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Topic Summary

Posted by: tobijon
« on: March 28, 2018, 08:33:51 AM »

If you tie in teams to research then the same can be done using ground troops, have a special troop ability to do research.  If such a thing were implemented, i think it should be a limited amount per planet.  So an interesting planet can get studied to get terraforming data, but not indefinitely.  The same mechanic can also apply to planets with ruins, with parts of research being found there (not just by recovering laboratories, but just the buildings themselves can reveal a lot, this can be reflected by such a mechanic). 
Posted by: Bughunter
« on: March 28, 2018, 06:15:42 AM »

I think just the potential for expanding it in interesting ways later on makes the team mechanic worth keeping. Like adding the possibility for teams to be abducted by hostile aliens. Or tie them in to some research branches, like a terraforming tech getting a bonus from sending a team to a specific type of rare planet to study it.
Posted by: ardem
« on: February 21, 2018, 10:28:01 PM »

I still not see the need for geology team it should be abstracted based on the number of mining stations you employed. I am normally a fan of micromanagement, but moving geology teams from one planet to another and finding deposits within a year is neither realistic or beneficial.

Realistically it should take 40+ years to ground survey a planet, for minerals.
Posted by: Hazard
« on: February 21, 2018, 04:22:30 AM »

Especially since we'll now have a transport bay that's about 1/5th smaller than the smallest we had before.

That seems about right for an independent survey unit, at a no-mechanics glance, though of course it will depend on how much survey capability you can actually fit into that much troop tonnage.

Not a lot of it. Enough, mind you, that you'll be able to get a decent estimate in a couple of decades as they roam the surface of an Earth sized planet looking for signs of TN materials, but that's about it. I personally expect that a given 'team' for archeology or surveying will mass at several thousand to several tens of thousands of tons between the equipment needed and personnel numbers.

Remember, that '5 tons for a basic weapon' isn't just the weapon; it's also everything that's needed to operate it, including the soldier and his life support systems.
Posted by: Conscript Gary
« on: February 21, 2018, 12:01:05 AM »

Especially since we'll now have a transport bay that's about 1/5th smaller than the smallest we had before.

The 100 ton bay will transport 100 tons of troops (about 20 soldiers or a heavy tank).

That seems about right for an independent survey unit, at a no-mechanics glance, though of course it will depend on how much survey capability you can actually fit into that much troop tonnage.
Posted by: Dr. Toboggan
« on: February 20, 2018, 08:09:49 PM »

I personally might request that survey ships be able to carry survey teams around that they automatically drop as part of surveying.  Then they wait for the team to finish, pick em up and move on.

If Steve does implement survey ground units, couldn't you just put the smallest troop bay on your survey ship, then carry a unit around for this?
Posted by: QuakeIV
« on: February 20, 2018, 07:37:21 PM »

Because letting the game decide legitimized the amount, accessibility, and location of the minerals, rather than it just being something you make up.

I personally might request that survey ships be able to carry survey teams around that they automatically drop as part of surveying.  Then they wait for the team to finish, pick em up and move on.

It's a bad idea in the near term for feature creep reasons I think, until Steve at the very least gets a test game going, but in general I would argue this might be nice.
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: February 20, 2018, 09:44:10 AM »

there's no reason not to fully survey every rock
If you are so obsessive that you HAVE TO use geo teams to survey every system completely, down to the last asteroid, then you are obsessive enough to go nuts with something else. I only use teams on bodies that I'm already colonizing or mining or using otherwise. I can't even imagine the OCD required to survey 200+ bodies in the hope of getting more minerals. Why not just use SM to put few million of each TN mineral somewhere and call it a day?
Posted by: Dr. Toboggan
« on: February 19, 2018, 02:54:17 PM »

Maybe the alien ruins could be expanded? There would be a higher chance of finding them, but the rewards would be reduced.  When your xenologist unit (or whatever form they will eventually take) finds the ruins and excavates them, they could discover something like an ancient defense network/fortifications, giving a small defense bonus to ground forces.  Or perhaps the team gets attacked by local fauna, which would require them to be somewhat defended.

For geological surveys though, I think that the possibility of more minerals should be detected during the initial scan, and then require a dedicated team, with the extra cost of transporting the team there being a big pay off in terms of minerals.  This could give it much more of an expeditionary feel to the mechanic, since instead of just sending teams to Mars, Venus, Europa, etc., your long range survey ships have found something far from your borders that is well worth the expense of exploring further. 

