To start off with the option of buying sorium mined from gas giants off the civilian lines like we do with regular minerals.
No matter what flavour of engine you use for an identical power output you consume the same amount of fuel per Engine Power Hour. What this means is that a conventional engine is as fuel efficient as a Magneto-plasma drive, just you can generate more power in the same space. There is no improvement in fuel efficiency as your engine tech improves.
This doesn't seem quite right. Almost like (in wet navy terms) as saying a reciprocating steam engine is as efficient as a high pressure steam engine is as efficient as a diesel engine is as efficient as a nuclear reactor.
With the recent changes to fuel requirements it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility to increase engine efficiency as the tech improves.
One problem with boarders is the question "How do they know?"
I'd suggest making this visible and distinct with claim markers, or beacons. These might be a PDC/ship component or piece of infrastructure. When active they would be visible to everyone in system like a transponder. The message is simple: "Mine, says Galactic Empire X." This way any ship entering a new system can instantly and realistically know if the new location is unclaimed or not.
An option could be to make JG specific to nations. If I build a gate on my side of a JP, and you transit through, you'd have notification of who owns the gate. You could still transit through the gate like normal. If I build it on the other side of the JP, you'd get notification like above, who owns it and you can still transit.I was thinking a flavor of nav buoy at jump points to lay claim to a system. A variation would be that only races that have established comms can read each others buoy's.
In practice right now you have no clue who "owns" a system either, so....
Exactly. I kind of like it that way myself. Really, until you would establish a diplomatic relation with that race you wouldn't know what any of their borders were. Such is the vastness of space that you might have been cross-crossing several of their systems that they claim as their own but you two never saw each other so you didn't know.
Adds an interesting dynamic in my opinion. I certainly understand your point though, for me personally I like the fog of war concept applied here.
I just had a new epiphany: tactical sorium harvesters and refineries.
Very small, rather slow, not practical for anything but implementation on deep space explorers. It would need to be of a scale that wouldn't be suitable for much aside from self-refueling geo and grav survey ships. I don't think it would be realistic that such a vessel would be capable of providing fuel services for a military fleet aside from an extreme emergency.
I would like to suggest having a list filter in the ship design screen, next to the race filter, to split the list of ships into military, fighters, missiles, PDCs, civilian(crown), civilian(private), and replace the show civilian design tickbox to show foreign designs.you can sort by hull type and size.
-The ability to classify a planet as an outpost, which would limit the total population to a small size.
*Ground unit theme names.
I would love to able to set default names for ground units. IE if I train up 5 Mobile Infantry, it might name them Security Company or Feudal Levy or Response Team or Armored Raiders. It's kind of a pain to rename them one by one, too much to bother with, especially in a multi faction game.
Anyway, back to the main topic: I'd like a task for shipyards that auto-builds slipways, in a similar way to continual capacity expansion. Constantly expanding my FAC SYs gets annoying.
This suggestion came from the thread about fixing missile damage and the amm spam attack tactic.I agree that giving some damage resistance is the way to go Brian, but there are several ways to do it.
How about a hybrid of the current ablative system, and the system it replaced many versions ago. The old system was each level of armor prevented 1 point of damage from each hit. So with two points of armor a missile doing 1 point of damage was effectivly doing nothing. The same hit with a base damage of 3 would be getting 1 internal damage point. The armor was not changed as the ship took hits.
...
The one major question I would have is if this would be to hard to code in. Each shot would need to compare the damage being done to the amount of armor remaining in the specific column being hit. This might add to much processor time to be worthwhile.
Brian
EDIT: For the same reasons, I'd like an auto construct ship option.
There is a delete star button in the System Properties screen with SM on. You don't need to wipe the whole system to get rid of offending outlying bodies.
Give us a reason to spread our labs around a bit. It's not logical that they all should be focused on earth (or what your starting colony is called), but just like with mines you need to move them around and expand.
1.) A new lab called "field lab". It works a bit like an auto mine, and only require for example 20000 workers instead of 1 mil. To balance it is twice as expensive as a normal lab.
2.) Divide ruins into two parts, the science part and the recovering physical installations part. To be able to recover tech from them you need to move at least one lab and scientist there and start working on a sceintific project, to speed up the process more labs can be moved there. This needs to be balanced so that it pays you back around 100% more RP then invested per tech level higher the ruin is.
3.) Field labs can also be built as a big ship/space station component (similar in size and cost to orbital habitats), so you can build science stations that provide research to the colony they orbit.
4.) Add "anomalies". These can be located on planets and give a local bonus in one certain fields of research, for example +50% power and propulsion research on that planet. Anomalies can also be out in space related to jump points, for example a stalbe or unstalbe wormhole allowing travel for crafts with no jump engine without building a jumpgate.
5.) Studborn researchers, sometimes a researches refuse to leave his colony, so if you want the bonus the labs need to move to the colony instead!
As for spreading them out, I usually end up doing so because of ruins.Guess that is a matter of playstyle, just hauling the recovered components home has been more simple for me so far.
I recommend adding a [Default] button on the "Game Details" and "Create New Game" windows. It would be quite useful to new players who are afraid of playing around with the settings without being able to remember what the "default" settings are.
Also, I recommend a [Quit] button on the "Game Details" window. The "Create New Game" window has one. But the only way to quite "Game Details" is by clicking the [X] in the corner. And that has the side-effect of starting an empty game, with a narrow game menu appearing and requiring the player to select "Exit" from the "Game" menu to confirm.
Another tilt at the size-1 missile windmill: (detailed discussion in http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,5525.msg61571.html#msg61571)I like the entire package sugested here.
1) Add a fixed-size "guidance package" requirement to all missiles of e.g. 0.5 MSP (missile size point). This would give a size-2 missiles 3x the usable volume of a size-1 missile. It doesn't have to be called a guidance package (the last time I proposed this I think the response was that even a big computer is much smaller than a MSP), it just needs some technobabble to justify it being a significant fraction of an MSP.
2) Fix the "why doesn't my armor tech affect my ability to armor missiles" problem as follows: Missile armor is treated as ship armor, with a factor of 1/20 thrown in to account for the MSP/HS size ratio. So 1 armor point (which can absorb 1 warhead strength point) on a ship is the equivalent of 20 MAP (missile armor points). This means that a str-1 warhead can kill any missile with up to 20 MAP. Beyond that, you could either treat the missile as having a single armor column to absorb hits or continue with the probabilistic kill formula (probably a lot less coding/book-keeping). The reason for doing this is:
3) Allow size-0 (or almost-size-0) warheads to kill missiles. The easy way is to say that the missile itself does 0.05 strength points of "kinetic kill" damage. This is enough to kill 1 MAP, with lower kill probabilities on armored missiles and no chance of scratching a ship. And since we've got the guidance package mass, we don't run into the previous problem with micro-missile exploits - the minimum size of a missile is the guidance package size. The reason this is needed is that the guidance package overhead will nerf size-1 AMM, so they need some other mass savings to make them effective.
I think there's a lot of goodness here: Fixing the missile armor problem by making missile armor and ship armor more closely related, fixing the issue that a str-1 warhead will be overkill for most unarmored missiles, pushing the balance towards beam PD for taking out big, heavily armored missiles, solving the AMM spam issue, ...
John
the alternative would be to be able to target with lasers invidiual systems (AKA weapon systems, engines, sensors) The would give more weight to laser or close in weapons and open a vast array of new strategies. Even Laser fighter might be given a real role.It would still require you to get very close. I can't imagine being able to specifically target subsystems unless the weapon already has well above 100% chance to hit the target.
When using win 7 on a laptop with a screen resolution on 1366 x 768, even with the minimize height on, I often can't see the bottom line in most windows. Could you maybe add a scroll function?
I would love to see an improvement for Population growth and spread mechanics.
Suggestion 1:
Add a new value called something like Natural Population Capacity for planets, based on how close they are to optimal race conditions and actual available area size of the body. Geological activity and % water would subtract from the available area effecting this negatively. This could also effect terraforming so that even if average temperature is 30 deg too high/low outside the acceptable interval there will still be a few areas (perhaps 2% max area) that can be settled with colony cost 0, so the actual colony cost is set to 0 but with a very low population capacity until average temperature is closer to race optimal. Everything above the cap is treated as normal requiring infrastructure.
This value is supposed to model how many people can comfortably live on a body without major infrastructure investments (modelling "normal" buildings fairly close to ground level and fairly spread out with a good percentage left for farming and industry/jobs for everyone).
For Earth it would probably be a 2000-6000 million (we have infrastructure today and are not living sustainable with food for everyone), but for bodies not perfectly terraformed or smaller, for example Mars (0.28 of earths area) or even smaller inhabitable moons it would be much lower.
If we say 4000 million for Earth it would be less then 1000 million for all Jovian moons as an example.
Growth % would be a function of how far from this cap you are.
Basically the mechanic means there is a cap on how big population can enjoy col cost 0 without infrastructure, but you can still always use infrastructure (at say cost one or two) to go above it if you want.
I'm not sure if odd gravity should influence how many that maximum can live on a body, perhaps high gravity should at least influence it negatively, what do you think?
Suggestion 2:
Add a new way of priority for what colonies are preferred by colony ships when there are multiple possible destinations. The two major things influencing where we move today are, is there work available there? and is it a comfortable place to live?
So the desirability of a colony should primary be modeled after this, an ideal colony would have a major shortage of workers and also an abundance of available spare room for colonists.
Civ shipping lines and civilian mining colonies are completely distinct. There is no relation whatsoever between the two mechanics.
There should be.Agreed, would be interesting with a game mechanics where it actually was major civilian mega-corporations that was responsible for all shipping, civilian mining as well as all the civilian industries in an empire. Each civilian outpost would be owned by a corporation.
Recently had a situation arise where only one line existed and had no freighters yet was popping up civilian mining colonies, this was causing me numerous problems
I don't understand why this caused you problems - you had three things you could do:
1) Build/use your own freighters.
2) Build mass drivers.
3) Forego the minerals in favor of taking tax revenues.
John
Mining colonies:
You don´t want to buy the minerals _and_ you don´t want the civies to have the minerals?
Well, there realy is no third option - I don´t see your problem here, except, you want to mine yourself.
If so, place a colony on the body after surveying it and the civies will not put a civilian mining colony there.
Shipping lines:
AFAIK, the type of ship created by the shipping line is random, so you just had a series of bad-luck rolls.
While this is tough luck, it is nothing to get worked up about. Perhaps the shipping line specialized in orbital sight-seening runs or somethig like it (yes, the passengers in a cryogenic transport won´t see a whole lot).
Allow non-SM player to apply starting RP. If there is not enough RP left, apply remaining points as a partially researched project. At present the remaining amount is not always visible everywhere the Instant tech button is available, and SM mode does not check. There is also no way to apply partial research to use up any remaining points without going over.
The RP is merely a guideline for start, not a hard and fast rule.
Save player notes in the database, attached to various objects. Notes on a ship design, for example, could be appended to the class summary. This would be particularly helpful in the Environment/GMC tab so a player can record terraforming targets for all gasses, not just the active one.
Save player notes in the database, attached to various objects. Notes on a ship design, for example, could be appended to the class summary. This would be particularly helpful in the Environment/GMC tab so a player can record terraforming targets for all gasses, not just the active one.
Several places in the game already allow notes, including class designs, individual ships, and officers.
Artificial Gravity on ships.If I recall correctly, this was discussed back during original game development. Basically the gravity effect for the crew is a side function of the inertialess drives. For Standard Aurora I don't see Steve changing this and I think it has been discussed in Newtonian Aurora, but have no reference to what may have been decided.
I know this is sort of abstracted in the "crew quarters" components, but I don't think they should be. If you think about it it's a major technological breakthrough (and probably not possible in real life). Early tech ships should not have it or have to use a lot of space/resources to get it.
I envision two tech lines. Large physical rotating components that can provide a certain level of gravity for a certain number of crew. The percentage of gravity provided of your racial norm along with the percentage of crew provided with gravity should affect moral, deployment length costs, and combat readiness.
Eventually have a higher level technology layer for a more "magic" technobabble device that produces artificial gravity via fiat without the large rotating sections. The trade would be while much small they use power from generators to provide the various levels of gravity.
You could add several modifier techs to improve the capabilities of this components like power required to gravity produced modifiers and so on.
Not taking into account inertia just means we are pretending our crews are not splattered against the aft bulkhead when accelerating to the speeds we use. That is indeed hand waving a real force of physics.Absolutely. It's a fundimental handwave for Standard Aurora.
What I am talkin about is gravity that keeps your feet on the floor, which ouside of rotating sections is just scifi magic.
It would be nice to have a small initially available ground unit that simulates a small landing team for role playing purposes. I spend the first few years of a conventional start sending small space craft to Mars and beyond (just an engine and a requireds) to role play the first manned missions to solar bodies. It would be cool to have a size 100 GU called "explorers" or "away team" to simulate/role play these historic firsts or later in the game missions to the surface of planets. No real stats, just a role playing I was there sort of thing, you could actually have an assigned officer be the first to set foot on the Mars.That is exactly how I used my GeoSurvey Team. True, I was hoping they might actually do a survey, but the RP worked nicely.
Yeah that works sort of but since they are 250 in size there is no way to do it in the early game and its still cumbersome as hell in the late game at that size.Geology Survey team, not Construction Brigade. No size, and any ship can transport them.
A central screen to manage teams.
Specifically:
-List all teams, # members, score, and current location.
-A dropdown box listing ships/colony at current location to transfer to.
-A button to disband the team (with confirmation).
Isn't this already all on the team tab of the economics screen?F2 Economics only works for teams on planets, and you must find the correct planet.
Geology Survey team, not Construction Brigade. No size, and any ship can transport them.
Retaining deceased officers until the turn after their death would be nice. Too often I've seen 'has died in an accident' and find myself frustrated that I can't review their accomplishments and accolades in life.
In the Galaxy Map, known one-way jump gates are not highlighted. As they are of strategic importance, perhaps such gates could be highlighted at just one end? I would suggest the end that has a gate, as an out-facing gate would be visually connected to the controlling player's system, while an in-facing gate would be visually disconnected, emphasizing foreign advantage.
