Moon Uplink Infrastructure

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I like the idea of making Luna my primary shipyard. It's close to Earth, has low gravity, and can dedicated 100% of its heavy industry solely to ship-building. Plus you can assign its own governor to further boost shipbuilding capacity.

However, it is very annoying trying to manage minerals fuel, maintenance, ordnance and fighters between Earth and Luna. I tried offshoring all combat and maintenance capability to Luna but that eats up too much of the workforce.

What I think would be interesting would be to add an uplink building that can be built on a planet and its moon that makes them share resources, manpower, and capabilities. So I could build a ship on Luna without having to worry about shipping materials, manpower, fuel or maintenance form Earth.

I think this would give the player incentive to colonize more 'useless' planets to be used for specialized purposes like construction or shipbuilding without the extra hassle making it seem not worth it. Moons would essentially become natural habitats that can dedicated 100% of their workforce to a useful industry rather than on agriculture and such.

[Cobaia]

I usually use Luna sized moons or planets either for Financial Centers or Ground Force Construction Complex, the maximum available workers on Luna is around ~210.00m that's 2800 Financial Centers or 210 GFCC. FC don't take minerals GU take Vendarite so you just ship it to moon for time to time.

I think there is no need for a special sharing connection between the moon and the parent planet. How about planets that have 1+ moons you share the connection with all the moons? What's the use?

[Froggiest1982]

I like the idea of making Luna my primary shipyard. It's close to Earth, has low gravity, and can dedicated 100% of its heavy industry solely to ship-building. Plus you can assign its own governor to further boost shipbuilding capacity.

However, it is very annoying trying to manage minerals fuel, maintenance, ordnance and fighters between Earth and Luna. I tried offshoring all combat and maintenance capability to Luna but that eats up too much of the workforce.

I may be wrong but probably you are focused either on getting too much too soon or to simplify your production chain in the attempt of making your life easier achieving the opposite effect. It all comes to how you manage your empire and how big it is. Population at beginning needs to be managed so it's important to have more colonies and allow our workforce to grow same as we do with our industry and such. As you grow wider in the galaxy you'll find yourself in the need of maintenance HUBs in different positions while you keep building the core of the fleet in one max 2 systems with the rest will be dedicated either to mining or wealth etc. The pops at that stage should not be an obstacle.

Back to Luna, honestly if you are aiming only to shipbuilding it would not be a big issue. However if you keep the fleet stationary there then it could become a big task. You should probably move your military ships on a different HUB once built (maybe back to Earth? Mars?), then I don't really see any big deal in keeping everything on Luna. For the minerals you don't even need freighters as a mass driver will be so close that a good and stable supply of minerals should be easy to achieve if you still have the majority of the minerals on Earth.

It would also make sense from a sci fi narrative and prospective: shipyards are usually far from the action due to their value while fleets are more close to borders or important systems. I understand your post but a link wouldn't be realistic and also would vanish the logistic base Aurora has and we love.

For me the only difference comes with ground units: these you need to have them trained in as many planets as possible for the following reasons:

1 - time: produce, load, move and deploy could take too long if you find yourself in need of fast protection/action
2 - logistic: the more you produce the more you have to move and the bigger you may have gotten, it is easier to produce your units directly "on site" even if it takes longer to set up
3 - fuel: sometimes fuel can be a problem and use it to move people around it's not the best. That fuel could be "wasted" in training the fleet
4 - specialization: some terrains and entrenchments are needed only for some worlds and you can focus your production on what is needed and where without going too crazy later remembering what is going where

[Jorgen_CAB]

I like the idea of making Luna my primary shipyard. It's close to Earth, has low gravity, and can dedicated 100% of its heavy industry solely to ship-building. Plus you can assign its own governor to further boost shipbuilding capacity.

However, it is very annoying trying to manage minerals fuel, maintenance, ordnance and fighters between Earth and Luna. I tried offshoring all combat and maintenance capability to Luna but that eats up too much of the workforce.

What I think would be interesting would be to add an uplink building that can be built on a planet and its moon that makes them share resources, manpower, and capabilities. So I could build a ship on Luna without having to worry about shipping materials, manpower, fuel or maintenance form Earth.

I think this would give the player incentive to colonize more 'useless' planets to be used for specialized purposes like construction or shipbuilding without the extra hassle making it seem not worth it. Moons would essentially become natural habitats that can dedicated 100% of their workforce to a useful industry rather than on agriculture and such.

