C# Suggestions

[Borealis4x]

Probably too complicated, but it'd be super cool if the game was designed to model all levels of officers, starting from Ensign all the way to Fleet Admiral. The way this would work is that every ship would need certain billets to be filled by default by lower-ranking officer (Department Heads, Co-Pilot on small craft, etc) and then on top of that every part you add to a ship needs a certain amount of officers to work properly (fire controls, engines, hangars, cargo shuttle bays, etc). Frankly, I think the XO and Chief Engineer should present on every ship you build above 1000 tons at the very least.

Currently officers start of as way too young, as the game models them as being mid-level officers (Senior LTs, Commanders) but they all start out at 21. Adding in more opportunities for multiple lower-ranking officers to serve on a ship would be extremely cool from an immersion and storytelling perspective.

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but in addition to adding complication for questionable game benefits I do want to point out that this system would be absolute Hell to use if you play without automatic assignments, or even if you do but also do a lot of manual work because you don't trust the system.

If the problem is that officers are too young, a simpler solution is to either change the default starting age to 30 or 35, or to decouple age from career length entirely and have age be another randomly-generated starting trait. Personally I headcanon that my leaders don't start at age 20/21, rather this is their career length to date and they've been promoted to a senior officer role after a couple decades climbing the ropes.

I don't know why you wouldn't play with automatic assignment tbh. To me the un-optimized nature of it actually contributes to the gameplay and feel of expanding your empire. For your first couple of ships, you can hand select the best guys personally to staff these groundbreaking space ships you are going to use to change humanity forever. As space travel gets more casual and the fleet gets larger however, it naturally becomes more and more difficult to hold leaders accountable and make sure the best guys are getting into positions of responsibility and you have to rely more on the 'system' which is imperfect and subject to bias and nepotism. 

Of course, that doesn't stop you from hand selecting a crew for your most important and groundbreaking ships.

[nuclearslurpee]

I don't know why you wouldn't play with automatic assignment tbh. To me the un-optimized nature of it actually contributes to the gameplay and feel of expanding your empire. For your first couple of ships, you can hand select the best guys personally to staff these groundbreaking space ships you are going to use to change humanity forever. As space travel gets more casual and the fleet gets larger however, it naturally becomes more and more difficult to hold leaders accountable and make sure the best guys are getting into positions of responsibility and you have to rely more on the 'system' which is imperfect and subject to bias and nepotism. 

Of course, that doesn't stop you from hand selecting a crew for your most important and groundbreaking ships.

My #1, #2, and #3 issue with the auto-assign is that unless you design your navy precisely to the dictate of the auto-assign algorithm, it will regularly either leave swathes of ships without a commander, or refuse to assign entire ranks to suitable commands, quite often both.

I would love if the auto-assign would reliably keep ships commanded and commanders assigned even if the result was not close to optimal, as you say the RP implications are a perfect fit for the game. I have a lot harder time RPing why half of my frigates lack a commander while half my Captains are sitting around scratching their asses just because my frigates require a "mere" commander and all the cruiser billets are filled. At some point manually filling in all of the holes left by auto-assign becomes tedious enough that one might just be better off doing everything themselves.

Of course, one can design their fleet structure to fit to the auto-assign, but this is a rather limiting view of how the game should be played. There are many systems in the game that impose constraints on the player which can be solved in interesting ways. The auto-assign requires the player to either do exactly as it says, or it just breaks entirely - "interesting" is hardly the word I'd use to describe this.

Anyways, I'm just ranting now and I've already made suggestions in this thread on the topic so I'll let it lie now.

[Droll]

I don't know why you wouldn't play with automatic assignment tbh. To me the un-optimized nature of it actually contributes to the gameplay and feel of expanding your empire. For your first couple of ships, you can hand select the best guys personally to staff these groundbreaking space ships you are going to use to change humanity forever. As space travel gets more casual and the fleet gets larger however, it naturally becomes more and more difficult to hold leaders accountable and make sure the best guys are getting into positions of responsibility and you have to rely more on the 'system' which is imperfect and subject to bias and nepotism. 

Of course, that doesn't stop you from hand selecting a crew for your most important and groundbreaking ships.

My #1, #2, and #3 issue with the auto-assign is that unless you design your navy precisely to the dictate of the auto-assign algorithm, it will regularly either leave swathes of ships without a commander, or refuse to assign entire ranks to suitable commands, quite often both.

I would love if the auto-assign would reliably keep ships commanded and commanders assigned even if the result was not close to optimal, as you say the RP implications are a perfect fit for the game. I have a lot harder time RPing why half of my frigates lack a commander while half my Captains are sitting around scratching their asses just because my frigates require a "mere" commander and all the cruiser billets are filled. At some point manually filling in all of the holes left by auto-assign becomes tedious enough that one might just be better off doing everything themselves.