(Default Orders) Survey Nearest Asteroid
Upon Relief Move To Earth
Refuel From Colony Earth
Resupply From Colony Earth
Overhaul (Rewind Clock) Earth
Relieve 2nd Survey Squadron
Cycle
(Default Orders) Survey Nearest Asteroid
Upon Relief Move To Earth
Refuel From Colony Earth
Resupply From Colony Earth
Overhaul (Rewind Clock) Earth
Relieve 1st Survey Squadron
Cycle
Relieve 2nd Defense Squadron and send to Earth
Move to Mars
Move to Titan
Move to Waypoint XXX
Move to Waypoint XXX
Move to Venus
(Cycle)
As far as I know, AI ships don't calculate fuel.
This creates a hole in their economy, and allows them to scout forever.
Maybe instead of not using any, at all, the ships should have a default order to return home at 10% fuel, excluding combat, but not actually face consequences if they run out.
Bar any better suggestions made that I just haven't seen.
... it appears that modifying members of a subspecies is totally impossible. :( Under the GMC drop-down, the only available option is "No Modification for Derived Species. "
I think I won't bother trying to colonize Triton after all. . .
Yeah, the current rules make GMC [Genetic Modification] mostly useless. Dropping the no remodifying subspecies limitation would do a lot to fix it IMO. It would break the limitations of genetic modification at the cost of slowing modification. It's already difficult to modify large populations anyway. Maybe bump up the rate of GMCs as well...
You cannot genetically modified a previously modified species, only a base. For example, you can drop Human Temperature Tolerance by 205 to create Homo Artcis, but you cannot drop Homo Artcis' Temperature Tolerance by a further 20%
i found a planet where humans would require infursturcture. I Genetically modified and created a human 2 race now the colony 3 jumps out from earth had humans on it so i sent human 2 there and removed the humans. Now im getting messages that human 2s are still resenting minority status even though all other original humans have been removed and their colony buildings etc sent over to the new ones. Seems to be a bug or a ability to change the race on a planet but the unrest still rises
...I just started producing genetically engineered "Lunies" on Earth. Every 5-day, I now get a "Unrest Increasing"/"Unrest Ruthlessly Suppressed by Ground Forces" pair of messages which interrupt auto-turns. I assume it's coming from "Unrest Increasing", and I'd like to turn it off. [snip]...i.e. the interrupt is forcing me into 1-click-per-turn mode.
I read an interesting suggestion on the Genetic Modification: switching between subspecies? (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,5992.msg61457.html#msg61457) thread on The Academy (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/board,19.0.html). As such, I thought I would mention it here on the official suggestions thread:I would assume it's because you could get a much-lower temperature tolerance without doing the research. Instead of studying temperature minus 30, you could just do a temp minus 10 modification three times. At any rate I don't think the solution is to modify modified species. I think this actually creates a good incentive to go out and conquer alien species, so you can modify their races to make new types of slave populations.
Perhaps it was feared players would abuse the GMC system?
I would assume it's because you could get a much-lower temperature tolerance without doing the research. Instead of studying temperature minus 30, you could just do a temp minus 10 modification three times.Fair point.
At any rate I don't think the solution is to modify modified species. I think this actually creates a good incentive to go out and conquer alien species, so you can modify their races to make new types of slave populations.
*Ground unit theme names.
I would love to able to set default names for ground units. IE if I train up 5 Mobile Infantry, it might name them Security Company or Feudal Levy or Response Team or Armored Raiders. It's kind of a pain to rename them one by one, too much to bother with, especially in a multi faction game.
Give us a reason to spread our labs around a bit. It's not logical that they all should be focused on earth (or what your starting colony is called), but just like with mines you need to move them around and expand.
4.) Add "anomalies". These can be located on planets and give a local bonus in one certain fields of research, for example +50% power and propulsion research on that planet. Anomalies can also be out in space related to jump points, for example a stalbe or unstalbe wormhole allowing travel for crafts with no jump engine without building a jumpgate.
i found a planet where humans would require infursturcture. I Genetically modified and created a human 2 race now the colony 3 jumps out from earth had humans on it so i sent human 2 there and removed the humans. Now im getting messages that human 2s are still resenting minority status even though all other original humans have been removed and their colony buildings etc sent over to the new ones. Seems to be a bug or a ability to change the race on a planet but the unrest still rises
If you captured a colony on the same planet as yours, it would be nice to have a button that could merge the two colonies on the same planet. It would be helpful for the multi-faction starts.
I've noticed that Brigadiers and Major-Generals have some issues, and had thoughts about those.
It seems to me that most Brigadiers are useless, and the same applies to Major-Generals. The problem is that once you reach R2 rank, the only stat that appears to matter is training rating. The ground combat bonus only applies to the unit they are assigned to, and Brigade and Division HQs are rather useless in combat in general. With that in mind, I had this thought:
Why not have a similar system to how Major-Generals transfer their training rating with ground combat bonus?
For example, a given Brigadier might have a 20% GCB. Transfer 1/4 of this to each of the battalions under his/her command. A Major-General would similarly provide just 1/16th to each battalion (and perhaps 1/4 to each Brigade HQ). This would imply that Brigadiers are giving better orders to their Colonels (and so on).
One of the new players had an NPR pop into an already-surveyed system through a hidden warp point http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,6351.0.html (I'm reverse-engineering what he said) and had a LOT of trouble figuring out how to re-set the survey points so that he could re-survey. In fact, he thought he'd done a re-survey.
He pointed out that it would be good if the button that clears the accumulated survey points in a system were non-SM-only. +1 from me :)
John
Academy suggestions.
Make changing ships and task groups between task forces more user friendly and less complicated. The dropdown menu on the task group screen doesn't work and the group always reverts back to fleet headquarters task force.
F9 shows system information which gives info about ships survey, but I can't see team's survey there. Are there team's reports also (like: Geological Team Survey Completed NO/YES).
If not, it will be helpful to have it here. I tend to use it more, as it shows whether space body is moon, planet, comet, asteroid. F2 colony summary does not show this info and I am not happy to send Geo Team to comets :)
F4 Commanders menu (called Leaders)
Clicking inside Potential Assignments window I can see commander detail in window Current Commander Bonuses but Additional Details (commander details) remain unaffected. Please make it auto-refresh as well, to the same current commander view.
The civilian contract system is very comfortable as you don't have to design routes to transport installations and can just say what you want to transport, however there are several things that could be improved.My biggest problem with mineral transport is that it doesn't follow the general rules of refining. That is less refined materials (minerals in our case) Always take up more space/weight for transport since the very essence of refining is removing stuff.
- Allow the transport of minerals and components: This would make it possible to fully rely on chartered civilian freighters, for minerals a repeating order would be even better. To prevent civilians from picking up 2t of duranium, maybe a minimum of filling half the ship would have to be added for them to consider the job.
My biggest problem with mineral transport is that it doesn't follow the general rules of refining. That is less refined materials (minerals in our case) Always take up more space/weight for transport since the very essence of refining is removing stuff.
That is not true at all in Aurora where you can fit many times more minerals in a single cargo hold then end products "refined" out of the same minerals.
Mineral freight and setting up these routes should be the core transport flows, and they should require huge civilian or imperial freighters.
In the real world what ships are the biggest of all? Oil tankers carrying raw unrefined oil![/list]
I always thought that duranium had replaced the role of steel/plastics seeing how it's used in everything and described as the most common ore.For example in mu current game there is a 100mm Lightspear (Laser) which requires 1x Duranium 1x Boronide 3x Corundium to manufacture, but the device itsdelf probably also has steel, carbon fiber, plastics and various other component parts that are not accounted for in the game, presumably because the cost of obtaining these components is trivial when compared to the cost of the TN minerals.
The TN minerals are more like rare earths in manufacturing today - used in small proportions to make devices but having a significant effect on the cost. For example the use of Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr), Samarium (Sm) or Dysprosium (Dy) in creating Magnets or Europium (Eu) and Yttrium (Y) in making LCD displays. Obaining these elements is not usually difficult, but it can be expensive (because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable ore deposits)
As far as I understand the mass on components are not actually the real mass as in the total weight, it is more a combination or ratio of volume and mass. So the end product of a component will have one mass which is not equal to the mass of the mineral from the start. At least that is they way I have interpreted some posts from Steve that I have read in the past.It doesn't matter if you measure volume or mass, raw materials should still have significantly more of both compared to the final refined product ;)
A little suggestion:
Could we have an order to "Load Ordnance" from task groups? This would really make reloading from colliers much easier. I tend to keep my colliers in separate TGs, and now when I need to reload, I have to merge task groups and then reload each ship individually in its details screen. It would be much, much faster just to use single order for all ships at the same time - just as we have the "Load Ordnance" order at populations.
(Or am I missing something and doing it wrong?)
A minor one: have the generated messages about an officer check their sex...so it isn't automatically "his" when "her" would be more appropriate.
You can mark class designs as obsolete. Components too. Delete them, as well. Edit them, if there isn't a shipyard producing them.
Ah, I see. Yeah, that would be good then, since I keep seeing class names in russian on mine.
The ability to edit, delete or obsolete Hull types. - Easily 80% of the list is populated by types that I will never use, and many of the ones that I do use I would prefer to be able to assign my own abbreviation.
Actually, deletion is probably a bad idea. If the designations were linked to a game, then I can support that. But I think the NPR also use those designations. So game and race linked.
Yeah, I thought that might be a possibility, which was why I put the obsolete option in there.
I don't argue that unrefined ore would have less mass and volume than refined ore. However, there are no indication that what is mined could not also be refined at the same time. So what is shipped could actually be in its refined and pure form (Sorium being the only one we know is not refined).Actually Industry is per definition refining less valuable raw materials into more valuable usable end products...
With that said a construction of Duranium such as infrastructure could certainly have allot more volume than the unrefined Duranium ore, it could be several factors bigger in volume.Why? Today the infrastructure we use is very efficiently packed for shipping towards final assembly using steel (girders, rolls, rebar), concrete and asphalt.
I think it would be a more legitimate question to ask why a cargo ship (or ships with hangars) require as much fuel when fully loaded as when empty. This goes for it's speed as well. The same with missile space, fuel etc.. It works for tugs.I agree, perhaps if the civilian cargo ships became bigger instead of more numerous, there would be extra calculation power over to simulate such things?
I don't mind the simplicity as it is, but I would not mind that both volume and mass was used as well as different fuel and speed depending in the ordnance, cargo, fuel and flights carried by a ship.
I think it would be a more legitimate question to ask why a cargo ship (or ships with hangars) require as much fuel when fully loaded as when empty. This goes for it's speed as well. The same with missile space, fuel etc.. It works for tugs.
I agree, perhaps if the civilian cargo ships became bigger instead of more numerous, there would be extra calculation power over to simulate such things?
Suggestions:That sounds like the perfect opportunity to make Civilian Fuel Harvesters useful.
Why not create a financial incentive for private companies to launch larger and larger ships as long as the routes are profitable enough to justify it? Possible solutions:
1) Have privately-owned civilian ships use a small amount of fuel and force them to deduct this cost from their profit margin. With larger ships able to haul more stuff for each round trip on the same amount of fuel (or less), they'd be more profitable. (Maybe make larger ships slightly faster, too?) If running out of Sorium becomes a concern, that might be fixed by increasing available amounts.
2) Profit maximization can be calculated as a function of revenue, minus costs, over time. Revenue is currently a fixed rate of 5 or 10 wealth per contract. With larger ships able to handle larger contracts in a single trip, vs making multiple trips, they take less time to complete the contract. Larger ships being able to handle more contracts in a give time span should have them considered more profitable. (Though, larger ships cost more to produce. So the ship should have to pay for itself before it is considered profitable and justification to produce more.)If that is how it works then the logical conclusion is that those players that see a runaway civilian traffic have a big colony on luna and possibly also spaceports on both earth and luna reducing loading/unloading times. That would mean extremely frequent wealth income from very short traderuns.
Also, do civilian ships have a lifespan (in years) after which a company must retired (scrap) them? If not, something like that might eventually reduce the number of smaller ships companies will initially produce.Yes, IIRC it's something like 15 years if a ship of the same type is launched and otherwise 20years.
FF Islip class Frigate 15,350 tons 434 Crew 3916.8 BP TCS 307 TH 2000 EM 2400
6514 km/s Armour 3-55 Shields 80-400 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 17 PPV 14.02
Maint Life 2.68 Years MSP 2711 AFR 110% IFR 1.5% 1YR 539 5YR 8081 Max Repair 1575 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 2
1000 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (2) Power 1000 Fuel Use 34.94% Signature 1000 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 33.6 billion km (59 days at full power)
Gamma R400/192 Shields (40) Total Fuel Cost 320 Litres per hour (7,680 per day)
Single 15cm C5 Near Ultraviolet Laser Turret (2x1) Range 180,000km TS: 12000 km/s Power 6-5 RM 3 ROF 10 6 6 6 4 3 3 2 2 2 1
Fire Control S16 96-12000 H50 (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 12000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Tokamak Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1.15 (2) Total Power Output 18.4 Armour 0 Exp 12%
Active Search Sensor MR840-R100 8/21 (50%) (1) GPS 105000 Range 840.0m km Resolution 100
ECCM-1 (1) ECM 10Shorten training time for ships.
I have 3 new ships that have been training for 1 year. The lowest training rating among all of the officers in that fleet is 250 (my highest in the entire officer pool is 375). After 1 year, they're only at 34% trained. This seems absurdly low for an entire year of training.
The ship's stats are:Code: [Select]FF Islip class Frigate 15,350 tons 434 Crew 3916.8 BP TCS 307 TH 2000 EM 2400
6514 km/s Armour 3-55 Shields 80-400 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 17 PPV 14.02
Maint Life 2.68 Years MSP 2711 AFR 110% IFR 1.5% 1YR 539 5YR 8081 Max Repair 1575 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 2
1000 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (2) Power 1000 Fuel Use 34.94% Signature 1000 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 33.6 billion km (59 days at full power)
Gamma R400/192 Shields (40) Total Fuel Cost 320 Litres per hour (7,680 per day)
Single 15cm C5 Near Ultraviolet Laser Turret (2x1) Range 180,000km TS: 12000 km/s Power 6-5 RM 3 ROF 10 6 6 6 4 3 3 2 2 2 1
Fire Control S16 96-12000 H50 (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 12000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Tokamak Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1.15 (2) Total Power Output 18.4 Armour 0 Exp 12%
Active Search Sensor MR840-R100 8/21 (50%) (1) GPS 105000 Range 840.0m km Resolution 100
ECCM-1 (1) ECM 10
Previous frigates of similar design have trained in less time (about a year), but that was with an officer with over 400 CTR. These are rare officers. It just seems odd that training would take years (even a whole year is a bit over the top, but acceptable). To me, 6 months should be average.
