Author Topic: C# Aurora v0.x Questions  (Read 183877 times)

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Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #150 on: October 20, 2018, 07:17:37 AM »
Damage to rubble doesn't cause civilian casualties or dust. The assumption is that civilians generally won't be in destroyed areas and the fires that would contribute to atmospheric dust have burned through already. It's not perfect, but it is intended to simulate that collateral damage has diminishing returns if an area has been fought over for a while.

This gets really weird once you start ground combat on planets with no atmosphere then. I get your point that on planets with a breathable(-ish) atmosphere and close enough to their star to support growing crops with minimal infrastructure support (so basically very low colony cost planets) atmospheric soot caused by fires resulting from combat are a major concern, but a planet that's not capable of doing that and has no (native) biosphere will not have the sort of fires that impact atmospheric dust. Either there's no atmosphere, so any dust and soot enters a ballistic trajectory that's going to fall back down in days at the most and more likely seconds or minutes, or the atmosphere is so unhealthy to crops and the population in general that all biomass is internal in the colony's infrastructure and there's a not inconsiderable investment in the atmospheric processing equipment to scrub dust and other contaminants out of the air without it ever getting ejected into the atmosphere. And this gets worse if the planetary atmosphere pressure is higher than the native population's tolerances.

So... collateral damage should probably always produce atmospheric dust, although certain classifications of planet may produce more/less dust than normal.

I don't think it will get weird, because of how Colony Cost is calculated in the first place.  It isn't an 'everything into one value' formula, but a 'use highest vale of {A, B, C, D, ..., R}' selection.

If the population is living in hostile environment domes (Col Cost 2.0) due to toxic gases, raising the 'dust factor' (planetary albedo and therefore temperature) from 0.67 to 0.82 isn't going to have an effect.
« Last Edit: October 21, 2018, 05:30:32 AM by Father Tim »
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #151 on: October 20, 2018, 10:03:29 AM »
Until the dust causes the temperature factor to escalate above a colony cost of 2.0, which is hardly impossible when the temperature factor is already close to 2.0.
 

Offline tobijon

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #152 on: October 20, 2018, 10:20:08 AM »
Until the dust causes the temperature factor to escalate above a colony cost of 2.0, which is hardly impossible when the temperature factor is already close to 2.0.

true, but you can also consider that as an incentive to terraform beyond the minimum required to avoid gaining a colony cost, and it makes a world that has not been terraformed extra vulnerable, which is a good strategic consideration to add.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #153 on: October 20, 2018, 10:24:20 AM »
Until the dust causes the temperature factor to escalate above a colony cost of 2.0, which is hardly impossible when the temperature factor is already close to 2.0.

I don't want dust to be too major a factor for purely collateral damage, which is one of the reasons why damage vs rubble causes no dust.

All of this is an abstraction of the environmental impact of heavy combat with the intent that environmental impact becomes a consideration for attacking forces - it isn't an attempt to accurately model that situation for all different potential circumstances.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #154 on: October 20, 2018, 11:25:01 AM »
true, but you can also consider that as an incentive to terraform beyond the minimum required to avoid gaining a colony cost, and it makes a world that has not been terraformed extra vulnerable, which is a good strategic consideration to add.

Unless you are terraforming the temperature down, in which case bring in the dust anyway. For humans you'd need to cause enough dust to drop planetary temperature by 28 degrees IIRC to go from the upper bound to the lower bound.

I don't want dust to be too major a factor for purely collateral damage, which is one of the reasons why damage vs rubble causes no dust.

All of this is an abstraction of the environmental impact of heavy combat with the intent that environmental impact becomes a consideration for attacking forces - it isn't an attempt to accurately model that situation for all different potential circumstances.

Okay that's fair.

In that case, is (general) orbital bombardment going to face the same limitation with dust and destroyed buildings?


And I suppose it ended up buried among the other things, but is there going to be a way to clear rubble from a planet?
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #155 on: October 20, 2018, 11:48:37 AM »
And I suppose it ended up buried among the other things, but is there going to be a way to clear rubble from a planet?

Rebuilding the destroyed installations seems the obvious way - especially if doing so offers a discount over new construction.
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #156 on: October 20, 2018, 11:58:50 AM »
STO units can only be attacked once they fire.

