C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions

[Profugo Barbatus]

How does a system that just mandates "slightly more training" introduce any meaningful decision into the game though. Father Tim put it well when he said that Aurora isn't about realism. As far as I can glean from Steve's messages, Aurora is about interesting Strategic decisions, and the tactical combat is the consequence of the strategic decisions playing out. I don't see how crew turnover provides any sort of interesting strategic decision, and I don't see how having my crews forget their training introduces any interesting strategic or build decisions. In almost all my empires, its pretty well set that the crews are performing normal drills and such while they're stationed, they're not just playing poker. They're beating their FNG's into shape, whole task group training just accelerates it by coordinating the training.

Changes that turn the decisions into flat "You must X" scenarios on a clock don't do anything other than introduce busywork. Stuff like the Sensor changes we're getting do introduce meaningful change, as the performance alterations adjust what sort of doctrines you may use for vision. The changes to fighters to allow them to be maintained and landed is already seriously changing up my plans for planetary defense, before factoring in surface to orbit guns. Those are meaningful changes that create meaningful strategic decisions. Ships being rustbuckets inevitably after X years and crews becoming useless after Y years doesn't create a meaningful decision. They just draw restrictions around the sandbox of strategic decisions we get to make in this game.

Roleplay just comes down to the player deciding how they limit their strategic decisions to a vision, good or bad. Until its feasible for Steve to build a system that allows me to enforce by game rule that my current empire is suffering from political infighting between the ground and space branches, where the ground forces have successfully argued that planetary facilities are safer than orbital ones, so we've got an abundance of fighter manufacturing and 4 shipyards for the next 20 years until the leadership roles over, and my doctrine has to live with that, Roleplaying is necessary. When arbitrary gameplay rules come in and do nothing but remove decisions, they remove space that roleplay could have ran instead, and narrow the possibilities for everyone.

[Father Tim]

As I also said before.. you can say that about ANY mechanic in the game... eventually you are just laying in bed dreaming... 

Yes, you have said that before.  But you have offered no explanation for why adding more restrictions would make Aurora more fun. . . only suggestions that would make *MY* Aurora less fun.

[Jorgen_CAB]

As I also said before.. you can say that about ANY mechanic in the game... eventually you are just laying in bed dreaming... 

Yes, you have said that before.  But you have offered no explanation for why adding more restrictions would make Aurora more fun. . . only suggestions that would make *MY* Aurora less fun.

I thought I had done that... adding experience change would have the same type of impact as maintenance needs of ships but in a different way. Will I have the ships stay out on a long mission or not, the longer ships stay out on a mission the more experience you loose at the end of their mission as they need to replace more crew. It would have the same type of impact as maintenance have, the same type of restriction but it would be important in a different way... it would also "fix" the issue of once a ship is trained to 100% fleet training it will not stay there indefinitely as long as it looses its crew.

If it is tied to an optional feature like maintenance I don't see why it could not be added.

You would have to manage deployment of fleets as well as choose how to design them and choose how long a service length your crew usually have in your empire. Crew is a finite resource and you need to manage it carefully.

It would make leaders more important in therms of training skills etc... leaders still come and go... why should not the crew do the same.

You can imagine your crew as immortal all you want, your leaders and officers still have human lifespans so I don't get why you could not imagine this anyway. You also could turn it of in the same way you can turn maintenance off.

I really don't see how this would be any different than manage maintenance with overhauls or minerals for building materials and so on. It also would require MUCH less micromanagement than maintenance and overhauls but add some interesting resource management into the picture.

[sloanjh (OP)]

General observation: things seems to be getting a little tense/personal.  Let's not to make Erik get out the trout!! http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=966.0

[Profugo Barbatus]

I really don't see how this would be any different than manage maintenance with overhauls or minerals for building materials and so on. It also would require MUCH less micromanagement than maintenance and overhauls but add some interesting resource management into the picture.

