Given by the number of posts that I've seen pop up, both on this forum and on Reddit, over the years; I think it might make sense to have any NPR that's currently marked as Neutral to automatically be set to Hostile when they open fire on your ships or kill a ground unit.

This should help curb at least one of the causes of the common message of "why can't I shoot back?"

I like the principle, but I think there's a lot of annoying "edge" cases where this wouldn't work.

Generally there are plenty of roleplay circumstances where you would want relations to remain nominally neutral after firing or being fired upon, which could range from warning shots fired at a scout or survey ship infringing your territory up to a conflict limited to only one or several systems but not a full-scale galactic war. In this case, automatically setting races to Hostile status can lead to some undesired expansion of the conflict, such as:

• STOs in "non-involved" systems may fire on the now hostile ships.
• Ground forces on shared bodies in non-involved systems will engage each other.
• Mines (of the explosive variety) may trigger unexpectedly.
• Specific to NPRs, but in "warning shot" situations additional unintended fire in other locations, for example from fire controls set to fire at will (e.g., "Oops, there goes the alien diplo ship"), will worsen relations and make it much harder to restore neutrality after firing said warning shots.

Note that shared bodies are particularly relevant in games with multiple player races, but also can be relevant in games with NPRs - particularly in cases with mixed player race and NPR starts in Sol, which is not an uncommon setup.

At the very least, it needs to be a toggled behavior which isn't something we have a lot of in the Aurora UI, and would likely cause just as many issues for the kinds of players who are likely to run into the above scenarios (e.g., NATO vs Soviet, "I shot at their survey ship, why are the Soviets invading Poland?" situations).

With the current behavior or with a new toggle switch, in either case the solution is "RTFM" and, since if we're being honest here the "FM" is not very readable maybe some better or more accessible documentation would be useful. That said, either way, it is a lesson a player learns once and then (usually) remembers for the next time.

P.S. Is this by any chance a suggestion motivated by recent events in the Blue Emu AAR @ Pdox forums? If so, I'd hesitate to draw a lot of conclusions from that experience, as Blue Emu is a great authAAR but really doesn't read the documentation very well and this is far from the first fairly basic error in understanding he's made in that AAR.

On the Research tab, clicking the Assign New button will cause the project name to be appended with "(N)".

I suggest prepending it to the project name instead, to make it easier to find such projects when the list is long

Also, some projects have names that are so long that you can't see the appended part in the list.
Example: "Max Tracking Time for Bonus vs Missiles: 30 Second..."

(N) moved to the start.

I've also gone through the tech system list and shortened any name that doesn't fit on the Research tab. For example, its now "Max Tracking Time vs Missile...".

Any chance you could force the new option to be first in the list? Sometimes my right-click lists are absolutely enormous.

Yes, it would be best if this option was always first in the list... a bit confusing to have it listed in alphabetical order with everything else.

I've added the Tactical Map as an option to the existing right-click menu on the Galactic map, and also added the option to centre on fleets in the system.
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg169909#msg169909

Awesome!

Any chance you could force the new option to be first in the list? Sometimes my right-click lists are absolutely enormous.

...Either make it so the System View open and the System map opens the system as well or add a button in the System view to focus the System Map on the selected system.

Or perhaps make it so that ctrl-click (or ctrl-doubleclick) focuses the System Map rather than opening the System view.

If at all possible I would like the ability to move minerals with civilian ships in the same manner that we can move installations I.e. set an amount for pickup/delivery.  Mass drivers are great for intra-system mineral transport but it becomes tedious to transport minerals between systems - you have to rely on your own vessels for that.  I think it is logical and consistent to give civilians the ability to transport minerals and it would alleviate some of the current micromanaging for larger empires.  I would still build freighters for initial colonization and for restricted systems where I don’t want the civilians to go.

I think the last time this came up, the issue raised was how to configure the civilian AI so that the freighters aren't constantly running off to random rocks to pick up 25 tons of vendarite when you'd prefer them to ship 12,000 tons of gallicite from some important colony instead. One suggestion I made at the time was to give civilians a dedicated class of mineral haulers which are just small shuttles (say 5,000 tons capacity) instead of big hulking freighters, however this conflicts with the general trend to use larger ship types to reduce pathfinding/detection slowdown.

With the new colonist transport code, maybe something similar could be added for mineral shipping to resolve this, e.g., the payout for a mineral shipment is scaled by the fraction of the ship's hold that is filled, so civilians will only prefer to pick up minerals if there's enough of them to make a real profit.

QOL Suggestion:

Naval Organization window, Fleet -> Movement Orders tab
Double clicking any order in the list of the fleet's current orders should remove all orders after that one (perhaps with a confirmation prompt).


Sometimes I need to trim a long list of orders back to a specific point.
Repeatedly clicking the Remove Last button is the only way to do it currently.
Sometimes that's a LOT of clicks, and sometimes a user overclicks and then has to re-create the unintentionally removed orders.

Seconded as I actually run into this issue often when I repeat a set of orders many times and find I miscounted or the conditions changed.