Of course, one can design their fleet structure to fit to the auto-assign, but this is a rather limiting view of how the game should be played. There are many systems in the game that impose constraints on the player which can be solved in interesting ways. The auto-assign requires the player to either do exactly as it says, or it just breaks entirely - "interesting" is hardly the word I'd use to describe this.

Anyways, I'm just ranting now and I've already made suggestions in this thread on the topic so I'll let it lie now.

I will say that I agreed with you up until 1.12 dropped and fixed the way commander priority worked. I have a lot of higher rank officers but that is less auto assignment making mistakes and more me having more than enough academies.

The only thing I did differently compared to other games is that I made my lowest rank lieutenant and moved the shifted the command structure upwards. Using the senior commander checkbox I have had absolutely no problem with filling commanders and bridge crews (this in particular used to be a problem). This is despite having 1000s of defense satellites for PPV normally hogging the lowest rank.

I haven't really felt that auto-assign limits and restricts the structure of the fleet. Unassigned commanders / vacant ships to me is more a problem with the way military academies work. A while ago I made a suggestion to split military academy into multiple buildings - each one only graduating a single type of commander, thereby giving the player more control over what officers they actually want. Either that, or allow the player to determine the ratio between each rank.

[Borealis4x]

A while ago I made a suggestion to split military academy into multiple buildings - each one only graduating a single type of commander, thereby giving the player more control over what officers they actually want. Either that, or allow the player to determine the ratio between each rank.

I like that idea. Though I would create different academies for each skill instead of saying they belong to the same school. We are talking planets here, it can have more than one school.

That actually makes me think of a completely different idea. The rate at which character spawn should not be dictated by academies. Instead, academies should increase the quality of students recruited off that planet. Sure Westpoint is a thing, but most officers come from ROTC programs held at their local colleges. Instead, character spawn rate should depend on how much you have allocated to recruitment via budget sliders.

I'll stop there, cuz budget sliders as a concept needs to be developed more in my head, but I think they would make the player pay more attention to their economy and overall make Financial Centers more desirable.

[Droll]

I like that idea. Though I would create different academies for each skill instead of saying they belong to the same school. We are talking planets here, it can have more than one school.

The reason why I avoided taking my suggestion there is because this would make academy commandants obsolete. If my suggestion were to be implemented it would probably be a good idea to have academy commandant skills have more of an influence on the skill set of the graduates.

[Ghrathryn]

I like that idea.  Though I would create different academies for each skill instead of saying they belong to the same school.  We are talking planets here, it can have more than one school. 

The reason why I avoided taking my suggestion there is because this would make academy commandants obsolete.  If my suggestion were to be implemented it would probably be a good idea to have academy commandant skills have more of an influence on the skill set of the graduates.

Might depend on how it's implimented.  At the moment we have an academy and every time we build it, it adds one level to the existing for that planet.  What could happen is split the academy between the 'officers' so you have one that's pure navy, one pure science, one pure admin and one pure ground, making four commandants initially and have training skill buff the number or quality of graduates (though that would mean every officer type would have that skill).

Maybe if Steve impliments that system, down the line you could have it that each academy also takes the highest one or two skills from the commandant and depending on the level of them and training, you'll have more chance of officers from that planet's x academy having those skills at some level so different worlds would produce officers with different starting skills depending on the commandant's skill set.

Or go a different route, maybe expand things so there's additional buildings you can build linked to the academy ala the ship command modules.  Each module building requires a certain type of officer and improves both the number of that type and the likelihood of others with that skill set.  It's still one planetary academy so to speak, but the additional 'campuses' both improve the output and allow different skill sets to be taught.

It kind of depends on how complex the programming is and how much manual work players want to deal with.

[Borealis4x]

I like that idea.  Though I would create different academies for each skill instead of saying they belong to the same school.  We are talking planets here, it can have more than one school. 

The reason why I avoided taking my suggestion there is because this would make academy commandants obsolete.  If my suggestion were to be implemented it would probably be a good idea to have academy commandant skills have more of an influence on the skill set of the graduates.

Might depend on how it's implimented.  At the moment we have an academy and every time we build it, it adds one level to the existing for that planet.  What could happen is split the academy between the 'officers' so you have one that's pure navy, one pure science, one pure admin and one pure ground, making four commandants initially and have training skill buff the number or quality of graduates (though that would mean every officer type would have that skill).

Maybe if Steve impliments that system, down the line you could have it that each academy also takes the highest one or two skills from the commandant and depending on the level of them and training, you'll have more chance of officers from that planet's x academy having those skills at some level so different worlds would produce officers with different starting skills depending on the commandant's skill set.

