Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[Michael Sandy]

Is it possible to see which asteroids, planets, moons have had completed geo survey team planetary survey from the System map?  Cause I want to be able to quickly check which places I have already done geo survey, and remove them from my colony list to reduce clutter.

I suppose I could just rename the ones that have had geo survey team completed.

[Erik L (OP)]

Is it possible to see which asteroids, planets, moons have had completed geo survey team planetary survey from the System map?  Cause I want to be able to quickly check which places I have already done geo survey, and remove them from my colony list to reduce clutter.

I suppose I could just rename the ones that have had geo survey team completed.

Only way I know to do it is from the task force screen.

[iceball3]

Missile design option: picketing.
The affected missile stage behaves as normal, except that during design, a picketing missile stage can have a distance set. This will cause the missile to picket the designated target at a particular distance. This can be useful for active/passive sensor missiles that you want to follow a target around without getting into gauss range, or for spacemines that you want to follow a particular carrier/planetary body/etc.
Requires at least a specific amount of agility on the missile in question before it can be used (with agility being otherwise useless for any picketing missile design), and missiles that picket will use fuel per normal.

[Drgong]

Completely silly idea -

Space whales that you can preserve or hunt down for resources. 

[sloanjh]

Completely silly idea -

Space whales that you can preserve or hunt down for resources.

Did you just say "Whaaaaaaales innnnnnnn Spaaaaaaaaaace"?

John

[swarm_sadist]

Some random suggestions:

1. Have either a "Date Launched" or "Age" for commercial ships in the Shipping Line Information

2. If a population has 0 people due to radiation, I should not get messages saying that unrest is rising due to radiation. -_-

3. A way to order which civilian contracts have priority would be nice. Especially if you could reorder it later.

4. Civilian ships do not use fuel, so why are they clogging up the "Fuel Situation" section?

5. Have ship designs separated similarly to missile series, with either a player custom list or have a premade list. Ex: Civilian ships, government civilian, captured ships, military ships, fighters/parasites, PDCs, misc.

[SerBeardian]

Rebalancing Box Launchers.

I've been embroiled into a rather lengthy debate on the balance between box launchers an Launcher+Magazine.

On one hand, Box launchers can hold 6MSP per HS of missile.  They can't externally reload, but they also can't explode either.  They also only die one by one, instead of dumping all your missiles if one blows up.

Unarmored Mags store a maximum possible 20MSP per HS, which sounds great, until you add the launchers in, which are 20x larger than a box launcher.

This leaves us with an issue that the same tonnage in boxes can have not only a larger apha strike, but can even compete in sustained fire by only linking some launchers at once.  This is made worse by the fact that box launchers can be researched really quickly, often well before max storage efficiency for magazines has been reached.

This leaves launchers with only the fact that they can be resupplied in-flight by small colliers as a solid advantage (which, granted, C# will help with).

I propose that Box Launchers have a significant chance, when destroyed, of causing the loaded missile to detonate. Ejection chance can perhaps reduce this, but it should be significantly higher than magazines (100% at no reduction, maybe 25% at max reduction).

Fighters, which probably can barely handle the hit that just shot them, won't really care that the box launcher also blew up.
But it will no longer be viable to put 5000 tons of box launchers all over a 7000ton ship and have it outcompete a 7000ton launcher-based ship.
This will also provide a better choice between launchers and boxes, as you still can pack 5000t of boxes into a 7000ton ship, just don't expect it to survive if it gets shot at.  Or you can have the added safety that proper magazines and well-designed launchers provide.

[Bremen]

Rebalancing Box Launchers.

I've been embroiled into a rather lengthy debate on the balance between box launchers an Launcher+Magazine.

On one hand, Box launchers can hold 6MSP per HS of missile.  They can't externally reload, but they also can't explode either.  They also only die one by one, instead of dumping all your missiles if one blows up.

Unarmored Mags store a maximum possible 20MSP per HS, which sounds great, until you add the launchers in, which are 20x larger than a box launcher.

This leaves us with an issue that the same tonnage in boxes can have not only a larger apha strike, but can even compete in sustained fire by only linking some launchers at once.  This is made worse by the fact that box launchers can be researched really quickly, often well before max storage efficiency for magazines has been reached.

This leaves launchers with only the fact that they can be resupplied in-flight by small colliers as a solid advantage (which, granted, C# will help with).

I propose that Box Launchers have a significant chance, when destroyed, of causing the loaded missile to detonate. Ejection chance can perhaps reduce this, but it should be significantly higher than magazines (100% at no reduction, maybe 25% at max reduction).

Fighters, which probably can barely handle the hit that just shot them, won't really care that the box launcher also blew up.
But it will no longer be viable to put 5000 tons of box launchers all over a 7000ton ship and have it outcompete a 7000ton launcher-based ship.
This will also provide a better choice between launchers and boxes, as you still can pack 5000t of boxes into a 7000ton ship, just don't expect it to survive if it gets shot at.  Or you can have the added safety that proper magazines and well-designed launchers provide.

I like this idea. It doesn't make box launcher warships obsolete, but you would definitely want to get off the first shot 

I'd been thinking about limiting the number of box launchers based on exterior hull size (Which the game already calculates for armor purposes) but I think I like your idea better.

