Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[Vandermeer]

So we all hate it when that great scientists has an earth attack, or when we loose experienced officers through health issue. It'd be nice to have a line of Biology research that boost life expectancy. It would fluff out biology a bit too.

Yeah, these Earth attacks have really disturbed at least two of my games already. All the dead officers, a shame.

...But I agree with the life expectancy thing, and had similar thoughts for long. This is especially an issue when you play as a phantastic race with non-earth start. Who says that a race of inky-skinned sauropoda must have the same life expectancy as humans, so a variable for the race's characteristics for this maybe could add something here for one.
On the other hand, if not standard, then at least some secret ruin tech for medicine would be nice. How that work exactly;...there are a couple things that would help. Instead of just making sickness or death more unlikely, it could also just introduce random "curing" events where the health status of a random afflicted officers betters "thanks to progress in medicine/he was treated successfully" or something.

Of course this would also increase the officer pool as a side effect, however with retirement age still in place, it shouldn't become too dramatic of an increase.(except maybe when there should be accustomed retirement with custom long-lived races)

[TMaekler]

When the life expectency is prolonged then all affected parameters should also prolong. Meaning to get promoted or increase a statistical value should take proportionally longer. Otherwise the longer life expectency gives an imbalance to the game (don't know how much of an imbalance - but definitely one).

[Sheb]

Why? Promotion depends on the number of officers you have, not time, so our command structure wouldn't get more top-heavy. And yes, it would increase the effectiveness of academies... But is that a bad stuff?

It would also improve population growth I think, which would also be fine.

[Vandermeer]

It would also improve population growth I think, which would also be fine.

Actually either not, or opposite. If the fertile years stay constant, then increased life time will actually reduce the population growth average.(->more people, but a smaller part of them is reproducing) If the fertile years expand in proportion to longer life-time, it will just stay constant.

When the life expectency is prolonged then all affected parameters should also prolong. Meaning to get promoted or increase a statistical value should take proportionally longer. Otherwise the longer life expectency gives an imbalance to the game (don't know how much of an imbalance - but definitely one).

For one I wouldn't like that with the promotion, because it is timed to exactly one year, and adding imbalance to that is ugly. But on the other hand, just as Sheb staid, promotion is not dependent on time, but total officer count. I had plenty 60+ old commanders and lieutenants in my time because they never got promoted as the combined skill-to-free-positions cross section was not in their favor. There would be more officers as they die less, so there is this imbalance, but enlarging promotion period will not hinder this.

I also don't know how much that would be. Depends on how many officers die percentage wise of sickness instead of retiring or in battle. If that number is say 30% (high estimate), then medical technology that reduces this to half would on average improve officer numbers by 0.85/0.7 = ~21%. However, keep in mind that there is a large cropping function in the game that just retires unused officers after 6 years (which usually accounts for the most "loses" in my games), so you cannot in any case get too much anyway.
The only thing that is  imbalance here is that you would maybe need only 5 academies to fill demands of 6 with this, and....

Why? Promotion depends on the number of officers you have, not time, so our command structure wouldn't get more top-heavy. And yes, it would increase the effectiveness of academies... But is that a bad stuff?

No, that really doesn't seem too much or cheating.

Also, there is construction factory efficiency tech, and mine and research efficiency tech. Then this would be a small bonus academy efficiency tech. Why not?

[TMaekler]

Example: If say at average 1 promotion is granted every 1 month per 60 officers.

Human Population: 3 academies by average lifespan as it is today lets say 300 officers on average - meaning 5 promotions per month - randomly dealt.
Alien Population: 3 academies by an average lifespan 1.5 of human population would give an average of 450 officers on average - meaning 7.5 promotions per month - randomly dealt.

Since officers in use usually get more promotions and upgrades, the top brass will be larger and more stronger in the alien population - just because of longer lifespan.

It can be that way - it should just be clear if it should be so - and be aware if it would be too strong a bonus for the alien population with the longer lifespan.


As far as I know Aurora has no underlying mechanic which calculates life span or anything similar. Just the Max Years to be in service for the officers. So we are talking pretty academic here with not much value to the game, I guess. The growth rate of a population is basically a curved % dependent only on the actual size of the population (of course modifiable by radiation or dust or leader bonus). If there are no negative or positive modifies whatsoever, the same size population on two different plants would grow exactly identical in size.

