Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[Droll]

Right now, especially at high tech for tracking and range making modern PD STO weapons is incredibly waste full as Aurora deems it necessary that my STO Gauss Cannons NEED to fire out to 1,750,000 (btw that's the 25% range bonus at max tech making projectiles FTL - bug?) resulting in some wasteful STO costs.

Instead of the game deciding what the BFC of your STO is, let the player select an apropriate single weapon BFC for the STO to use, with stats and cost following naturally from that.

OR

Convert the "Racial Tracking Range" and "Racial Fire Control Range" text panels at the top into drops downs populated with their appropriate BFC tech type, letting the player easily specify to what level the STO should perform, with cost again reflecting the changes.

[nuclearslurpee]

Right now, especially at high tech for tracking and range making modern PD STO weapons is incredibly waste full as Aurora deems it necessary that my STO Gauss Cannons NEED to fire out to 1,750,000 (btw that's the 25% range bonus at max tech making projectiles FTL - bug?) resulting in some wasteful STO costs.

This is a bug and should not be happening. STOs with the PD weapon fire controls should use the 1x range multiplier, not 4x - which, with STO bonus range should only extend out to 437,500 km. I will admit that this is still a bit wasteful since you probably would be fine with a shorter range (this gives you 97.7% base accuracy at 10,000 km for final fire PD, where a range of 100,000 km would give you 90% accuracy and save some uridium).

There is also supposed to be a change in 2.2 that will reduce the BFC range multiplier for non-PD STOs if the BFC range is significantly greater than the weapon range, which would apply if you are using 10cm railguns as PD for instance.

[Ulzgoroth]

There is also supposed to be a change in 2.2 that will reduce the BFC range multiplier for non-PD STOs if the BFC range is significantly greater than the weapon range, which would apply if you are using 10cm railguns as PD for instance.

I've seen that in action.

[Droll]

Right now, especially at high tech for tracking and range making modern PD STO weapons is incredibly waste full as Aurora deems it necessary that my STO Gauss Cannons NEED to fire out to 1,750,000 (btw that's the 25% range bonus at max tech making projectiles FTL - bug?) resulting in some wasteful STO costs.

This is a bug and should not be happening. STOs with the PD weapon fire controls should use the 1x range multiplier, not 4x - which, with STO bonus range should only extend out to 437,500 km. I will admit that this is still a bit wasteful since you probably would be fine with a shorter range (this gives you 97.7% base accuracy at 10,000 km for final fire PD, where a range of 100,000 km would give you 90% accuracy and save some uridium).

There is also supposed to be a change in 2.2 that will reduce the BFC range multiplier for non-PD STOs if the BFC range is significantly greater than the weapon range, which would apply if you are using 10cm railguns as PD for instance.

Right so I apparently have been modding my DB for so long that I've completely forgotten that the vanilla BFC range tech line ends at 350,000 km and not 1,400,000 km. So the system that you described is actually WAI and this is not a bug (aside from the potential for 1,750,000 km range).

However I am going to maintain the validity of my suggestion as I think you've pointed out that it's still quite wasteful, just not nearly as wasteful as I stated originally. At least I can fix my DB modding with... more DB modding.

[Elminster]

It would be nice if we can get an option to randomize the System Theme and Class Theme in the Race Information tab.
Same as the randomize option for the Ship names.

It doesn't feel right to have a Theme with thousands of names, but they always start the same.

[KriegsMeister]

Touching back on the topic of ground unit techs. I would really like to see more depth to the ground forces tech tree and separation of armor/damage/penetration dependency on naval weapon techs. As it stands now the ground combat research tree is wide with lots of capability, base unit, and weapon techs, however, it lacks depth. Once you get through those base options the only true multi step progression is construction rate, leaving our GC scientists mostly jobless till its time to upgrade the unit series. Its not too difficult to reach this point either, even with limited admin and reduced research rates, you can power through the whole tree in a few decades, and this has been further exacerbated with the recent RP cost cut. And honestly in most of my campaigns, I usually use a good chunk of starting RP or even just SM most of the techs as I want the flexibility and wide choice of design considerations early on, and most of my GC scientists get converted to other fields.

