Aurora II

[UncleBob]

I'd rather not have randomness messing with my economy. However, I agree that much could be done to make the economy more chalenging. One thing I'm thinking about is actually making unemployment a bad thing. As things are now, you couldn't care less about having too many workers. You can grow a population without having to provide jobs for them, and they still pay taxes.

What I came up with that might add an interesting element is simply having unemployed workers not pay taxes, and marking all workers that are not working in an ACTIVE factory unemployed. Maybe even an optional "tough"-level where they cost you (as they would in real live). The financial crisis could come quite naturally this way: You're forced to terminate some projects because of mineral shortages, so you have to terminate some projects. Fifty percent of an industry on a planet goes unused, making fifty percent of the industrial workforce unemplyed, which might easily result in 20% drop in tax income. If this goes on a while, you might be forced to terminate some other projects because you're running out of money, resulting in more unemployed, and off you go into one hell of a recession.

[ardem]

Well if you going to have those things, some policies for colony governors should be in place to help in managing these additions.

Just as a governor that inflicts curfews, alien tolerance, alien intolerance, higher social policies, higher work policies.

These policies will be able to proved some control without complete micro management.

[UnLimiTeD]

The problem there is that it will have absolutely no effect once you have several colonies.
Current, if a planet is 1000 negative a month that can easily be paid for by prospering colonies somewhere else.

[Aldaris]

We're neglecting civillian industry here, it might actually be a very bad thing if your government is employing 100% of its industrial sector, as the production of conventional goods would go down drastically. This would mean that military bases that employ almost all of their population would have to import a lot of things, which I feel would be a nice touch.

[UnLimiTeD]

Interesting.
Maybe just add a third branch, after service, and agrarian, and name it civilian heavy Industry. That one would not take priority over manufacturing. Would solve a lot.
Still doesn't allow for unpredictable things happening, like a financial crisis induced by the breakdown of a bank or something.
I mean, people could still turn it off.
Predictability is boring.

[UncleBob]

Current, if a planet is 1000 negative a month that can easily be paid for by prospering colonies somewhere else.

Which is a great opportunity to bring a bit of mass psychology into the picture: people anywhere usually don't like it when they have to pay for "lazy buts" at the other end of the Galaxy. Taxes could be calculated per colony. If too much of the tax money of a colony gets spent improving another colony instead of theirs, there is unrest. You can fight this by making colonies as self-sufficient as possible, financing propaganda programms (making people feel more as a part of a greater whole etc.) and so on. It would be great if it also would bring a more complex taxation system: set taxes for colony level and empire level (after all, regional and national taxes are customary in most states).

Civil industry would certainly be cool. We already have civilian mining and shipping lines, so industry would be a logical next step.

Predictability is boring.

I thought in a strategy game, EVERYTHING is about predictability, i.e. your ability to predict stuff happening and taking adequate steps to prevent it from happening. Randomness might become a very frustrating factor in a strategy game. I'm not saying it has no place at all (there's a LOT of randomness in Aurora, after all), but throwing your economy upside down without giving you any chance to foresee and prevent it might be a tad frustrating.
For example, I had a financial crisis quite lately in my game. I saw it comming for a while, and had the opportunity to catch it by building financial centers and putting all my research into economy +20%. I had to take a lot of resources off from stuff I'd rather had been doing, but the problem had to be solved. And I solved it, just in time (I went something like 120 into minus). If I had a random economic crisis at that moment, I'd have been screwed. Now, if that crisis occured because I missed some important developements and stats, so be it. That's the game. But if that crisis happens purely out of the random generator, without me having any chance to prevent it whatsoever, I might just get a little frustrated.

Economic crisises usually happen because people are shortsighted and greedy. If a player is either, he has plenty of opportunity to get himself into trouble of any sorts, that to him might come quite unpredicted, while an expert player would have seen it comming long ago and took according steps to never even let it get a real problem. That's the fun of the game, at least for me. that, and exploring... I LIKE exploring in Aurora. It's also a pretty random thing, but it's still not so random that you couldn't saveguard against it. You ships don't blow up randomly, they blow up because you designed them badly, or neglected to watch their maintenance clock, or they get blown up because you didn't take neccessary precautions. For the economy, it should be similiar: a certain degree of randomness, ok. But it should still be predictable in a way system failures on ships are predictable.

