Author Topic: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions  (Read 345288 times)

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Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #480 on: August 27, 2018, 01:02:44 AM »
Fuel Report window: being able to exclude selected ships in this view would help getting rid of unnecessary clutters (I do have lots of sorium harvesters which I really don't need to see in this window). So an option box for every entry which when enabled would exclude that ship from showing in this list (with an option button at the top of course to enable showing them) would be nice.

Alternatively having a general option button in the class design window which sets this flag for the whole class might be a less micromanage alternative.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #481 on: August 27, 2018, 01:06:32 AM »
Foreign Aid - can also be used for "war reparations payment". But what population would like that, right? Maybe there could be an "make pop angry" option added to this feature, if the amount of payment exceeds a certain amount of income percentage ...
 

Offline JacenHan

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #482 on: August 27, 2018, 12:26:00 PM »
Fuel Report window: being able to exclude selected ships in this view would help getting rid of unnecessary clutters (I do have lots of sorium harvesters which I really don't need to see in this window). So an option box for every entry which when enabled would exclude that ship from showing in this list (with an option button at the top of course to enable showing them) would be nice.

Alternatively having a general option button in the class design window which sets this flag for the whole class might be a less micromanage alternative.

Civilian ships also show up on this window, which is unnecessary, as they don't use fuel and wouldn't be managed by the player anyway, so it would be nice if those could be removed from the list by default.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #483 on: August 27, 2018, 02:28:49 PM »
Improvement on TG/Fleet loading logic.

Currently, in VB6 Aurora, a TG ships load one by one. Once the topmost transport is full, then it starts loading the next transport and so on down the list. This isn't much of a concern with cargo freighters until very late in the game when you might have a TG of 20+ super-freighters, at which point the loading and unloading times get really noticeable. Or you don't use Cargo Handling Systems for some reason.

But with troop transports, this becomes noticeable way earlier. As an example, I have a TG of 8 ships, each capable of carrying a full division. I ordered the TG to load 2 divisions, a bunch of REP and GAR units and a whole load of CBs. The TG has been loading units forever and is still going strong. Because it takes about 27 days to load one CB. I forgot to check how long the individual battalions or the divisions took. Next time, I'll just create individual TGs for each troop transport, it's not a problem.

But for C#, ensuring that each ship in the Fleet/Sub-fleet loads concurrently instead of consecutively, would be an awesome improvement. 
 
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Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #484 on: September 03, 2018, 06:19:41 AM »
For roleplaying reasons: many AARs are played in a way that messages have to travel via the limits of lightspeed. Usually you would have to manually calculate the lag time and then perform your planned actions. So how about a new dialog in which you could calculate the distance between the two objects you want to sent the message to (Rigel 9 to Wormhole Sol System, Wormhole to Earth - So Rigel 9 to Earth) and see the time it would take. This dialog then could add an event which will occour right at the time when the message arrives. So you get reminded in the event log.

Or if we want to get fancy, Steve could add a whole technology branch "subspace communication speed", which begins with lightspeed and provides several development steps to increase the speed; and then adds the option for "send message to XY" into the fleet command list. That way we could automate it completly...  :D
 

Offline chrislocke2000

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #485 on: September 03, 2018, 10:11:52 AM »
Improvement on TG/Fleet loading logic.

Currently, in VB6 Aurora, a TG ships load one by one. Once the topmost transport is full, then it starts loading the next transport and so on down the list. This isn't much of a concern with cargo freighters until very late in the game when you might have a TG of 20+ super-freighters, at which point the loading and unloading times get really noticeable. Or you don't use Cargo Handling Systems for some reason.

Snip

Very much agree with this, it’s also very acute if you do it with loading troops from transport bays to drop pods.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #486 on: September 03, 2018, 10:48:31 AM »
Improvement on TG/Fleet loading logic.

Currently, in VB6 Aurora, a TG ships load one by one. Once the topmost transport is full, then it starts loading the next transport and so on down the list. This isn't much of a concern with cargo freighters until very late in the game when you might have a TG of 20+ super-freighters, at which point the loading and unloading times get really noticeable. Or you don't use Cargo Handling Systems for some reason.

But with troop transports, this becomes noticeable way earlier. As an example, I have a TG of 8 ships, each capable of carrying a full division. I ordered the TG to load 2 divisions, a bunch of REP and GAR units and a whole load of CBs. The TG has been loading units forever and is still going strong. Because it takes about 27 days to load one CB. I forgot to check how long the individual battalions or the divisions took. Next time, I'll just create individual TGs for each troop transport, it's not a problem.

