Author Topic: C# Aurora Changes Discussion  (Read 441794 times)

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Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1635 on: April 08, 2018, 05:06:39 PM »
If all weapons have a 2% chance to fail on firing, then a weapon that fires every 5 seconds would fire 12 times a minute, working out to (on average) .24 maintenance failures a minute. A larger weapon with a 30 second rate of fire would fire twice, for on average .04 maintenance failures.

If instead, say, the failure rate was .2% per second rate of fire, then the rapid fire weapon would have a 1% chance each shot, and the larger laser would have a 6% chance each shot, and both would on average suffer .12 maintenance failures each minute.

I know realism isn't a strict argument, but consider it like saying a machine gun can probably fire a lot more total shots before needing servicing than a tank's cannon.

The rationale behind the weapon failure rule is to avoid a point defence ship sitting in orbit and gradually laying waste to a huge planetary population, with no cost. That same weapon defending against missile attack would need a repair about once for every 50 salvos it faced, which should be OK. Even a point-blank range energy engagement will rarely last several minutes. Combat should involve a lot of wear and tear on ships.

In VB6 Aurora, the no energy weapon in atmosphere rule was intended to prevent the destruction of populations by energy weapons. For C#, the weapon failure and lower planetary bombardment for energy weapons are intended to allow that destruction, but not easily.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1636 on: April 08, 2018, 05:16:43 PM »
If I understand this correctly, if I survey a system body which has minerals only after it's deposit is nearly empty I would benefit more from ground survey as if I do the surveying at the beginning? In the first one the new deposits are always greater than the existing and the minerals will be "fulled up" again with the new amount. In the second one, it is possible/likely that the existing minerals outnumber the "new found" ones and there are nearly no chances at all.

Am I missing something?


3) Also - I am sure I missed the numbers somewhere, so sorry for asking - for clarification:

Let's say a "typical" survey unit has 10 "trucks" with 1 Survey point/day in total, how long would the survey last in comparison to the old "team" with 100 skill? I would like to think that a unit like this should need at least 3-4 months for a "typical planet" - maybe even more - but with what numbers are we working here atm?

4) will a unit with survey ability start working with unloading them on a planet or will there be a special order for the ground-unit to start it?

looks really good so far, thanks a lot :)

Ground surveys will start automatically.

Each geological survey component is worth 0.1 per day. Assume a basic unit design is a geological survey vehicle with two components, allowing 0.2 per day and a size of 218 tons. If there a formation type of 'Geosurvey Expedition' with twenty such vehicles, plus some supporting troops and a HQ, that would be about 5000 tons transport capacity. A survey of an Earth-sized planet would need about five months.

You are correct about the ability to survey and restore and I understand that isn't very realistic. However, by following that strategy, you could well be missing out on higher accessibility and extra mineral types while you wait. Generally, it is accessibility and variety of minerals that is the most important factor on larger worlds, rather than total supply.
 
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Offline Bremen

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1637 on: April 08, 2018, 08:36:24 PM »
The rationale behind the weapon failure rule is to avoid a point defence ship sitting in orbit and gradually laying waste to a huge planetary population, with no cost. That same weapon defending against missile attack would need a repair about once for every 50 salvos it faced, which should be OK. Even a point-blank range energy engagement will rarely last several minutes. Combat should involve a lot of wear and tear on ships.

In VB6 Aurora, the no energy weapon in atmosphere rule was intended to prevent the destruction of populations by energy weapons. For C#, the weapon failure and lower planetary bombardment for energy weapons are intended to allow that destruction, but not easily.

Oh, I understand that rationale (though I still think it works better if failure rate is modified by RoF, since otherwise a ship with a giant spinal laser/plasma carronade can still inflict nearly infinite damage by repeatedly bombarding with it). As is it also creates an odd scenario where you specifically want to disable your smaller guns for planetary bombardment.

I think the maintenance failures for weapons is also a positive change for space combat even if it was intended for bombardment, since it prevents the technique of infinite kiting.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1638 on: April 09, 2018, 02:32:11 AM »
Oh, I understand that rationale (though I still think it works better if failure rate is modified by RoF, since otherwise a ship with a giant spinal laser/plasma carronade can still inflict nearly infinite damage by repeatedly bombarding with it). As is it also creates an odd scenario where you specifically want to disable your smaller guns for planetary bombardment.

