Author Topic: C# Aurora Changes Discussion  (Read 441819 times)

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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1650 on: April 10, 2018, 02:27:20 AM »
I don't have any objection in principle to reducing the effect of nukes against small populations. They would have to be fairly small though. Even smaller Earth-based population are still relatively concentrated. Australia for example, has a population of about 25m and one of the lowest population densities on Earth (229th  / 241), yet the top 8 cities account for about 70% of that population and the top 20 account for 80%.

Perhaps below 10m, it would start to make a difference. Even that is probably high, because new colonies are likely to be in small areas (look at Earth-based colonization). Also, not sure how much game play benefit (in terms of consequential decision) this would add.

It's not so much about small populations actually. I guess what I am after mostly is some diminishing returns.

The first nukes hitting the main population & industrial centers ( or forces guarding them ) would be significantly more devastating then the last nukes when everything of value already is destroyed and all that remains are some rural / mining / food production facilities in the countryside...

And that goes for both facilities and population.

I don't have anything against being able to kill of 80%+ of the population of a small new colony of 100k pop using a single nuke. My issue is being able to kill the same amount of population on a planet that recently housed billions, where the last 100k pop realistically would be the 0.00X% that was hardest to get ( extreme rural, surivors/preppers, refugees in caves/bunkers and so on ).

I'm not sure if it's even feasible to do, maybe some sort of "recently bombed" modifier lowering damage of subsequent nukes or something to model this.

The only real game benefit I see would mainly be making it harder to totally wipe out all life & facilities right away, so you could have some scenarios/stories with a small post-apocalyptic band of survivors.
 

Offline Person012345

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1651 on: April 10, 2018, 03:25:47 AM »
It's not so much about small populations actually. I guess what I am after mostly is some diminishing returns.

The first nukes hitting the main population & industrial centers ( or forces guarding them ) would be significantly more devastating then the last nukes when everything of value already is destroyed and all that remains are some rural / mining / food production facilities in the countryside...

And that goes for both facilities and population.

I don't have anything against being able to kill of 80%+ of the population of a small new colony of 100k pop using a single nuke. My issue is being able to kill the same amount of population on a planet that recently housed billions, where the last 100k pop realistically would be the 0.00X% that was hardest to get ( extreme rural, surivors/preppers, refugees in caves/bunkers and so on ).

I'm not sure if it's even feasible to do, maybe some sort of "recently bombed" modifier lowering damage of subsequent nukes or something to model this.

The only real game benefit I see would mainly be making it harder to totally wipe out all life & facilities right away, so you could have some scenarios/stories with a small post-apocalyptic band of survivors.
Remember that reducing a population of 1 billion to a population of zero would require 10,000 points of nuclear damage. Would that not render the planet uninhabitable generally anyway?
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1652 on: April 10, 2018, 04:06:29 AM »
Remember that reducing a population of 1 billion to a population of zero would require 10,000 points of nuclear damage. Would that not render the planet uninhabitable generally anyway?

Yeah probably. It was mostly an extreme example though to make a point. You could make the same argument with 1, 10 million or 100 million initial population ( That it would be neat if the final percentages left of population & buildings was getting gradually harder to kill ).
 

Offline lennson

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1653 on: April 10, 2018, 01:51:47 PM »
Yeah probably. It was mostly an extreme example though to make a point. You could make the same argument with 1, 10 million or 100 million initial population ( That it would be neat if the final percentages left of population & buildings was getting gradually harder to kill ).

Destroyed installations could perhaps produce ruins which would then continue to absorb some amount of the bombardment damage and would require a large amount of damage to completely flatten. Maybe ruins could also be reconstructed at a lower cost than building things again from scratch.
 

Offline Jovus

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1654 on: April 10, 2018, 01:55:46 PM »
Destroyed installations could perhaps produce ruins which would then continue to absorb some amount of the bombardment damage and would require a large amount of damage to completely flatten. Maybe ruins could also be reconstructed at a lower cost than building things again from scratch.

I like this idea, but higher, not lower. On an industrial scale, in order to rebuild a city you don't pick through and salvage things; you bring a fleet of bulldozers and clear it all away.

Which means we'd then need to think about how to make it so ruins weren't just ignored instead of being rebuilt, either. Maybe having ruins on the planet (of the bombed-out kind, rather than precursor kind) would increase unrest.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1655 on: April 10, 2018, 02:00:07 PM »
Lower mineral cost, similar wealth cost.