By this measure, no ship laid down at the start of WW2 was fully trained since they take 2 years to build, and 3 years to train the crew...
I suspect it's a combination of factors.
1) My current admiral of the TF is a fighter pilot glitch admiral. He's been admiral rank since he was 25 years old. So, his CTR is only 125. I'd put someone else in charge, but he's actually better than the *other* fighter pilot glitch admirals.
To me, training should be a maximum of 1 year in the worst case (no TF staff bonus, 25/50 CTR). Best case should be weeks, or perhaps a month. This would make the most sense realistically.
A small change in missile design:I like that idea. I haven't really done much with sensor missiles, because it's annoying to try and get the exact right size and still be effective, and the lines of decimals are really ugly.
The reactors for sensors now have infinite lifetime, so the reactor space is allocated automatically. If you allocated sensors right now you have to fiddle around to get your desired size.
So my proposal is that the allocated size for sensors includes the reactor, so if you want a 10 MSP sensor buoy, you simply enter 10 in the box, and the game calculates how much of it goes to the sensor and how much to reactor space.
In a way you can.
Repairing a damaged component cost twice the "maintenance failur repair" amount, so if you have a base/ship with lots of spare parts, you can reload your damaged ship and continue repairing.
This is one of the reasons, my ships carry at least twice as many maintenance supples as the "Maximum Repair" on the design screen says.
Note: You can _not_ repair armor in that way, but everything else is fair game.
WrecksWould also add a lot of tension if it was hard to tell a wreck apart from a stationary object with powered down (or knocked out) engines.
Should not be visible system-wide, but detectable normally by sensors
This would be particularly helpful in the Environment/GMC tab so a player can record terraforming targets for all gasses, not just the active one.
I'd really like to see a set of time advancement buttons in the event updates window, I find that a lot of the loading time of the game is just opening up all the information in other windows, and I like to avoid having stuff open other than updates so I have a clear idea of whether or not I actually need to do anything at the beginning of every turn.
Please please please please please make it possible to select whether an event is worthy of an interrupt or not. :(I believe this is already in there. One of the buttons on the Event Log screen should bring up this functionality.
I believe this is already in there. One of the buttons on the Event Log screen should bring up this functionality.
Also the fleet combat control panel list is major pain to sort out. I can't see any rhyme or reason to the listing. So 4th Squadron Battlegroup is not immediately above 4th Squadron Support Group and 5th Squadron...instead you have to scan through the list trying to find the ships.
@AbuDhabi, if you're still around - do you know about the "Minimum Intervals" box in the system map? You can put, say, 50 intervals in there, click auto turns and 30s, and the fights will require a lot less clicking of time buttons. :)
I believe some events do stop interrupting if you filter them, but that generally doesn't include combat events...
Soft lockYou can already fire missiles at waypoints, just place one in front of the target, and you should be able to launch a salvo of self guided missiles at it.
Ability to lock/launch missiles with self-guidance on passively tracked targets calculated interception points. (Based on their current speed and heading as well as missile speed)
Missile would have 0% chance to hit unless able to pick up the target on it's own sensor.
This would give stealth oriented ships operating alone the ability to fire on detected targets without revealing them-self.
You can already fire missiles at waypoints, just place one in front of the target, and you should be able to launch a salvo of self guided missiles at it.Yes I know that, but this only works when they have already spotted you and thus are heading straight for you... Which defeats the entire purpose of operating passive only "stealth" ships that can fire without being detected.
I would like to suggest an interface function to toggle display of civilian ships. In some of my games they become so numerous that the lists of civilian ships crowd out other information on the system map.
What I was thinking about was having an option on the New Game Menu to restrict or limit the weaponry choices to either Missiles or Beam/Kinetic Weapons for both the NPRs, Spoilers (Perhaps with the exception of the Invaders) and the Player.
It could be like this:
Missiles only game: Missiles, Drones, etc..., as the only offensive weapons. Beam/Kinetic ONLY as PD (Can't target ships or they have really poor accuracy).
Beam/Kinetic only game: Beam/Kinetic as the only usable weapons. Missiles would only be able to be placed on Mines. Drones usable but only on non-combat (Geo/Grav Survey) or semi-combat roles (Active/Thermal/EM Sensors).
I believe this would be a great option for the game, allowing currently semi-useless or very situational weapons like Plasma Carronades or HPWs to be effective.
Kinetic weaponsThis is one of those "laws of realistic sci-fi" problems. Any spaceship fast enough to be interesting is an unparalleled weapon of mass destruction by its kinetic energy alone. The truth is that a mid-game 20,000km/s fighter would probably cause a crater the size of Texas, kicking off a dinosaur-esque mass extinction event. If you stick to realistic models of motion and include technology powerful enough to travel between planets then you get a situation where you don't need warheads ever, you just accelerate towards your opponent and toss a bag of relativistic crowbars out the window at a distance of a few light seconds.
For fun I figured out the joules in a kinetic strike on my first gen missiles in the game I am playing in the fiction section, which are 4 msp and go 30,000 km/s. I got a large number and I checked it against the Tzar Bomba, the largest nuclear device that humans have ever set off, and the W88, the main warhead in the US at present. This strike is ~1.7 times the size of the Tzar Bomba and ~200 times the size of the W88.
So saying that 1 warhead, which is what the ICBM has, is equal to the Tzar Bomba then we get kinetic missiles that do damage comparable to missiles with warheads. Practical purposes would be both cost effective and it would give a viable option for lower missile tech. To get the "warhead" size for such a device would be ((((speed*1000)^2)(msp*227))/2)^(1/15)/240. I don't know how hard it would be to code in the putting the speed and the msp into the equation but past that I shouldn't think putting it into warhead size would be that hard.
Now that multi-faction starts with NPR are viable, there's only one thing left that would make me very, very happy (almost like a Christmas gift!)
Making conventional NPRs work.
By that I mean, they would research TN elements and then gradually start researching all the prerequisite techs for weapons, wormhole hopping etc., build their first ships, start colonising space... Is this too much work? They already seem to be partly working (for example, they do convert conventional industry to normal factories) but it seems the AI is confused by the missing prerequisite techs.
I would like to suggest that certain actions take time that are currently done instantly now. As these actions can be done manually and in that sense take no time it could be argued that it is odd to have them take time when done in a order but the reality is they do take time when done manually...they take the players time.
I'd suggest that refueling takes a time rated by the amount transfered 100 m3/h might be a starting point plus a fixed time to couple and decouple. If any Navy people are about they probably know as a quick google didn't reveal a rate that I could find.
Remunitioning a ship with missiles probably should be a fixed couple/decouple time and then 5-10 min per missile space point to move it from one ship to the other.
Spares could be moved at a rate of 5 min per MSP transfered plus the fixed couple/decouple time.
The couple/decouple time isn't exactly that the two ships lock airlocks but mainly the time that is required to get close to each other and open airlock doors and exchange all the standard transfer protocols list and everything else involved in such transfers.
This would be another case where logistics skill could be used to reduce the times.
The major problem is that there are a lot of basic TN techs and most things you build or design requires one or more of them. For a TN start they are almost all available so no problem. For a conventional start I would either have to set up checks for the techs every time an NPR considered designing a ship, constructing an installation, etc, or create a series of flags for all the various ships, installations etc and check/set those flags every time a new tech was researched. It's possible, it's just a lot of work. I will get to it one day :)
Wouldn't it be a bit easier to have a solution where you just give them one or a few long list with these "basic" techs and have them postpone all ship design and ship building? Still allow the basics like upgrade conventional industries (which usually takes a few decades anyways), or do other conventional start things until they have the basic research for most ship design figured out so ordinary AI can be used.
Basically either just use a single flag to say "ding" now I'm ready with all the basics, or perhaps have two flags one for civilian and one for military ships.
That's possible but it would put them at a huge disadvantage. For example, you can build survey ships or freighters a lot sooner than you can build a warship.
My main point was that this would put the AI in a much better situation compared to currently regardless of if there are some inefficiencies ;DWould it be possible to have several phases of development, essentially checkpoints on one long research queue? You could have a "civilian shipbuilding" and a "military shipbuilding" phase, or you could go somewhat more complicated and have "explore" (survey ships only), "expand/exploit" (colony ships, gate construction and freighters) and finally "exterminate" (military construction) once they reach the end of the starting research queue and transition the standard NPR AI.
That's possible but it would put them at a huge disadvantage. For example, you can build survey ships or freighters a lot sooner than you can build a warship.
My suggestion, adding the "always on top" for windows
then adding the termination of turns for the event log
I play in one monitor and every time when i click to end turn event log hidde to main window. Is it possible to block that did not disappear. Sorry for my english :-[
Or you can use Alt-F3 (I think) to display it again.
when you start a new campaign, every officer is 21. I feel like the head of the children's crusade. Any way to stagger their ages.
when you start a new campaign, every officer is 21. I feel like the head of the children's crusade. Any way to stagger their ages.
Blanketing their homeworld with radioactive dust isn't enough for you?
Build a 20 million ton terraformer and suck all the air out of their world and replace it with flourine if you want.
Might i suggest some work be put into compensating for Game slowdown. Such as trying to implement some functions that use OO language modules that allow for multi threading? VB as i learnt it was only a semi OO language but ive read that it can be used in conjunction with OO Languages or vice verse it helps with dealing with legacy systems built before the likes of Java and C++ became popular.
A somewhat serious suggestion. Can we have some planet destroying weapons? You know, like the Death Star's superlaser :pPerhaps more doable is having an asteroid destroying weapon, or have a certain spoiler race "eat" asteroids.
A bit of searching would have revealed that this is in the works, just don't expect it anytime soon.
Im not sure if this has been suggested but could we have some work done on the fleet order screen to make it easier to choose fleets and stuff instead of a drop down box? It quite unweildly when you have several explorer vessels all acting independently.
I haven't played Aurora for quite some time and I can't check now, so this might have already been implemented but...
Can we get a "reload ordnance from task group" command? The same that we have for populations, only for task groups? When I played, unless I did something wrong, the only way to reload missiles was to do it manually from the ship details screen, which gets very tedious if you have many ships you need to reload.
I might look at this at some point. Don't forget though you can right-click the fleet on the system map and select it that way. It's easier than opening the Fleet window and scrolling down the list.
The aliens can build infrastructure.....Sure they can but how much infrastructure can they make in a day? Even at base terraforming tech of 0.001 a 20,000,000 terraformer will do 54.8 atmospheres a day. So within two days you could take Venus and terraform it to a vacuum.
One thing I would not mind seeing is some changes to the balance for beam weapons and missile weapons.
1. Reduce the size of beam weapon fire controls to 0. Lets be frank here: a dedicated graphics card based solution (the physics chip) can perform the calculations necessary. There is no sensors associated with the system, it is simply a balistic targetting computer that tells the turret or barbette where to point based on the ships sensors information on the targets location. It is in terms of tonnes of material a few kg. The performance cost of it should scale with your settings but the system itself is zero space or at most 1 space. The current situation where the fire control system occupies more volume then the weapon works against the beam weapons sigificantly. It makes it hard to even justify them as a secondary weapon.
2. Remove the x3 multiplier from missile fire controls. This has nothing more than the effect of making it easy to use missiles at long ranges and completely negates the effect of ECM. ECM is best countered by simply overbuilding your missile fire control rather than investing in ECCM.
3. Increase the fuel requirement on missiles signficantly. At the moment missiles contain virtually no fuel. A modern missile is mostly fuel.
4. Change the to hit formula for missiles, and remove the "missile speed"/"target speed" term. In principle if the missile reaches the target is the only affect missile speed should have. Once it is at the target it needs to detonate at a close range so the target is inside that fireball of the missile. This is so far as I can see the missile agility. That should be the only factor determining if the missile hits. The formula as it stands makes sense for beam weapons but pretty much no sense for missiles, and I see no reason the same formula needs to apply to both beam weapons and missiles. Speed would only effect the question of the detonation timer...so it would be the vector sum of the velocities of the missiles compared to the fireball range and timer accuracy. Basically were the missiles moving in such a way that the timing of the detonation left the target outside the effective blast radius. But in this case really fast missiles would suffer reduced chances to hit since the accuracy of the detonator would be more critical.
I understand that none of this will be popular.
Steve, please, could we know why missiles are basically intended as the only viable weapon for a fleet? I am not necessarily saying they should be nerfed in range, but it's not nice that they are the only viable fleet weapon. Let's face it, why using beam weapons when I can just make 10 missile slinging ships, overwhelm point defense from 100m km away, and then reload and do it again?
I didn't start out with the idea that missiles would massively out-range beams. I just created a game with a set of base principles for the physics and that was the result. For example, in the real world if there was a war between two modern navies, how much of the combat would be missile-based and how much would be gun-based? How would that change when they ran out of missiles?
The missile has a huge range advantage because that is simply the reality of the situation. Beams are easy to avoid at any appreciable range just by dodging. Even if you didn't know you were being fired at then random course adjustments would suffice. I could build into the game long-range beams and random dodging but it would add complexity with no game-play benefit. Even with current tech we can send 'missiles' millions of kilometers so there is no justifiable reason to artificially restrict their range.
In a one-off battle, missiles are far more powerful. In an extended campaign, that isn't the case. Once you have played a few campaigns you will be building a significant number of beam ships because missiles have a lot of disadvantages as well. They can be intercepted, missiles have to be built using minerals/wealth and transported to the combat ships, once you run out your missile ship is just an expensive target, missile ships get taken apart in a close range jump point defence, missiles don't work in Nebulae, etc.
