C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions

[sloanjh (OP)]

You punish single unit formations with your own single unit formations.  If someone has all tank formations, you bring nothing but anti-tank guns.

No. You cannot adjust your unit composition on the fly. That leaves all the advantage to the attacker. The defender cannot know what kind of units an invader will bring, so he cannot make single unit formations, else they can be hard countered. The defender thus needs mixed units, which should be able to defeat any single unit formation that possibly attacks them to make it even worthwhile to attempt a defense.

Can we please move this to the "C# Ground Combat" thread?  It looks like a revisit of previous discussions that Steve has already made a decision about, and it's showing all the signs of having a long back-and-forth that will distract from the suggestions thread.  The Ground Combat thread was introduced as a forum for that sort of discussion.

More generally, I think that everyone should keep in mind that Steve spent a LOT of time deciding on the ground combat mechanics, and that it has already delayed the C# Aurora release by several months.  So I would suggest that people try to focus on suggestions for "tweaks" or "refinements" to the system that he's decided on (and that can be decided on and coded up relatively quickly) rather than changes that would cause him to revisit the whole system, leading to further significant delay. 

If you still feel it's important to make such a suggestion, please put it in the Ground Combat thread and post a link in Suggestions, so that any back-and-forth that it generates doesn't fill up the Suggestions thread.  Remember that Steve uses the Suggestions thread as a "filing cabinet", so we want to make it easy to find unique suggestions by browsing the thread.

Thanks,
John

[chrislocke2000]

At the moment all of our ground forces and our enemies fight to the bitter end no matter what the odds. It would be great to see a bit of a morale overlay to this that means this is not always the case. At a very simple level I was thinking that when morale drops below a certain grade then there is a check each cycle as to whether the unit will seek to do one of several things:
- Cease to attack
- Look to move from a front line position to a rear position
- In very low morale surrender to the enemy creating PoWs and the potential to capture combat units such as tanks and artillery.

This is obviously pretty simplistic and I'm sure the rules could be expanded to cover items such as:
- Units with morale failures impacting the morale of other units - potentially leading to a rout
- Different modifiers on morale checks for elite units or the ability to create fanatical units that will fight to the death / robotic units that have no morale checks
- Higher morale losses when faced with overwhelming forces against you - could be a good reason not to reduce your unit size down too far to play with the mechanics.
- A system for dealing with PoWs including a similar interrogation system as with the Navy with chance to identify OOB of troops in theatre, details of weapon systems etc.
- Ability to surrender a very badly damaged unit in the hopes you might recover the PoWs at a later stage.

Hopefully this would mean no fighting to the bitter end in most circumstances.

[hubgbf]

At the moment all of our ground forces and our enemies fight to the bitter end no matter what the odds. It would be great to see a bit of a morale overlay to this that means this is not always the case. At a very simple level I was thinking that when morale drops below a certain grade then there is a check each cycle as to whether the unit will seek to do one of several things:
- Cease to attack
- Look to move from a front line position to a rear position
- In very low morale surrender to the enemy creating PoWs and the potential to capture combat units such as tanks and artillery.

This is obviously pretty simplistic and I'm sure the rules could be expanded to cover items such as:
- Units with moral failures impacting the morale of other units - potentially leading to a route
- Different modifiers on morale checks for elite units or the ability to create fanatical units that will fight to the death / robotic units that have no morale checks
- Higher morale losses when faced with overwhelming forces against you - could be a good reason not to reduce your unit size down too far to play with the mechanics.
- A system for dealing with PoWs including a similar interrogation system as with the Navy with chance to identify OOB of troops in theatre, details of weapon systems etc.
- Ability to surrender a very badly damaged unit in the hopes you might recover the PoWs at a later stage.

Hopefully this would mean no fighting to the bitter end in most circumstances.

And for the winner, ability to take prisonner (who said xenophobe?)
An ennemy not willing to take prisonner will certainly drive his opponent to a fight to the end, isn't it?