However, both of these should probably be limited to large planetary bodies.  Maybe instead for asteroids, there could be a chance where once the sensors finish the scan, the ship would scan the body again, with a chance to find extra minerals.  Rather than sending an entirely separate expedition, the ship just does a double check and might find something it did not see on its first pass.
Posted by: the obelisk
« on: February 19, 2018, 02:35:17 PM »

Geological teams (or the unit that resonances them) should do more than just have a chance if fusing nite minerals or increasing accessibility.   Maybe they could give you an idea of the what the planet's trade goods situation will be if you decide to set up a colony.
Posted by: Bremen
« on: February 19, 2018, 02:17:43 PM »

The original geology team mechanic was intended for use on a few key worlds (which is how I tend to play it). However, I didn't think it through that well :)

The ground-unit solution for a few worlds only would match my original intention.

To clarify, my opinion is that even when confined to a few worlds, it doesn't really add anything (except maybe roleplay opportunities I guess) that having the minerals surveyed from the start doesn't. Though in that regard I do at least favor the ground based teams over a second type of survey ship I suppose, since it's not doing the same thing twice.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: February 19, 2018, 04:16:06 AM »

The original geology team mechanic was intended for use on a few key worlds (which is how I tend to play it). However, I didn't think it through that well :)

The ground-unit solution for a few worlds only would match my original intention.
Posted by: Bremen
« on: February 18, 2018, 01:27:25 PM »

It lets you pick out potentially useful worlds for further investigation, and then further-investigate them.  It's a good RP endeavor with practical benefits.  I don't think it was ever really intended as something you should do for every dead rock.  In Aurora-VB, i only team survey potential colonies and bodies that already have notably good minerals.

In Aurora-C, it could also potentially have impact on ship design, and on player behavior. Right now, optimal play essentially involves throwing out lots of expendable survey ships because they really arn't worth the fuel or effort of naval squadrons to even pretend to protect them.  A large science vessel worth many BP and carry as much as 10 or more commanders would in comparison be an asset of considerable worth.  Or, difficulty of survey could be split up between 'asteroidal' - easy - and 'planetary' - much more difficult'.

Consider that surveying is somewhat degenerate right now in Aurora VB.  There's little consideration of systems too far to practically survey - little use of forward survey bases - no percentage in protecting your survey ships.  It's unappealing micro precisely because there's little reward or engagement in the mechanic right now.

Except as you point out, there's no reason not to fully survey every rock, because distance is otherwise a large obstacle. Better to have 100 minerals in a colonized system system than 1000 ten jumps away. So in practice geosurvey teams/ground units always boil down to "the optimum path is lots of unnecessary micromanagement".

As for the rest, I'm not opposed to survey ships being more expensive, I'm opposed to having to survey things twice to get the full results. Not to mention two levels of survey wouldn't change what you're saying; if there were cheap initial survey ships and expensive secondary survey ships, people would just explore systems with the cheap ones and only send in an expensive one once the system was checked out (and thus wouldn't need an escort).

If you want actual reasons to escort them, or establish frontier bases, you'd want expensive survey ships but only one survey level.
Posted by: TheDeadlyShoe
« on: February 18, 2018, 01:06:35 AM »

I really don't see what the game gains by having multiple levels of survey. It isn't a fun or interesting mechanic, and it adds nothing except micromanagement.

So my suggestion remains to just have the one level of survey. If you want to have the equivalent of more in depth surveys on larger planets, just increase the survey point cost of large bodies and have it give accurate reports the first time - then you can model larger and more efficient geo scanners by just putting more scanners on the survey ship.

It lets you pick out potentially useful worlds for further investigation, and then further-investigate them.  It's a good RP endeavor with practical benefits.  I don't think it was ever really intended as something you should do for every dead rock.  In Aurora-VB, i only team survey potential colonies and bodies that already have notably good minerals.

In Aurora-C, it could also potentially have impact on ship design, and on player behavior. Right now, optimal play essentially involves throwing out lots of expendable survey ships because they really arn't worth the fuel or effort of naval squadrons to even pretend to protect them.  A large science vessel worth many BP and carry as much as 10 or more commanders would in comparison be an asset of considerable worth.  Or, difficulty of survey could be split up between 'asteroidal' - easy - and 'planetary' - much more difficult'.

Consider that surveying is somewhat degenerate right now in Aurora VB.  There's little consideration of systems too far to practically survey - little use of forward survey bases - no percentage in protecting your survey ships.  It's unappealing micro precisely because there's little reward or engagement in the mechanic right now.

Posted by: Graham
« on: February 17, 2018, 11:55:43 PM »

I feel the current survey teams are a little clunky.   They require a lot of manual effort and management.   It would be nice to either attach that ability to another entity in the game and/or to provide automation to the player in conducting surveys.   For example, you could add teams to survey ships and have them explore and survey automatically.

If we are just having two levels of survey which both operate in the same way, we may as well just remove team surveys, since it would then be adding basically nothing.
I prefer the previous idea of using ground forces, but only only having a handful of bodies per system worth surveying, and maybe add some new events to survey to make it more interesting.