There are two arguments here. One is that once they move the enemy can't tell what they are. On the other hand, once one side identifies a hostile formation, they will continue to know its capabilities. At some point ELINT will be extended to cover identification of hostile formations based long-term observation, in which case, the STO units will be flagged as such when their formation is identified even in the first scenario.
How often does this reset?  Can I fly a scout ship past a defended planet, take one round of STO fire, and come back a year later with my whole fleet and still have perfect info on the STO formations?
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #157 on: October 20, 2018, 12:17:55 PM »
I note the collateral damage calculations specify 10 damage for infantry instead of 1. I assume that means it uses tech modified values?

In that case perhaps collateral damage should be reduced by the armor tech of the owning side? Otherwise it seems like it would cause a situation where collateral damage becomes exponentially larger as your tech levels rise, since both weapons will be dealing more damage and ground units will have higher defenses.

Yes, it is modified by tech. More powerful versions of the same weapon type will do more damage. As defenders improve their armour, it will take more firepower to overcome them.

Also, as tech levels rise, population and industry will likely be larger so the collateral damage may not be much different in proportion.

I don't necessarily agree with this, but I can accept it (as was pointed out, weapons get more powerful, but also more accurate). However, I'll point out that right now weapons are rising by the cube of tech progression; assuming tech progression keeps the roughly 20% increase per tier, that means every tech tier works out to something like a 70% increase in collateral damage, compounding. That's going to get huge fast.

And that's not tech tier over your enemy. That's tech tier in absolute, so by the time you're at tech tier 7, you're looking at ~46 times the collateral damage as base TNE tech.
« Last Edit: October 20, 2018, 12:43:41 PM by Bremen »
 

Offline Conscript Gary

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #158 on: October 20, 2018, 01:19:31 PM »
For example, I am currently coding up Precursors and I will be adding a ground-based element to some of the ruin defender forces. Rather than robots popping out of the ground in VB6, the C# Precursor ground forces will be already entrenched around the ruins. Also, just to make it more interesting, the installations in ruins that are yet to be recovered will take damage from orbital bombardment and may suffer collateral damage from ground combat. So accessing ruins will now be more of a combined arms operation.

Out of curiosity, will they be following the same supply rules that normal player/npr ground forces follow? Because if so, particularly callous players could embrace the Zapp Brannigan gambit and send waves of men until the killbots' guns ran dry- hardly an optimal strategy, but certainly an amusing one.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #159 on: October 20, 2018, 02:44:41 PM »
It's been answered, and the answer's yes.

You can in fact just drown the enemy in LPW equipped infantry.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #160 on: October 20, 2018, 08:27:34 PM »
For example, I am currently coding up Precursors and I will be adding a ground-based element to some of the ruin defender forces. Rather than robots popping out of the ground in VB6, the C# Precursor ground forces will be already entrenched around the ruins. Also, just to make it more interesting, the installations in ruins that are yet to be recovered will take damage from orbital bombardment and may suffer collateral damage from ground combat. So accessing ruins will now be more of a combined arms operation.

Out of curiosity, will they be following the same supply rules that normal player/npr ground forces follow? Because if so, particularly callous players could embrace the Zapp Brannigan gambit and send waves of men until the killbots' guns ran dry- hardly an optimal strategy, but certainly an amusing one.

Yes, they follow player supply rules.
 

Offline totos_totidis

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #161 on: October 21, 2018, 09:11:57 AM »
Will there be surface to space missile weapons?
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #162 on: October 21, 2018, 09:17:25 AM »
Will there be surface to space missile weapons?

No, I have nothing planned on those lines. I want to avoid tracking any type of munitions or ordnance for ground units and keep them relatively simple (in management terms).
 
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Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #163 on: October 24, 2018, 01:07:12 AM »
Not sure if I missed this information or if this has been considered but will there be a finer granulation of fighter engines now that the fuel economy are somewhat different from before. There will be a huge difference between a size 1 and size 2 engine now.

If it wouldn't be too much a trouble to make it like 1 and 0.1 increments to 2, 0.2 increments to 3 and 0.25 increments to 4 and 0.5 increments to 5 or some such.
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Questions
« Reply #164 on: October 24, 2018, 01:41:44 AM »
No, I have nothing planned on those lines. I want to avoid tracking any type of munitions or ordnance for ground units and keep them relatively simple (in management terms).

Wouldn't it be possible to have them fire munitions straight from the planetary stockpile to get around this if you wanted?