Agriculture and Environment is not just about providing food... it is about providing the infrastructure and all essentials for living on that planet... I guess that actual food production is a rather small part of this. You can't expect Earth to provide the housing and habitat space needed for people to live on Luna.

The reason you don't need this on habitats is because habitats are finished housing with more or less automated farming structures to feed the people living there. So habitats only need a small service industry. If you want that on the moon you need to actually build a habitat there...

As also noted I find it odd that it is a hassle to bring resources and handle the ships in any way, most of this can be automated to a very high degree with very little effort. Whenever a ship is finished then moving it back to earth should not be much of an issue, I would likely keep some maintenance facilities there for fighters though so I don't need to move them as soon as I built them. Having about 50kt of maintenance should not be too much of a problem, you can make space stations if you don't have the people on the ground to run them.

[skoormit]

Agriculture and Environment is not just about providing food... it is about providing the infrastructure and all essentials for living on that planet... I guess that actual food production is a rather small part of this. You can't expect Earth to provide the housing and habitat space needed for people to live on Luna.

The reason you don't need this on habitats is because habitats are finished housing with more or less automated farming structures to feed the people living there. So habitats only need a small service industry. If you want that on the moon you need to actually build a habitat there...

These are fine ways to explain the game's mechanics in terms of world lore or canon, but we could also provide suitable explanations for alternate mechanics.
The questions we should be asking are about gameplay.

Is an idea fun?
Does it create new interesting decisions for the player (or make existing decisions more interesting)?
How does it affect balance?
How much complexity does it add?

Having mechanics for some type of interaction between a planet and its moons could lead to more interesting situations.
OP's idea of a full "uplink" that shares everything might make exploiting difficult moons trivial.

Perhaps something simpler?
What if moons automatically utilized some portion of the agriculture produced by the planet?
Perhaps a moon with a population less than 5% of the parent planet gets a 50% reduction in the required agriculture worker percentage?
Something along those lines could lead to more interesting colonization decisions.

Maybe a given planet isn't a terribly attractive colony prospect by itself--it's just some place to put population, and not too hard to terraform.
But it has several moons with good minerals, and if we put a large population on the planet, we can more efficiently use those moons.
That sounds like a fun kind of thing to think about, without too much complexity added.

[Froggiest1982]

Perhaps something simpler?
What if moons automatically utilized some portion of the agriculture produced by the planet?
Perhaps a moon with a population less than 5% of the parent planet gets a 50% reduction in the required agriculture worker percentage?
Something along those lines could lead to more interesting colonization decisions.

I am not completely against this. However it would require part of the pop to load and unload materials still. I would probably tie this function only if both the planet and the moon have a spaceport and a cargo station. However I believe this idea would be rather hard to code.

[TMaekler]

If I understand the concept correct, I think you can emulate it with the current functionality. You ship all the incoming resources to Luna instead of Earth, build some Mass Drivers on Luna, define the minimum mineral and fuel amount you want to have on Luna, and everything above that will be auto transferred to Earth by the Mass Drivers.

[esavier]

hmmm, i am reading through you comments, i would actually agree with all of you:
- it can be emulated by current technology - yes, but by trying to simplifying the production we will get it far harder to control so its counterproductive.  I am sure you can use your bases to produce components and transport those, but still this is not a way to go.
- careful planning have its role in the game, it both helps and give you a thrill of management stuff, but at the same time its also tedious at some points, and require a huge psychological fortitude to keep it focused on it and to it properly (also not becouse its hard its because there is so much data to remember)
- and you are right, it needs both to be lore-explainable and fun to play.