So, I propose the following tech lines, the first 2 groups being Armor and Penetration Techs which cover the current progression system but disconnects them from the naval weapon techs. Id also like to propose 3 additional groups to increase Rate of Fire, Hit Points, and Damage for additional unit design diversity

_________________

Armor Techs - I think these could have a relationship with the naval Defensive Systems Armor techs akin to powerplant/engine techs though would be fine stand alone. If related I think the RP cost should be half of the requisite DS tech.
- Personal Armor - Infantry Armor Techline
- Vehicle Armor - Affects Light and Medium vehicles, but the current Light/Medium Armor Type retains its relative modifiers
- Heavy Vehicle Armor - Heavy and Super/Ultra Heavy Vehicles, I chose to separate these from the other vehicles as I always felt the "light" armor on a "heavy" vehicle should be comparably stronger to a smaller vehicle, therefore this tech line should be slightly cheaper per level.
- Static Fortification - Armor line for Static, slightly different name to the rest just to break up the monotony and better represent them as emplaced weapon systems

Penetration Techs - Standalone tech lines, I like it this way as opposed to the Armor tech for when you come across a more advanced NPR/Spoiler you can attempt to rush design stronger weapons to close the gap.
- Personal Weapon Penetration - Affects PW/PWL/IPW (Also side note, Id like to see IPW renamed to Heavy Personal Weapons and given a +1 DMG buff, frees up the Improved title for techs and gives the weapons a decent little buff)
- Crew Served Weapon Penetration - CAP/HCAP pen tech line
- Anti Vehicle Penetration - LAV/MAV/HAV/SHAV
- Autocannon Penetration - LAC/MAC/HAC (And could LAC could a base +1 or +2 AP buff to make it stand out a little better in comparison to HCAP)
- Anti-Air Penetration - LAA/MAA/HAA
- Bombardment Penetration - LB/MB/MBL/HB/SHB

Rate of Fire Techs - These should be very expensive techs with only 1-3 tiers
- Personal Weapons RoF - PW/PWL/PWH Increases number of shots by 1 per tech level but would also increase transport size by 1 ton each. Gives some roleplay options to say have a 3 shot PWL submachinegun equivalent to 1 shot PW in size but differing capabilities, or a slightly heavier 2-3 shot PW to represent an Automatic Rifle like the M1918 BAR or M27 IAR that isn't a full on machinegun like CAP.
- Crew Served RoF - I would drop the the baseline to 4 or 5 shots and increase by 2 per tech level as well as increase transport size by 2 tons
- Autocannon RoF - Increase 1 shot and 3 or 4 Tons per tech level.
- Bombardment RoF - I'm not too sure on adding this one, maybe just a single level that increase shots to 5 but doubles transport size

HP Techs - I think it would be neat if increasing health was a possibility and could make battles more dynamic against different races. The problem is trying to figure out how to justify it besides the Infantry Genetic Enhancement. There could be a fixed racial modifier that makes larger/smaller species harder/easier to put down, but that still doesn't really give vehicles a good justification. So my suggestion is to implement shields for ground forces. Like suggested for the armor techs, these should be paired with the Shield Strength techs, with a little caveat that smaller shields for Medium/Light Vehicles and Infantry require higher tech level.
- Static Shields - Unlocks with Alpha Shields
- Heavy Vehicle Shields - (Super/Ultra) Heavy Vehicles, Unlocks with Gamma Shields
- Light Vehicle Shields - Light/Medium Vehicles, Unlocks with Delta Shields
- Personal Shields - Infantry, unlocks with Theta Shields (The pretty high requirement here is because infantry already have their genetic enhancement)