I think the maintenance failures for weapons is also a positive change for space combat even if it was intended for bombardment, since it prevents the technique of infinite kiting.

Giant weapons don't help too much because each weapon can only destroy a single installation per shot (including infrastructure), plus you still have to build and maintain the mounting ship.

However, ships only using their larger weapons for planetary bombardment (i.e. not PD weapons) is what I am aiming for.
 

Offline Draco_Argentum

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1639 on: April 09, 2018, 02:40:14 AM »
Quote from: Steve Walmsley link=topic=8497. msg107721#msg107721 date=1523198418
There is also the constraint of ensuring bodies with very good minerals are still rare.  I could expand the lower end (Minimal, Low), and leave the upper end the same without too much concern.

True, a 4X where two of the Xs are pointless because you already have everything you need wouldn't be very good.  The new system is also much better than the current survey everything setup.

What if dwarf planet size bodies had no chance of excellent and reduced odds of good and high? I just think the dwarf planets and big moons are cool basically.  Not a big deal either way though.
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1640 on: April 09, 2018, 03:19:32 AM »
Quote
Missile warheads inflict civilian casualties at the rate of 100,000 per point of damage. Energy weapons inflict civilian casualties at the rate of 2,000 per point of damage.

This sounds a bit simplistic, and like it makes it way to easy to wipe out populations entirely with nukes.

For example should the last 100,000 population of scattered survivors on a massive planet that at the start of bombardment housed billions really be possible to finish of with a single nuke?

And shouldn't there be some randomness involved here too?
 
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Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1641 on: April 09, 2018, 04:29:58 AM »
Regarding weapon failure rates; I think it would not be bad if the system was a little more granular. For example, with 4 levels.
The first level, Glitch, is a very minor failure that takes a minute to resolve and costs no maintenance points. Glitches can propagate to the fire control system, which can be particularly devastating for point defense arrays.
The second level, Minor Maintenance, means the weapon fails to fire and loses all charge and must be repaired with half the maintenance points, which takes about 5 minutes.
The third level, Major Maintenance, means the weapon fails to fire, loses all charge and must be repaired at full cost through the damage control teams. Minimum repair time is 15 minutes.
The fourth level, Catastrophic, means the weapon misfires. It dumps half the damage of a point blank shot in the ship's armour and the remainder runs through the ship, hitting the weapon first.

Regarding ground surveys; it's probably fine to have any celestial object large enough to end up round under the influence of its own gravity be a candidate for the ground survey algorithm. It should probably be a much lower chance of finding anything as well as the size and richness of the deposit, of course.

Regarding orbital bombardment; the lack of roll over for more destroyed facilities might actually be a flaw. It means that if you drop your biggest nukes on a planet you can quickly kill most or all of the population (at 100 000 per point of damage a 16 damage missile kills 1.6 million colonists) and take the colony for your own with all those nice facilities on planet ready for new workers.
 
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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1642 on: April 09, 2018, 04:48:26 AM »
Regarding orbital bombardment; the lack of roll over for more destroyed facilities might actually be a flaw. It means that if you drop your biggest nukes on a planet you can quickly kill most or all of the population (at 100 000 per point of damage a 16 damage missile kills 1.6 million colonists) and take the colony for your own with all those nice facilities on planet ready for new workers.

The way I read it only being able to destroy one target only applies to beam weapon fire (which does very low pop damage), not to nukes:

Quote from: C# Aurora Changes List
A single energy weapon can destroy only one target per hit. A missile warhead is applied until all damage is used. For example, a 5-point missile warhead is counted as 100. If the first installation hit is a construction factory, that factory is destroyed and the remaining damage reduced to 80. That damage is then applied the next installation hit and so on.
 

Offline Azarea

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1643 on: April 09, 2018, 05:36:38 AM »
Any chance the treshhold and chances for mineral surveys can be made a tweakable during game setup? Then people can tweak them after their own preferences/playstyles.
 

Offline db48x

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1644 on: April 09, 2018, 09:38:34 AM »
In VB6 Aurora, the no energy weapon in atmosphere rule was intended to prevent the destruction of populations by energy weapons. For C#, the weapon failure and lower planetary bombardment for energy weapons are intended to allow that destruction, but not easily.