But for C#, ensuring that each ship in the Fleet/Sub-fleet loads concurrently instead of consecutively, would be an awesome improvement.

All freighters load together in VB6 Aurora, if they are loading the same type of installation. If you have different installations to load, they are done sequentially because they are different orders (although you can split the freighters before loading to avoid that). Troop transports usually load sequentially because different units are loaded with different orders. You can avoid that by using the option to load subordinate units, or by splitting the transports up.

I will be adding some combination orders to C#, although orders will still be executed in sequence.
 

Offline Haji

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #487 on: September 05, 2018, 03:19:55 PM »
Due to the insane length I haven't even tried to read this topic. As such my apologies if any of my suggestions have already been made and commented on/discarded.

1. Please allow us to modify characteristics of various stellar bodies or, even better, add custom ones. I quite often start outside the Sol system and for roleplaying reasons want something rather specific forcing me to reroll systems again and again. Not only it is tedious but it did cost me dozens, maybe even hundreds of hours when I was setting up my games.
2. System generation algorithm should be modified in my opinion. Back when I started playing Aurora, Sol was fairly average system, but after that a lot more bodies were added - without changing how other systems were generated. By now it is next to impossible to find system larger and richer than Sol, and I really mean next to impossible. In fact I'm not sure when was the last time I've seen one (please note I'm talking overall larger. It is possible, though still very, very rare, to find system with either more planets or more asteroids or more comets, but combination of those? One in a million chance or so).
3. Missile agility has to be modified. Late fusion/early anti-matter era anti-missiles have 50%-80% interception chances all due to agility which cannot be countered with intelligent missile design. One option would be to discard it completely (although the starting interception chances would have to be increased as otherwise anti-missiles would have like 20% interception chance) while another would be to allow missiles to use agility to avoid interception. The second option would be more interesting in my opinion but would require more balancing work as it should also impact point defences.
And yes, I know there are changes coming to missiles, but agility is pure interception chance with no counter, so I don't think it will solve the issue.
4. At the moment repeatable missile launchers are flat out useless, as demonstrated in Steve's own colonial campaign. A way to possibly solve the issue would be to create a new technology that would reduce the impact of miniaturised launchers, which currently receive large penalty to fire rate. Obviously such technology should not, by itself, make miniaturised launchers as fast as full sized ones, but after playing dozens of campaigns I simply cannot find use for repeatable launchers as they are very, very easily countered by turreted gauss cannons.
Admittedly simply removing gauss cannons would also solve the issue, at least in mid to late game, after railguns are no longer effective.
5. While I appreciate better automation of weapon to fire control assignment, there is one small addition I'd like to request. I'd like to be able to select a type of weapon, type of fire control and then tell the game how many of armed weapons I'd like to assign per fire control. This would help enormously with box launchers when I don't want to use their full power.
As an example I had a battleship with at thousand box launchers, twenty fire controls and I had to target gunboats. With the current changes I would end up with fifty missiles per fire control, which would be overkill, forcing me to assign weapons manually. That's a lot of unpleasant work.
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.
 
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Offline Person012345

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #488 on: September 05, 2018, 11:46:59 PM »
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.
I feel like this could be solved by better AI and I believe I have proposed logic that would help with this somewhere, though it's possible I just meant to post it then forgot to. In any case, with the multi-leveled AI coming in C# aurora I feel like there are plenty of possibilities to make the AI smarter when it comes to choosing what ships to build. I wouldn't even mind if it was deliberately imperfect, for example basing it's purchasing decisions heavily on prior income - IRL, markets usually take time to adapt to sudden changes after all - rather than having it be predictive, but I do think there needs to be some mechanism to push companies towards the demand rather than it being fairly arbitrary. It also might result in companies tending to specialise which might be cool to see.
 
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Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #489 on: September 05, 2018, 11:56:38 PM »
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.
I feel like this could be solved by better AI and I believe I have proposed logic that would help with this somewhere, though it's possible I just meant to post it then forgot to. In any case, with the multi-leveled AI coming in C# aurora I feel like there are plenty of possibilities to make the AI smarter when it comes to choosing what ships to build. I wouldn't even mind if it was deliberately imperfect, for example basing it's purchasing decisions heavily on prior income - IRL, markets usually take time to adapt to sudden changes after all - rather than having it be predictive, but I do think there needs to be some mechanism to push companies towards the demand rather than it being fairly arbitrary. It also might result in companies tending to specialise which might be cool to see.