Damage Techs - Nothing to extravagant here, just corresponding techs to increase damage to off set HP increases and follow the same groupings as the aforementioned Penetration Techs
- Personal Weapon Damage - PW/PWL/PWH
- Crew Served Weapon Damage - CAP/HCAP
- Anti Vehicle Damage - LAV/MAV/HAV/SHAV
- Autocannon Damage - LAC/MAC/HAC
- Anti-Air Damage - LAA/MAA/HAA
- Bombardment Damage - LB/MB/MBL/HB/SHB

_______________

This comes out to a whopping 24 new Tech lines which would greatly expand the Ground Combat list, probably too much fit under the one category. It might be best to have the Armor and HP/Shield Techs in the Defensive Systems, and I would also move all the Troop Transport techs to Logistics. To further declutter I would like to see a couple of the base and weapon techs moved into the base research like was recently done for AUX and FLAG Bridges, namely Heavy Vehicle Base Unit, Heavy Vehicle Armor, Heavy Anti-Vehicle, and Long-Range Bombardment. I find the lack of Heavy vehicles and associated armor and weapons to be disappointing for the the initial diversity of an army, as well the MBL would give game start armies the ability to have rear echelon fire support.

_______________

Bonus suggestion!
This isn't directly related to the previous talk on ground force techs but just some other things I think would be pretty great

Personal Support Weapons - Because of the transport size, I always found LAV/LB/LAA for infantry to be akin to crew served weapons along the lines of TOW/Kornet Missiles, WWII Light Anti-Tank guns, Mortars and what not, which might be a little excessive for your Armies needs and maybe you want something closer to a Carl Gustav, RPG-7, under barrel grenade Launcher, or Stinger Missile. So I think it would be neat to add infantry exclusive support weapons that are more compact but a little less capable. I'm not a big numbers guy so I dunno how well these would calculate into the current meta but something along the lines of



These would get improvements by the aforementioned AV/B/AA tech lines

[nuclearslurpee]

I think we need to be careful here not to make ground units into an extremely complex mechanic. Steve has been pretty clear in the past that he wants ground forces and combat to be secondary to spaceships and starfleets - not that ground combat should be a minor detail but that it should not have the complexity and detail that ships do, for the sake of focusing the game on what it's meant to be about. The current ground forces system works pretty well for roleplay purposes and doesn't necessarily need to have a great deal of added complexity (the only added complexity I would want to see would be airframes as a base unit type, which would require reworking AA mechanics but I think would be worth it to live out my USAF vs. Precursor dreams).

So based on the above I think it would make more sense to slim it down as:

• Have progressive GC techs for armor, HP, damage, and penetration. Just four tech lines, this is plenty to keep ~2 GC scientists busy at about the same workload as EW or DS scientists.
• I don't like the idea of a ROF tech line. Remember that ground combat in Aurora is inherently operational, not tactical, so ROF does not represent how fast you fire your weapon but rather the relative weights of fire between different weapon types over the course of an 8-hour engagement period.
• We don't need dedicated tech lines for specific component types, It is too much added research complication and actually adding these would make it more difficult to add new component types in the future if Steve wanted to.

Regarding the bonus suggestion, I think this is adding more granularity than makes sense for Aurora. If you need an alternative way to handle heavier personal weapons, we have a component type for that called PWI (although I think PWI should be buffed a bit in stats to be more distinct from PW, currently it is not very useful). Note that in most militaries, these "personal" AT/AA/BB weapons are still effectively crew-served as most TO&E will specify a gunner/operator and assistant/loader for that weapon. So I don't really see a need for having something 'under' the LAV/LB/LAA category. I can see that some players would like to have enough different component types to specify different grades of weapons within those categories (e.g., Javelin vs TOW, 60mm vs 81mm mortars, etc.) but that level of granularity is not really fitting with Aurora so I think what we have is sufficient.

