Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[Detros]

Might be kinda strange that, given enough time your fighters could kill battleships with what amounts to a machine gun.

Battleships should have enough weaponry, shielding and smaller friends around to not allow that.
On the other hand, yes, one machinegun could be all you need to capture an unguarded tanker or freighter.

[QuakeIV]

I think his point is the damage should be too low to do anything appreciable to the armor given its thickness.

[Barkhorn]

Got another suggestion.  Maybe its better considered a bugfix, but I don't know.

Currently, if you have a task group of mixed military and commercial ships, its difficult to get them to transit a jump point; for instance cruisers and their accompanying tankers.  They complain about not having a jump engine large enough, even if the tankers have their own jump engines.  You usually end up having to detach the tankers, have both groups transit individually, then reform the task group.  This makes traveling to a destination thats several jumps away a big micromanagement headache, since you can't queue up the entire trip at once.

My proposal is to have all ships use their own jump engines if they have them when you issue the "standard transit" order.  "Squadron transit" should remain unchanged.

[Frank Jager]

Missiles already got slapped into the dirt with the most recent update logs, and gauss was already "good enough" under the previous paradigm.
AMMs already take up the niche of "logistics-intensive anti-missile system" anyway, and tracking miniscule metal fragments that could be anywhere from a pound to a few grams apiece seems a bit unnecessary, all things considered.

TL/DR I think its a tradeoff, make PD more effective but limit its use.  Missiles should only be a long range / first strike weapon and should have multiple strong counters.

In my opinion Missiles haven't been "Slapped into the dirt", they have been turned into what they should be I. E.  the primary long range armament of a space going ship, incremental missile sizes don't really change much of the status quo, only real difference to missiles that I can spot is that they wont have super ranges because of increased fuel usage, unless you build multi stage missiles which at least for the first stage will have to be slow.

I don't accept that Gauss Cannons are "good enough" I see it as trying to be two seperate weapons systems and failing at both.
I'm proposing to make a smaller system with its own inherent weakness, and actually make Gauss stronger for its size.

AMM's are one "logistics-intensive anti-missile system", but what if i wanted to play without missiles entirely? I should have missile defense systems that provide no drawbacks through the lifespan of a ship that simply its cost and how much tonnage it requires? C# Aurora should be more than capable of adding some variety into the weapons mix.

At no point did I suggest that the game tracks any of the above, it would simply tie into the current "5 Second Lightspeed" rule and all shots fired / damage / misses, would be displayed for that increment exactly the same as it does now for Gauss / Railguns, it simply adds an additional requirement in the code that checks for ammunition present in the ship after checking weapon damage, readiness, crew grade.  Tracking "Miniscule metal fragments" through space is completely unnecessary I wholeheartedly agree

No-one seems to be commenting on the changes to Railguns, so I'm assuming that no-one cares about having a replacement / alternative to Laser techs.

@Barkhorn
If you allow a fighter however armed to approach within 10k of your battleship and allow it to fire for long enough to penetrate the Armour then you my friend need to redesign you ships, Missile PD alone should be sufficient to destroy a group of Fighters at that range, hell even if you only mounted the same "Auto Cannons" as they did you should come off better as you will probably have more weapons per craft, they will both only fire at the minimum combat range (10km) which is the proposed MAX / only combat range these new cannons will allow, to track anti-ship missiles of a similar tech you will need a faster tracking speed than any fighter is capable of, and they will blow up as most fighters dont carry a huge amount of armour or HTK and these weapons are supposed to spit out 10-30 damage per increment (Over 10-30 individual shots).  I have yet to design a fighter that can take that sort of punishment.

My suggestion remains just that a suggestion for the community and Steve to consider and comment upon I value your comments but fear that some of you may not have read my huge wall of text.

I don't seem to actually be able of writing short posts 

Regards

Frank

[Barkhorn]

Frank

I think its strange that machine guns could even conceivably do it though.  I didn't really mean that autocannon fighters killing BB's was a reason this idea shouldn't be implemented.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like it.  Ships should have some external parts, which could be disabled by these autocannons.  Really it doesn't make a lot of sense that turrets, sensors, engines, and missile launchers can be completely within the armor.

In WW2, fighters would often perform AAA suppression on enemy shipping by strafing the open-topped gun turrets to cover the bombers' approach.  The bridge, signalling equipment, radar, and fire control were also vulnerable.

[chrislocke2000]

For amm missile fire Chris control settings on think it would be useful to be able set both a minimu and a maximum engagement range so as to avoid the current situation where amms will fire when there is no actual time for them to intercept and are hence wasted. That should help with designing and setting a layered defence.

[Detros]

Add two more sizes of beam fire controls: 0.75x and 8x.

Alternatively allow all sizes between 0.25x and (5x or 10x ?) in 0.25 increments.

[Barkhorn]

Add two more sizes of beam fire controls: 0.75x and 8x.

Alternatively allow all sizes between 0.25x and (5x or 10x ?) in 0.25 increments.

How about doing away with discreet sizes entirely and just let us type in numbers?

If I want a 3.1915926HS sensor, let me.