[MasonMac]

That reminded me of Halo

[TMaekler]

Quality of Life: Reduction of Micromanagement: adding tonnage to shipyards as well as adding slipways, should be easier. How about: Reducing it to One function where you type in the number of tonnage to add as well as the number of slipways. Time needed to build should be ‚easy enough‘ for the program to calculate.

Task Force commands: when a TF finishes it’s list, that causes a time progression break. Good feature. However, not all finishing does need that (e.g. transferring a fleet of mining ships to a new location. Nice to see, that they have arrived, but that does not need to break time progression). An option field in the task screen where you can select ‚don’t break time progression at end of list‘ would be nice. Default is off, and if you don’t want a break, you have to activate it. When list s done it is automatically set off again. So next time if needed it would break again by default.

We do have mass drivers for easier mineral harvesting. How about an additional research tech for a frozen fuel slingshot? Fuel harvested at a gas giant could be ‚frozen‘ and then slingshotted to a target planet as well. Would make fuel harvesting as easy as mineral harvesting...

VB6 does not calculate the additional tonnage of a tugged ship into the time calculus of the TUG travel time. Will we get that in C#? Also, what will happen when we Tug a Tug a Tug... I guess the VB6 bug is no longer useable, right?

For long term planning of mineral harvesting it would be nice to have more statistics which could show ‚mineral usage of production over past x month‘. It is nice to see, that I have 540.000t of storage as well as seeing, that I gain 5.600t a year. But if that 5.600t is the tip of a +205.600t Mining and a 200.000t useage per year, I would want to have a bigger buffer rather than ‚only‘ 540.000t.

What is not possible as of yet, would be something in the line of ‚total war like in the last world war‘, where production efforts were more and more switched to military use. I am thinking of a system like in HOI4, where when transferred to Aurora, 75% work in service industries, that number could be changed. Switching them from service to manufacturing to go ‚mass production‘ for a total war, but loosing morale and general happiness of your population.
Such a system would need some thinking to make it balanced (so maybe for a later version of Aurora). What do you think? Worth implementing?

[Garfunkel]

I don't like the fuel slingshot idea because the fuel harvester already refines raw gaseous Sorium into usable fuel. We have tankers and with the new refueling rules, fuel economy becomes more important, so I think such a feature would take away some of the importance of paying attention to your fuel harvesting and routing.

That TF progression break button is a great idea, as is the shipyard size thing, same for tug estimated time.

Mineral production is difficult because the system cannot know if you add stuff to production. We already have the bare minimum needed for ship maintenance per colony per year shown on the Industrial tab. Showing how many minerals were consumed last month is kinda useless since it depends so much on player actions. Ship maintenance via minerals is going away as well, so in C# there are, to my understanding, no constant mineral drains - it all depends on how much and what your colony is doing.

Agreed on forcibly changing service sector percentage, it just needs to have hefty enough penalties so that running with minimal service sector indefinitely does not become the obvious go-to solution. On the other hand, it would allow playing as more Hivemind-like races and worrying about how players "cheat" or not in a single-player game is kinda pointless.

[Father Tim]

I would love a 'Bug Button' -- something we can click to 'Add Hive Mind NPR' to our game.  Whether it be Heinlein's original literary Bugs, or Starship Trooper's more B-movie sci-fi version, or Weber & White's deadly serious technologically adept Arachnid Omnivoractiy.  Ideally they would exist on a continuum of such, and vary from game to game (or even within games, if one were adventurous enough to add multiple such races).

I suppose what I'm asking for is half-spoiler race, half starting NPR.  To me the important part is the flavour -- massive overpopulation, massive industrial production, suicidal tactics, stunted technological growth, ground forces that are basically ten billion armoured infantry, the ability to consume other races' biomass for food, fuel, or whatever. . .

[chrislocke2000]

Now we have some serious logistics considerations in place I was thinking it would be good to also have some control on how this gets burned. Perhaps have three rates on use of supplies based on how intense you want to fight, ie low intensity, normal, high intensity. Low intensity would give penalties to hit but reduce the rate of supplies used, normal would be as is and high would increase chance to hit but drastically increase supplies usage as well.