Its very different. Maintenance and minerals play into that strategic portion of the game, you have to have produced enough of them in advance, with enough mineral income to support that production, and have deployed it to forward positions/supply tenders to feed your fleet in its forward operations. A flat "My crew gets crap over time" ticker doesn't play into any of that, short of sliding around the crew training setting between 1 and 5. There's no part of that mechanic that turns around and provides interesting strategic decisions, just "Crew gets crap, swap 'em out".

You mention mitigation solutions like planning around your crew duration, but that's not a mechanic, that's a limit. Your ship design, endurance, etc is now being limited by some other arbitrary line that assumes X percent of your people retire every year, even thought your roleplay may say differently, such as a militaristic alien culture where a caste system means service is for life. I know you keep discounting roleplay, but your talking drawing arbitrary lines around how you think it should work, which is exactly what roleplay is, except you want to enforce that as a straight game rule against everyone else.

your leaders and officers still have human lifespans so I don't get why you could not imagine this anyway.

I think this is part of our fundamental disconnect, my cybernetic enhanced humans, my android race, my hivemind insectoid race, none of them have human lifespans To apply a human limit to a science fiction game in a universe of impossible physics and alien species is going to be pretty silly.

[Garfunkel]

Well your officers still get sick and they still retire during "human" life spans. As far as I know, that's hard-coded into VB6. In C# we can use the "Story Character" tick box to make an officer live forever but currently we can't. I think that's what Jorgen_CAB intended to say. You can roleplay that your race lives 500 years but your actual officers will retire when they are in theirs 60s and 70s.

I do agree that there is little point in forcing old ships to be scrapped and while I'm not against TF training slowly diminishing over time - remember it's a different thing from crew grade - I don't think it's a high priority thing either.

[Kristover]

Listening to the current argument I think both sides have valid points but I personally default to the idea of some level of crew skill degradation being modeled.  But first, a word on RP - my personal RP story line for Aurora isn't an immortal race but rather a post-WWIII 'rise from the ashes' kind of scenario with decidedly human crews and most of my asks are generally towards RPing that sort of scenario...but everyone enjoys this game from a different angle and if a Warhammer scenario of ancient dreadnoughts or 'immortal' crews is your thing, than great!  A couple of weeks ago, I asked for the ability to rename academies - I could have done without it but hey, It got added and that is cool too.  I'm not necessarily a fan of 'immortal' ships which can theoretically be upgraded forever but as has been pointed out, I can 'RP' it so that I force myself to not upgrade any ship which requires more than 25-30% of tonnage differential so my style really isn't constrained where forcing the mechanic would constrain someone else.

When it comes to crew skill degradation, I do think there is an argument to be made. We now have effectively 'immortal' ships and because of it, the crew bonuses/grade points short of catastrophic damage to the ship won't significantly degrade.  The crew/officer model is now predicated on 'mortal' crews which age up, transfer, retire, get sick, and die (I know the story tag exists but that is an option and not the default).  That creates something of a gap where the conceit is that this one fortunate and ancient ship is crewed by superbly trained crewman accrued over the decades the ship has been in service but the crew model is one of mortality and rotation and I think this in some fundamental ways cheapens the crew grade training bonuses and detracts from those that might want to RP a more 'conventional' sort of space empire.

I think some of the ideas about gradual degradation would be unwieldy and constrain other's RP choice but I think perhaps a reasonable and possibly more simple compromise would be to tie crew skill degradation to ship overhauls - therefore it becomes an optional part of the game because one can switch it on/off at game setup.  If you elect to play with it on, every time a ship overhauls/refits, then it would lose a percentage of its crew grade points (lets say 25%) to simulate crew rotation, retirements, promotions of enlisted crew members, transfers.  I wouldn't actually propose 'moving' crew members back into the pool because I think it might create too much complexity in the model and naturally the ship would have received competent replacements....but what the 25% crew point degradation at overhaul simulates is new people coming on board and building a new team and learning all the new hardware/software upgrades on board.  I think my handling it this way, it lets you create 'ships of excellence' - older and more prestigious ships will have have more 'accrued' points reflecting optimization and traditions - but also incentivizes a cycle of training exercises to rebuild/recertify crew competency like in a real navy.  If you decide to just let a ship set without training, eventually its crew training points will erode due to overhauls and even the best ship in the fleet will be 'stale'. 

