Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread

[papent]

it would be amazing if all beam weapons were turret capable and or spinal mountable.

[Vortex421]

An idea I had is for a fleet planner of sorts.  Let me elaborate:

Right now we can only set up order of battle stuff if ships have already been built.  But I would love to see a fleet planner where I can lay out a theoretical OOB before building the ships for it.  I'd especially love it if we could set up said theoretical OOB and send it to the shipyards and they begin building the ships for it. 

[iceball3]

I threw some suggestions in for Pulsar 4x, but i think they would go great in aurora, if balanced out a bit. What are your thoughts, Steve and others?

You mean like in aurora?
Laser: Highest potential range, most dynamically changeable, turretablr. Piercing Profile. Spinally Mountable. Reduceable size.
Particle Beam: Highest damage at end of range, with no damage dropoff. Higher general range per HS excluding laser reductions. Piercing Profile.
Plasma Carronade: Deals explosive damage profile. Damage drops off extremely with range. Highest point blank damage.
Microwaves, mesons, Et cetera. So there are different beam types, but i wouldn't mind a few more if they could meaningfully have a reason to exist in the combat system.

I honestly would personally like if all the beams had more modifiers to how they preformed. A couple of ideas:

Meson Attenuation:
Five levels at most, each level increases meson damage by 1, decreases range to (1/level^1.5) it's previous range, with level 1 being 1 damage. If pulsar is using the current system of minimum range increments, having a range less than a minimum increment should render the meson innefective at the minimum range increment. Each level should require research to ascend.
Mesons with damage more than one have a random chance of having their damage partially absorbed by shielding, but will damage shields in the process and 1 damage will always leak through.

Plasma Carronade Encasement: Plasma Carronades with a metastable encasement to hold it stable briefly in flight.
Range increase in the same manner range tech affects lasers.
Will still have damage falloff proportional to original, so the initial damage falloff will be steep relative to the significantly weaker end of the range. This could lead to an interesting effect with rather long range carronades that hit 1-5 damage on the ending range of the weapon, sharply increasing at shorter range.
The main distinguishing part of this tech from other range techs is that it will also increase the size of the carronade a bit with each level.

Streaming particle beam: Particle beams which rake across the target as opposed to piercing. Each level halves the depth of a particle beam rounded up but widens it, to elaborate :

Code: [Select]

Intact Armor
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO

Particle Beam Str 6 No Streaming
OOOXOOO
OOOXOOO
OOOXOOO
OOOXOOO

Particle Beam Str 6 Streaming 1

OOXXOOO
OOXXOOO
OOXXOOO
OOOOOOO

Particle Beam Strength 6 Streaming 2
OOXXXOO
OOXXXOO
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOOAnd so forth. Streaming particle beams which miss should have a very slight chance of hitting their target anyway, doing small amounts of damage. The chance is slightly higher at higher streaming levels.

[linkxsc]

Idea, a pair of mid-high level techs, that allow the creation and destruction of jump points in systems.

Mind you, these are balanced by being a huge module on a ship. And at the lower techs can take 50-100 years to destroy or create a jp, perhaps with the best level, you can pull it off in 10-20 years.

Dunno all the mechanics behind it. Perhaps make it such that when making a new jp, itll have a chance to open into a new system, or 1 thats already been generated.

This would be a tech for way later on, in the case of a game where you might literally run out of routes to travel. (I think you can sm change them now, but a legit tech to do it could be interesting.)

[Rich.h]

Idea, a pair of mid-high level techs, that allow the creation and destruction of jump points in systems.

Mind you, these are balanced by being a huge module on a ship. And at the lower techs can take 50-100 years to destroy or create a jp, perhaps with the best level, you can pull it off in 10-20 years.

Dunno all the mechanics behind it. Perhaps make it such that when making a new jp, itll have a chance to open into a new system, or 1 thats already been generated.

This would be a tech for way later on, in the case of a game where you might literally run out of routes to travel. (I think you can sm change them now, but a legit tech to do it could be interesting.)

It is a nice idea but the time span is way off. At higher tech levels even if you do not have any NPR empires in play you are still likely to have a reasonably slow game due to the civilian ships etc. At 10-20 years of play it would probably take weeks or maybe months of real time play to get a new jp. As you said the sm can already do this and I think it is a better option since the NPR will likely not be able to take full advantage of them, so it is far better and easier to simply use an rp reason for sm'ing them into existence.