[bean]

Well, there are two things which determine the promotion rate - attrition and corps growth.  We can do basic analysis of each of these separately, and then look at combining them:
1. Assume the officer corps is in a steady state.  Officers are being introduced as fast as they are attrited by age, accidents, medical conditions, and lack of requirement.  In this case, the promotion rate will be based entirely on the average lifespan of officers.  Let's say it's 20 years.  In this case, assuming that attrition is constant at all ranks (a bad assumption, but I'm doing this on a piece of paper for fun), then each rank will lose 5% of its strength every year to attrition.  Which means that (5/3)% of officers of each rank will be promoted each year to the next rank up, plus those to replace losses of officers at that rank to the next rank up, and so on.  In practice, this will increase the percentage loss for promotions to 2.5% in the lower ranks.  So you'll see 7.5% turnover in each rank each year, and a 1 in 40 yearly chance of promotion for officers, or 1 per 480 officers per month.  Doubling the lifespan of the officers to 40 years would drop this to 1 per 960 officers per month, but the number of officers in the corps for a given number of academies would double.
In practice, you're going to see quite a few officers attrited out at 5 years or so due to non-assignment (because they just didn't have the skills) while others can easily pass 40 years.  I don't have the time to put together a better analysis of this case. 

2. Assuming that there's no attrition, and promotion only comes from corps growth.  In this case, there's a total of 1 promotion per 2 officers added.  (One-third of officer additions cause a promotion from O-1 to O-2, but 1/3rd of those cause a promotion from O-2 to O-3, and so on.  Those of you who had calculus just realize that we're doing a sum of a series, and wincing.  The sum comes to 1/2.)  In this case, the total size of the officer corps is irrelevant. 

That said, I'm in favor of adding medical technology to the tech tree.  If nothing else, it would make biology researchers more useful.

[Sheb]

It should be fairly easy to implement too: The game must have a %age chance of officers getting sick, dying from accidents, etc etc. You'd just need a tech to bring that percentage down.

[ChildServices]

Add a level of army organisation above Division so that we can actually make use of Tier 4 ground officers, named either a "corps" or an "army. "

[Sheb]

What about ground force staff officers, like for fleets?

[Rich.h]

Could we get the ability to add notes to specific bodies/colonies, either on the F9 system generation screen, or the F2 economy screen. It would help with general fluff type info to flesh out the RP of the game if we were able to add things.

[ChildServices]

What about ground force staff officers, like for fleets?

That would be pretty good.    Maybe at Corps/Army level you can have staff officers in addition to the actual leader of the corps.    I'm not sure how much you can do with it from a gameplay perspective though.    A guy for training, a guy for his combat bonus, a "public affairs" guy, and the general himself?

I think a better place to add staff officers personally is actually with civilian administrators.    Having a cabinet for the whole nation or for individual sectors would add a great deal to the game, in my opinion.   It'd certainly alleviate a lot of the civilian administrator bloat that I've been noticing in my current game, by actually giving these men something to do.  Maybe as well as that, we could have multiple "ranks" for civilian administrators so I could give my sector governors different titles.

[Tree]

Yeah, more stuff for civilian administrators would be amazing, ranks and cabinets both.

It'd be nice to have a sort of tier system (colony, system, sector, empire) so that the cabinets' bonuses are less effective the farther they are from the colony tier, but still have it stack with all those below.  Probably also a minimum population requirement so you can't abuse it and have a cabinet at each tier, everywhere.

[TMaekler]

A way to exclude ships or posts from Auto-Assign. Alternatively Auto-Assign not only for ALL posts, but for a specified selection of posts.

Also an option that Auto Assign does not dump the overhead administrators and ranking officers.

Maybe an event warning that there are open posts (this warning should not be given if post is excluded from being filles by above marker).

[bean]

Could we change the 'Continual expansion' box for shipyards to an 'expand to'?  I often find myself needing to get a shipyard to some specific value which isn't divisible by 500, and it's annoying to have to keep an eye on the shipyard when I'm doing so.  Instead, set it so that it expands to the value you give it, and then sends an alert, with a target tonnage of 0 triggering the system as it currently works.

[83athom]

I'm actually quite baffled no-one has suggested this yet (at least to my knowledge and searches).

A Squad Size reduction tech for jump engines. After maybe Squad size 6-7 you could be able to research Squad size 2 with x0.9 to engine size, and Self Jump for x0.8 engine size after that (invalid if drive size already makes it "self jump" to still have that branch meaning something).