If anything should be added randomly, then maybe disasters, that can also have an influence on your economy, but are justly random. There's no way to foresee that your major ordonance factory will blow up tomorrow because some bloke decided to have a smoke...

[voknaar]

There's no way to foresee that your major ordonance factory will blow up tomorrow because some bloke decided to have a smoke. . .

I'd invest research points into No Smoking signs to minimise that random event from occuring.   

[UnLimiTeD]

I absolutely dislike complete predictability.
It would basically be part of your playstyle.
Sure, you can have a controlled economy, with modern tech it might actually work, or you could go for uncontrolled free market, with a chance of economic and financial Breakdown, but also higher gains in times of prosperity.

See, to take an off example, if your tank has a 70% chance to penetrate the enemy tanks armor, theres a good chance you win, but theres also a chance to lose. Knowing that fact, you have to take measures to sill beat it.

Also, currently Invaders popping up in your system are a random event.
It poses a challenge.

Random evens like an Ordnance factory exploding would also be a possibility.
While were at it, you could try to research automation, getting high production with few workers, and then establish a utopian welfare state after 100 years, where unemployment is no problem enemy because working is so yesterday.
Of course it decreases the number and moral of your troop supply.

As for psychology:
It gets complex there, because yes, it might be that your paying largely for an other colony, but that might be a military beachhead, or the only supply of a rare mineral, or food.

[voknaar]

In my humble opinion adding more complexity should be an optional difficulty, like toggling no maintinance.   like a realistic economy setting for the planning 100 years ahead pros among the boards.   



But one thing i would like to see is the conventional industry getting some popular use.   I can think of many reasons why they'd remain popular even in games of multiple colonys spread over a handful of colonys.   A Conventional Industry building could be a sourse for the production of comercial shipping.   Contracts could be set up to build transnewtionian buildings/components that use the industry.   The industry could be used to make use of population not working.   As mentioned above non working population wouldn't generate income but if they had CI's then they'd be happily toiling away building and maintain non transnewtionian tech.   Like producing civilian goods for trade purposes when not contracted for other things. 

When CI is used as part of a contract they'd only have say 1/3 of the base building power of normal factorys and potentially be used to help ballance production of the much larger ships if assistance is contracted out to the civilian sector.  Of course Newtionian buildings have population priority over CI if theres not enough population for all the structures

[UncleBob]

See, to take an off example, if your tank has a 70% chance to penetrate the enemy tanks armor, theres a good chance you win, but theres also a chance to lose. Knowing that fact, you have to take measures to sill beat it.

As I was trying to say with ship failures, Such "random events" are totally acceptable, because they're not "random" in a completely unrelated way. Everything still has causes that are accessible, and you can do enough to shift the odds in your favour. It would be completely ok to have a higher chance of an economical crisis occuring if you for example, tax the private industry too high or stuff like that. What I was saying is that actual randomness, i.e. stuff happening completely unrelated to what you can do and can know shouldn't really be in a strategy game.

I didn't know that inaders in your homw system where completely random. I didn't have any so far, so I wouldn't know: surely there is some way to spot them on their way in if you set detectors in surounding systems?

[wilddog5]

Maintenance supply's

One of the few in consisties that i see in aurora is that ships require maintenance supply's but buildings are perfectly constructed, ok some of them might make maintenance supply's for themselves but some obviously can not.

My proposal is this make it so that maintenance supply's are like infrastructure is a trade good and a builderable item the rate of trade production being decided by free industry and maintenance yards but have buildings fail and require supply's to repair them, everything breaks eventually most of the time these should be small things with the occasional large thing requiring lots of supply's a failure without supply's results in a building (type determined when the failure type occurs to allow the fact that factories and mines are more dangerous than finance centres)  to go inactive repairing this takes time when supply's arrive to take into account that it would take time to repair a failure that happend some time ago than repairing it as it happened, the trade good section is to allow civilian ships to automatically supply automine planets without having the player constantly resupply his planets manually (talk about a lot of work for a large empire), a minimum limit should also be setable to allow the player to setup military bases to be setup easer by having the civilans transport supplus when they get to low (below the amount set) this would be more realistic as companies (and the military?) probably buy spare parts from the companies that make the products (cheaper and more efficient this way) rather than the government

Another think would it be better to allow civilian ships to transport missiles (which go boom if the cargohold is destroyed in an attack) and ship parts (engines weapons etc) therefor allowing a planet the make the parts and another with shipyards to use them.