[iceball3]

Another approach to making other launchers competetive with box launchers is to make it so no launchers actually store missiles anymore, and have box launchers load directly from magazine (but only can fire once before requiring an external reload).
The idea being that the magazine can be abstracted as also including the place where missiles are actually stored in the launcher
For clarity, how it currently works in VB6 aurora:

Normal Launchers -
(75% efficiency) Size 5 Magazine: 75 MSP
Size 5 Missile launcher at 5 HS, stores 5 MSP
Total HS: 10
Total Firepower: 1 per salvo
Total Sustained Firepower: 16, low cooldown.

Box Launchers -
Total Firepower: 14
Sustained Firepower: 14, instant.

How it works in the new system were all storage is now magazine only:

"No launcher storage" normal launchers -
(75% efficiency) 75 MSP magazine at 5 HS
Size 5 Missile launcher at 5 HS
total HS: 10
total firepower: 1 per salvo.
Sustained firepower: 15, low cooldown

Whereas the "no launcher storage" box launchers -
9 size 5 box launchers = 6.75 HS
45 MSP magazine is 3 HS
total HS: 9.75
total firepower: 9
sustained firepower: 9, instant.

This has several effects.
-General missile capacity is very marginally nerfed. Very slight, easily ignorable threshold.
-Magazine efficiency techs now effect box launchers, and as a result, box launchers become more size efficient the better your tech gets rather than stagnating as "exactly the same as it always is."
-Box launchers are nerfed, as are reduced launcher techs, in the sense that they simply no longer render full sized launchers almost obsolete by outclassing them in every meaningful way besides one (which it barely stands to match anyway). This is a slightly less applicable point, with the upcoming logistics update, but the fact that launchers carry vastly more power, flexibility, etc in roughly the same tonnage is a bit... overbearing.
-Armored magazines now have enough elbow room now to be considered potentially useful. You can even armor box launcher magazines to make the capacity line up the MSP with the amount of launchers you want on a particular vessel.

The exact direct mechanical change would be:
-Set the mag capacity of any launcher in of itself to 0.
-Everything would otherwise behave the same, though maybe make the ship maker pop an error if magazines have insufficient storage to fire a missile out of every single launcher once.

[iceball3]

Another suggestion, this time concerning Ablative Armor and the intelligence menu.
I remember Steve mentioning that missiles use ablative armor as an extra chance to ignore point defense, contested by the point defense's sheer damage.

Could we make it so that if any of our point defense systems fail to kill a missile at this step (that is, we score an "accuracy" hit, but the "armor" check allowed the missile to ignore it), that it is reported as "this missile is armored" in the racial intelligence window and event logs?

[bean]

This leaves us with an issue that the same tonnage in boxes can have not only a larger apha strike, but can even compete in sustained fire by only linking some launchers at once.  This is made worse by the fact that box launchers can be researched really quickly, often well before max storage efficiency for magazines has been reached.

This isn't quite true.  There are some use cases where conventional launchers really dominate, and reduced-size launchers can go quite a ways to even the balance. 
For missile defense, box launchers are the way to go if your enemy is launching lots of missiles and your fire control only gives you a few increments to shoot at them.  But if you have long-range AMMs and FCs, then it starts to turn into a contest of who has more missiles, particularly if they didn't go for box launchers themselves.  In that case, normal launchers carry at least 50% more missiles.
For attack, reduced-size launchers help a lot.  If my design case is needing to fire two salvos of 24 size-4 missiles an hour or more apart (let's assume I'm going for really long range or something), then 25% reduced-size launchers will take 24 HS for the launchers plus something like 6 HS for the magazines.  Box launchers will take 32 HS.  Adding a third salvo will take 16 HS for the boxes and 5-6 HS for the conventional launchers.  Obviously, I'm giving up the capability to combine my salvos, but in addition to the efficiency gains, I'm getting collier reload capability.  For bigger ships, that's a big deal.

[iceball3]

Suggestion - Change ship ramming to include some combination of the following:

- Limit the ram damage to 10-30% of the max armor points mounted on a ship.
- Make it so ships making a successful ramming maneuver instantly scuttles, or instantly destroys their own engines with the normal explosion chance rolls.
- Make it so ramming maneuvers have a range of 0, so that the only times a ramming maneuver can normally succeed is if the ship performing it has both superior initiative and movement speed.

[MagusXIX]

Time advancement buttons on the event log would be nice. Currently I have to switch back to the map window to advance time, and then try to switch back to the event log while the program is running so that I can track the events as they scroll by. This wouldn't really big a big problem if the event log didn't keep having the tendency to hide behind the map at random while time is running.

Maybe most people don't hover over the event log as time is going by and I'm just weird, but it's the best way I've found for me to keep track of things as they're happening. Like I said, though, while time is processing the window likes to hide behind other windows. It's frustrating to no end.

[Erik L (OP)]

Time advancement buttons on the event log would be nice. Currently I have to switch back to the map window to advance time, and then try to switch back to the event log while the program is running so that I can track the events as they scroll by. This wouldn't really big a big problem if the event log didn't keep having the tendency to hide behind the map at random while time is running.

Maybe most people don't hover over the event log as time is going by and I'm just weird, but it's the best way I've found for me to keep track of things as they're happening. Like I said, though, while time is processing the window likes to hide behind other windows. It's frustrating to no end.

Run one increment at a time?

[serger]

Or split windows.