I think handling it in this fashion might be a good way to meet all equities and do it in a relatively easy way to implement and without stepping on people's RP styles.

[Father Tim]

I thought I had done that... adding experience change would have the same type of impact as maintenance needs of ships but in a different way. Will I have the ships stay out on a long mission or not, the longer ships stay out on a mission the more experience you loose at the end of their mission as they need to replace more crew.

Okay.  I think that would be NOT FUN.  In fact, I think it would be annoying.  It would be counter to my fiction and my desires.

It would have the same type of impact as maintenance have, the same type of restriction but it would be important in a different way... it would also "fix" the issue of once a ship is trained to 100% fleet training it will not stay there indefinitely as long as it looses its crew.

This is not a problem I've EVER had.  It's not a problem I've seen anyone else complain about.  If you think it's a problem, I suggest you stop training your Task Forces up to 100%.   I don't think I've ever had ship reach that point.  You are asking to restrict everyone's game to stop you from exploiting one part of the rules.

If it is tied to an optional feature like maintenance I don't see why it could not be added.

Because then you've ruined my maintenance.

Now, if it was an entirely separate feature with an on/off checkbox and the default setting was 'OFF' then it would be easy enough to ignore.  In that case, the only 'cost' to me is the programming time Steve spends on it in place of something that makes the game better for me.

You would have to manage deployment of fleets as well as choose how to design them and choose how long a service length your crew usually have in your empire. Crew is a finite resource and you need to manage it carefully.

No it isn't.  My crew are pressed landlubbers from a thousand different ports and every time a ship touches down some percentage of them desert and (a hopefully greater number) are kidnapped and forced to join the navy. . . because I'm playing Age of Sail in space.

What I am NOT playing is an orderly turnover of one-quarter of my crew every six months.

It would make leaders more important in therms of training skills etc... leaders still come and go... why should not the crew do the same.

You can imagine your crew as immortal all you want, your leaders and officers still have human lifespans so I don't get why you could not imagine this anyway. You also could turn it of in the same way you can turn maintenance off.

I don't know that Officers should be more important. . . I already find them epicly important.  And whether my crew comes and goes, or are chained to their stations like slave galley rowers, is for my fiction to decide.  I disagree that crew experience should fluctuate on a schedule -- that dictates that my empire's training methods can't allow five veteran beings to compensate for one newbie.

It flies in the face of 'Lucky' Jack Aubry or Honor Harrington whipping their crew into crack shape, or already-whipped crew finagling ways to join their old captain.



If such a system gets added, I certainly will turn it off.  The problem is that I was told the same thing years ago about up-or-out realistic promotions. . . and that system was bugged and never got fixed.  Literally every single conventional start I have ever played has included ~80% of my officer corps being deemed excess to requirements and let go because I can't create jobs for them fast enough.  Sure, there are workarounds (dozens of excess teams, SM re-run officer creation, hammering the 'Add Officer' button) but it's still super annoying.

I really don't see how this would be any different than manage maintenance with overhauls or minerals for building materials and so on. It also would require MUCH less micromanagement than maintenance and overhauls but add some interesting resource management into the picture.

Resorce management, yes.  Interesting?  I disagree.  It seems like I just get to watch my crew training go slowly up, then abruptly down every X months.

Actually, I'm not seeing the 'management' part.  My only real choices seem to be how much of my crew gets replaced and when.  And who decides the 'when' part?  You seem to be suggesting "only at colonies with pools of available crew" but that's not how officers work -- they can be sent anywhere, instantly.  Sure, many (most?) of us use actual ships to move them around as cargo, but Aurora's Auto-Assign teleports them across the universe. . . even on & off the command deck of our 22-year deep space explorers a dozens systems out from anywhere friendly.  Is crew rotation going to work the same way?

