Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[Garfunkel]

Import / Export Ground Force units, formations and organizations please! It's been talked about since before C# released.

[smoelf]

Not sure to report this as a bug or a feature request. According to this post: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg104912#msg104912, "Ground units of species with certain types of home world may gain capabilities for free". I have not done the testing to see if this is implemented behind the scenes, but in a recently created game with a player race that has a home world of the desert mountain type, when creating ground units I still need to research and pay to apply the desert and mountain capability on ground forces.

If it is implemented behind the scenes, then it can be easy enough to remember if you only have one race, but it becomes more complicated if you conquer and integrate a different race with, say, a jungle home world and start building ground forces with them to mix into the main army.

If this is already implemented, I would like to suggest an interface update to reflect if a particular ground unit already has a terrain specialty, and if it is not, then perhaps a check could be made to award the relevant techs for free and allow free updates with the relevant terrain specialties.

[lumporr]

Not sure to report this as a bug or a feature request. According to this post: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg104912#msg104912, "Ground units of species with certain types of home world may gain capabilities for free". I have not done the testing to see if this is implemented behind the scenes, but in a recently created game with a player race that has a home world of the desert mountain type, when creating ground units I still need to research and pay to apply the desert and mountain capability on ground forces.

If it is implemented behind the scenes, then it can be easy enough to remember if you only have one race, but it becomes more complicated if you conquer and integrate a different race with, say, a jungle home world and start building ground forces with them to mix into the main army.

If this is already implemented, I would like to suggest an interface update to reflect if a particular ground unit already has a terrain specialty, and if it is not, then perhaps a check could be made to award the relevant techs for free and allow free updates with the relevant terrain specialties.

I tested this recently - if you check "Auto-Design Ground Forces" on the Race Creation screen, it will in fact research the relevant terrain modifiers and I believe relevant generated troops had the modifier by default. But as you said, if you're choosing your own research, it isn't free.

[Doc]

Not sure if I’m suggesting something unreasonable, but the ability to queue shipyard tasks/modifications similar to construction, ground forces, or research, would be nice. 

[Kaiser]

Steve, in the class design window, the engine storages are not in size order and that is counter-intuitive when you have select different storages to fit the tonnage.
It is actually standard-large-very large-ultra large and then small-tiny-fighter-minimal. Can you make instead from the bigger to the smaller?

EDIT: Same goes for maintenance storage bays

[nuclearslurpee]

Steve, in the class design window, the engine storages are not in size order and that is counter-intuitive when you have select different storages to fit the tonnage.
It is actually standard-large-very large-ultra large and then small-tiny-fighter-minimal. Can you make instead from the bigger to the smaller?

EDIT: Same goes for maintenance storage bays

I think the idea is to have the 'Standard' size at the top of the list where it is easiest to find. I find this to work fine for Maintenance Storage but for fuel it is not useful to me personally as the Fuel Storage - Large is my default for most ships, so I would prefer a consistent ordering as well.

[smoelf]

I would love a way to create a colony from the tactical map. I believe there used to be such an option in VB6 through right clicking on a system body without a colony. If implementing in the right-click menu is not feasible, then perhaps a button on the 'Body Info' tab once you have it selected.

This is very useful for setting up sensor outposts on asteroids in Sol. In most systems it would likely not be an issue to do this through the systems view, since the asteroids are numbered, but the asteroids in Sol are named and are not always in a logical order (to me at least), so it can take a while to find the correct asteroid there.

The same goes for asteroid mining. You might want to mine one asteroid at a time and reduce the distance needed to relocate once the asteroid is empty. This is very easy to do when looking at the tactical map and only showing asteroids with minerals, but the challenge is then again to find the same asteroid in a different window to establish the colony.

[Ush213]

Reinforcement Building or feature on existing recruitment ground force building.

I posted this months ago but with all the activity i'm going to chance my arm again.

Could there be a new building or feature in the ground force units building to slowly reinforce existing ground units stationed on the planet with the building.
The current reinforcing mechanics would stay in place and be crucial in reinforcing front line positions fast.

But more for peacetime or light spoiler engagements.  The ability to have a building set to reinforce at a trickle speed to bring armies back up to full strength over time would be a nice QOL improvement.
Multiple buildings speed up the process but have diminishing returns.  This would allow for the creation of recruitment worlds where dedicated reinforcement armies go back to resupply and be ready for the next large scale fast reinforcements, this would save having to rebuild new reinforcement armies each time.

It could be that the reinforcement building is "loaded" with a new (2. 2) organization or template and in the background has every unit already built in a sort of ghost reinforcement unplayable army.  this way when you land your real army on the planet the two armies react the same way as they do now just at a much slower rate.

Population of a body could also be a factor in reinforcement speed.

[Ush213]

Templates for Civ orders

Discovering a new rich resource system begins the process of assigning mines and mass drivers to mining colonies or infrastructure and installations to future colonies.
I propose a way to create templates for Civ orders to allow a way to reduce a amount of manual input needed.

Templates are created in the Civ/flag window and can be applied from there but also can then appear in the system view window as a drop down bar which you select the desired template and then create colony.