Or go a different route, maybe expand things so there's additional buildings you can build linked to the academy ala the ship command modules.  Each module building requires a certain type of officer and improves both the number of that type and the likelihood of others with that skill set.  It's still one planetary academy so to speak, but the additional 'campuses' both improve the output and allow different skill sets to be taught.

It kind of depends on how complex the programming is and how much manual work players want to deal with.

I think it makes sense to at least have sperate institutions for the different leaders.

Naval Academies run by Commandants

Army Academies run by Superintendents

Scientist Academies run by Directors

Civil Servant Academies run by Deans

[QuakeIV]

That would probably make it more convenient to weight the number of specialists produced by the academy system.  I'd say it would probably almost purely a quality of life thing.

[Frank Jager]

Would it be possible to add another filter set to the ship design window?

For grouping common types of ship / station designs, that still have distinct name for class and hull.

I tend to design ships and stations that complement each other but have different hull names.

Currently I'm grouping them via hull name.

What I'm proposing is either a third drop-down list or a drag and drop functionality so that my "Combat Logistics" ships which all have different hull names (therefore appearing in different places on the list) could all be displayed together.

Or all my "Carriers" could all be displayed together even though one design is an Escort Carrier, one is an Auxiliary Carrier, and one is a Carrier, and the last is a "Supercarrier" they all have the same basic function (carrying, refuelling and rearming short ranged parasite craft) but all also have different purposes (Auxillary to move undamaged craft to the combat zone as replacements, Escorts to move with other craft, Carriers and Supercarriers to be flagships.

[Droll]

Would it be possible to add another filter set to the ship design window?

For grouping common types of ship / station designs, that still have distinct name for class and hull.

I tend to design ships and stations that complement each other but have different hull names.

Currently I'm grouping them via hull name.

What I'm proposing is either a third drop-down list or a drag and drop functionality so that my "Combat Logistics" ships which all have different hull names (therefore appearing in different places on the list) could all be displayed together.

Or all my "Carriers" could all be displayed together even though one design is an Escort Carrier, one is an Auxiliary Carrier, and one is a Carrier, and the last is a "Supercarrier" they all have the same basic function (carrying, refuelling and rearming short ranged parasite craft) but all also have different purposes (Auxillary to move undamaged craft to the combat zone as replacements, Escorts to move with other craft, Carriers and Supercarriers to be flagships.

What you want is unit series and the old missiles series to be extended to ships by the sounds of it. At least that's the easiest way I see it being implemented.

[db48x]

What I'm proposing is either a third drop-down list or a drag and drop functionality so that my "Combat Logistics" ships which all have different hull names (therefore appearing in different places on the list) could all be displayed together.

Or all my "Carriers" could all be displayed together even though one design is an Escort Carrier, one is an Auxiliary Carrier, and one is a Carrier, and the last is a "Supercarrier" they all have the same basic function (carrying, refuelling and rearming short ranged parasite craft) but all also have different purposes (Auxillary to move undamaged craft to the combat zone as replacements, Escorts to move with other craft, Carriers and Supercarriers to be flagships.

In the mean time, you can create your own hull names. Make hulls called "Carrier, Escort", "Carrier, Auxiliary", etc. Then they'll be sorted so that the carriers are next to each other. You can give hull types whatever abbreviations you want.

Use the "New Hull" button at the bottom of the window.

[Froggiest1982]

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg119602#msg119602

Would be nice to have a way to see what is the status of the transponder also on the map like it currently happens for the overhaul, as when you are planning to betray allies (I know I am a piece of s**t) you may don't want them to know where your ships are and you don't want to go check manually fleet by fleet.

[Platys51]

Suggestion: Put ammount of free facilities on top of the screen in ground construction window.

When you make 80 at once, its hard to hit just right amount when you cant see how many facilities are left...

[db48x]

When you find alien ship components, the alien race's name should be used in the name of the component as if it had been in the company field when it was designed. I'm putting a House of Emris 25.0cm C5 Far Ultraviolet Laser on each of the new Hammer of Light battleships that I've just designed (along with divers railguns and some particle beams; I have no laser tech at all).

[vorpal+5]

Could replenishing occurs if there is a wait order before processing the next order, when you don't have underway replenishment (or have it but you are going too fast) ?
Because right now, if there is an order, any order, even one where you are not moving, then it won't work.

And the issue is that you can't automate: Move to waypoint, wait a few hours (replenishing would occur, you are not moving), resume travel. You must reach the WP, make sure the order list is empty, wait some hours, and plan the end of the travel.