[KriegsMeister]

So based on the above I think it would make more sense to slim it down as:

• Have progressive GC techs for armor, HP, damage, and penetration. Just four tech lines, this is plenty to keep ~2 GC scientists busy at about the same workload as EW or DS scientists.
• I don't like the idea of a ROF tech line. Remember that ground combat in Aurora is inherently operational, not tactical, so ROF does not represent how fast you fire your weapon but rather the relative weights of fire between different weapon types over the course of an 8-hour engagement period.
• We don't need dedicated tech lines for specific component types, It is too much added research complication and actually adding these would make it more difficult to add new component types in the future if Steve wanted to.

- I was actively thinking about the possible "over"complexity of my suggestion, but I think its warranted to provide better roleplay diversity in the same way we can choose between all the various beam weapons and missile design (which I think got a little too over complicated for my tastes). And the great thing about aurora is that even with super in-depth mechanics, you can smooth brain it and make it work. Dont want to replicate the entire US Marine corps down to the fireteam level, no worries, make tank, make infantry, produce a bunch in a 50kton formation, and if 1 doesnt work, send 10. Or in regards to missile design, you can ignore it entirely and just make beam only warships.
- While I only provided a tactical/RP argument for the RoF tech, it does have a massive operational/strategic capacity in that buffing the number of shots (which I did not suggest should consume more GSP) reduces the number of required 8-hour ground combat cycles to resolve a battle. The AP/ARM and HP/DMG balance have a smaller effect on the actual length of combat as opposed to RoF.
- I'm not too sure about this argument as realistically what other components could we add besides slight modifications like my PSW suggestion. Unless Steve wants to implement choice between weapon types like lasers and railguns and missiles for ground units, I think its kinda moot.

Regarding the bonus suggestion, I think this is adding more granularity than makes sense for Aurora. If you need an alternative way to handle heavier personal weapons, we have a component type for that called PWI (although I think PWI should be buffed a bit in stats to be more distinct from PW, currently it is not very useful).

I wouldn't be overly opposed to this, even in my post I did mention giving PWI a small buff. I'd be content for trading my PAV/PB/PAA for a Heavy PW that was 6-8T/4-5AP/4-6DMG. However, I still prefer my Personal Support Weapons for the thematics of CAP/HCAP/LAV/LB/LAA can be moved around by infantry, mounted on vehicles, or emplaced in fixed positions, but PAV/PB/PAA fill the same roles less effectively but more compactly. And I think you may have glazed over my examples for PSW's, its not Javelin vs TOW and 60mm vs 81MM mortars, its RPG-7 vs TOW, M320 Grenade Launcher vs 60/81MM mortars. My examples are almost exclusively single user operated, but yes TO&E will usually have an assistant/ammo bearer, but that's not the same as an average mortar team of 3-5 guys and you'd never see them mounted on a vehicle or fixed emplacement.

[captainwolfer]

Feature suggestion: add an option that prevents planet's from being spawned more than 10 billion KM from the center of a system, so that you can choose to never have a system that won't automatically be 100% geosurveyed by a ship

[nuclearslurpee]

I was actively thinking about the possible "over"complexity of my suggestion, but I think its warranted to provide better roleplay diversity in the same way we can choose between all the various beam weapons and missile design (which I think got a little too over complicated for my tastes).

Again this goes back to the game design philosophy that Steve has, which is that ground forces design and combat shouldn't be as detailed and involved as ship design and combat to keep the focus where it is. Even though Aurora is designed largely as a roleplay tool, this doesn't make "roleplay diversity" the dominant factor in decision-making, it must work as a well-designed game too.

Missiles in 2.2+ are a good example here, as the added complexity may be a little too much for purely roleplay purposes but it has added a large decision space to missile design that was not there before, and correspondingly a wider space for strategic vs tactical considerations related to missile designs and stockpile maintenance. There's a lot of interesting game design in this new feature set, so it is not just a roleplay component even though, yes, being able to roleplay fragmentation warheads and SLQ-25 Nixies is awesome too. 

