Author Topic: C# Aurora Changes Discussion  (Read 441959 times)

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Iranon

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #300 on: October 28, 2016, 07:59:44 PM »
@ TCD: Yes there are associated costs and restrictions for bulky ships with oversized propulsion plants. Shipyards, maintenance facilities, jump drives, sensor footprint, bigger crew...
it's a personal preference, not clearly better than more compact ships for now.

When we're encouraged to put a decent fuel load on everything though... hmm.
What is a decent fuel load? 40% of engine weight gives the best performance on a given tonnage, I usually wouldn't get close to that.
If x is our proportion of fuel in the propulsion setup and we keep the range constant, speed is proportional to (x(1-x)^2.5)^0.4... we get a nice graph for the trade-off between fuel economy and performance, naturally peaking at 2/7 (as that corresponds to 2 parts fuel out of 7 parts propulsion, i.e. 5 parts engine, i.e. 40% of engine weight).
If we give up 10% of the highest achievable speed, we cut the fuel use in half.

Note that these considerations may include tankers, e.g. if your fleet is accompanied by equally fast tankers using the same engines... it's easy to blunder into using excessive amounts of fuel for no gain.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #301 on: October 31, 2016, 11:36:30 AM »
All the changes so far seem very good. I do hope that there be some changes to how hangars work, at least provide ships in hangars with a maintenance cost, don't give them a free pass. With the change to how maintenance work this should not be a huge problem to add to the game. I always feel like I cheat when I park larger ships than a FAC in a hangar, especially in PDC hangars since neither the PDC nor the ship pay any sort of maintenance.

In regards to the refueling discussed I find this to be a very interesting and fun mechanic. In general I give ships about the amount of fuel they need to do combat maneuvering inside a system. Smaller ships usually get about 10-15 billion km range, medium sized ships like destroyers get 15-20 billion range and cruisers and up 20+ billion km range.

I also rather put less engines (20-30%) on my ships in favor of more powerful ships or less fuel efficient engines on smaller ships. I rather sacrifice speed for operational versatility in my designs. I usually move task groups with an intricate web of picket and scouts so the core of any task group remain hidden from the enemy, this means that large ships need to move slow in the first place to remain undetected through their heat signatures. Big ships usually get more expensive and more fuel efficient engines, both in engine size and power to fuel efficiency. Thus larger ships are much slower than smaller ships, but since they usually move separately this is not a problem for me.

The new refueling and resupply mechanic is a welcome addition to me and I already build dedicated fleet tender ships to accompany large task forces.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #302 on: November 01, 2016, 04:07:19 AM »
Would support the idea of seeing parking a ship in a hangar as cheating in terms of maintenance. Maybe parking a ship there offers a maintenance reduction to 1/4th (or a fitting reduction value) from which the ship can be unmothed. Also there would be no crew onboard during that time (at least when parked in a PDC), so any previously gained experience would go back into the personell pool. If you unmoth the ship you have to train the crew again from the beginning on - giving a good reason NOT to mothball everything.
 

Offline Tree

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #303 on: November 01, 2016, 04:30:57 AM »
Would support the idea of seeing parking a ship in a hangar as cheating in terms of maintenance. Maybe parking a ship there offers a maintenance reduction to 1/4th (or a fitting reduction value) from which the ship can be unmothed. Also there would be no crew onboard during that time (at least when parked in a PDC), so any previously gained experience would go back into the personell pool. If you unmoth the ship you have to train the crew again from the beginning on - giving a good reason NOT to mothball everything.
Fighters shouldn't lose training or crew, though.
Maybe FACs too.
Maybe a little box to check, decide if the ship is mothballed and sits there, useless, not costing too much or if it's ready to go at any time, and costing much more.
 

Iranon

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #304 on: November 01, 2016, 06:19:16 AM »
I agree that we should have an eye on things that play around game concepts entirely.

Shove things into a hangar, and avoid maintenance completely.
Give things enough maintenance life until obsolete, never overhaul, maybe never maintain.
Build things with an eye towards fuel efficiency, so we don't need refueling during a mission (fast ships) or ever (slow ships).
If we just want high tactical speed - solve the fuel problem with carriers (possibly commercial in the future) or tugs.

I think it's best if extreme approaches have their niche, but don't dominate conventional designs for general use.
Current problems: Excessive PDC hangars are conceptually problematic for long games, because they eliminate running cost entirely.
Tractoring military pods is very attractive mechanically, but incredibly annoying (allows offloading engines to a commercial design, some other tricks, but chain breaks with every malfunction).

Refueling and maintenance situation is ok-ish at the moment, but any significant inconvenience/cost increase may favour playing around the system. Fuel is pushing it already (I find it best to invest very little RP/BP in fuel logistics and limit fuel use by design concessions).
 