So now I should exploit the solution to the exploit by setting my crew rotation to 5 days, so that the constant flux is small enough to be ignored. . . or maybe set it to fifty years, so that it doesn't happen before the ship gets scrapped.  Or maybe five hundred years, because my fiction includes ships a century or two old.  Certainly, turning it off would be easier but it might not be possible without breaking something else I care about more.

- - - - -

What you're requesting would make the daily life of my empire worse (and more annoying) in order to solve a problem that -- to me -- seems self-inflicted.  And only 'a problem' for one or two people.

= = = = =

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the math here, or your idea.   It sounds like the HMS Average (crew exp 100) under Captain Okay would train a bit (crew exp 104) in six months, then swap 25% of its experienced crew for average newbs (new net crew exp 103), and repeat.  End result is a lower 'max crew exp' when the two curves of 'training rate' and 'turnover rate' meet.

. . .Though note that the empire-wide crew pool is now slowly rising in base experience.  If the majority of your crew are being trained by captains, the 'max crew exp' is still going up (though more slowly) since the replacements are no longer 'average' but above average.  You've changed the problem from 'exceptional ships' to 'exceptional navy' -- which, granted, may not be a problem.

[Father Tim]

We now have effectively 'immortal' ships and because of it, the crew bonuses/grade points short of catastrophic damage to the ship won't significantly degrade.  The crew/officer model is now predicated on 'mortal' crews which age up, transfer, retire, get sick, and die (I know the story tag exists but that is an option and not the default).  That creates something of a gap where the conceit is that this one fortunate and ancient ship is crewed by superbly trained crewman accrued over the decades the ship has been in service but the crew model is one of mortality and rotation and I think this in some fundamental ways cheapens the crew grade training bonuses and detracts from those that might want to RP a more 'conventional' sort of space empire.

Only because you're choosing to define it that way.

The fifty-year-old ship with the exceptional crew doesn't have to mean octogenarians that have been doing the same job the whole time.  It can mean the culture of the ship is to learn and excel.  It can mean a prestige posting that the best & the brightest wish to serve aboard.  It can mean a lucky ship that likewise attracts skilled crewbeings.

Or it could even mean a thousand little tweaks and upgrades that makes it function faster or more effectively than a sister ship, even with an equal crew.

The SAS used jeeps in WWII North Africa. . .  but there are jeeps and there are jeeps.  Is a 4% improvement of a specific jeep over another due to the skill of its mechanic & driver, or the use of German jerry cans instead of British?

[Kristover]

RE:  Father Tim

Of course I've chosen to define it that way.  I play a relatively 'human' empire whose military and personnel policy mimics 21st century military organization with ships that operate (and wear out) much like their 21st century naval equivalents and crews do a cruise or two before transferring to a different ship or shore job.  That is how I play my game.  It seems you play a more exotic sort of RP conceit and that is cool as well...but no more or less valid than my play style and respectfully, from your comments to me and Jorgen, it kind of seems to me that you think your play style is more valid.

That solution I propose isn't one to constrain your play style, that is why I suggested it to be optional.  I'm suggesting some sort of crew training degradation to better enable my play style. Aurora 4x really isn't your or my fantasy universe - it is Steve's and generally his vision/style aligns with mine and where it doesn't, in this case ships with an effectively infinite service life that never wear out and a crew bonus that only ever gets bigger (short of damage) and never smaller , I'll make and adhere to personal analog rules which further aligns our visions and maximizes my enjoyment.  However, Steve has shown in numerous ways he is willing to share and collaborate on his fantasy universe and so therefore - much like the academy ask from last week - I'm willing to ask for something to facilitate my play style and do it in a fashion which allows for others to live their own fantasy.  He'll either incorporate it or he won't - either way I'll play.

I hope that clears up my position.

[Jorgen_CAB]

@Father Tim
I don't understand the rather hostile stance here.. I did also suggest it could be an "optional" mechanic in the same way that maintenance is optional as it is in the same category of "human" realism that perhaps not everyone would like to use.

From a human perspective it does make allot of sense. From an immortal tree species it might not... but then officers are still a problem in my opinion story wise too.