Eg.
Drop down                                                    Create Colony
-None
-Pioneering Mining Base (10xam, 1xMD)
-Emerging Mining Base (50xam. 2xMD)
-Established Mining Base (500xam, 5xMD)
-Early Settlers (5000xinfra)
-Thriving Settlers (10000xinfra)
-Established Settlers (50000xinfra)

"Colony has been created with a demand of 10 automines and 1 mass driver"

The game would remember the last drop down selected so the player could quickly go down the list adding mining colonies or population center's or any template of their choosing.
The player would then just be left with ensuring there is enough installations built on the production world to supply the civilians to transport.
"None" is the default and just does what create colony does now.

[SevenOfCarina]

A minor addition I'd like to see for ground combat unit design: a "seek combat" checkbox for ground units that does the exact opposite of what the current "avoid combat" checkbox does. Units set to "seek combat" will appear five times as large when hostile formations select their targets, at the cost of being easier to hit (perhaps a 2x multiplier to hit-chance).

This would allow the construction of "shield" units that can draw fire from squishier elements (say APCs protecting infantry, or infantry drawing fire away from tanks) without being excessively unbalanced, since the "shield" units are easier to hit.

[SevenOfCarina]

Oh, and while we're at this, I'd once again like to request that missile warheads use square-root scaling like power plants currently do. The math behind decoys right now means that larger missiles can only break through missile defences at similar rates as smaller missiles by having smaller warheads relative to their size. And missile warheads are anaemic as is!

Something like warhead strength = ((warhead size in MSP)/0.25)^0.5 * (warhead size in MSP) * (warhead strength per MSP)?

[Snoman314]

Oh, and while we're at this, I'd once again like to request that missile warheads use square-root scaling like power plants currently do. The math behind decoys right now means that larger missiles can only break through missile defences at similar rates as smaller missiles by having smaller warheads relative to their size. And missile warheads are anaemic as is!

Something like warhead strength = ((warhead size in MSP)/0.25)^0.5 * (warhead size in MSP) * (warhead strength per MSP)?

I think there's something to this. I've noticed the same thing when trying to design size 10 or 12 ASMs. By the time I add enough penaids to offset the smaller volley size due to the larger missiles, the average damage per MSP tends to go down.

[smoelf]

I would love to be able to set a reserve level for MSP production (and maybe also fuel).

Once you start having maintenance locations spread out over multiple colonies, it can be a bit hard and micro intensive to keep track of MSP levels. In my current game I realized that production of MSP was the single biggest gallicite sink, so continuous MSP production could mean that I drain my gallicite reserves while building more MSP than I could ever dream of spending.

Setting a reserve level would activate MSP production only up to that point to keep your desired reserve topped off, but would prevent excessive production if you forget to turn MSP production off.

[BwenGun]

Gauss and Railguns providing a very small bonus to beam weapon hit chance if on the same ship and if past a certain tech level.

As beam weapons go at the speed of light that means that part of their hit chance calc comes from the fact that hostile ships will be engaging in automatic small positional manoeuvring to make it harder for beam fire controls to lock their exact position. And the further away a target is the more time they have to be elsewhere when the beam intersects with the place it was aimed at. This same problem also exists for rail and gauss based weaponry except amplified by the much slower velocity of their rounds.

However, with sufficiently advanced computers and skilled tactical/weapons officers kinetics can be used to limit the probability cone of a targets movement in space and thus provide the beam fire control with a higher chance to hit. Effectively the kinetic rounds would be fired in sequence before the beams reach optimum range, with the aim being to have them flying through an enemy formation as the beam weapons come within range. The target ships will be able to spot the incoming kinetic rounds, especially as some may be a variant of canister, designed to burst at preset points to cover a wider area with small debris, and will adjust course to avoid them. But those kinetics will still be a danger and so will block off a region of space they're passing through to the target ships list of automatic anti-beam manoeuvring, and in doing so increasing the chance of a beam weapon hit slightly.

My thinking behind this is a) I think its a cool concept for space combat b) gives a small benefit to the player if they vary their ships armaments and don't tunnel vision down a single weapon tree. 

[nuclearslurpee]

Oh, and while we're at this, I'd once again like to request that missile warheads use square-root scaling like power plants currently do. The math behind decoys right now means that larger missiles can only break through missile defences at similar rates as smaller missiles by having smaller warheads relative to their size. And missile warheads are anaemic as is!

Something like warhead strength = ((warhead size in MSP)/0.25)^0.5 * (warhead size in MSP) * (warhead strength per MSP)?

I think there's something to this. I've noticed the same thing when trying to design size 10 or 12 ASMs. By the time I add enough penaids to offset the smaller volley size due to the larger missiles, the average damage per MSP tends to go down.

One thing to keep in mind is that even if larger missiles have lower damage per MSP due to mounting penaids, etc. the idea is that they will still deliver more damage per salvo due to all those penaids making it harder to kill them. Whether this idea works in practice is something we need to figure out with a lot of playtesting since all of these new missile options are new and not yet well understood.

I do like the idea in concept, just think we need to get more data as a playerbase before we start making more changes to missiles.