Offline TCD

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #305 on: November 01, 2016, 09:52:14 AM »
I agree with most of what you said Iranon, especially the general theme, but to nitpick a few points which highlight what a difficult discussion this is:

Build things with an eye towards fuel efficiency, so we don't need refueling during a mission (fast ships) or ever (slow ships).
A classic situation of conflicting viewpoints- why should I need to refuel during a mission? During a campaign, sure, but why during a mission? Modern naval warships have a range in the thousands of miles, so they can complete most short term "go and destroy something and return home" missions, at least in their neighborhood, and would only need to refuel for something like a picket, or multiple missions strung together. So in Aurora why shouldn't my cruisers be able to jump into a system, go destroy a planet and return to their home system without refueling? But then again, how many systems should I be able to transit through without needing a fuel tanker?
If we just want high tactical speed - solve the fuel problem with carriers (possibly commercial in the future) or tugs.
I agree, but what about the people who don't want to solve fuel/maintenance problems but want to have a cool star destroyer that is so big it can fit corvettes in it? Giant alien motherships are a staple of sf...
Refueling and maintenance situation is ok-ish at the moment, but any significant inconvenience/cost increase may favour playing around the system. Fuel is pushing it already (I find it best to invest very little RP/BP in fuel logistics and limit fuel use by design concessions).
I'd say you're not playing around the system in that case, you're playing with it, by taking an efficiency hit to make your life easier. I guess the question is, would you be against Steve introducing a new expensive and slow engine with infinite endurance (call it a "zero point fusion drive")? That would allow people to entirely by-pass fuel logistics but at a very upfront cost to their ships? I'd be cool with that, let people play the game as they fant to play the game, but keep things balanced, so the zero-point engine would have to be expensive and slow compared with the conventional engine alternative.
 

Iranon

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #306 on: November 01, 2016, 10:41:40 AM »
1) I'm all for different designs for different roles. My point was that planned changes that are intended to add depth to fuel management make it attractive to simplify fuel management instead.

2) Could you elaborate where you see the problem? Those star destroyers seem fine now, and in the next version as far as I can tell.

3) I wouldn't see the point, because we already have access to cheap and slow engine that may a well use no fuel.
Engines with 0.1 or 0.15 power multiplier can run for centuries on a fuel load that wouldn't raise an eyebrow for faster ships.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #307 on: November 01, 2016, 01:23:33 PM »
Fighters shouldn't lose training or crew, though.
Maybe FACs too.
Maybe a little box to check, decide if the ship is mothballed and sits there, useless, not costing too much or if it's ready to go at any time, and costing much more.
Good idea, deciding what type of hangar it is. Maybe two different types of hangar space - one which works like it does right now (except doing a medium amount of maintenance) so crews stay on it and will be up to speed - and another type which is a mothballing hangar which removes crew entirely and uses only a little maintenance.
 

Offline TCD

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #308 on: November 01, 2016, 01:25:29 PM »
2) Could you elaborate where you see the problem? Those star destroyers seem fine now, and in the next version as far as I can tell.
Oh, I thought you saw a problem and were calling for a change in hangars to prevent folks abusing the fuel/maintenance system? If not, my bad.
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #309 on: November 01, 2016, 04:12:44 PM »
Good idea, deciding what type of hangar it is. Maybe two different types of hangar space - one which works like it does right now (except doing a medium amount of maintenance) so crews stay on it and will be up to speed - and another type which is a mothballing hangar which removes crew entirely and uses only a little maintenance.

Yeah it's probably easier to make two hangars. One bigger "Mothballing hangar" that takes enough time for ships to re-activate from that it's not possible to use for Carriers/Fighters, and the normal we got now.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #310 on: November 01, 2016, 08:51:01 PM »
Refueling and maintenance situation is ok-ish at the moment, but any significant inconvenience/cost increase may favour playing around the system. Fuel is pushing it already (I find it best to invest very little RP/BP in fuel logistics and limit fuel use by design concessions).
I disagree. Designers of single-player games should not waste any time on how to combat player exploitation of the system, aside from ensuring basic mechanical robustness of it. There will always be exploits available and sooner or later someone will post an Excel sheet that allows everyone to min/max their ships to their hearts content. Aurora currently supports multiple different playstyles, which is something I value highly. To me, it doesn't matter if they are equally balanced or not. Furthermore, the tolerance point for micro-management is different for every player and can change even with the same player depending on his mood. So unless Steve pushes a system to levels of obsessive-compulsive behaviour - which is unlikely - there is no need to worry about whether people play around the system or not. Hell, everybody who has been playing Aurora for a while knows that missiles are clearly better, yet most of us keep building beams as well.

So, while you dislike the fueling/maintenance system and design ships that need as little of both as possible, I quite like building the logistics network, having maintenance stations and fuel depots everywhere. Just like I know that mechanically a single colony with 10 DSTS is the superior choice, I still prefer building ten colonies with one DSTS each.
 

Offline Felixg

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #311 on: November 01, 2016, 11:24:44 PM »
I have wanted the ability to mothball my ships forever. Ideally mothballing should be done in space, remove all the crew, fuel and munitions and let it sit there, in complete vacuum there should be 0 maintenance needed. Things wont corrode without atmosphere, and things wont break down if they arent being used and thus no maintenance is needed.
 

