Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[mike2R]

Awesome, thanks Steve!

[smoelf]

I'd love a conditional order for 'Full cargo'. This would be useful for salvagers. As far as I know, if the cargo space is full, the salvager can still continue salvaging but the extra salvage is lost, since there is no place to put it. This requires a bit of micromanagement to avoid ejecting the salvage into outer space once the cargo is full. With a 'Cargo space full' conditional order, you could set it to 'Unload all installations at colony (A)' and not worry more about it.

EDIT: Could possibly be an 'Unload everything' or 'Unload all minerals and ship components', since the game distinguishes between installations, minerals, and ship components for unloading purposes and the last two seems more common when salvaging.

[Destragon]

I'd love a conditional order for 'Full cargo'. This would be useful for salvagers. As far as I know, if the cargo space is full, the salvager can still continue salvaging but the extra salvage is lost, since there is no place to put it. This requires a bit of micromanagement to avoid ejecting the salvage into outer space once the cargo is full. With a 'Cargo space full' conditional order, you could set it to 'Unload all installations at colony (A)' and not worry more about it.

EDIT: Could possibly be an 'Unload everything' or 'Unload all minerals and ship components', since the game distinguishes between installations, minerals, and ship components for unloading purposes and the last two seems more common when salvaging.

I'm not sure exactly how salvaging works, but won't your salvager end up with for example only a 90% full cargo hold, then salvage another wreck and have most of the contents be wasted, because they didn't fit into the rest of the space? Possibly never actually reaching 100% full and then never stopping?

There needs to be some kind of prevention that stops salvagers from salvaging something that can't fit into their cargo hold.
Either the salvager should know beforehand that the wreck salvage can't fit into its hold or after salvaging the rest of the loot that doesn't fit should just be dropped in space at that location.

[smoelf]

There needs to be some kind of prevention that stops salvagers from salvaging something that can't fit into their cargo hold.
Either the salvager should know beforehand that the wreck salvage can't fit into its hold or after salvaging the rest of the loot that doesn't fit should just be dropped in space at that location.

This would be a good addition. Because minerals are part of the salvage loot, you will eventually fill out every last corner of cargo space and reach 100%, even if the larger components vanish when they don't fit, but automatically unloading before reaching that point to avoid salvage being wasted would be even better.

[Coleslaw]

Sometimes with ground formations, it will have units in it that throw off the auto-assignment at least in my case. For instance, if I make an HQ formation that holds a few construction elements, it will oftentimes prioritize a construction commander when I would favor one with more tactical skill. Would it be possible for us to select the commanders + bonuses we want assigned to ground formations like how we can set parameters for auto-assigning civilian administrators on colonies?

[mike2R]

It would be great if the Default Movement Action that's issued when double clicking on a location could account for the capabilities of the ship.  I'm specifically thinking of only issuing Geo/Grav Survey orders in the case where the fleet has the relevant sensor, and just doing a Move To order otherwise.

When exploring, I normally use a dedicated scout craft to enter a new system first, and then bravely fly around its planets to see if it bumps in to anyone.  Every now and again I find one stuck forever trying to survey a planet because I forgot, and just double-click ordered it to survey

On this subject, I'd also suggest making the Default Movement Action when clicking on a population Refuel, Resupply And Load Ordinance From Colony, rather than just Refuel And Resupply From Colony).  That could be issued to all fleets, since those without ordinance capacity treat the two orders the same.

[nakorkren]

Similar to Science Module ship components, could we get a "Logistics Module" ship component that allows the assignment of a Load Master who adds their logistics skill? Would be a nice use of officers for Troop Transports, cargo/colony ships, takers, colliers, etc.

[SpaceMarine]

Pre-amble: Many people who use ground forces often have a stockpile/reserve formation which they draw replacements from, however it is not only used for that it is also used to manually move elements around and create entirely new formations but as of 2.1.1 it is not possible to create a completely new formation with existing elements and so you have to build new "empty" formations for this purpose.


Suggestion: Make it so when you drag an element out of its formation and onto the body it is apart of or ship etc that it gives you the option to create a new formation with that element or elements inside.

SJW: Added for v2.2: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg162257#msg162257

[nuclearslurpee]

Pre-amble: Many people who use ground forces often have a stockpile/reserve formation which they draw replacements from, however it is not only used for that it is also used to manually move elements around and create entirely new formations but as of 2.1.1 it is not possible to create a completely new formation with existing elements and so you have to build new "empty" formations for this purpose.


Suggestion: Make it so when you drag an element out of its formation and onto the body it is apart of or ship etc that it gives you the option to create a new formation with that element or elements inside.

Seconded as this would be a brilliantly simple UI fix for a common problem.

[ranger044]

Pre-amble: Many people who use ground forces often have a stockpile/reserve formation which they draw replacements from, however it is not only used for that it is also used to manually move elements around and create entirely new formations but as of 2.1.1 it is not possible to create a completely new formation with existing elements and so you have to build new "empty" formations for this purpose.


Suggestion: Make it so when you drag an element out of its formation and onto the body it is apart of or ship etc that it gives you the option to create a new formation with that element or elements inside.

Seconded as this would be a brilliantly simple UI fix for a common problem.

Thirded.