However, ships only using their larger weapons for planetary bombardment (i.e. not PD weapons) is what I am aiming for.

I think some atmospheric effects would be nice to have.

An atmosphere magnifies the effects of a nuclear explosion (or any large explosion at all, but especially nuclear because the atmosphere absorbs all those x-rays, making the fireball and pressure waves larger). On an airless world a nuclear explosion could overkill a facility while doing very little to anything nearby.

The same atmosphere will also absorb energy from a laser, weakening and defocusing it. Naturally this depends on the depth of the atmosphere, its density, and (to a lesser extent) its composition. Seems like there could be a lot of fun to be had there; the player might want to keep some old lasers around, since the the atmosphere around their latest target might as well be opaque to their new fusion-pumped x-ray doom lasers of doom.
 

Offline TheBawkHawk

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1645 on: April 09, 2018, 01:41:37 PM »
This sounds a bit simplistic, and like it makes it way to easy to wipe out populations entirely with nukes.

For example should the last 100,000 population of scattered survivors on a massive planet that at the start of bombardment housed billions really be possible to finish of with a single nuke?

And shouldn't there be some randomness involved here too?

Why not have nukes kill a certain percentage of the population? Just some numbers off the top of my head, the casualties would be calculated as (population*damage)*(0.001 +/- up to 0.0005) with minimum casualties being ~1k per point of damage. So if you're bombarding a colony of 100 million, each damage point is going to kill 50k to 150k civilians. After some bombardment, lets say you got the colony down to ten million population, then each point of damage is going to do 5k to 15k casualties. Exact numbers and formula are of course subject to change.

I think a system that uses percentage based casualties would solve the issue of colonies being super easy to wipe out with nukes, while also making it a little more realistic with you being able to fire at the largest targets before having to eventually move on to the smaller ones.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1646 on: April 09, 2018, 04:04:41 PM »
I don't have any objection in principle to reducing the effect of nukes against small populations. They would have to be fairly small though. Even smaller Earth-based population are still relatively concentrated. Australia for example, has a population of about 25m and one of the lowest population densities on Earth (229th  / 241), yet the top 8 cities account for about 70% of that population and the top 20 account for 80%.

Perhaps below 10m, it would start to make a difference. Even that is probably high, because new colonies are likely to be in small areas (look at Earth-based colonization). Also, not sure how much game play benefit (in terms of consequential decision) this would add.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1647 on: April 09, 2018, 05:40:41 PM »
Colonisation patterns are likely to be very similar to habitation in the American Midwest and in Siberia. Mostly due to a variety of factors, all of which are to do with food and water.

To put it quite simply, without food and water it doesn't matter how rich a place is in resources. This means that without a way to acquire enough food in an area that can be worked by 1 individual it doesn't matter what else is in the ground there's not going to be any colonisation or exploitation of that area. You'd simply starve to death. We've seen mining towns sidestep this issue by digging up resources and exchanging them for food.

However, this presumes that food keeps well enough to store long enough to transport it to where it needs to go. While generally speaking cereals and other staple foods can be moved in relative bulk without needing to worry much about freshness, meat and vegetables are more vulnerable to rot and decay. Without a way to store those for travel populations won't urbanise much. There's quite frankly no way to move a number of important sources of vitamins across more than 20 to 40 kilometers of distance (especially on bad roads) without causing issues in local diets, greatly increasing the spread of disease. Combine this with pre-modern poor hygiene in cities and you'll see why cities before the industrial revolution had a net negative growth and needed a constant supply of peasants moving in just to maintain their size.

This is the main factor why Europe, for example, has such a large number of relatively modest sized cities for its population, and why there's a town every 10 kilometer; that was effectively a day trip for the average farmer.


This changes in the modern era. Massively.

People go where there's food, money and people, in that order. With modern storage, refrigeration and mass transportation techniques vast quantities of food can be moved at speed across large distances. Rome in the glory days of the Roman Empire had roughly 1 million people, and that required a constant supply of grain and produce from the Empire (mostly the very fertile Nile flood plains), brought in by boat. These days we can supply vastly more food across larger distances, by truck, by plane, by ship, and most important for food, by train. Trains do two things; they move fast (about 60 to 80 kilometers per hour even for cargo), they move a lot (20 truck load equivalents is small for cargo trains), they move them efficiently, they move them across large distances and they move them refrigerated or frozen when needed.