You can probably build a viable beam-only fleet. There is no way you could build a viable missile-only fleet.
Hi Steve
Thank you for your time spent on improving this monster game/simulator of whatever it is, all of us are impatiently waiting next 6.40.
I would again stress you the importance to have somehow, ground invasion by AI.
I know, maybe it's not in your plan and you focusing on other, but you could think something of specific and not so complicate as for instance, that AI makes invasion only for a certain kind of planet based on size, thermal signature, distance from its nearest base, I don't know what...
Adding just something of simple that simulate ground invasion would add a lot of fun and surprise, stressing in positive we poor aurora-maniacs ;)
3) Agree absolutely, pre version 6 had rather logical fuel useage
Beams are easy to avoid at any appreciable range just by dodging. Even if you didn't know you were being fired at then random course adjustments would suffice.
I might consider modifying the size of beam fire controls though. I'll probably look at it over the weekend.
I would suggest making it so that shields require reactors. As it is right now you only need reactors for beam weapons, so potentially you never need them. If it is needed to power the shields more ships will need them...plus, atleast to me, it seems like what would power them.
-Five
Keep in mind that suggestion around more systems using energy adds alot of complexity to take into account.
For example what happens if you have energy to only run your shields or your energy weapons? Do both get 50% of the required energy each, or is the other automatically turned off if you try to active one system? Imagine what consequences that would have if it's also linked to life support? :P
How do you manage all this for an entire fleet in a simple way? Are we forced to design a model with energy required to constantly run all systems even if we never are going to use shields and tractor beams at the same time? How do you balance all energy needs in a realistic way? Does shields consume more energy when they are recharging? How much more?
Keep in mind that suggestion around more systems using energy adds alot of complexity to take into account.
For example what happens if you have energy to only run your shields or your energy weapons? Do both get 50% of the required energy each, or is the other automatically turned off if you try to active one system? Imagine what consequences that would have if it's also linked to life support? :P
How do you manage all this for an entire fleet in a simple way? Are we forced to design a model with energy required to constantly run all systems even if we never are going to use shields and tractor beams at the same time? How do you balance all energy needs in a realistic way? Does shields consume more energy when they are recharging? How much more?
An economic suggestion.
One of the issues to a conventional start is that the intial few years (or decades more accurately) has you spending very little money. Thus you accumulate a nest egg of fairly substantial proportions.
Governments unfortunatly (or not) don't work like this. If you have money it is spent. I'd suggest that the maximum yearly surplus be capped at 10% of your current yearly income. Monthly surpluses to be capped at 10% of your income.
So a empire with a monthly income of 1000 could have a surplus no higher than +100, and could over a year accumulate a net positve balance of no more than 1200. This just reflects the fact that governments will transfer money to another project, increase social funding or decrease tax rates to essentially balance their books. Unless they are attempting to pay down a debt they aren't any more keen on a surplus than a deficiet. And weath generated greater than 10% is just lost though the value remains for other purposes. So an empire with a monthly income of 24 000 and expenses of 12 000 would gain no more than +240 but would still be considered to have an income per month of 24 000 or per year of 288 000.
This should apply only to players though to make programing the NPR easier.
An object that is half the size of another object is pretty much the same thing as hitting the larger object at twice the distance. This is a two dimensional thing and has more or less nothing to do with speed. This would obviously also make fighters/FAC more of a valid platform for beam combat, which could be a welcome change for those that like to use fighters for that. Realy large ships should be pretty much sitting ducks for close range beam weapons.
My first reaction was "I really like this idea (bigger = easier to hit)".
My second thought was "but then P(hit) should go down like the square of the range too (because a target twice as far away occludes twice as much angle). So this leads to multiplying the raw P(hit) by (size/range)^N, where N is 2 in real life but probably 1 in Aurora (Aurora usually substitutes linear drop-off for high-powers). This in turn would lead to, for a particular size target, a magic range at which P(hit) becomes >100%, i.e. a sure thing. In other words, from a game mechanics point of view, I think that range and size would become the dominant factors in beam fire control. The problem with this is anti-missile fire - thinking this way a beam on final defensive fire should always hit (due to range being zero).
I think/vaguely recall that Steve might have already gone through this thought process and decided to apply technobabble to avoid the issue because of the major impact on gameplay.
John
One thing that I would like to have in the game would be to be able to use conventional warhead on missiles that are only useful for bombarding planets. That way I can avoid polluting the planet with precision bombardment from space.
Or some other specific weapon that I can bombard a planet with, perhaps some form of kinetic kill bombardment weapon, or a combination of both of these weapons.
I don't have all that much experience with bombarding planets and don't remember how effective a heavy laser would be in let's say Earths atmosphere.
What about a clean warhead tech, somewhat along the lines of the enhanced radiation tech.
One of the early design decisions on Aurora was to make Planetary Bombardment expensive in terms of the environmental effects. This was due (in part) to the old Starfire strategy of GFFP (Genocide For Fun and Profit) where it became a standard to wipe out indigenous populations on usable worlds, and a month later drop small populations that were completely functional and productive. The current situation is intended to ensure that this is not the optimum strategy in all cases, hence I doubt that any "clean" bombardment tech will be introduced. in other words, its a game balance issue not a reality issue. :)
It should be possible to allow rail guns and lasers to support ground operations. The requirement would be a unit on the ground (spotting) and this use of orbital support would give some bonus to the units fighting on the ground. Basically you need to force the enemy into an engagement otherwise it is a bit like random artillery bombardment or for that matter random ariel bombing in accomplishing pretty much nothing.
I'm not sure what you want to give for bonuses and so on but it would not invalidate the concept and frankly there is no real reason lasers can't be fired through atmosphere's you just need to tune them properly, since they are pulsed anyway after a few pulses they have opened a "hole" in the atmosphere. But regareless rail guns would be highly useful as orbital fire support.
So a 10 cm rail gun gives +1% per rail gun to the ground units combat values with a maximum of +25% attack and +50% defence or what have you. Scale it upwards with the rail gun size.
This avoids invalidating ground combat but allows for orbital support. Conventional missiles yeah but really with missiles sizes...not sure how this would work. The key point again would be requiring "boots on the ground" which would again keep the game balance reason valid.
What I'm describing has been used to great effect in strategic games by Paradox, see e.g. this screenshot:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=71416&d=1358497869
I'd like it if shipnames could be cast in sets for classes so that newly constructed ships will draw names from the list for that class (would make things much simpler than at the moment when I have to rename 90%+ of the ships to fit into the class naming conventions I use.
for example have the shipnames.txt with;
[County]Devonshire,Hampshire,Kent
with County being the classname, so whenever you build a ship flagged as County class, it uses the next name from the list (ie if it's the third one it'll become Kent)
Matt
I would really like additional places to control time. Especially on the event window as this is really the only window I'm paying any attention to while time is passing and it would be nice to quickly restart autoturns when the interrupt is inconsequential. Either that or a standalone very slim profile time control that I can put next to the event window or whatever other window I'm watching while autoturns are chugging away. I attached 2 poorly edited paint examples made from cut and pasting resources already in game somewhere.
I did not have to increase the size of the event window, you just lose view of 3-4 events up top (which is fairly inconsequential with a scroll bar).
Not having this is really the only reason I have to play dual-monitor.
I would really like to have fewer places to control time. One place to do it is enough. Having time control that do the same thing in each and every window of a game is plain bad interface design.
Good design would be to remove time control from all windows and have a small separate window for time control that you can put wherever you want instead in that case. Then you can put it next to or on top of your event log or wherever your prefer!
You put it a lot better than I did. I agree with you, the small separate control would add much more flexibility and be simpler.
not sure VB can keep that tab on top?
Most people today have 1080pixles vertical resolution so it's not needed. Dock it on top of (or below) the Events, Economy or whatever window you are using.
Not sure about this.
While I run a dual monitor setup, with one 1920x1080 screen as the main screen and a 1280x1014 as secondary, I mostly set the system view to fullscreen, while the events window and galaxy window sit on my secondary screen, the galaxy window fullscreen with events over it. I'm not sure where I'd put the time control if it wouldn't stay on top automatically, since the game often enough manages to put the events window behind the galaxy window and I have to wait until the end of the current cycle to bring it back to front.
So you don't have a problem at all since you already have time control in the System Map View then? Check.
The original suggestion was to add time control to windows that are not fullscreen. I suggested a better solution is to have a separate small window that can be put above/below the windows that are not fullscreen.
Ah, okay, I misunderstood it then. I thought the notion were to remove time control from every window, like the system map, the F2-screen etc. and only put in one central time control.
To rotate a figure counterclockwise around the origin by some angle \theta is equivalent to replacing every point with coordinates (x,y) by the point with coordinates (x',y'), where
x'=x \cos \theta - y \sin \theta
y'=x \sin \theta + y \cos \theta .
Thus: (x',y') = ((x \cos \theta - y \sin \theta\,) , (x \sin \theta + y \cos \theta\,))
Grease is the word!
Matt
In the summary page for a body it states if the body in question had a ground survey performed or not. Admittedly this isn't exactly what you want, and I'd not mind seeing something somewhere in the system overview to say which bodies have had it as well.
Just picked up the game a couple weeks ago, and have been loving it so far. If suggestions are still being taken, I have a few.
1. "Grant Shore Leave" option (similar to overhaul or resupply or refuel). I'm sure this has been mentioned before, so no elaboration needed.
I don't know if it was already suggested, probably yes because it's obvious, but, I would like to ask to Steve, why don't you disable game interruptions when the human player does not see and it is not affected in what is happening beetween NPRs? I mean, in a standard game with 1 NPR at start and 30% chance to appear another it, the game suffers a lot of annoying interruptions because interceptions, fightings etc., but because this happens in other systems, beetween computer controlled race, these interruptions may be skipped and the interceptions, fightings could go ahead normally.
Crews take shore leave automatically by being in orbit around a colony, no special order needed. I think they need a certain population at the colony though - I forget the exact minimum.
Alternatively, use a ship/NPR with Recreational Facilities component - being in the same location as one of these will also count as shore leave.
What he means is grant shore leave like the overhaul command: "Stay here until the crew completes shore leave, then continue with your order list. "
What he means is grant shore leave like the overhaul command: "Stay here until the crew completes shore leave, then continue with your order list."
Then yes, this would be a very awesome idea.
Also, when you have 600+ systems, it burns a ridiculous amount of fuel to get fleets from one place to another.
Building up a new shipyard/supply depot that can handle massive warfleets is...difficult and you still burn all that fuel getting ships between them.
How about a high-end tech line developed from jump tech that can either build a directed warp-gate, or re-align an existing gated jump point to another gated jump point (at massive time/expense)? That way you can skip the 7 completely empty systems and get to the frontline quicker.
Or maybe the opposite of Hyperdrive: Cruise Engines. A tech that can be added instead of a Hyperdrive and instead decreases thrust for increased fuel efficiency?
This would make moving fleets around much more viable.
Or maybe the opposite of Hyperdrive: Cruise Engines. A tech that can be added instead of a Hyperdrive and instead decreases thrust for increased fuel efficiency?
But the game can't "Go Ahead Normally" when the NPRs are fighting. The combat works basically on 5 sec intervals once missiles start impacting as you have AAM missile fire cycles, point defence cycles and detections etc. Then there are pauses where you can move by 30 seconds to 30 min and then follows another phase where you are down to 5 second turns again. There is no "automatic" resolution function that adds up the attack value and compares it between both sides and determines a winner. The game is built around a 5 s combat turn, and when combat starts it is very hard to get too much away from that.
So you can't advance the time in time segments of 1 day while an NPR is fighting. It doesn't matter if you are being updated on the battle or not, the database is being updated on a 5 game second basis.
That already exists, and has a name. Commercial Engines.
What would really solve this problem would be the ability to mount 2+ types of engines, and switch between them. Added weight and cost in exchange for strategic options seems to fit thematically.
Not too sure if this has been suggested but it would be nice to be able to send yourself memo's for the future. Basically an order or way to send yourself a message to yourself.
LOL this was actually in SA oh so many years ago :) I think it didn't make it into Aurora because SA was turn-based and Aurora is not. Anyway +1 from me for this one.
John
Just a thought - are the numbers of jump points found around a system related to the number of systems shown when starting a game - e.g for a 1000 system game will you find more jump points per system than you would in a 500 system game ?
DavidR
Just picked up the game a couple weeks ago, and have been loving it so far. If suggestions are still being taken, I have a few.I would love all these to be implemented. Note:
1. "Grant Shore Leave" option (similar to overhaul or resupply or refuel). I'm sure this has been mentioned before, so no elaboration needed.
2. "Auto Turn NPR Bypass" Make an option for auto-turn to not cause an interrupt when an NPR interacts with another NPR. I've been getting 1 to 3 day interrupts for a full year of in-game time due to them going back and forth on thermal sensor detections, and it's killing my 70year game.
4. NPR battle bubble - Currently you are able to select (in SM mode) to make a system bubble, to assist with quickening the pace of battles for small-time increment processing. It would be nice if there was an option/system to erect a battle system bubble when two NPRs engage in combat if you have no visibility over said battle, and your current selection is on a longer time increment, so the processing time would be greatly reduced. Make a general "everyone" update every 1 hour or something.
ScottyC
But the game can't "Go Ahead Normally" when the NPRs are fighting. The combat works basically on 5 sec intervals once missiles start impacting as you have AAM missile fire cycles, point defence cycles and detections etc. Then there are pauses where you can move by 30 seconds to 30 min and then follows another phase where you are down to 5 second turns again. There is no "automatic" resolution function that adds up the attack value and compares it between both sides and determines a winner. The game is built around a 5 s combat turn, and when combat starts it is very hard to get too much away from that.Of course the game still needs to hit 5 second increments to resolve the battles, but what I ask is that the game should continue doing 5 second turns or whatever is needed untill the battle is resolved, without needing any player interaction. Also, would it be possible to have a window popup when turns are processing showing some kind of information related to what is going on, this might help to see if the game has actually crashed when windows says it's not responding. The window could be very simple, a small window the size of those damn error windows, laid out something like;
So you can't advance the time in time segments of 1 day while an NPR is fighting. It doesn't matter if you are being updated on the battle or not, the database is being updated on a 5 game second basis.