I think the problem could be far better solved by limiting all Civilian Shipping Lines to a single category of ships (so cargo only, or colony only, or luxury passengers only ((Also, please bring back Luxury Passenger Ships.)) or fuel harvester only, etc.)  That way, only the types of civilians actually being used would make money and thus build more ships.

We would end up with Wilson Cargo Lines, and Phillips Fuel Services, and Chynna Colony Company, and eventually Wilson Luxury Cruises, etc.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #490 on: September 06, 2018, 05:28:02 AM »
1. Please allow us to modify characteristics of various stellar bodies or, even better, add custom ones.
2. System generation algorithm should be modified in my opinion.
A dialog where one can select several parameters as to a rough category of system that should be created would help much.

5. While I appreciate better automation of weapon to fire control assignment, there is one small addition I'd like to request. I'd like to be able to select a type of weapon, type of fire control and then tell the game how many of armed weapons I'd like to assign per fire control. This would help enormously with box launchers when I don't want to use their full power.
Would make sense.

6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.
I think the civilians will be better in building new ships, depending on the needs of the empire. Steve wrote about that not so long ago. Although, being able to "select" which areas are made accessable for civilians would be a) nice, and b) make it easier to simulate different kinds of societies.
 

Offline Whitecold

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #491 on: September 06, 2018, 10:38:47 AM »
3. Missile agility has to be modified. Late fusion/early anti-matter era anti-missiles have 50%-80% interception chances all due to agility which cannot be countered with intelligent missile design. One option would be to discard it completely (although the starting interception chances would have to be increased as otherwise anti-missiles would have like 20% interception chance) while another would be to allow missiles to use agility to avoid interception. The second option would be more interesting in my opinion but would require more balancing work as it should also impact point defences.
And yes, I know there are changes coming to missiles, but agility is pure interception chance with no counter, so I don't think it will solve the issue. Flattening out the Agi tech curve would help as well, especially since shipkillers are usually not using much agi.
4. At the moment repeatable missile launchers are flat out useless, as demonstrated in Steve's own colonial campaign. A way to possibly solve the issue would be to create a new technology that would reduce the impact of miniaturised launchers, which currently receive large penalty to fire rate. Obviously such technology should not, by itself, make miniaturised launchers as fast as full sized ones, but after playing dozens of campaigns I simply cannot find use for repeatable launchers as they are very, very easily countered by turreted gauss cannons.
Admittedly simply removing gauss cannons would also solve the issue, at least in mid to late game, after railguns are no longer effective.
For 3. I think ECM will at least alleviate the problem somewhat, as loosing 30 or 40% interception chance is quite painful, and ECCM uses up 25% of a 1 MSP countermissile.
4. I think it is a serious problem. It could however be fixed with making box launchers larger.
Per msp missile size if you have 3 HS giving you 2 launchers + 1 HS magazine you can fit in 16+2 missiles at 80% efficiency. The same size in box launchers fits you 20! missiles, more than the re-loadable solution.
Dropping 0.25 reloadable launchers and making box launchers 0.3HS per msp would give you an actual trade-off between launchers and magazine size.
As for gauss cannons, one possibility to make smaller missile sizes viable would be to limit the amount of shots that can be fired on the same missile. The reason would be that due to your fire controls and sensors being correlated, if you localize a missile where it is not, more shots will miss as well, and you don't get time to fix your error. Only allowing 2 shots per missile max would give you a finite but low leaker rate for your gauss defense.
« Last Edit: September 06, 2018, 10:40:27 AM by Whitecold »
 

Offline Haji

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #492 on: September 06, 2018, 11:05:56 AM »
I feel like this could be solved by better AI

That is true however I have decided to propose a single tickbox for several reasons. First it will take much less coding. Second even though C# Aurora will be much faster I'm still worried about resource usage. Third at the beginning shipping lines have only enough money to buy a couple of ships and they usually buy a single type of ship, so they may still end up failing without subsidies as they usually build one type of ship at the beginning.