[bankshot]

It would be great if the Default Movement Action that's issued when double clicking on a location could account for the capabilities of the ship.  I'm specifically thinking of only issuing Geo/Grav Survey orders in the case where the fleet has the relevant sensor, and just doing a Move To order otherwise.

When exploring, I normally use a dedicated scout craft to enter a new system first, and then bravely fly around its planets to see if it bumps in to anyone.  Every now and again I find one stuck forever trying to survey a planet because I forgot, and just double-click ordered it to survey

On this subject, I'd also suggest making the Default Movement Action when clicking on a population Refuel, Resupply And Load Ordinance From Colony, rather than just Refuel And Resupply From Colony).  That could be issued to all fleets, since those without ordinance capacity treat the two orders the same.

Also could geo&grav survey orders be automatically interrupted if there are no operable sensors of that type in the fleet or the parasites attached to it?  This would make more sense than waiting in orbit indefinitely.

[smoelf]

I'd like to reinclude this one as a formal suggestion:

Depending on playtest, I may also add load/unload colonist orders that have an Ark ship as a target, although I suspect this would be seldom used in practice. Ark Modules will more likely load colonists once and then retain them indefinitely (with the exception being an orbital colony that builds its own Ark ships).

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12523.msg159464#msg159464

Building large colonies through Ark modules can take a really long time, since you need to build them on main planet, load colonists, and then tug them into place, which can take years for a single sending. This is why, when designing colonies with Orbital Habitat Modules from previous versions, I would usually build them on site once I got the colony going, and ship colonists in, which was a lot faster.

I suppose a current workaround is to unload the colonists on the surface, and then ask the Ark modules to load them immediately, but I'm not sure if this will work for deep space populations and it would have to be immediately to avoid infrastructure production triggering civilian shipments of colonists.

[mike2R]

Fire Control Groups

The Issue

Managing large engagements can take a lot of clicking to handle target assignment.  The existing tools to copy targets between ships are all based on doing so to ships of the exact same class, which can mean that doing something as simple as concentrating fire on a single target requires assigning the target many times.  And splitting fire between ships can mean falling back on manually assigning targets to every ship (and fighter...) in the fleet.  Then you kill your targets, and have to rinse and repeat.  Assign Sub Fleet can help a lot, but isn't flexible, and obviously depends on everything being the exact same class.

Suggestion

Fire Control Groups.  Every fire control can be part of an unlimited number of groups.  These groups can be assigned targets, which get assigned to every fire control in that group within range (with the Range x2 tickbox allowing shorter range weapons, or nearby ships, to also be assigned - maybe adding an x10 or bigger as well).

This could then be used by the player in many ways.  I'd set up some permanent groups like All Main Guns, or Everything Including Gauss.  These would be used by any fleet to quickly concentrate fire from multiple ship classes.  In an established fleet, I'd also set up some groups specific to that fleet - splitting the fire 2 ways, and 3 ways and 4 ways etc.  Letting me easily divide my fire based on the targets I was facing.  Or it could be used just to combine certain types of ships that I think of as being the same, but are separate classes in game terms due to minor changes.

[SpaceMarine]

Pre-Amble: In the current ground force system players must create individual formations and then bring them under one another to create a hierarchy for actual duty in combat, this can become heavily tedious as players must individually drag formations under headquarter formations and this is especially so when you consider larger hierarchies, this is why I believe we can solve this relatively simply through the introduction of the ability to save and construct entire hierarchies from the ground force construction window.

Suggestion: The way I see this being implemented is through a system of "hierarchal" formation templates, what I mean by this is that in the formation templates window of ground forces you would be able to grab formations and bring them under other formations within that window assuming they follow the normal rules of course, this would create a hierarchal formation and would be designated with (H), a simple +- tab could also be implemented to hide these subservient formations like currently implemented in order of battle.

Once formations are brought into this hierarchy you can then begin construction, the new system of ground force construction will begin constructing the hierarchy either 1 at a time from top down or all at once equally and once built it will then automatically be put into order of battle in that exact same hierarchy.


Feasibility: I am unsure how much you will be able to adjust or make this work but I believe simply copying the hierarchies from order of battle with some modification should make things easier, the difficulties being getting construction to work with it and automatically creating hierarchies on completion

SJW: Added Now: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg162324#msg162324

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Pre-Amble: In the current ground force system players must create individual formations and then bring them under one another to create a hierarchy for actual duty in combat, this can become heavily tedious as players must individually drag formations under headquarter formations and this is especially so when you consider larger hierarchies, this is why I believe we can solve this relatively simply through the introduction of the ability to save and construct entire hierarchies from the ground force construction window.

Suggestion: The way I see this being implemented is through a system of "hierarchal" formation templates, what I mean by this is that in the formation templates window of ground forces you would be able to grab formations and bring them under other formations within that window assuming they follow the normal rules of course, this would create a hierarchal formation and would be designated with (H), a simple +- tab could also be implemented to hide these subservient formations like currently implemented in order of battle.

Once formations are brought into this hierarchy you can then begin construction, the new system of ground force construction will begin constructing the hierarchy either 1 at a time from top down or all at once equally and once built it will then automatically be put into order of battle in that exact same hierarchy.

Feasibility: I am unsure how much you will be able to adjust or make this work but I believe simply copying the hierarchies from order of battle with some modification should make things easier, the difficulties being getting construction to work with it and automatically creating hierarchies on completion

I am working on a version of this right now