Aurora Turn Process [x]
Aurora is processing the next turn, don't panic!
Auto turn: [on/off] Increment remaining: [N$]
Last increment: [5 seconds]
Event: Hidden Activity (Tells the player what caused the last reduced increment, with sm mode turned on this might read
NPR battle or New sensor contact or something)
Progress: Doing stuff (This area could have list status of what the game is doing, everything doesn't need to be listed,
specifically nothing that would be a spoiler, but this might actually help to diagnose what's causing game lockup or slowdown)
[Panic button] (An end turn button, please for the love of god let me end the autoturns without having to click that
tiny checkbox at the exact right time between ticks)
Steve, Could you make the "Source of colonists", "Stable" options available on bodies below 25 million population?
This would allow people to somewhat mitigate the Colony ship population dumping bug, while also allowing slightly more options for controlling how the CIVs move your populations around.
- Treat all pop enroute as if they already had arrived for calculating infrastructure demand
Is it not easier to just treat all pop enroute as if it had arrived for both infrastructure AND new population demand. Make sure this calculation is done per ship that load population so that there are not ten colonizers loading population at the same time.
On a side note on population...
I would like for planets that has a high unemployment to get some reduction in production/economic efficiency or perhaps other political effects. Too high unemployment should also result in some unrest. I think there should be more stuff modifying these values overall that you must deal with. It just is too easy to keep people content in the game outside of role-play.
Perhaps if a world don't get enough civilian trade ships (based in their civilian production) they should start to suffer in production/economic efficiency as well, this lower their expectation for trade and soon they reach an equilibrium, once trade ships show up more often the economy will pick up again and start flourishing. These calculation should be done in such a way that it look at how many ships have been these trading in the last 12 month and compared to what the colony would need. Perhaps these calculations would be done once each month, they should not impact performance very much.
Rappahannock class Oiler 15 950 tons 58 Crew 1523.4 BP TCS 319 TH 800 EM 0
2507 km/s Armour 1-56 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 60 Max Repair 50 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 0
Roll Royce Trent 2500 200 EP Commercial MP (4) Power 200 Fuel Use 7.96% Signature 200 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 10 250 000 Litres Range 1452.7 billion km (6706 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
Red Cloud class Freighter 59 900 tons 92 Crew 703.2 BP TCS 1198 TH 1200 EM 0
1001 km/s Armour 1-136 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 7 Max Repair 50 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 1
Cargo 50000
Roll Royce Trent 2500 200 EP Commercial MP (6) Power 200 Fuel Use 7.96% Signature 200 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 1 000 000 Litres Range 37.7 billion km (436 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
Please review the build costs for fuel tanks. For comparison, two designs. The freighter has 50% more engine space, and displaces almost four times the tonnage. Still, it costs less than half as much as the oiler. The oiler's fuel tank costs 1230 BP. I mean, Sorium is nasty stuff, but isn't this a little too much?
Not sure if it has been suggested already but it would be cool to see details for destroyed/decommissioned ships and retired/killed officers. I've been documenting significant individuals as part of my gameplay and an officer who was never particularly prominent but whose name cropped up a few times has just died - now I realise I can't give him an obituary because I don't even know how old he was!
If that would add too much strain to the database, maybe add it for 90 days after the officer/ship goes out of active service just so the information can be retrieved?
TransferShips()
{
for each (Ship ship in GetShipsToTransfer())
{
SourceTaskGroup.RemoveShip(ship);
DestTaskGroup.AddShip(ship);
}
SourceTaskGroup.Speed = CalculateMaxSpeedForTaskGroup(SouceTaskGroup);
DestTaskGroup.Speed = CalculateMaxSpeedForTaskGroup(DestTaskGroup);
}
TransferShips()
{
sourceOriginalSpeed = SourceTaskGroup.Speed;
destOriginalSpeed = DestTaskGroup.Speed;
for each (Ship ship in GetShipsToTransfer())
{
SourceTaskGroup.RemoveShip(ship);
DestTaskGroup.AddShip(ship);
}
SourceTaskGroup.Speed = Math.Minimum(sourceOriginalSpeed, CalculateMaxSpeedForTaskGroup(SouceTaskGroup));
DestTaskGroup.Speed = Math.Minimum(destOriginalSpeed, CalculateMaxSpeedForTaskGroup(DestTaskGroup);
}
My reasoning for the extra accuracy is that the entire ship is acting as the barrel, so more precision should be possible.
<snip> but TN ships travel while constantly under thrust <snip>
I would like to suggest an increase in the usefulness of spinal weapons. I like the basic thought and think that they should be available for any beam weapon.First I agree that spinal weapons should have a different, heavier damage model. I'd be in agreement with a straight linear model. It doesn't seem like much at first. But once you go past a couple of range modifier brackets it is significant.
In addition I think the spinal weapons should have an increased damage at longer ranges, and a somewhat better chances to hit at long range. I am not advocating making them fire beyond normal beam weapons range, just increasing their accuracy at the longer ranges.
My first thought was to add to the range modifier. While that would take care of extra damage at longer ranges it would not make a difference in the accuracy. Does anybody have an idea that would be simple to apply.
My reasoning for the extra accuracy is that the entire ship is acting as the barrel, so more precision should be possible.
Brian
I'm deliberately quoting this out of context to make a specific point.
Aurora does not use (ie deliberately ignores) Newtonian movement mechanics. So there is not thrust for movement, muchless thrusters for maneuvering. The movement model is functionally inertialess. This is why ships stop when they run out of fuel instead of drifting on the last vector and there is not tech to compensate for high levels of inertia.
If and when Newtonian Aurora is released this will change.
History of the Commonwealth of Free States
[...]
Up until 2020, space exploration consisted of unmanned probes with little financial support for manned missions. China sent a manned mission to the moon in 2018 but abandoned further missions to concentrate on earthly expansion. After the carnage of the China Wars, the three superpowers turned to space to try to gain an edge over each other in future conflicts. The smaller powers followed suit, determined not to be left behind. In 2036, a commonwealth science team examining the possibilities of several outlandish propulsion systems made a startling discovery; the existence of another dimension, close to our own, but with radically different physical laws, the most significant difference being that space-time in the other dimension had the properties of a fluid rather than a vacuum
Although they could not find a way to move from our own reality into the nearby universe, the theoretical work of the scientists resulted in the discovered of previously unknown elements with strange compositions that seemed to be affected by the presence of this universe. Unfortunately, almost all of the elements were only found within the molten core of the planet and would require significant effort to access. Given the significance of the discovery, sufficient funds were quickly made available and core mining techniques developed. Once in the possession of sufficient quantities of the minerals, the scientists discovered the minerals somehow intruded into the space-time of the alternate dimension and that spacecraft built from these elements would be affected by some of the physical laws of that universe. They theorized that this would allow spacecraft to turn in space like ships in water but it would also quickly slow them to a stop if their engines ceased operating. A secondary effect was that the mass of such a ship would be dramatically reduced allowing much higher speeds from conventional power systems. Finally, it was discovered that sensors and communication systems constructed from some of the new elements could send energy signals through the other dimension at a speed much greater than light. Within a solar system, communication and sensors would effectively be real time.
This breakthrough meant that long range system exploration was finally a reality and the Commonwealth began diverting more and more funds to building a space-based capability. Such a discovery could not remain secret for long through and within a year, the other nations of the world learnt of the newly discovered dimension and the existence of the minerals, now known as Trans-Newtonian Elements, and began building their own shipyards and factories to support the exploration and exploitation of nearby space.
Two years later, the same team made two new discoveries, the first amazing and the second apocalyptic. Using new gravitational sensors developed from Trans-Newtonian Elements, the team discovered a number of gravitational fluctuations throughout our own space-time with no obvious cause. They theorized that these fluctuations might be caused by the existence of invisible wormholes forming between the gravitational wells of stars and that study of the gravitational fluctuations in a star system would provide the locations of these wormholes. Experimentation with the creation of tiny wormholes provided exactly the readings expected and the scientists informed the Commonwealth government that travel between star systems might be possible if the wormholes could be located and a way found to open them. Work began immediately on ship-based sensors to detect the wormholes and an engine capable of opening a wormhole and taking a ship through it.
To go with the research anomalies you now need the ability to target your salvage ship downloads to a particular system to make most efficient use of the various research outposts in your empire.
Ian
I may be missing/misunderstanding something here, but your salvager already have that ability.
There is a check-box on the "individual ship" page, history/notes/tech data tab to keep the ship from downloading tech data. Generally, I keep this checked until the ship reaches the system where I want that data to be downloaded to.
Yes you can withhold all the data but not a particular piece of data. For example if I salvage a few precursor wrecks with a single salvager, I may get engine tech, armour tech, ECM tech etc. If I am researching the engine tech in one system and all others in the home system I don't really want to download the engine tech to the home system with all the other data. Hope this makes it clearer.
Ian
Hm, thinking about it, how about the ability to _upload_ specific tech data into a ship again, I mean, it isn´t _gone_ it is just sitting in the computers of your research lab and if it fit into the salvager´s databanks and if that salvager was able to download that data to the labs, it sure should be possible to do the reverse.
Perhaps only salvagers (massive databanks that are part of the salvaging module) can hold/download/upload that huge amount of data, or how about creating a new module like "research databanks", so you could build a tech-courier?
A small thing:
It would be cool if the picture chosen for a medal would be changeable, as I'm stuck with a choice I'm no longer happy with.
In the same line of thought, would it be possible to force civilian lines to retire their ships/build them/delete a line completely?+1
Another suggestion from me, missile magazines and maintenance storage should be civilian parts. Right now colliers and supply ships are military classified. It makes little sense that carrying a stockpile of spare parts or missiles instead of fuel or minerals should cause your engines to fail, about the only part that can, which drains a lot of spare parts especially for the huge civilian engines.I completely agree with this.
I completely agree with this.
To me, having a ship that is 5% military should be much easier to maintain than a ship that is 50% or 90% military. Adding 1 laser to a freighter during wartime should not cause the ship to catastrophically explode every so often due to engine failure.
- All magazines, fuel tanks and maintenance to be given a transfer rate. Ie msp per minute / litres per minute with civilian versions having a decidedly worse rate. These rates would then be used to make such transfers take time rather than the instantaneous transfers done today.
Some suggestions for shipyards:
Retool costs should be based only on the cost of new components used, similar to refit costs, except there shouldn't be a size penalty, as you're building new ships. So if you have a new freighter design with just new engines, only the price of the engines is used as cost of the ship for calculating the retool costs.
It would also be good if the expansion could be done by continual expansion to a target size. So if I want to upgrade 7k yards to 15k I don't have to either keep an eye on the size to not end up with oversized yards or have to go through multiple steps to reach the desired size.
FAC's should be assignable to squadrons, to make management easier.If you are fit with the management tab however (task force window), you can have really easy control already, including such quick squadron launches. Slightly better than the fighter window even imo, because you do organization and orders in the same window, and can easily split and connect groups.
I would love to see an improvement for Population growth and spread mechanics.i would like that too
Suggestion 1:
Add a new value called something like Natural Population Capacity for planets, based on how close they are to optimal race conditions and actual available area size of the body. Geological activity and % water would subtract from the available area effecting this negatively. This could also effect terraforming so that even if average temperature is 30 deg too high/low outside the acceptable interval there will still be a few areas (perhaps 2% max area) that can be settled with colony cost 0, so the actual colony cost is set to 0 but with a very low population capacity until average temperature is closer to race optimal. Everything above the cap is treated as normal requiring infrastructure.
This value is supposed to model how many people can comfortably live on a body without major infrastructure investments (modelling "normal" buildings fairly close to ground level and fairly spread out with a good percentage left for farming and industry/jobs for everyone).
For Earth it would probably be a 2000-6000 million (we have infrastructure today and are not living sustainable with food for everyone), but for bodies not perfectly terraformed or smaller, for example Mars (0. 28 of earths area) or even smaller inhabitable moons it would be much lower.
If we say 4000 million for Earth it would be less then 1000 million for all Jovian moons as an example.
Growth % would be a function of how far from this cap you are.
Basically the mechanic means there is a cap on how big population can enjoy col cost 0 without infrastructure, but you can still always use infrastructure (at say cost one or two) to go above it if you want.
I'm not sure if odd gravity should influence how many that maximum can live on a body, perhaps high gravity should at least influence it negatively, what do you think?
- All magazines, fuel tanks and maintenance to be given a transfer rate. Ie msp per minute / litres per minute with civilian versions having a decidedly worse rate. These rates would then be used to make such transfers take time rather than the instantaneous transfers done today.+1 (but i read it's already on steve's todo list)
The ability to edit, delete or obsolete Hull types. - Easily 80% of the list is populated by types that I will never use, and many of the ones that I do use I would prefer to be able to assign my own abbreviation.+1. that's really annoying.
When an officer dies or retires, there needs to be a separate message category for those.+1
Presently, Officer Health and Officer Update categories are overflowing with messages. To see when you need to replace an officer that has been killed, you have to read through a lot of messages.
Would be nice if the GEO and GRAV buttons on Task Groups (F12) first tab "Task Group Orders" was a toggle on-off instead of just add GEO/GRAV orders ( so you can click them again to remove the default order ).
You can use the "No Defaults" button at the bottom of the window to clear the default order that the geo and grav buttons add.Thanks. SO many buttons ;D
I don't know if this has been suggested before , but could Steve please add "unload all ship components from cargo hold " ( or similar ) to a vessels action menu.
This is because that when a salvage vessel with numerous salvaged components on board has arrived at the player colony ;the player at present has to individually
click on each component to unload the item.If the salvage vessel has many cargo holds or is in a Task Group helped by cargo vessels then the number of salvaged components can be many.
DavidR
My personal list of things that will never happen but if they did i would fap myself to death over awesomness of Aurora ( even more than i do now ).
In my case it would be addition of "crazy science" which can be either researched or found. Some examples include:You've played Space Empires IV & V before haven't you?
1. Atmosphere remover, which creates a wormhole to "somewhere" and suck atmosphere out of the body allowing you to easily colonies and terraform Venusian planets (for balance reasons it would be one use item).
