Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: C# Edition

[skoormit]

I usually find that running out of leaders is a bigger bottleneck for ships and ground formations than running out of build capacity...

Are these bottlenecks equally impactful, though?

Running out of leaders means your surplus ships/formations don't get bonuses.
Running out of build capacity means you don't get surplus ships/formations.

I know which one I'd rather have.

[nuclearslurpee]

I think it's an open question, and to be honest perhaps superfluous in most cases but ultimately Aurora is a roleplay game after all...

But in practice, if I don't have sufficient leaders, I don't build fewer ships or ground units, but I do change how those are designed. Without sufficient commanders, the command modules of ships will be removed so you don't have your AUX, CIC, etc. which you might actually like to have, at a certain point these modules are more impactful than adding another railgun, sensor, or what have you.

For ground units what changes is usually the base formation size - if I have 100 ground officers I will build 100 formations at 20,000 tons each rather than 400 formations at 5,000 tons each. I suppose practically the effect is not too great if it is the same mass of troops either way, though. Otherwise you would see with fewer commanders a shift to less-numerous, more costly formations with high armor values, gene-modding and other capability modifiers, etc. On one hand this is a reasonable game-mechanics response to officer scarcity, but on the other hand this does mean tangibly that the amount of officers you generate can limit your options for force composition.

So ultimately it is an open question, and the answer is not either/or. That is, we are not asking whether or not to build an additional academy (usually), rather asking how many resources should be dedicated to expanding our leadership versus other aspects of the empire. To be simplistic about it, if we ask whether to dedicate 100% of our production towards academies or towards factories, obviously the former would be very silly and the latter preferable. But if we are asking whether to go 100% for factories or, say, 90% into factories and 10% into academies, we may find that having enough officers to command our entire force provide enough added value to justify that 10% even though our direct production capability is only 90% of what it could have been. Again, an oversimplified example but it illustrates the point, I for one would never stop building academies entirely but rarely would I ever put more than 5-10% of production capacity towards them.

[cdrtwohy]

I just RP that Junior officers are in command, and breveted to the rank needed to command said unit. then as officers become available its those breveted commands getting confirmed. this is realistic too when a military undergoes massive expansion (think US Army during the Civil war and the World Wars where you had young and or inexperienced officers in command of units much much larger than their rank would suggest) as for Academies i require ever planet with to have at least one academy per 1 billion people up to a limit of 10 with as population with a minimum of 100 million requiring at least one  (not all get a commandant with this but it is what it is)

[Shuul]

Oh nice, thank you for the update Steve!
Im sending you all of my enthusiasm

[Kamilo]

Quick question: How do maintenance modules work?

I tried making a maintenance base for my military fleet(s) and put so many maintenance module on the base to match the tonnage of the fleet, yet it didn't decrease the deploy time or maint time.

Am I missing something?

[Droll]

Quick question: How do maintenance modules work?

I tried making a maintenance base for my military fleet(s) and put so many maintenance module on the base to match the tonnage of the fleet, yet it didn't decrease the deploy time or maint time.

Am I missing something?

Maintenance modules do not affect the maintenance time of the parent ship. You need engineering bays and maintenance storage for that.

Maintenance modules maintain other ships that are at the same location as the parent ship depending on the total tonnage it can support, preventing their maintenance clocks from progressing while using up MSP to do so.

[Garfunkel]

Maintenance has multiple elements to it:

1) Engineering bays decrease the chance of components breaking down while also carrying some maintenance supplies to automatically repair components that do break down.
2) Maintenance storage/bays drastically increase the number of maintenance supplies a vessel carries, allowing the vessel to keep going longer through maintenance breakdowns.
3) Damage control drastically shortens the time required to repair damaged/broken components - this is only necessary if you want to fix something during combat as outside of combat it doesn't matter whether it takes 30 seconds or 30 minutes to repair something.
4) Maintenance facilities / modules allow vessels to be overhauled, resetting their maintenance clock. The higher the maintenance clock, the higher the chance that something breaks down. So, you want to overhaul your ships regularly. Even more importantly, vessels staying in the same location as sufficient facilities/modules do not run their maintenance clocks at all.

As Droll said, a maintenance vessel cannot maintain itself.

[unkfester]

Quick question: How do maintenance modules work?

I tried making a maintenance base for my military fleet(s) and put so many maintenance module on the base to match the tonnage of the fleet, yet it didn't decrease the deploy time or maint time.

Am I missing something?

Maintenance modules do not affect the maintenance time of the parent ship. You need engineering bays and maintenance storage for that.

Maintenance modules maintain other ships that are at the same location as the parent ship depending on the total tonnage it can support, preventing their maintenance clocks from progressing while using up MSP to do so.

Where do maintenance modules get/use there msp from?
Do you have to load msp to maintenance ship? if you have one.

[Black]

Where do maintenance modules get/use there msp from?
Do you have to load msp to maintenance ship? if you have one.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg101959#msg101959

3)   The ship being maintained will use up MSP from any racial populations in the same location, in descending order of MSP stockpile. If no populations are available, or have no MSP, the maintained ship will use MSP from any Supply Ships in the same location, in descending order of available MSP. Finally, if no other option is available, the maintained ship will consume its own MSP. A ship can use a combination of the above to locate sufficient MSP.

[kilo]

Another question regarding maintenance modules:

Do they manufacture MSP as well, if you make the required resources available on the body they are stationed at?

[Black]

Another question regarding maintenance modules:

Do they manufacture MSP as well, if you make the required resources available on the body they are stationed at?

They don't:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg116175#msg116175

2) The only source of maintenance supply points is from maintenance facilities as you can no longer build them with construction factories.

[Voltbot]

I have two questions:
    1.  When ship creates Langrance Point, is stabilization module level affects time required to do this?

    2.  Is there any way to move ground units between two populations on the same planet, without using ships?

[Droll]

I have two questions:
    1.  When ship creates Langrance Point, is stabilization module level affects time required to do this?

    2.  Is there any way to move ground units between two populations on the same planet, without using ships?

For point 1, IIRC the module does not affect the time but the system body size does. Large gas giants are faster to turn into Lagrange points.

For point 2, yes. Go to the ground combat screen and drag and drop formations between the two populations. As long as the populations exist on the same system body, the game shouldn't complain.

[Voltbot]

Another question:
What does standing order "Move to the Entry Jump point" mean?
To go to the Jump point, that ship entered through?

And what is "Point of intersest"?

[nuclearslurpee]

Another question:
What does standing order "Move to the Entry Jump point" mean?
To go to the Jump point, that ship entered through?

Almost; it is the jump point the fleet entered through, which is an important distinction as it means that if you break up and re-form a fleet, the ships in that fleet do not retain any memory of their entry jump point, and as far as the new fleet is concerned it does not have one.

And what is "Point of intersest"?

It is a type of short-lived waypoint which can be set for use with the standing order, for example you can set POIs at system bodies and have a scout ship with the standing order automatically move to check out each body. It's not a terribly well-used feature and I suspect it is mainly a bit of NPR code which Steve exposed to the player for those rare use cases.