And the great thing about aurora is that even with super in-depth mechanics, you can smooth brain it and make it work. Dont want to replicate the entire US Marine corps down to the fireteam level, no worries, make tank, make infantry, produce a bunch in a 50kton formation, and if 1 doesnt work, send 10. Or in regards to missile design, you can ignore it entirely and just make beam only warships.

The difference here is that you can ignore things entirely in these examples, which isn't really the case with the ~24 techs proposed above. If I want to build an extremely basic force based entirely on INF+PW and some kind of tank design (say the classic 62-ton VEH+MAV/CAP), I need to research 10-12 of the techs you've listed (I'm not clear on the HP techs) to keep my super-simplistic ground forces competitive as tech advances. Currently, you have to research zero techs as long as you are developing your ship techs, and with a simplified proposal breaking down into HP/Armor/Damage/AP techs you have a consistent tech burden of 4 techs. Very different levels of complication.

The important thing is that this complication doesn't necessarily add complexity in the sense of interesting decision-making opportunities. You have to keep up on these techs, or your ground forces fall behind. That's a dynamic we can have in the game (with appropriate balancing of research costs) regardless of if those are 2 techs, 4 techs, or 24 techs. Adding the granularity doesn't add more decision making, it just adds more for the to-do lists. It also unnecessarily locks roleplay opportunities (diverse force design) behind tech gating - I say "unnecessarily" because there is not a pressing mechanical reason to develop a wide range of ground unit types, it is 95% a roleplay decision (at least against NPRs) since once you have infantry, tanks, CAP, and some anti-vehicle capability you really have all you need from a mechanics perspective. Changing this would mean reworking the entire ground combat system, which is a lot of work and not really needed since what we have now works fine for most purposes.

While I only provided a tactical/RP argument for the RoF tech, it does have a massive operational/strategic capacity in that buffing the number of shots (which I did not suggest should consume more GSP) reduces the number of required 8-hour ground combat cycles to resolve a battle. The AP/ARM and HP/DMG balance have a smaller effect on the actual length of combat as opposed to RoF.

My point was that having these techs changes the balance of components relative to each other, particularly because having multiple shots is a bigger force multiplier than having better stats. To wit, if we start improving the shots for CAP, AC, and BB then our AV weapons become increasingly weaker by comparison. It is a lot easier to keep things balanced if we don't start changing weapon base stats relative to each other.

I'm not too sure about this argument as realistically what other components could we add besides slight modifications like my PSW suggestion. Unless Steve wants to implement choice between weapon types like lasers and railguns and missiles for ground units, I think its kinda moot.

I have seen proposals for drones and EW units for instance. It also does not have to be a different kind of weapon; if Steve wanted to add super-heavy autocannons he would have to make a bunch of rather finicky and error-prone changes to make the autocannon techs work with the new SHAC, because weapon types are not grouped into the supertypes (CAP, AV, AA, etc.) that we as players use to discuss them, under the hood.

I'd be content for trading my PAV/PB/PAA for a Heavy PW that was 6-8T/4-5AP/4-6DMG.

What are these stats relative to (i.e. armor/attack tech levels)? Base PW stats for example are 1 damage, 1 AP, 1 shot, 1 GSP before considering the racial tech levels.

By the way, if you're curious, the GSP cost is computed as Damage*AP*Shots so you can use this formula in your theorycrafting. For example, sometimes I mod PWI to have 1.25 damage and 1.25 AP, which gets a GSP cost of 1.6 (1.25*1.25 = 1.5625, rounded up to keep things simple).