It was just as simple suggestion to get crew replacement into the game without much micromanagement.

I'm pretty sure Steve are less interested about covering every type of RP setting and rather look at how fun a mechanic is to use as a base reason for adopting it... that seem likely from his many responses in general. I leave it to him to ponder if crew degradation could be interesting or not.

[Father Tim]

RE: Kristover

I do not think my play style is more valid than any other.



@Jorgen_CAB

I do not think my stance is hostile.



- - - - -


Along with trying to be clear that I do not want any such change in my personal Aurora campaign(s), I am objecting to the idea that it is somehow realistic.  To extrapolate from the given condition that crew experience is only reduced by crew deaths the hypothesis "therefore, no personnel changes occur over the life of the ship" is, I think, going too far.  Why not the explanantion "new crew are quickly trained up to this ship's standards, which exceed those elsewhere in the fleet" instead?

I also completely fail to see where the mangement, decision making, or fun is in changing the paradigm from "training/experience increases from good officers/combat" to "training/experience increases from good officers/combat and then goes down over time."


= = = = =

I agree that Steve has limited development time, and I'd rather he use it implementing a new feature that forty-odd players want and are excited about instead of one that maybe only a couple of people want and a couple of others definitely don't.



So. . .  to clear up my position:
1.  I read a request for a feature that, as I understand it, I definitely do not want and would not use.
2.  So I tried to explain why I did not want it.


I'm glad we all agree that if implemented, it should be optional.

[QuakeIV]

I mean, its true that the ship crew rating pretty much stays top notch after you train them up and then stays there forever, which is deeply unrealistic compared to navies that regularly have to do drills to stay reasonably sharp.

Unless you could automate training exercises though, I dont think its a fun thing to add to the game.  In reality training is actually an exceedingly costly endeavour for most militaries and choosing to not keep up with training requirements is a pretty common budget decision when times are hard, that could later lead to that military getting its ass kicked.  It could be a pretty fun tradeoff (in my opinion) to cut off the training due to a sorium shortage and to then actually feel the negative effects of less well prepared crews.  However it would not be particularly fun (in my opinion) to constantly be having to manually re-schedule training exercises lest your fleets become useless.

[SevenOfCarina]

I mean, its true that the ship crew rating pretty much stays top notch after you train them up and then stays there forever, which is deeply unrealistic compared to navies that regularly have to do drills to stay reasonably sharp.

Unless you could automate training exercises though, I dont think its a fun thing to add to the game.  In reality training is actually an exceedingly costly endeavour for most militaries and choosing to not keep up with training requirements is a pretty common budget decision when times are hard, that could later lead to that military getting its ass kicked.  It could be a pretty fun tradeoff (in my opinion) to cut off the training due to a sorium shortage and to then actually feel the negative effects of less well prepared crews.  However it would not be particularly fun (in my opinion) to constantly be having to manually re-schedule training exercises lest your fleets become useless.

I'm not sure how much of an issue that would be. If I understand correctly, fleet training can happen at any time while a ship is within the radius of its parent admin command, even while it is executing a movement order, but it needs to be assigned to the training admin command, so theoretically, it would just be a matter of copy-pasting the fleet to the training command whenever you want it on the move, or when it is garrisoned somewhere.

Maybe reassigning command could be an order of some sort? Like, "move to planet X, reassign to TRN Command, start fleet training. If hostile fleet detected, reassign to NAV Command, abandon training." or something similar.

To mitigate the effects, fleet training could decay over time, at a slow rate inversely proportional to the existent fleet training and crew grade. So it might take a year to go from 100% to 99%, another year to 95%, another year to 75%, and then it would rapidly decrease to zero, so a small amount of this decay could be acceptable.

Remembering to assign fleet to fleet training every three or four years is not that big of a chore, unless you somehow have hundreds of fleets.

[Razgriz]

Any thoughts on Tech to extend leader/species lifespans? It would push the age of retirement up higher. 

Unless the new story function makes them immortal, only dying in battle and accidents.