trade - the civies would look around for the nearest place they could make a profitable run in the least time.  This could even set the civies up to deliver automated mines to mining colonies.

Just went back to this after seeing your post later in the thread. I've just posted the new trade system I have up and running for v4.1 and it is very similar to this, although on a cross-Empire basis. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to extend that to the above idea now that the basic code is written. It could even allow foreign shipping to move your mines, etc.. I was going to go for a system of hiring civilian ships for government work but I think I like this better, although as you say the two systems could complement each other.

Steve

[ShadoCat]

Just went back to this after seeing your post later in the thread. I've just posted the new trade system I have up and running for v4.1 and it is very similar to this, although on a cross-Empire basis. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to extend that to the above idea now that the basic code is written. It could even allow foreign shipping to move your mines, etc.. I was going to go for a system of hiring civilian ships for government work but I think I like this better, although as you say the two systems could complement each other.

As an old econ guy, I really like this.  

I too like both systems.  However, the leasing could get added later.

You might want to add events here.  Such as them grabbing and transporting stuff you don't want them to.  If a civilian colony has a lot of resources but no mines, they might make off with a load of homeworld mines (or make off with fatories, etc.).

[sloanjh]

Just went back to this after seeing your post later in the thread. I've just posted the new trade system I have up and running for v4.1 and it is very similar to this, although on a cross-Empire basis. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to extend that to the above idea now that the basic code is written. It could even allow foreign shipping to move your mines, etc.. I was going to go for a system of hiring civilian ships for government work but I think I like this better, although as you say the two systems could complement each other.

As an old econ guy, I really like this.  

I too like both systems.  However, the leasing could get added later.

You might want to add events here.  Such as them grabbing and transporting stuff you don't want them to.  If a civilian colony has a lot of resources but no mines, they might make off with a load of homeworld mines (or make off with fatories, etc.).

A few observations:

1)  I'm not convinced the events would do much good, since there would be so many of them that one would probably filter them out (either explictly or mentally).  If Steve did put in events for this sort of thing, I would strongly recommend not having them generate an interrupt (see my posts elsewhere about "updated contact" events from civilian traffic).  In addition, unless a player makes a mistake, he doesn't need to worry about the civies grabbing his stuff because....

2)  The idea is that each population would have a display similar to the one that shuts off industry.  Only if you explicity declared something (like mines) to be "surplus" or "needed" would the civies be able to touch it on that world - the default state would be "frozen" which means civies aren't supposed to touch that kind of stuff.  This idea comes from what Steve's doing right now with civilians, i.e. declaring a world as a source or a sink - it simply adds a "frozen" state and extends it to other kinds of stuff.

3)  Steve could easily extend the "surplus" or "needed" states to include a count (similar to the "load X" command).  If the count is unspecified, it means to just open the faucet and let it run.  If a count is specified, however, each unit picked up or received decrements the appropriate count - when the count reaches zero, the state switches back to "frozen".

[EDIT]  Oops - misunderstood what you meant by "events".  I just figured out that you meant them grabbing stuff that you had declared "frozen" or "needed", aka going a-viking