And I think you may have glazed over my examples for PSW's, its not Javelin vs TOW and 60mm vs 81MM mortars, its RPG-7 vs TOW, M320 Grenade Launcher vs 60/81MM mortars. My examples are almost exclusively single user operated, but yes TO&E will usually have an assistant/ammo bearer, but that's not the same as an average mortar team of 3-5 guys and you'd never see them mounted on a vehicle or fixed emplacement.

My point with the examples was simply that we already have examples where real-life weapons have granularity within the same 'type'. A 60mm mortar may have half the footprint and require a team of 3 guys compared to a 81mm mortar requiring 5 guys, but we call these both LB and deal with it. There is no need for Aurora to have several slightly different LB subtypes just so we can have picture-perfect USMC OOBs, this is what we use our imaginations for.

Point being that the same applies in the other direction, for a smaller weapon type. For the RPG-7 or M320 I would probably use a PWI to represent this. Also keep in mind that the size of a unit includes the logistics tail, not just the weapon + crew itself. You can model a RPG-7 as a LAV if it is your main man-portable anti-tank weapon, then that's 0.25 tons for the weapon and a couple guys to operate it, and 15.75 tons for all the other stuff needed to sustain this (maybe not exactly 16 tons - see previous paragraph). Same idea as how our basic infantry rifleman is 5 tons, not because we are using Space Imperial measurements but because that 5 tons is 0.1 tons the actual guy in the field and 4.9 tons all the stuff needed to get him to the battlefield and keep him in fighting shape.

Anyways, I don't want to get lost in the details. The point is that if we're going to add more component types and granularity, there needs to be a compelling mechanical reason for it beyond accuracy in roleplay. Having several different infantry-portable AV or AA types of slightly different sizes and stats that all do the same basic job isn't compelling.

[Droll]

When an organisation is selected, as well as showing the stats currently shown, it would be nice if the cost is also broken down by mineral cost.

I realise that it's mostly going to be vendarite city, but STOs are also a thing and unlike ship components GU vendarite cost doesn't 1-1 map to BP cost anyways.

[Droll]

When building an organisation, right now the game will simply create all tasks at 100% power individually, building formations one by one. It would be nice the game tried to balance the GU construction output. Though I realise that is easier set than done (maybe balance sub-organisation by sub-organisation instead of the whole thing?).

Failing that, unlike construction, ordnance and fighter factories, the player cannot right now modify the % of GU construction capacity used, would be nice if we could - it would make my above suggestion less important.

[nuclearslurpee]

When building an organisation, right now the game will simply create all tasks at 100% power individually, building formations one by one. It would be nice the game tried to balance the GU construction output. Though I realise that is easier set than done (maybe balance sub-organisation by sub-organisation instead of the whole thing?).

Failing that, unlike construction, ordnance and fighter factories, the player cannot right now modify the % of GU construction capacity used, would be nice if we could - it would make my above suggestion less important.

I think this may be forced by the current implementation of organizations, since there can be a problem if the component formations are built out of order. By setting them to 100% it is easier to ensure that everything is built in the right order as long as the player doesn't screw it up on purpose.

[Droll]

When building an organisation, right now the game will simply create all tasks at 100% power individually, building formations one by one. It would be nice the game tried to balance the GU construction output. Though I realise that is easier set than done (maybe balance sub-organisation by sub-organisation instead of the whole thing?).

Failing that, unlike construction, ordnance and fighter factories, the player cannot right now modify the % of GU construction capacity used, would be nice if we could - it would make my above suggestion less important.

I think this may be forced by the current implementation of organizations, since there can be a problem if the component formations are built out of order. By setting them to 100% it is easier to ensure that everything is built in the right order as long as the player doesn't screw it up on purpose.

Yeah I guess. The easy way to do it would be do condense an organisation build order into a single construction task and then spawn the required formations and structure when the task is complete.

But then you lose some the granularity of the construction system. Though if you are building things through the organisation tab maybe one doesn't care?

[Droll]

The the missile tab on the technology screen should display ATG and Retarget similar to how the ship design ordnance tab does.