And i think i have some propositions, hear me out
I am a game developer by trade, and i learned that, to be blunt , there is no mechanic, however stupid and/or great it is, that can not be done well enough that somebody would pray to you for it.  Let me help you on that

We have sector mechanics.  Right now its kinda bland - like, you are doing a building and appoint some head of bureaucracy there - that's it you done it, you are ruling the sector, wow.
Lets spice it a bit now and make it not-boring.  Imagine that you will have to manage each sector yourself, but what are pyramid schemes for? Lets appoint headguy to talk to the civilian sector on each of the overseen systems and organize civilan transports to move stuff around.  That way you will have to put some of your wealth to pay for your laziness, some shipment lines to protect.  You still have to appoint correct people to handle correct sectors.  Also you can not transport raw resources  between colonies, because thats boring, (unless its maintenance supply or fuel, more on that later).  You also would be able to harvest fuel automatically from fuel harvesting stations or stuff from mining stations, but only in range of the current system or closest habitable system.  You need to still provide infrastructure to build parts, for example construction or ordinance factories.  That would work more or less like a little bit more automated shipment lines from old aurora  I had this problem so many times, when i lost 200 mln fuel transport from (kinda) automated transport route.  So there will mechanic that would satisfy both sides of the discussion - you can do it as it is - the old way - with micromanagement and careful planing, or leaving the boring stuff to the management, and providing sufficient protection around the gas pipe

enjoy, and share your thoughts on this!

[xenoscepter]

Your a game developer by trade? What titles have you worked on?

Don't agree with transporting raw materials as boring. Also, you mentioned protection... from what? Aurora has no piracy or crime of any sort, so the only time you need protection is during war, and only for the shipping lines that are being actively threatened. I do wish Aurora had piracy / crime... it'd be kinda neat, but also a bit much. It'd need to be toggleable for those who don't want yet another thing to manage., or better yet, scalable.

[esavier]

I was working on Frostpunk, Witcher 2 and 3, Frostpunk, but up till now the stuff i am most proud off is StarRuler2 (which is free now btw, go to github, check it out

By protecting i mean actually war. i know this is not like there is always war to worry about, but consider that you still have a tankers to drive from one place to another, the same stuff is happening with parts, since you are usually most shipyard-active when you are actually at war, not so much when you are at peace (i mean you can dial it down then and micromanage). However there were situations when my cargo ships transporting parts/ordinance/maintenance or tankers got cough somewhere just after the jump where i was least expecting - and loosing 200 mln fuel when it was  . _ / [REALLY] \ _ . needed in the system i was actively fighting aliens in. And it hurt much. Making supply lines a thing and physical entity in the world (like abstraction but for programmers this is different, just take my word for it) allows AI to "see" them and be able to "want" to raid those and not your main forces.

Piracy - no, i do not care, i dont see it in arora, i wouldn't have patience to micromanage each line to setup escorts and whatnot. This would be more like cat and mouse, more tedious than fun. There is similar abstraction with the planets - i don't care about the crime or that my population is going vegan, local government is for that. My job is to send my tanks to shoot those (vegans usually) who does not pay (enough) taxes.

but transporting ores? I am still on it, it should be either no possibility to do it, or it should be done from designated places only, and only when colony/shipyard,whatever needs it, and with delay (i.e. hamper the mechanics).
imagine in real life, that your government puts you on a planet, asks to mine rocks, and instead giving you normal, well payed work to make parts locally, spends all the money to buy a huge smeg to sends all precious metals to china. I know the place, its Africa, do you want to go to Africa? But to be honest the OP said that he wants to build faster not in one place, so sharing the work between local colonies is far more efficient than having one huge 50-slipway shipyard assembling everything from zero. Now it is usually not done because you need to designate manually which colony needs to do what manually and then transport stuff for assembly to the actual place of assembly. This is just a suggestion to automate it via sector command and commercial shipping lines.
Of course you can collect your local or neighbor systems for automatic mines and stations, but auto-sending raw stuff between colonies smells fishy...

[Jorgen_CAB]

Rakhas could be made to act like pirates in Aurora by spawning raiding parties here and there so we needed to worry about that once in a while.

They could also be made to spawn migration fleets and then settle down into new planets or even invading your own colonies if they decide they want them.

[Rich.h]

I think mass drivers already fill this role perfectly, if you apply some house rules that is.

Personally I only allow mass drivers to be used on planets/moons, all interplanetary/interstellar transports happen via actual ships. Now the mass drivers themselves you can call whatever you want, it might be a series of short range shuttles, or it could be a star trek style transport system etc. The point being it has a direct limitation on how much can be moved based on the amount of installations.

With the 1.12 update allowing for ships to wait until they are full, this system will be even easier to work as you are no longer wasting fuel on half empty runs.

Having bodies share population and other things I don't think will work well at all. It would create ways where you can exploit mining for example on many moons all at once, based on a large population on a single planet. In addition it removes the basic point of making populated colonies at all anywhere.