2. Gas giant ignitor, which can turn a gas giant or a brown dwarf into a miniature star, allowing you to colonize and terraform their moons that were far too cold previously (always a one use item).
3. Link destroyer/creator that would allow you to destroy an inconvenient jump connection (or to create a convenient one) without resorting to SMing.
4. Superscale habitats like McKendree cylinders, Bank's Orbitals or maybe small (3mln kilometers) ringworlds around those useless white dwarfs.
5. Matter transmuter that would would be deployed close to a star (in the same way fuel harvesters are deployed around gas giants) manufacturing TN elements for free.
2. More ways to generate revenue, preferably though some kind of ship component (like solar power satellites).and Alpha Centauri too I see.
Other things I'd also like to see, but are unlikely to be added are:This would of made my Freelancer based campaign so much easier to make. Even if you could just SM a star's stats and let it generate the system by itself. Or SM planetary bodies' mass, radius and moons.
1. Ability to make a custom star system. Recently I play much less campaigns with all powers starting on Earth and more scenarios with several powers starting in different star systems and getting a reasonable one via random generation is a friggin' nightmare, especially when you want a somewhat specific system for RP purposes.
In my case it would be addition of "crazy science" which can be either researched or found. Some examples include:
You've played Space Empires IV & V before haven't you?
Noooooooooo. I hate things like that. Aurora is suppose to be hard Sf not another Star Trek with "magic".
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,7502.0
Make CMC chances based on mineral quantity/availability.
Yes CMC is an area with lots of possible expansions. For example:
* Shuttle traffic back forth that needs protection to model personnel rotation / maintenance and expansion. Could be present to all colonies and your auto-mine ops too actually if performance allows.
* CMC Corporations where we can track profits and expansion in a way more like Shipping with lines.
* Dismantling/Redeployment of CMCs once minerals are depleted.
* Ability to Add/Remove CMCs in the "SM-Mods" interface
* A civilian market for mined TN minerals and refined fuel where you could buy sell surplus that goes into the sector with prices reacting to supply/demand.
General ( both civilian lines and CMC corporations ):
* Ability to nationalize a shipping line or CMC corporation/location taking full control of all their assets ( 1 CMC is converted to 10 automines ), would also be useful to get rid of unwanted shipping or mines. Should temporary reduce private investment chances in all areas or perhaps wealth/wealth&trade modifier?
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,7502.0
Make CMC chances based on mineral quantity/availability.
Civilian and commercial ships should cost some modest number of wealth in maintenance. They will not require direct maintenance facilities as military ships, these are supplied by the civilian population and you would only pay a sum for each ship each year, say 1/20 of their build cost in wealth per year in maintenance.
I would like to see more integration or fleshed out internal politic of planet mechanics over all.+1
Would it really add much value to have each civilian ship cost say 10 credits maintenance per trip and add +10 credits to their income to compensate?
Would it really add much value to have each civilian ship cost say 10 credits maintenance per trip and add +10 credits to their income to compensate?
Gas giant ignition can be done one of two ways. You can either drop a miniature black hole into it or you can manipulate gravity to begin fusion (large scale project of course, but from what I understand Aurora does feature artificial gravity so it should be possible).
I'd love to seen an option to change racial wealth generation in game, not only during empire creation. I'm in the middle of creating an empire and I've just remember that it was supposed to have a weakness in the form of low per capita income
Agreed. Would also be very useful for RP campaigns where you want one of your empires to gradual improve it's wealth over time.
I think better names would be:
1. Battle Stations
2. Alert
3. Guarded
4. Peace
Just having 4 might be better, and have mothballing and shore leave be the same as transit delay (IE a status effect from an order).
As for fighters and bombers, having a separate alert system for individual squadrons could work. A modern destroyer can launch a light helicopter in 45 minutes when at minimum alert level.
Since Aurora takes its inspiration from the wet navy an alternative would be:
Action (or Battle) stations. Ship is closed up and ready for immediate action.
Defence stations where 50% of weapons are manned and crews are sleeping at their weapons, but ship is not closed up. This could be maintained for a considerable time in WW2, eg time for convoys to pass through threat areas where attack could be expected.
Cruising stations. Ship is on passage weapons at nominal readiness.
Then if ship is in orbit of a planet it could be at 1 to several hours notice to space, systems powered down as appropriate.
However none of this would affect automated weapons ie CIWS. This could open a whole new research path! :D
Ian
Not sure if its been asked before, but it would bee nice to be able to see wich ship is firing certain missiles, or for that matter energy weapons.
Are under attack by an enemy with some 30 ships, his ASM ships went away in an one direction.
His AMM ship is in the middle of his main group, that went in the oposite direction...
But I cant se who is firing alot of AMMs, at 1.8 M/km...
Shipyard damage calculation needs adjustment. I'm attacking an outpost (both sides are player controlled) with a forty thousand tonne shipyard complex, numerous forty thousand tonne maintenance space stations (civilian unarmored constructs) and a couple of twenty thousand tonne warships. The shipyard took twice as many hits as the warships and five or six times as many hits as the space stations and is still standing. And since it has only a single slipway it's not even damaged in any way.SHouldn't it have lost capacity s a result of the bombardment?
Shipyard damage calculation needs adjustment. I'm attacking an outpost (both sides are player controlled) with a forty thousand tonne shipyard complex, numerous forty thousand tonne maintenance space stations (civilian unarmored constructs) and a couple of twenty thousand tonne warships. The shipyard took twice as many hits as the warships and five or six times as many hits as the space stations and is still standing. And since it has only a single slipway it's not even damaged in any way.
I agree that it's random, but I actually like the aspect that you can't reliably destroy a huge shipyard with peashooter missiles.
While I understand making normal damage calculations for a yard could be difficult, I think the probability should be based on the total amount of damage done in a 5 sec tic, rather than any specific missile (in which case the damage would be not 5 but 160 as I was using 32 missile salvos).
That being said, have you seen a SY get destroyed?
halo universeHeh, I was expecting that.
The ability to resize the windows with scrollbar support. This would help people with laptops (like me) a lot. I know in several posts by other people, some said there are some utilities you could install but are difficult to use/hack the laptop (ie resolution set where it cant be displayed). The last time (that I could find) that this was in the suggestions was in 2012 (and twice more in 2010), so I was also wondering if the game could not support that at that time, and if it can support it now.
The ability to resize the windows with scrollbar support. This would help people with laptops (like me) a lot. I know in several posts by other people, some said there are some utilities you could install but are difficult to use/hack the laptop (ie resolution set where it cant be displayed). The last time (that I could find) that this was in the suggestions was in 2012 (and twice more in 2010), so I was also wondering if the game could not support that at that time, and if it can support it now.
Look into the Reduced Height Windows menu option.Already doing that and I still am missing many buttons in TG orders, Intel and FR (SM Options), and System Display.
The version of VB that Steve is using, IIRCVB 6.0, scalable screens/windows are not possible. Steve has stated over the years that this is on his 'to do list', just not a priority.Ok, I did not know.
@athom: Maybe you could try little tools like resize enablers. (I think there was one that was named directly ResizeEnabler) I don't have mine anymore since setting up the computer anew, but those do exactly what you would guess: You become able to resize any program window that normally disallows you to.Resize enable is the only option, but isn't perfect, it tends to scramble windows badly and often requires several attempts before you can reach something, I only just discovered the spacetime bubble option today due to it always being hidden. A good compromise would be for more options to be available through the menu bar.
I have not tried it with Aurora yet, because my 1080p display works just fine with everything, but the tool has never failed me so far.
@athom: Maybe you could try little tools like resize enablers. (I think there was one that was named directly ResizeEnabler) I don't have mine anymore since setting up the computer anew, but those do exactly what you would guess: You become able to resize any program window that normally disallows you to.My original suggestion/question was about how to do it without the additional stuff. I guess I have to use it then. But my problem was that stuff didn't fit on screen at all (ie window was aligned to the very top where you cant move it higher and stuff was still cut off on the bottom), so will this ResizeEnable really work with my problem. Found out what you were talking about but hesitant to download.
I have not tried it with Aurora yet, because my 1080p display works just fine with everything, but the tool has never failed me so far.
In that case it likely wont help you. It doesn't hurt in trying maybe, because this requires no install, but chances are low after what MarcAFK said.Honestly I can't play aurora on anything less than what my laptop has( I forget the specs, I think it's 1366 by 900) the easiest solution is to get your hands on a cheap hd monitor and plug that into your box, the extra screen helps immensely . However I've had at least one netbook that wouldn't allow even an external monitor to use higher resolution, you may need upgraded display drivers.
I've lost my patience and deleted it, so in this particular campaign I have yet to see a yard getting destroyed. I did destroy a lot of them in my previous one though, but I don't remember whether or not it was the same game version.
On the various Ship Details / Class Design views, 'Maint Life' is given in years and 'Intended Deployment Time' is given in months. I'd prefer if both used the same increments.
Having just conducted my first full-scale planetary assault, I second the suggestion that shipyards should be a bit more vulnerable. I dumped 40 size 20 warheads on one 18,000 ton shipyard, an amount that could easily crater a moon, or aerosolize a small battle line of starfrigates, and it had no in-game effect. Given that the primary mission objective was to destroy the shipyard, this was a little disappointing.
The two are slightly different as deployment time refers to how long before you crew start to stink up the ship and demand time away with tribbles. Whereas the maintenance life is how long before the ships begins to literally fall apart.
I think the reason for them being given in different scales is due to some ships only being meant to have short service crews such as fighters and FAC.
I know the two refer to different things - I'd just prefer not to multiply (or divide) by 12 in my head to compare them when I'm designing a ship. And the reason they're given in different scales is that they were implemented at different times, and each used the scale that seemed most sensible for that specific purpose.Really? I thought it was because it was giving the time units in the relative usefulness ie deployment in months because of moral (shown as months deployed in the TG window) and maintenance life in years because of AFR (annual failure rate) compared to MSP (maintenance storage pionts). I actually find the different scales (years and months) more useful. But I might be just reading to much into it.
That's what construction engineers are for.
Happy New Years,Ummm, there already are, as in every planet generated in the game that are not in the Sol system. I think you might have been referring to rouge planets. That actually would be an interesting mechanic. Imagine entering a system and at the center, instead of a star, is only a single planet. The jump points for that could be interesting too, instead of having the multi-layer of search points, have only a sing layer to search.
Any chance of having exoplanets within the game?
You can already make notes, just not in this window. There is a field for notes on the left side, somewhere below observed speed IIRC.But he means in the big box underneath under Class Design Summary.
You can already make notes, just not in this window. There is a field for notes on the left side, somewhere below observed speed IIRC.
"Ugly numbers"I was hoping to do so without it. Even if just for cosmetic, I try to avoid using the space master as much as possible. :P
Trim them down with spacemaster.
Allowing the player to set a design to use lower tech armor instead of the latest one, without requiring him to clone an earlier tech design and use it as a base. Sure, it would be of very limited use, but there are some issues where it'd be useful.+1
A tech that makes ships more efficient in maint, so eventually you dont need hundreds of maint facilities for moderately sized ships.This would really just break the game. The maintenance is set up the way it is for a reason, balance. And hundreds actually give you diminishing returns, and I have even seen adding engineering decrease maintenance life.
An extension of this would be a more efficient engineering space tech, affording more msp and AFR reduction in the same space.
[...], and I have even seen adding engineering decrease maintenance life.That is only due to a calculation bug though. If you add some more after that, it goes up again and reveals itself as better. Had ships with 40-60% engineering, and it was always an upgrade.
Another minor suggestion
The ability to temporarily disable a listening post, or any planets dsts.
Ran into a problem in a game this morning where i dropped a couple dsts off in a few systems. And now i have a system with 1 npr hostile ship that keeps jumping in and out of system every 2 hours and stopping my time increments. Only reason hes getting picked up is because of the dsts, and my fleet is about 8 days away, slowly trawling towards the system to kill him and make the jumping stop.
Don't know if this has been suggested before, but when creating new empires, either from a new game or SMing a new one in, to have a random option in the main empire theme and commander theme, so the game will pick a random empire and commander theme. As I doubt most people use more than a few of themes.You could always just assign a theme/government to a number and use a random number generator and pick the corresponding theme/government with the number. Or draw a name out of the hat, figuratively.
Just two things wrong with what you said. First of all, you said there is no way radiation could effect the interior of a ship with duranium armor except if its already blown up, but the ships don't all have duranium armor. My ships (right now) are using composite ceramic armor, which isn't rad-proof last I checked, as well as if there are holes in the armor (from battle damages) the radiation can soak through anyway. And I never said anything about radioactive material, I was talking about weaponized radiation weapons (specifically radiation enhanced lasers, which by the definition of laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, with normal lasers in game doing a lot already) which are far more than radioactive materials. Secondly, radiation has nothing to do with atmospherics. What your thinking of is radioactive dust, what I'm talking about is radiation which still exists even in a vacuum (as evident of energy from the sun in the form of light, which is radiation, reaching us). Plus, the current rules of the game in itself are already breaking the laws of physics.Pfft.
Sorry, got a little rantty there. I just get ticked off at people who don't know what they are talking about but says things anyway like they are a master of that topic (which does include myself at times).
Pfft.I beg to differ. While yes, duranium requirements do go up as you increase armor, only 2 of the armors are duranium (tech 2-3). Although you could argue 5 duranium armors (t2-t6), duranium is just used because there are no other resources to fill the needs (ie iron, carbon, crystal, steel, ect), all the armors are not duranium armors, although I do accept the values of duranium in the armor it isn't all duranium. 1) Coventional 2) Duranium 3) HDD 4) Composite 5) Ceramic Composite 6) Laminate Composite 7) Compressed Carbon 8 ) Biphase Carbide 9) Crystalline Composite 10) Superdense 11) Bonded Superdense 12) Coherent Superdense 13) Collapsium
First off, literally all ship armor is made of duranium. Serioudly, that is part of why ships take so much of the darn stuff.
Lore-wise, duranium is a primary ingredient in all ship armors, so it is assumed the ceramic-composite is partially "composed" of duranium. It is that way both lore wise and mechanically. The interior of the ship would be also be made of the same stuff. If you don't believe me, look at how the ship cost changes as you add or remove armor.