Last thing, escort ships allow civilian shipping to build the obsolete warships that you allow them to (tick box) this would allow rich companies to build ships that sit in formation of their ships and protect then from attack when traveling through dangerous sectors these ships would be very expensive to buy 5 to 10 time normal cost to cover licences, insurance, etc (so no private fleets that might compete with the navy) thus rather rare, a trader does NOT want the missiles he is transporting to go BOOM.

Thank you for reading

positive comments welcome, negative ones not so much

[Hawkeye]

I didn't know that inaders in your homw system where completely random. I didn't have any so far, so I wouldn't know: surely there is some way to spot them on their way in if you set detectors in surounding systems?

If they approach your homesystem through normal space, i.e. they spawn in another system and then decide to come to you, then yes, you would spot them coming.
Unfortunately, the backstory is, that they are from a different Universe, and come thought a stable wormhole, which forms in a random system. If this system happens to be your homesystem, you´re pretty much screwed (at least early to mid game).

And yes, that´s the one realy random thing, I don´t like (not the Invaders per se, but that they can appear in your homesystem. I usually disable them for a while, until I could handle them tech-wise, because having them hit me after some heavy investment in a campaign is just too frustrating. Now, if there would be a checkbox to only let them spawn at least two systems from any homewolrd, that would be another thing).

[Hawkeye]

Maintenance supply's

One of the few in consisties that i see in aurora is that ships require maintenance supply's but buildings are perfectly constructed, ok some of them might make maintenance supply's for themselves but some obviously can not.

My proposal is this make it so that maintenance supply's are like infrastructure is a trade good and a builderable item the rate of trade production being decided by free industry and maintenance yards but have buildings fail and require supply's to repair them, everything breaks eventually most of the time these should be small things with the occasional large thing requiring lots of supply's a failure without supply's results in a building (type determined when the failure type occurs to allow the fact that factories and mines are more dangerous than finance centres)  to go inactive repairing this takes time when supply's arrive to take into account that it would take time to repair a failure that happend some time ago than repairing it as it happened, the trade good section is to allow civilian ships to automatically supply automine planets without having the player constantly resupply his planets manually (talk about a lot of work for a large empire), a minimum limit should also be setable to allow the player to setup military bases to be setup easer by having the civilans transport supplus when they get to low (below the amount set) this would be more realistic as companies (and the military?) probably buy spare parts from the companies that make the products (cheaper and more efficient this way) rather than the government

Another think would it be better to allow civilian ships to transport missiles (which go boom if the cargohold is destroyed in an attack) and ship parts (engines weapons etc) therefor allowing a planet the make the parts and another with shipyards to use them.

Last thing, escort ships allow civilian shipping to build the obsolete warships that you allow them to (tick box) this would allow rich companies to build ships that sit in formation of their ships and protect then from attack when traveling through dangerous sectors these ships would be very expensive to buy 5 to 10 time normal cost to cover licences, insurance, etc (so no private fleets that might compete with the navy) thus rather rare, a trader does NOT want the missiles he is transporting to go BOOM.

Thank you for reading

positive comments welcome, negative ones not so much

Hm, except for PDCs and the like, all buildings are considered civilian. Civilian ships don´t need maintenance supplies, so why should buildings? I don´t see the inconsistense here.
PDCs would probably need them, but could be handled like ships in orbit with enought maint-facilities, i.e. just costing some minerals.

I´ll scond the "civillians can transport missiles" and would like to expand this to "all cargo holds can hold missiles as cargo", i.e. not in a "ready to use" form.

I am a bit undecided on the "armed civillian ships".
I could envision something like this if your race is a corporate government or oligarchy, but a monarchy/tyranny/dictatorship? No King/Dictator worth a damn would allow some private corporation to own armed spaceships, whatsoever.
Perhaps make it dependant on the government form?

[Aldaris]

Speaking of which, government forms should have more influence altogether, I can't see a military dictatorship outsourcing the supply of military bases to the civillian sector, at least not on a large scale. Of course some of this is up to the player to RP, but NPRs should take it into account to some extent, and the more in-character options should be somewhat more attractive.

[Sotak246]

Just my two cents.  I never have cared for games that throw in completely random events just to make it seem "realistic".  I like aurora because I can concentrate on the 4-Es and if my economy crashes it is because of somethig I did or didn't do.  So if Steve does add that, I really hope he makes it optional in the set up.