Iranon

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #312 on: November 02, 2016, 04:29:18 AM »
@ Garfunkel: To me, it's a success when you can min/max to your heart's content and find that there are reasonable trade-offs to be had rather than a clearly preferable approach.
Aurora is surprisingly good at this.

Btw, I have played Aurora for a while and don't know that missiles are clearly better. Getting the job done without expending ammunition is preferable if possible, so at least for low-intensity conflicts beams are attractive. And for one big battle... missiles would struggle against something consisting mostly of base-tech beams (ideally railguns for some measure of PD) and very low-power engines: the target is literally cheaper than the ordnance necessary to destroy it. Made worse by concerns of overkill v. point defence.
Spoilers are known, functional NPR designs are unlikely to take extreme forms that would warrant metagaming, so it's easy to fall back on a missile doctrines that's known to work... but the mechanics certainly don't support unqualified superiority of missiles. And it'd be a sad thing if they did.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #313 on: November 02, 2016, 04:44:00 AM »
I have wanted the ability to mothball my ships forever. Ideally mothballing should be done in space, remove all the crew, fuel and munitions and let it sit there, in complete vacuum there should be 0 maintenance needed. Things wont corrode without atmosphere, and things wont break down if they arent being used and thus no maintenance is needed.

Yes, more or less this... there are allot of radiation is space but not damaging enough to a starship in the time frame you would mothball them in a game, perhaps a few decades at most. Space function very well as an environment to mothball ships or you could just dig a big hole in an asteroid and place them there.

I would love for sensors to not be linear when that was brought up with the DSTS stations, I always restrict myself heavily on large sensor systems for that reason alone. I don't think they necessarily need to scale realistically, just not completely linear.

As long as there is a maintenance cost with hangars I'm happy. If Steve want to introduce a mothballing mechanic I don't think hangars is needed for that at all. You should just be able to mothball ships and have them re-crewed at a later stage with basic training. Now you need to retrain the ships. This would be enough of a deterrence for doing it too often. The ships should perhaps also automatically be at around 25% of its maintenance cycle when you reactivate them, so you need to perform a maintenance overhaul or risk them breaking apart when used. A simple tickbox for mothballing would suffice.

If you are a min/max player there are many mechanically abusive way to play the game. In single play you can do whatever floats your boat. If playing the mechanics is fun no one is there to stop you as is no one stopping you role playing. Aurora is more about building your own story line and imaginative world anyway.

I think that some player want certain aspect changed not because they are restrictive but because they help give more options. Sure... anyone can role-play that refueling takes time and set aside space for small cargo holds and cargo transferring equipment in their military refueling ships and then have the ship take some time to refuel. The problem is that it is too micro and takes too much effort to do this when the game cold do it automatically for you. The same goes for maintenance on ships in hangars. This is not a problem in short games but rather irritating in long games where resource imbalance become a thing.

The game has continually evolved making the logistical side of it more and more involved and realistic, I think this is just good. There are almost always ways to work around any perceived micro managing tasks it brings with it. Such as ships with millenia worth of crew and maintenance facilities or engines with more or less no fuel costs. But at least they have ship design drawbacks you need to deal with. We should not just have to imagine everything, drawn to its extreme we might as well imagine playing as well... ;)
« Last Edit: November 02, 2016, 05:00:02 AM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #314 on: November 02, 2016, 04:56:32 AM »
@ Garfunkel: To me, it's a success when you can min/max to your heart's content and find that there are reasonable trade-offs to be had rather than a clearly preferable approach.
Aurora is surprisingly good at this.

Btw, I have played Aurora for a while and don't know that missiles are clearly better. Getting the job done without expending ammunition is preferable if possible, so at least for low-intensity conflicts beams are attractive. And for one big battle... missiles would struggle against something consisting mostly of base-tech beams (ideally railguns for some measure of PD) and very low-power engines: the target is literally cheaper than the ordnance necessary to destroy it. Made worse by concerns of overkill v. point defence.
Spoilers are known, functional NPR designs are unlikely to take extreme forms that would warrant metagaming, so it's easy to fall back on a missile doctrines that's known to work... but the mechanics certainly don't support unqualified superiority of missiles. And it'd be a sad thing if they did.

In my opinion the meta gaming of missiles being superior is a not really true. It is perfectly viable to build ships in a more balanced approach and be successful. You should look at what resources you are mining and see how best you can expend those resources to build efficient ship designs. Having weapons that can destroy target without spending much resources are really effective in the long run.

There are some problems mechanically how some weapon systems works though, such as PD only able to fire at one salvo at a time and clustering up missiles in huge swarms making DP practically pointless, even AMM to some extent unless they also are fitted as box launchers and so on... there are certainly ways to break the mechanic by abusing them.

I also wish missile maneuvering capability had a greater impact than speed on how good missiles are at dodging or hitting something, make sense to me. This would make slow missiles more viable than they currently are which also would introduce a higher complexity with PD systems.