I think the problem could be far better solved by limiting all Civilian Shipping Lines to a single category of ships (so cargo only, or colony only, or luxury passengers only ((Also, please bring back Luxury Passenger Ships.)) or fuel harvester only, etc.)  That way, only the types of civilians actually being used would make money and thus build more ships.

The reason I dislike the idea is due to potential clutter. In many cases I found myself using basically no colony ships, either because the nation was small or because I had large nation that didn't need to move people around for both practical and RP reasons. Not only that but fuel harvesters generate almost no money so I'm not even sure you could have a shipping line operating those exclusively. This would lead to whole lines being essentially useless but still cluttering the UI.

Also the lines currently do build liners (you as a player can't build them though) and they are absolutely broken, generating insane amount of money in some circumstances. Too bad lines build very few of them.

1. Please allow us to modify characteristics of various stellar bodies or, even better, add custom ones.
2. System generation algorithm should be modified in my opinion.
A dialog where one can select several parameters as to a rough category of system that should be created would help much.


I have to admit that a simple screen to, for example, select number and general type of bodies (dwarf planets, terrestrial planets, gas giants, asteroid, comets) would already be a vast improvement, and something much easier to code. Would definitely be happy with just that. By the same token I'm an empire builder and a full scale customisation would allow me to, for example, simulate turning gas giants into miniature stars, or towing asteroid to a new position and turning it into garganutan fortress (though now that PDCs are gone it will no longer be possible). For that matter with the ability to fully customise location and so on of objects and if we had PCS back it would be very easy to simulate having a death star.

I think the civilians will be better in building new ships, depending on the needs of the empire. Steve wrote about that not so long ago. Although, being able to "select" which areas are made accessable for civilians would be a) nice, and b) make it easier to simulate different kinds of societies.

I've checked the official changes list and all it said about civilian shipping lines building AI is that they will be building more even numbers of freighters and colony ships, which is exactly what is causing me problems right now. It's possible something was mentioned in other topics, but I haven't seen that.

For 3. I think ECM will at least alleviate the problem somewhat, as loosing 30 or 40% interception chance is quite painful, and ECCM uses up 25% of a 1 MSP countermissile.

I'm not sure it will help as we will now be able to build fractional size missile launchers (1.1 HS for example) which will allow construction of larger, but still far smaller than 2 MSP counter missiles. This makes ECCM not that difficult to build in, while still leaving very, very large space for agility. In fact those fractional launchers may even make the matter worse as it may end up being possible to build an anti-missile that is 1.3-1.6 MSP that has 90% interception chance or so. It's difficult to say without having access to the finished game, but this is what I fear.

4. I think it is a serious problem. It could however be fixed with making box launchers larger.
Per msp missile size if you have 3 HS giving you 2 launchers + 1 HS magazine you can fit in 16+2 missiles at 80% efficiency. The same size in box launchers fits you 20! missiles, more than the re-loadable solution.


I'm afraid you forgot that capacity has to be divided by missiles size. 1HS magazine will give you 16 capacity allowing you to carry five missiles, for a total of seven. However I would argue that your example isn't really that good, for in that situation you could five only three times per launcher. If you build them to fire 7+ salvoes magazines are much more efficient way to store missiles than box launchers. So box launchers are already a tredeoff - lower total ammunition capacity in exchange for firing all of it at once.

As for gauss cannons, one possibility to make smaller missile sizes viable would be to limit the amount of shots that can be fired on the same missile.

I"m afraid you're forgetting "bonus tracking vs missiles" tech. Gauss cannons are very, very accurate and it's very rare for them to need to fire more than two shots to take down incoming shipkillers of equivalent technology level. At least I think so, can't be bothered to do the math right now.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #493 on: September 06, 2018, 12:55:05 PM »
In VB6, civilians tend to build mining colonies on their own. While nice, I would like to have more control over, where they are allowed to do that. The game I guess has several parameters as to what would be ideal for the civis to build such a base. Maybe making these available and editable might be enough control. If not, the ideal is always body-individual rights-setting  ;)
 

Offline Kytuzian

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #494 on: September 06, 2018, 03:08:02 PM »
Regarding civilians, it would be cool if there were more types of civilian ships (e.g., terraformers, jump gate constructors, asteroid miners (though I realize this partially filled by civilian mining colonies), etc.) which we could support/influence via government contracts for some amount of money.

Also it would be nice if we could get civilian fuel harvesters to automatically drop off the fuel at colonies so we don't have to send our ships out to them, which I personally find annoying.
 
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