Secondly, by the looks of things, the only harmful frequencies the hull doesn't seem to absorb is microwaves, as there are lasers with frequencies from infrared to upwards extreme gamma that are all soaked up by armor. Which would also be soaked up by interior airlocks and such.Oh My Goood...*sigh*, I just... *sigh*. Steve or Erik or someone who can do this, please add a facepalm emoticon for the forum.
So really, the only available frequency that could be proposed while maintaining internal consistency is microwaves, as all other frequencies is either a radio or needs to completely burn the hull off a ship before getting inside. The latter of, which we already have, lasers.You literally just contradicted your last phrase.
Just two things wrong with what you said. First of all, you said there is no way radiation could effect the interior of a ship with duranium armor except if its already blown up, but the ships don't all have duranium armor. My ships (right now) are using composite ceramic armor, which isn't rad-proof last I checked, as well as if there are holes in the armor (from battle damages) the radiation can soak through anyway.Anything is radiation proof when used in large enough quantities. Modern Battle Tanks are ceramic armour with DU inserts, which provides limited protection from gamma and x-rays. Most nuclear reactors use H2O or H2 to capture radiation. Six feet of deuterium will caption nearly 100% of the radiation emitted by submerged fuel rods. Any ship that travels in deep space would need to be protected from cosmic radiation, as well as any radiation from stars, black holes, supernovas, enemy weapons, planetary radiation, etc. It would be very odd to have a ship be unprotected against such a common danger.
And I never said anything about radioactive material, I was talking about weaponized radiation weapons (specifically radiation enhanced lasers, which by the definition of laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, with normal lasers in game doing a lot already) which are far more than radioactive materials. Secondly, radiation has nothing to do with atmospherics. What your thinking of is radioactive dust, what I'm talking about is radiation which still exists even in a vacuum (as evident of energy from the sun in the form of light, which is radiation, reaching us). Plus, the current rules of the game in itself are already breaking the laws of physics.I think you're mixing up ionized radiation with non-ionized radiation.
Anything is radiation proof when used in large enough quantities....
Would you folks like me or one of the other moderators to split this discussion out into another thread? It's probably best not to fill up the official suggestion thread with a big debate over a single suggestion, since Steve uses it as a "filing cabinet" to remember the suggestions people have made....Sure, do it.
Thanks,
John
Would you folks like me or one of the other moderators to split this discussion out into another thread? It's probably best not to fill up the official suggestion thread with a big debate over a single suggestion, since Steve uses it as a "filing cabinet" to remember the suggestions people have made....I think I've said all I could say on this topic.
Thanks,
John
Could it be possible for a refit to reset the deployment clock? It won't help me as I am still behind the times but I assume others are running into the annoyance of clicking to remove error messages every production turn.Just overhaul before refitting.
Also it might be worth considering making the Brigade HQ cost less or be free with the development of the mobile infantry battalion. It seems to be an important unit but one that doesn't really require TN technology.Why. That would just be too overpowered.
Lastly could the rank for the CB be set to R2 not R1...it makes no sense for Colonels to be commanding a brigade.The different Empire Themes have different rankings. Another theme will most likely have it the way you want it.
Also it might be worth considering making the Brigade HQ cost less or be free with the development of the mobile infantry battalion. It seems to be an important unit but one that doesn't really require TN technology.
Lastly could the rank for the CB be set to R2 not R1...it makes no sense for Colonels to be commanding a brigade.
Could it be possible for a refit to reset the deployment clock? It won't help me as I am still behind the times but I assume others are running into the annoyance of clicking to remove error messages every production turn.
Just overhaul before refitting.
Also it might be worth considering making the Brigade HQ cost less or be free with the development of the mobile infantry battalion. It seems to be an important unit but one that doesn't really require TN technology.
Why. That would just be too overpowered.
Lastly could the rank for the CB be set to R2 not R1...it makes no sense for Colonels to be commanding a brigade.
The different Empire Themes have different rankings. Another theme will most likely have it the way you want it.
For it to work the hierarchy also needs to understand that construction brigades are on the same level as brigade HQs, otherwise you would have a HQ brigade commanding 4 CBs anyways.
And I'm not sure that is actually desired since it would make it harder to move alot of CBs due to not fitting into the hierarchy.
Uhm, you don't understand the point I am making. The deployment clock is not reset by anything other than sticking the ship in a hanger, even if the ship should not have a deployment time issue. This results eventually in a bunch of annoying error messages every production cycle.Ohhhh, deployment time. That goes down gradually when you have it over a colony with what, 0.25 million population or at the same location as a ship/station with a recreational module. So still, an unnecessary change. Since you can only decrease the deployment time in a hangar, you might want to report that bug because you can reset the time in other ways (as stated before).
Because frankly it makes no sense to NOT have brigade HQs when I used to have division sized combat forces. Making the HQ unit a seperate development project doesn't seem necessary. 5000 RPs is 2.5 years of research at the moment. Why is it that expensive? The HQ doesn't change if you have TN technology. It is still a bunch of guys with radio's who support the Brigade CO.Once again I ask Steve, Eric, or someone who can, add a facepalm emote for the forum. To Paul; Okay, I'll just have my commanders use WWII radios and paper maps to command my Power Armored Infantry fighting on an entire planet. Also just because it inconveniences you doesn't mean that it should be massively changed, I can research that in 2-3 months no problem with other research going on. Also, they are in full command vehicles/mobile bases going around the battlefield coordinating large numbers of people across an Entire Planet, doing that is expensive and difficult irl, and the game models that just fine.
That does not solve the issue. It is a brigade, it should be commanded by a officer of R2 and it should only be attachable to a division HQ, since it should have its own brigade HQ.Once again, different Empire Themes have different ranks in those positions. If I remember right, one of those themes has a General as the lowest rank. Like I said before, just use a different theme if you are unhappy with the one you are using.
Doesn't a balanced version of this already exist, in the form of missile stages?We are talking about the launchers themselves, not the missiles. Its an end-game launcher that behaves like a box launcher but stores and fires multiple missiles rapidly. It also has different reload mechanics than the other launchers. Go back and read where I first suggested this, or not since I thought we were done on this topic.
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 ArmorAnd 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.
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
OOOOOOO
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.)
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 (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! :)
At 10-20 years of play it would probably take weeks or maybe months of real time play to get a new jp. A
The actual shuttle was only 100 tons, but I agree, maybe there could be a tech line that increases capability of maintenance facilities?
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
Some additional realism in this category could be that shipyards are required for maintaining and overhauling ships instead of maintenance facilities. That would fix the imbalance between 2.5M to service one and the same 2.5M to service 100.
No matter what suggestion someone comes up with it has to be relatively simple to be viable. Anything that adds to the micro-management without adding to gameplay is just more buttons to click without more fun.
May be rather complex, but how about fuzzier thermal detection? For instance, a task group appearing as one big thermal signature rather than many distinct ones at the far range of a sensor and perhaps even blurring together signatures of nearby ships at the furthest range? Nearby signatures would still be rather distinctive, but i am having fun imagining this if stars also maintained a signature as well.I think this would be perfect, for lower tech. I think, yes the passives should be changed to be a little less clear, that it would be easy to distinguish between multiple small contacts and a big one at a medium/high tech level. It is an interesting thought for the mixing the signatures, and that could be put in as a TG order to fly in close formation to mix signatures (has some risk/adds additional hit chance on those ships (enemies firing at close formation ships/TG get a hit chance bonus)). And I think that another tech should be added with this, Sensor Clearness (name debatable) that does exactly what is says, a multiplier to how clear passive contact(s) are (affected by close formation).
I think you are confusing maintenance facilities with something else. They don't "house" ships, that is hangars and that is exactly how those work already. The facility is able to work on ships up to a size (not total size of all ships but the individual ship) and I think that is the most simple it can get. And are you sure the AI don't build maintenance facilities, how else are they able to keep their military ships operational? Although you have been here a long time.He's not confused, he's participating in an ongoing conversation about potential models for a change in how they function. In fact, not only was that post essentially reiterating an earlier point, how did you miss the immediately preceding post he was responding to? Myself, I think I prefer the current system to any of the proposals I've seen; it seems to get the balance between micromanagement and interesting simulation about right.
Is it possible to add Precursor orbital habitats back in? I just ran across them in the spoiler forum and love the idea, maybe the bug that was plaguing them has already been solved?
Missile Size: 0.25 MSP (0.0125 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 17
Speed: 22400 km/s Engine Endurance: 1 minutes Range: 1.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.3568
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 380.8% 3k km/s 119% 5k km/s 76.2% 10k km/s 38.1%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.1068x Gallicite Fuel x5
Development Cost for Project: 36RPKeep in mind this is still only 1377 pounds (625 kg) (assuming the tons in this game is metric tons, 1400 pounds-long tons, 1200 pounds-short tons). This is about the size of the IRL Harpoon Missile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpoon_%28missile%29) that was designed in the 60s.
The ability to create smaller than 1MSP ordinance. I really want to rock my MIRVs firing hails of 0.25MSP Micromissiles. The design I came up with seems to work well in theory, but I can't actually design and build them because of that limitation.Code: [Select]Missile Size: 0.25 MSP (0.0125 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 17Keep in mind this is still only 1377 pounds (625 kg) (assuming the tons in this game is metric tons, 1400 pounds-long tons, 1200 pounds-short tons). This is about the size of the IRL Harpoon Missile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpoon_%28missile%29) that was designed in the 60s.
Speed: 22400 km/s Engine Endurance: 1 minutes Range: 1.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.3568
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 380.8% 3k km/s 119% 5k km/s 76.2% 10k km/s 38.1%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.1068x Gallicite Fuel x5
Development Cost for Project: 36RP
I'm suggesting a minor alteration of shipyard expansions, continuous expansion easily outpaces large chunk expansions making them basically pointless, I imagine it should be more efficient to retool at once, also remembering that there is a major downside which is you can't cancel mid expansion like you can with continuous.It would be so much easier if instead of a continuous expansion there was just some window in which you could put the target mass that you want, where it would stop. Normally you know what size you want anyway, and with the current method you just check a couple of times around the time when you think it is where you wanted it. This would have the advantage... of having no advantages, because it could operate just like the normal 1k, 2k etc. expansion, where you see the resource cost and the time, but only get the result once it is really finished, so it would in no way be better. (with such a little entry box, the drop down menu could in theory even be scrapped, because everyone would be using target mass)
I propose making larger expansions increasingly more efficient, not game breakingly so but enough to justify using them over continuous, also I suggest seriously nerfing the efficiency of continuous, maybe just a flat 30% reduction over a standard 1000 ton expansion, the larger chunks getting minor bonuses, maybe just 5% faster for each level? And maybe add some larger chunks too, 2-,000, 50,000, and 100,000 ton expansions.
I would also ease my OCD. I never use continuous expansion as I cannot stand not having nice even numbers for my shipyard tonnages.Hehe, that is why I avoided it for 4 long games too, even though I needed huge shipyards. I reached the point where seeing all that work coming up again had finally overpowered my reluctance to correct with SM. ...Though I still refuse to do it for yards up to 300kts. :)
The ability to tow wrecks. I was actually kind of surprised that you could not tow them. Also a side request, I think that wrecks should changed in that they require to be found via sensors to see them. They don't have to be found with a special "wreckage scanner" but I think either the active or gravity sensors (or both) would work perfectly. However I don't think this should effect wrecks made from your own ships as they are confirmed wreckage at a confirmed location.
Don't wrecks drift?
is there a way to clear all orders for all civilian ships? If not there should be.Shipping Line Information Screen, 5th tab from the right, "Clear Orders" in the top right of the screen. I believe it deletes anything they were holding though so I only use it when there is a bug.
I just had an epiphany for a super easy way to fix the issue of civilian shipping getting out of control.I'll second that
Add a setting somewhere for "maximum number of civilian ships allowed per empire". Let the player decide how many.
1) an alternate/additional suggestion: add a "balance crew within TG" button that behaves similarly to the one for fuel.
John
While investigating a slowdown in Aurora 6.43 game I used the designer mode to investigate. Sure enough there were the precursors and an NPR fighting it out. No big surprise. However as the action wound up I watched the NPR use 955 ASMs and over 2100 AMMs to kill a C10's worth of ground forces and a handful of DSTS and they were still launching when I gave up counting. Every ship in the NPR fleet appeared determined to fire every missile they had.
Is there any chance of Steve making the NPR response to a few ground forces a little more measured? Even get them to close the planet first then fire if no enemy ships are present, not stand off from several hundred million kilometres. NPR ground invasions would be even more welcome! He can do it for precursors!!
Ian
Bofors AA Emplacement Mk III class Anti-Air Defence Installation 1 200 tons 53 Crew 904.6 BP TCS 24 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 16-10 Sensors 1/6 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 11
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 2
Twin R15/C6 Meson Cannon Turret (1x2) Range 150 000km TS: 31600 km/s Power 12-12 RM 15 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
PDC Fire Control S02 112.5-40000 (1) Max Range: 225 000 km TS: 40000 km/s 96 91 87 82 78 73 69 64 60 56
Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (2) Total Power Output 12 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor MR1-R1 (1) GPS 6 Range 1.1m km MCR 118k km Resolution 1
This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre and can be pre-fabricated in 1 sections
1 - In the Intelligence:Strategic tab, there should be a list of known colonies, known PDCs (since they don't usually move) and known civilian mines.
2 - You should also be able to see a nation's colonies on the map, even if you don't have direct line of sight on the colony at the time. If you have seen a colony there once, it's doubtful it just got up and left when your sensor ship left range.
3 - PDCs should be separated in the tactical tab from other ships.
4 - There should be a way to declare what ship type you think an NPR ship is. You should also be able to organize the list based on that, or at least filter based on certain facts (such as size).
5 - The ability to obsolete NPR classes you no longer see.
Good ideas, although don't forget you can currently flag a system as having enemy colonies by setting the Controlling Race flag on the system mapTrue, but that doesn't help with remembering which planets have colonies on them. I have bombed empty planets from long range for the simple reason of not remembering which planet was which.