Otherwise you just get punished for nuking a place into submission beyond the long term radiation and dust problems as well as the loss of taxes and industrial capacity.
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1656 on: April 10, 2018, 04:43:21 PM »
Destroyed installations could perhaps produce ruins which would then continue to absorb some amount of the bombardment damage and would require a large amount of damage to completely flatten. Maybe ruins could also be reconstructed at a lower cost than building things again from scratch.

If the game went this route, maybe ground units with construction equipment could passively restore damaged buildings?
 

Offline Person012345

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1657 on: April 10, 2018, 06:02:58 PM »
I would actually be pretty happy if it was almost impossible to completely wipe out a population through direct bombardment. It would make sense to me to have a strict percentage system that meant you would inflict massive casualties initially, but towards the end you'd stop bombardment and let radiation and temperature or lack of infrastructure kill off the remaining population. Or else you'd be killing 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 people per nuke.
 

Offline Bughunter

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1658 on: April 12, 2018, 07:28:32 AM »
If the game went this route, maybe ground units with construction equipment could passively restore damaged buildings?

And even find some research points or similar if they belong to another less advanced race :)
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1659 on: April 12, 2018, 11:28:24 AM »
While we're discussing ruins and facilities, what if they improved ground unit defense?  Historically, built-up areas have been some of the hardest to assault.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1660 on: April 12, 2018, 12:08:23 PM »
Destroyed facilities should not remain as ruins that can be rebuilt. That's not how it works. It is much faster, easier and cheaper to bulldoze the wreckage away, recycle some of it, and build fresh. That is how every bombed out, burned out, fought out city was reconstructed after WW2 - exceptions were only made for few historically important buildings like cathedrals and so on.

Also, ground combat does even in C# will not operate on a small enough level that ruins should change fortification value of ground units, since there is only one planetary terrain.
 

Offline Kytuzian

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1661 on: April 12, 2018, 03:24:27 PM »
If the ruins thing happens, couldn't it just be merged with the existing mechanics for ruins that you find on planets? You could then clear them with construction brigades (or whatever is replacing them, I forget what is/if this is happening), and have a chance to recover technology/installations. It could then work so that when you encounter ruins on other planets, instead of a generic tech level, the destroyed alien race has specific technologies rolled up for it (probably not too hard, if there's a list of technologies for every tier, you could simply choose a tier then pick randomly from it). This could also let you find ruins for alien races that aren't actually extinct, which I think would be cool.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1662 on: April 12, 2018, 04:14:05 PM »
While we're discussing ruins and facilities, what if they improved ground unit defense?  Historically, built-up areas have been some of the hardest to assault.

This is part of the world mechanics; planets that are very close to their maximum population level become urban worlds, representing that the bulk of the fighting occurs in and around the cities rather than further away from habitation. Although not as good mountainous and jungle worlds for bonuses IIRC, it's still fairly substantial.
 

Offline mtm84

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1663 on: April 13, 2018, 02:52:56 AM »
Personally I think there should be a distinction in planetary damage between normal missile warheads and enhanced radiation warheads.  Or change the direct damage done to be partially based on warhead strength and partially based on radiation damage.  So there could be a set amount of population killed per warhead strength, and then an additional percentage killed based on radiation strength.

I guess I always considered it unlikely that we would be using actual nukes in normal ship to ship combat vs exotic types of high explosive warheads.  Ticking the enhanced radiation box makes it clear that you are going for something more WMD vs. conventional.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #1664 on: April 13, 2018, 04:50:51 AM »
The game already does that.

A missile in the game has a nuclear warhead. It does not explode directly in contact with the target in space combat; it's a close proximity detonation that, due to the way the damage model works, might well be a Casaba howitzer style weapon projecting a jet of nuclear powered plasma at the target.

In a bombardment role the nuke does multiple things, it explodes on or near a target, doing blast damage, it stirs up a lot of dust and smoke, which affects how much sunlight the planet surface gets, and it creates a quantity of radioactive materials, which impact the planetary population's health. What you do when you tick the enhanced radiation warhead box is instruct your designers to prioritise the production of radioactive materials (and thus long term impact of the nuke) over the blast damage (and thus the short term impact). Nuclear bombs like this are called 'salted' nukes.

The reason you are unlikely to use standard high explosives in space is because the energy density of a fission bomb is three orders of magnitude greater than an explosive, a pure fusion bomb would even reach 4 orders of magnitude greater than an explosive. This means you can shove a whole lot more boom in a handier package, and in space, where propagating an explosion is difficult, the harsh radiation coming from a nuke works quite well.