[QuakeIV]

Thats actually something I would like to remark upon.  I think that if the player wants to make an absolutely gigantic piece of hardware to do a job, then they should be allowed to do so.  Essentially, compensating for their lacklustre technology with sheer scale and cost.  It would make things a lot more potentially interesting I think.  If trying create machinery well above what you should be capable of results in dminishing returns, then after a certain point you would be defeated by an equivalent economy building lower tech equipment.  On the other hand, it would let you vaguely try to defend yourself against the attention of much more advanced empires.

[Detros]

Thats actually something I would like to remark upon.  I think that if the player wants to make an absolutely gigantic piece of hardware to do a job, then they should be allowed to do so.  Essentially, compensating for their lacklustre technology with sheer scale and cost.  It would make things a lot more potentially interesting I think.  If trying create machinery well above what you should be capable of results in dminishing returns, then after a certain point you would be defeated by an equivalent economy building lower tech equipment.  On the other hand, it would let you vaguely try to defend yourself against the attention of much more advanced empires.

Sooo... what about any number between 0.1x and 10x as a size multiplier here?
So that you can get anywhere from 0.01 HS to 100HS with combining size for range and size for speed?

[Barkhorn]

I'd like to make a few suggestions about asteroid miners.

Currently they're a huge head-ache to use.  There is no default or conditional order to automate them.  The "move to mineral source" default order is not smart enough to only consider asteroids; your miners will happily fly to moons and then just sit there confused.

Worse yet, it seems miners can only mine from bodies that have colonies on them, and these colonies have to be made manually.  And then your colony list will get cluttered with dozens of asteroid mines.

The worst part though, is just how slowly they actually mine once they're actually working.

These three factors combine to make AM's just not worth it.  Its much easier to just explore more and find planets or moons with far more resources than even a hundred asteroids would have, and that you can focus several hundred automated or manned mines on.

So to solve these problems, here's some suggestions;

1) Make asteroid mining modules work much faster.  Perhaps make it depend on the size of the asteroid.  Smaller asteroids mine faster, since the ore deposits cannot be as deep.

2) Make asteroid mining ships automatically create colonies when they stop at an asteroid with minerals.  Perhaps automatically delete these colonies once the mining is complete and the minerals have been picked up.

3) Either make the "move to mineral source" default order only consider asteroids or add a new conditional that does so.

4) Add a conditional order that executes an order template.  This will allow us to essentially make our own conditional orders.  This is helpful for the asteroid miner situation because it will allow us to automate having a freighter follow the miner around, and when its full, drop off the minerals at Earth, then return to the miner.  I'm sure there are more situations this would be useful in as well.

[Havear]

Some fellow players and I were discussing the planned Plasma Lance for 7.2 and had a couple of suggestions. (This rolls with an earlier suggestion of mine making plasma carronades ignore atmosphere so beam bombardment presents another option. I also habitually refer to particle beams as particle torpedoes, since they 1) used to be called  that 2) have a torpedo-like footprint and 3) have an advanced form in plasma torpedoes like advanced lasers and advanced railguns)

With the addition of the Particle Lance (and Spinal options for lasers) we've got a few options for customizing beam weapons. Why not take that slightly further? Plasma Carronades as their own weapon system can be dropped in favor of a Particle/Plasma Carronade option on Particle Torpedoes that increases damage several ticks (like Spinal and Advanced Spinal) while slashing range. Railguns and Gauss Cannons could also conceivably rolled together into a single system, with something something like a unified "Kinetic Launch Velocity" and "Kinetic Payload Count", with Launch Velocity being a straight carryover of Gauss/Railgun Launch Velocity and "Kinetic Payload Count" not only adjusting Gauss RoF, but potentially Railguns shells fired in one volley. The Gauss module for Railguns would thus disable power requirements while reducing damage and range, or some other arrangement.

The main thrust is reducing the total beam weapon trees required while making individual choices more flexible.

[Barkhorn]

A suggestion regarding long voyages.

Specifically what I'd like to be able to do is select a TG and order it to go to a specific system.  I don't like that I have to do all the pathfinding myself.

If we had the ability to order a TG to move to a specific system, combined with the custom conditional orders I suggested above, we could totally automate interstellar mineral, MSP, and missile shipments, all of which right now are a bit of a hassle.

Basically I'm just tired of specifying every single jump on a voyage that's possible dozens of jumps long.  Its especially bad for long range gravsurvey ships, which are almost always taking the longest trips in your empire.

[TheBawkHawk]

A suggestion regarding long voyages.

Specifically what I'd like to be able to do is select a TG and order it to go to a specific system.   I don't like that I have to do all the pathfinding myself.

If we had the ability to order a TG to move to a specific system, combined with the custom conditional orders I suggested above, we could totally automate interstellar mineral, MSP, and missile shipments, all of which right now are a bit of a hassle.

Basically I'm just tired of specifying every single jump on a voyage that's possible dozens of jumps long.   Its especially bad for long range gravsurvey ships, which are almost always taking the longest trips in your empire.

I know it's not exactly what you're asking for, but there's something you can do that's kind of like this.

If you create a colony in a system near where you want to send your fleet, you can tell your fleet to go there and they'll automatically pathfind to it.  Make sure you have "Show All Pops" checked or you won't see the colony, and also make sure to check off "No Auto-Route Jump Check" or the fleet won't go if there aren't jump gates along the route.

[Barkhorn]

Oh my god, THANK YOU!!

New suggestion; add a "Help" menu full of useful, simple tips like this.