No idea if this has been suggested yet or not, but an option to randomize the names taken from the ship name list would be nice.Please, this.
4. Would it be possible to add an option to ban JPs or systems like we have for system bodies? It would be nice to be able to have a little more control over civilian shipping and prevent a majority of them from going into an active combat zone just to drop of colonists/non-TN goods that will die/be destroyed with their ships anyway. This is even more of a concern with plans to remove the range limitation in the upcoming 6. 50 version of Aurora.
Thank you
There is a rating for the systems which includes hostile aliens/combat in them. The higher the number, the less likely the civ is going to go into that system.
I guess I have been dealing with some bull headed civilians then! Still being able to say "thar be monsters" would be helpful.
This results in nothing but 5 second increments until the detected missiles reach their target or are destroyed.some sort of "auto continue to next player event or chosen increment" would also help with issues like these.
This should reduce the slow down due to the number of civillian ships as the only thing that will matter is the number of lots to be moved not the hulls looking for a lot to move.
Since in the next patch were getting a whole bunch of simplifications to speed up AI i was wondering would it be possible to implement off screen rules for AI that are outside explored space?
Simply put if the ai are doing something outside explored space even if its combat it does not cause interrupts nad the game keeps running sim without stopping time (while running AI battle off screen)
or is this impossible or somesuch?
I've never really seen the slowdowns with civilian traffic. I don't know if it is the new pathfinding code but I am running fourteen player races at the moment without any problems.
just sim those systems that are in the "off screen" category like econ events ect on a cycle that doesn't cause interrupts
everything for the AI runs as usual but instead of halting in the middle of the "players" 30 day time skip the time skip keeps running even as those events that the AI perpetrate on other AI at the other end of the galaxy sim
its literaly as simple as "if the player can't see it, it does not cause the player time skip to stop"
even while the AI stops time skip, does stuff, and restarts it in the background
fancy infographic time!Off-Topic: show
although their may be a need for a "please wait while we sim the AI actually PLAYING THE GAME" waiting icon to avoid rage and "help my game is freeze" the may happen if the AI takes a really long time to play out their wars where player can not see it; loading/progress bar
[time skip is: 0=====|>---30]
As I understand the posts on the issue it is the total number of ships the civillians have. Apparently once a day each ship looks for something to transport. There are several topics related to speeding up the game and they zero in on the size of the civillian merchant marine. People use NPRs to hunt them down or whatever apparently. I certainly can't comment myself, my game is at about 5 min for a 5 day turn (or less days game time if it is interupted) with 40+ clicks to clear the damned crew morale bug thing away.
My comment is basically to search for a ship for the lot as then you only have to execute as many searches as there are lots. That has to be faster than the other way around. I was also hoping you could get some "outsourced" help on the matter.
That isn't how the civilians work. It sounds like something else is causing the slowdown. A civilian selects a trade run or colonist run and doesn't check again until that is completed, which can be weeks or months later. I have 164 civilian ships in my current campaign and the 1-day increments take about 4-5 seconds.
What is the crew morale bug? I thought the issue with morale was already fixed
Simple then: checkmark option to have all popup error windows dump data to a temp log file instead of error windows. Game will keep running until it doesn't regardless of the errors. Use at your own peril.
I believe that was fixed too. Your horribly long increments might just be the way vb handles those errors. Is it possible to fix with designer mode I wonder?
Paul started his epic campaign ages ago, as I recall he's running in 6.10 .
I've said this before many times but I know 5 second increments are essential for working out parts of the simulation, but I just would live an option for them to not stop turn processing unless they're actually caused by my own sensors.
Edit: I think that is part of what amimai was suggesting. Basically keep running turn processing as normal but don't stop unless it's something that's relevant to the player.
Well the errors are from an already fixed morale bug, so you could open the database and modify the deployment time for all affected units, it shouldn't be too time consuming with only 40 units, just open in a text editor and search for whatever string precedes deployment time.
ErrorInCheckCrewMorale
Error 3421 created by DAO.field
Data Conversion Error
The problem is that I am using a long variable instead of a double to store the last launch time (which is stored for all ships even if they never enter a hangar). Because your game has been running for a long time, the number of seconds passed the game has exceeded the capacity of the database field. This is fixed for v6.20 but will continue to affect current games.
If anyone wants to fix this for a current game and has Access, you need to change the data type of the LastLaunchTime in the Ship table to Double (or currency).
You mean still have the short increments but the player wouldn't need to press the turn button?yes x 100
You mean still have the short increments but the player wouldn't need to press the turn button?It's been a while since I've ran into AI related interrupts, so I can't really recall what was causing them, I would run some tests if my pc was working :(
That should be happening in most cases already. The game has separate interrupt code for the AI and the players so that events that stop the game if they happen to the player, won't stop the game if they happen to an AI player. I'll go through the EventType table and see if I can flag a few more as 'no interrupt'.
Also you can use the Minimum Increments options on the tactical map to force the game to keep processing increments no matter what happens.
yea that:yes x 100
I'm not sure anyone cares that the AI they have not met ran 5000 5second increments in the space of 1 day on the other side of the galaxy while fighting another AI that you never met, its just not relevant to the player.
The problem with that toggle is that the turns blow right past a legitimate interrupt that affects the player.This is an easy one, actually. Just set on auto-turns and set minimum increment to 0. It will basically just increment turns until anything relevant to the player comes up in the event window. Since it will skip only event-less turns automatically, you don't have to worry about missing anything important as just about anything important will make the increments stop.
but if you have auto-turns toggled and set to 0 it will halt the sim even if the most pointless interrupt causing event in the universe happens, and in mid game those events happen with startling regularity...
its especially bad if you have something like mineral shortage or another event that procs every single turn occurring that happens in the middle of a 5 hour long AI v AI 5 second increment war
Great news, now when an NPR detects my exploration ship the only warning I get will be from it's destruction. As it should be :pIf you put any sensors (size 1 and lower are commercial) on it or if it survives the first salvo/hit then a few seconds warning before it's ultimate destruction.
I found a logical inconsistency!
i use MIRV with warheads, but once the MIRV missiles releases its payload the primary carrier missile does not speed up accordingly with the lowered mass of the missile sans MIRV bomblets!
PLZ Fix
If that is the biggest inconsistency you found, I am in good shape :)i assumed that was the "trans-Newtonian" part of trans-Newtonian
How about the ships maintaining the same speed when they should be under constantly increasing acceleration due to fuel use?
Or how do the ships instantly change direction at 4000 km/s?
i assumed that was the "trans-Newtonian" part of trans-Newtonian
this makes MIRV game play impractical with is sad
good point! it must be another logical inconsistency!Except it is logically consistent because all of the mechanics in the game work like this.
A space wizard did it.
i assumed that was the "trans-Newtonian" part of trans-Newtonian
this makes MIRV game play impractical with is sad
Why are MIRVs impractical? If my one munition generates 6 sub-munitions, that's 6 more targets for the PD to deal with. If my salvo is 30, then all of a sudden it is 180, that's a big-ass pain in the PD's butt.
It might be from a misunderstanding of what exactly a MIRV is. If someone was thinking it was one projectile that split into two or more and with the split each piece was identical (literally, the missile split into two).
Sounds great, what was the result of your research into this?
I have been reading up on electronic warfare lately so a future version (but not v4.0) could have systems along the lines of the following:
1) Jammers that can jam all active sensors and fire controls of a particular resolution within a specific area. This will affect friendly ships within the same area as well.
2) Jammers that jam a specific hostile active sensor within range of the jammer
3) Decoys that will have a chance to distract self-guiding missiles within a set range
4) Decoys that will appear to be ships to enemy sensors, or flares to generate thermal signatures
5) On-board blip enhancers to make targets appear larger
6) Some form of chaff to block hostile fire control against a specific target
7) A Towed decoy that exactly replicates the signatures of a particular ship
8) Specialized passive sensors that can detect the lock on of hostile fire control systems
These systems would replace the current ECM. ECCM would consist of improved sensors to burn through the jamming or be able to figure out which are the decoys, etc. This is all in the early stages at the moment though.
Steve
I was wondering if anyone besides me would like to have a hangar reloaded gun that works somewhat similar to the box launchers, like the Metal Storm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm).
(http://hugelolcdn.com/i/110427.gif)
Well to be honest Rail guns should require ammunition, I would also love to be able to select the number of shots per salvo.
But I'm happy enough with the way they work now.
WTB, spinal mount rails huehuehuehue 120cm advanced spinal mount railgun. Just fire 4 small meteors at the enemy ship in quick succession.Personal opinion: Decoupling weapon size from theoretical research would be pretty sweet. You could build massive spinal primary weapons, and really core the smeg out even thickly armored targets. If you hit ;p
well technically the diameter of a railgun doesn't even matter xD
just the NRG
But truth is, even if a tiny projectile had that much energy, it would probably still be blocked quite easily by armor due to Newtons Approximation of impact death. Basically above a certain speed, the speed matters no more and its all the density of the projectile vs the density of the armor.Well that is true, however when you start accelerating a projectile in a smaller space (lets say to about 0.25c+ in 100m), the projectile would condense itself do to the immense pressures put on it.
And even if it did penetrate, it would blast through with a fairly small non explosive projectile, not doing too much (best case is it doesn't go through and out the other side and instead bounces around a bit).Also true, however the impact force of even the small projectiles will still be an immense issue for an enemy ship. Even though they would pass strait through, they will still leave behind so much kinetic energy that passing through doesn't really matter. I can't help but think about the super MACs from halo, they are so powerful that they blast through 2 Covenant ships (completely destroying them) and then cripple a third (although this gives you a bit more credit, oh well).
Once you reach the max projectile speed... your best bet from there is to scale the projectile size up, and try to keep the same speed.
Which could actually be quite interesting. Perhaps as a silly thought, Add a new kinetic weapon, the Coil Gun, fires explosive fillered (magnetic filler also for acceleration) rounds.A coil gun is a gauss weapon, so maybe instead you can set the ammo type when designing the gauss cannon.
1Well that is true, however when you start accelerating a projectile in a smaller space (lets say to about 0.25c+ in 100m), the projectile would condense itself do to the immense pressures put on it.1. (TBH, max range 50cm rail is actually firing at 1.2c)
2Also true, however the impact force of even the small projectiles will still be an immense issue for an enemy ship. Even though they would pass strait through, they will still leave behind so much kinetic energy that passing through doesn't really matter. I can't help but think about the super MACs from halo, they are so powerful that they blast through 2 Covenant ships (completely destroying them) and then cripple a third (although this gives you a bit more credit, oh well).
3A coil gun is a gauss weapon, so maybe instead you can set the ammo type when designing the gauss cannon.
the wrench in all of that is that we are dealing with trans-newtonian physics so the ability of kinetic energy to inflict damage is strictly arbitrary
the actual energy imparted by the railgun might be quite low, and the velocity of the projectile (as indicated by its range) is in fact a transnewtonian pseudovelocity the limitations of which impose the hard limit on railgun range
I'd like to see the ability to name colonies. I have a power on a planet that has taken multiple colonies from various other nations and it is getting hard to determine which prior colony is which.Can't you already do that? On the bottom bar of the summary screen there is a button called "Rename".
Can't you already do that? On the bottom bar of the summary screen there is a button called "Rename".That renames the whole planet. When there are multiple colonies on the planet from occupation and surrender, they just rename themselves to whatever the planet is named. Therefor you would have 2+ colonies named "Earth". He wants to be able to rename just the colony.
A default order for task force training would be excellent, combined with making a fleet receiving conditional orders not cause an interrupt would make my game run smoother.
At the moment half my interrupts are from training squadrons announcing they're going back to earth to refuel, then later that they have done so and are waiting for new orders.
Ideally I should be able to automate a squadron for training, refuelling then training again and get no interrupts until either the entire fleet reaches 100% or they start getting maintenance failures.
Because of the long and variable turn processing times it would be great if there was some sort of gentle chime when turn processing had completed and it was time for your input again.I would actually like to second that, if its not too hard to code in. We joke about reading books or doing various other things while waiting for turns to process but some sort of notification (possibly that we can turn on and off) would be good.
2) Retrograde orbits. I had no idea that Venus and Uranus went in the opposite direction of every other planet. There are several moons that move CW as well, such as Triton.You're confusing revolution around the sun for rotation around the body's central axis.
You're confusing revolution around the sun for rotation around the body's central axis.You're correct, the only significant body apart from asteroids which has retrograde orbit is Triton.
All planets orbit the sun counter-clockwise. Venus and Uranus rotate differently than the rest of the planets. Venus rotates the opposite direction than the rest of the planets, and Uranus rotates perpendicularly to the rest of the planets.
Standard Transit Proxima Centauri Jump Point
Refuel from colony Proxima Centauri III
Standard Transit Alpha Centauri Jump PointStandard Transit Proxima Centauri Jump Point
Refuel from colony Proxima Centauri III
Geological Survey Asteroid #276
Standard Transit Alpha Centauri Jump PointStandard Transit Proxima Centauri Jump Point
Geological Survey Asteroid #276
Refuel from colony Proxima Centauri III
Standard Transit Alpha Centauri Jump Point
but not this:Geological Survey Asteroid #276
Standard Transit Proxima Centauri Jump Point
Refuel from colony Proxima Centauri III
Standard Transit Alpha Centauri Jump PointAdd "water" option in terraforming. This would both enable to creation of more realistic atmosphere, including water vapors and eventually creating a hydrosphere on a planet. Turning a normal planet into a water world should also be possible, though I guess it's more of an cosmetic effect.There already is, although it doesn't do much to the hydrosphere at the moment I believe.
Suggestion: Waaaaaay up the tech tree, a black hole-related installation that works as a sort of extremely crude terraformer. It's like an ordinary terraforming installation except:
1. It only removes atmo. It can't add any.
2. It operates at about 100x the speed of an ordinary terraformer.
3. It targets all available gases, in proportion to their part of the whole. (If the atmosphere started out as 100 atmospheres of CO2 and 0.1 atmospheres of Methane, this thing would reduce it to 10 atmospheres of CO2 and 0.01 atmospheres of Methane along the way toward 0 of both.)
Call it the "Venus 3000" maybe.