I would anticipate that colonisation of planets in the modern space era would be based on the question of where are the money making resources (mostly metals and oil), which will be the focal points of the original colony. If there's a lot of such resources on planet a town will spring up, otherwise you will see something similar to a lot of long abandoned small towns that were originally founded to exploit local ore seams. This town will originally be supplied from space when it comes to food and everything else; if the planet is sufficiently earthlike or can otherwise be tamed local farms with expansive fields are likely to establish themselves. If not hydroponic farming is the most likely due to small footprint.

As the planet draws in more settlers to exploit local resources an infrastructure network will start to establish itself. It will start with limited air traffic, as air traffic doesn't need a lot of support beyond a way to determine where you are and where you are going, and with a space capable planet backing up the new colony there'll be a basic GPS satellite constellation in place very soon, or even just a single stationary orbit satellite acting as a beacon. Once populations grow large enough further infrastructure will start to establish itself; either with sea travel, because small ships and the harbours to service them are cheap, or by rail for more landlocked areas.

If large scale traditional farming is an option you are likely to see massive, mostly automated and extensively mechanized farms with their own dedicated storage and transfer hubs for the preferred method of transportation, be it by ship or by rail, to move food to the cities. Population of those working those farms is likely too small to finance a service and manufacturing industry to support the farm locally, and with modern transportation not needed. It likely has a dedicated airstrip to service most of its transportation needs except for bulk cargo transfer. Outside the first places people started to settle large concentrations of population are unlikely; all food and other resources are easily moved to the cities, and that's where the money is and where the people are.


All of which is a long winded manner of saying that while planetary population densities and counts are probably going to be quite low, most of that population would, in my estimation, likely to concentrated on a very small portion of the planet, and very vulnerable to orbital bombardment. Be it directly or as collateral damage.
 

Offline DEEPenergy

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1648 on: April 09, 2018, 05:51:54 PM »
I think the idea of missiles killing a percentage of a population, while also having a minimum casualty count, is a really smart way to handle inflicting casualties.   You could even work in the surface area of the planet, where a small body would receive a higher percentage of their population harmed per missile strike.   A colony built into a small asteroid might not be able to take more than one nuclear blast without the surface being completely consumed. 

However, if you're going to go that route, I think it would be smart to look at the effects of radiation on population as well.   As it stands right now, SM adding 10,000 radiation to an Earth with 300,000,000 population is only able to reduce that population by about 7,000,000 over a 30 day period, while the amount of missile damage required to reach 10,000 radiation would be enough to kill everyone several times over through sheer population damage (1250 size-8 missiles, which is a massive amount of destruction, would only increase the radiation to 10000 yet kill over 1,000,000,000 civilians with the new rules).   The way I see it radiation should have a much more devastating effect on populations, able to very quickly push them into negative population growth and eventual extinction.   This also opens some avenues of meaningful choices if you're going to attack a population with missiles.   Should I go all out with bombardment, destroying all traces of the population and industry but pacifying it more immediately in the short term? Or destroy less of the installations and and be force to babysit the planet while you rely on radiation to destroy the population over a longer period of time (weeks?/months?)? Or come in with a massive high radiation bomb that does minimal damage to the installations on the surface and gradually kills the population, but turns the surface into an irradiated hellscape? 
« Last Edit: April 09, 2018, 08:00:48 PM by DEEPenergy »
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1649 on: April 09, 2018, 08:23:48 PM »
I think the idea of missiles killing a percentage of a population, while also having a minimum casualty count, is a really smart way to handle inflicting casualties.   You could even work in the surface area of the planet, where a small body would receive a higher percentage of their population harmed per missile strike.   A colony built into a small asteroid might not be able to take more than one nuclear blast without the surface being completely consumed. 

This sounds good to me. Maybe just come up with a population density figure based on current population/maximum population, and use it as a multiplier for civilian casualties. Possibly with some lower number as a minimum, but I think it might be interesting if there were almost always a few survivors (huddled in caves, bomb shelters, or basements) from anything but the most apocalyptic of bombardments.

If radiation effects also got increased they might not stay that way for long, of course.