I'd also suggest that the attacker would drive the rate of supplies used so if they were low intensity then the defending side would also be low intensity and if both attacked then the highest intensity selected by wither side would be the intensity of the battle.

You might use different rates if holding on for reinforcements or on the opposite side may look to up the ante to win before reinforcements arrived or if there was time pressure on the objective.

[Steve Walmsley]

I would love a 'Bug Button' -- something we can click to 'Add Hive Mind NPR' to our game.  Whether it be Heinlein's original literary Bugs, or Starship Trooper's more B-movie sci-fi version, or Weber & White's deadly serious technologically adept Arachnid Omnivoractiy.  Ideally they would exist on a continuum of such, and vary from game to game (or even within games, if one were adventurous enough to add multiple such races).

I suppose what I'm asking for is half-spoiler race, half starting NPR.  To me the important part is the flavour -- massive overpopulation, massive industrial production, suicidal tactics, stunted technological growth, ground forces that are basically ten billion armoured infantry, the ability to consume other races' biomass for food, fuel, or whatever. . .

I already plan to add this half-spoiler, half NPR concept to Aurora, although I hadn't mentally categorised it in those terms. NPRs have design themes that affect their entire approach, while species have characteristics that affect production, growth, research, etc.. I have also set it up so that different design themes will have different considerations for AI. For example, 'normal' AIs may withdraw from a system when badly outgunned while precursors will fight to the death. Different design themes also have different approaches to the composition of their ground forces.

I've been creating the scope for this flexibility because at some point I plan to run a WH40k campaign and I wanted to have the flavour of the various hostile races, some of which will be a spoiler-style menace and some will be more 'normal' NPRs. It will take a LOT of setup in terms of DB and code, but I can add new design themes and race types over time within the framework I've created.

[Steve Walmsley]

Now we have some serious logistics considerations in place I was thinking it would be good to also have some control on how this gets burned. Perhaps have three rates on use of supplies based on how intense you want to fight, ie low intensity, normal, high intensity. Low intensity would give penalties to hit but reduce the rate of supplies used, normal would be as is and high would increase chance to hit but drastically increase supplies usage as well.

I'd also suggest that the attacker would drive the rate of supplies used so if they were low intensity then the defending side would also be low intensity and if both attacked then the highest intensity selected by wither side would be the intensity of the battle.

You might use different rates if holding on for reinforcements or on the opposite side may look to up the ante to win before reinforcements arrived or if there was time pressure on the objective.

I will probably have something on these lines at some point, although perhaps not for the initial release.

[db48x]

On your recommendation I've just read the first chapter of Supplying War, and I'm compelled to ask if you've thought about armies plundering supplies from enemy territory at all? I suppose we could officially have gotten over that sort of thing, but when you're on an alien planet light-years from home and the round-trip time for your supply ships is measured in months... On the other hand, it is an alien biome.

Also, the new Sednoid 2015 TG387 would be fun to add to the game, if only because it's such a ridiculous distance away most of the time (it varies from ~65 AU to ~2000 AU).

[chrislocke2000]

Along with the new forces summary it would be helpful to have a munitions summary so you can see ammo stocks on various planets or perhaps various task groups in one place to help with planning.

[MasonMac]

Not sure if added/suggested yet (probably was)

Preset orders for ships so you don't have to manually put the same orders for every ship, its a pain to do so.

[Steve Walmsley]

Not sure if added/suggested yet (probably was)

Preset orders for ships so you don't have to manually put the same orders for every ship, its a pain to do so.

Do you mean weapon assignments? Orders are at the fleet level.

[MasonMac]

Not sure if added/suggested yet (probably was)

Preset orders for ships so you don't have to manually put the same orders for every ship, its a pain to do so.

Do you mean weapon assignments? Orders are at the fleet level.

No I meant conditional orders such as refueling/surveying.