[Witty]

I'd love to see the return of some of the NPR interaction mentioned in this old rules thread
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,146.0.html

I understand why Steve removed most of these at the time, but a lot of cool potential political depth was lost with the rewrite. Hell, I don't think client states are even possible in the current version.

Most players seem to agree that diplomacy is one of Aurora's weaker sides, but it wasn't always that way! 

[sloanjh]

I'd love to see the return of some of the NPR interaction mentioned in this old rules thread
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,146.0.html

I understand why Steve removed most of these at the time, but a lot of cool potential political depth was lost with the rewrite. Hell, I don't think client states are even possible in the current version.

Most players seem to agree that diplomacy is one of Aurora's weaker sides, but it wasn't always that way! 

Wow - almost 10 years old.  I thought we'd had a forum crash where we lost everything since then, but I guess not.  Thanks to Erik for keeping the forum going for the last decade!!

John

[iceball3]

Have a checkbox in the display tab on the System Map window called "Estimated movement on Time & Bearing" with a box below it that you type in a time in seconds. When enabled, will trace a line to the estimated position of a contact or task group on the system map on it's bearing, with the length being the time multiplied by the contact's/tg's speed.
This can make it significantly easier to tell where something is headed. Which leads to a next idea:
Commander Skill: Evasive manuevers. A ship can preform evasuve maneuvers, which will essentially slightly offset it's bearing randomly while still generally heading to it's target. This can heavily throw off interceptions if they have high initiative, make it harder to estimate the overall bearing of something early on it's path to a target, and perhaps have the added benefit of increasing it's effective "speed" but only for determining accuracy missile collisions and of weapons targetting the evading ship? A penalty of such would be the increased fuel use induced by the manuevers themself and perhaps a cut to all tracking platform speeds, turrets included.

[swarm_sadist]

Some ideas for UI improvements.

1) It would be great if we could get a tab in the fire control panel to control movement, even if only to contacts, lifeboats and task groups. Attempting to set follow courses to contacts from the giant list in the TG control is a pain, considering the way the list is ordered.

2) Rearrange the contact list in FC to list the closest ships to the selected ship first.

3) Have the contacts in the FC display bearing from the selected ship, in addition to distance and tonnage.

4) Have a little box in the contact list on the left hand side, to easily distinguish armed ships from unarmed ships in the contact list.

5) Have a range with current fuel level in the TG window, right below the ETA and range to next order.

[InfinitySquared]

Different icons for body types would be nice, as well as the ability to automatically follow a selected body/TG in motion.

An example color scheme would be:
Blue circle: planet/moon
Brown square: asteroid
Brown diamond: comet

And stuff like that, with potential color changing depending on status.

[MarcAFK]

It would definitely help speed up combat for the fire control list to be ordered by distance.

[Theodidactus]

At 10-20 years of play it would probably take weeks or maybe months of real time play to get a new jp. A

my game is large and complex and I simulate a lot of political stuff behind the scenes but for some perspective it's taken me one real life year to play the last 2 decades of gametime.

[IanD]

I think that Maintenance facilities are grossly overpriced and overmanned. Currently one maintenance facility in Aurora employs 50,000 workers and can maintain 200 tons of ship. NASA when operating the Space Shuttle (Mass 2030 tons) only employed approximately 58,000 people including contractors. I suggest allowing one maintenance facility be able to maintain 2000 tons and employ 5,000-10,000 workers. After all its meant to be an advanced maintenance facility, isn't it?

Ian

[MarcAFK]

The actual shuttle was only 100 tons, but I agree, maybe there could be a tech line that increases capability of maintenance facilities?

[linkxsc]

Make armored missiles more of a thing.
Looking at the game, every aspect of missile design can be compacted with higher tech, with the exception of armor.

Now this could be wrapped into an "ablative armor" tech. Or run off of the regular armor techs. Ofcourse it would suck to see like 50 armor missiles running around so it should perhaps be a little expensive to research, but it would be nice, from time to time to actually think about using large armored missiles (that dont need to be 50% armor by weight to even consider being effective)