The only mechanic that is bad is combat.

[Jiman (OP)]

I think Aurora is a fun and fantastic game.   Its in depth, its complex and you can tell even though it is complex, time has been taken to organize it in a way where its easy to interact with. 

The only issue i have though with Aurora and everything it offers is combat.   I simply can not stand the combat.   It does not seem realistic to me, its cumbersome, it destroys the flow of the game. 

I dont have any specific suggestions to improve this part of the game, but I felt that I needed to share my prospective in hopes that it eventually is improved upon so I may once again enjoy the game to its fullest. 


Edit:

I do realize that it would be more productive to state specifically why I feel this way.  I will do this once I have more times on my hands.

[xeryon]

I was just going to respond and then saw your quick edit.

Everyone here seems to welcome discussion of the positives and negatives with equal reverence to both.  But to state that you dislike something it will be beneficial if you can elaborate on what you dislike.

In some case, myself included, incorrect menus or functions are being used thus giving an undesirable experience.  For combat there is more then one screen where you can administrate your warships and one of the pages is all but non-functional.

[crys]

i dont have much experiance with combat, but a few things i think can be improved, or maybe someone can tell me a better way todo it.

my first problem is, that the Combat Assignments Overview window is not updated between combat turns, opening it every turn again is realy no fun =(

my 2. problem was with an enemy missile ship
i think it fired about 300 missiles at me, in volley of 8 or so, i used beam ships, so there was not much offence for me, so i needed to fly thrue all of thouse missiels which took me about 10 game mins or so - in 1-5s time frames Oo.

i see that it is neccessary in some way to give me all the information about thouse size 1 missiles(hits/misses/dmg reports/pd).
but it was not much fun to play.

3. is about crew training - in close combat i got the msg "not ready to fire yet". i know now that it means that my crew was untrained, but maybe the msg could be changed in some way to reflect, that it is connected with crew training.
that new players dont get confused/enraged about it, without a chance to understand without searching the forums =)

[Nathan_]

Combat for me was incredibly frustrating, and then I figured it out. it still does some annoyances, but that is for balance reasons rather than poor design as far as I can see.

Missiles take a while to get through, but that is the nature of the game(which is mp focused acutally). You want the time to react and respond to threats. You can pass through them faster though, by forcing increments, space time bubbling the system in question, and having an extremely robust final defensive fire setup.

As far as ships not firing, that is inexperienced crews, or ships trying to synchronize their fire with other ships that are not yet ready to fire. On one occasion I had my ships in a synch fire -> autofire loop where they refused to fire, so be careful with those options.

[Erik L]

i dont have much experiance with combat, but a few things i think can be improved, or maybe someone can tell me a better way todo it.

my first problem is, that the Combat Assignments Overview window is not updated between combat turns, opening it every turn again is realy no fun =(

Just select the system from the dropdown near the top. That will refresh the info.

[waresky]

Am play Aurora from early stage..with enormous enthusiasm (apologize my english,mates..)

But combat r a hardest part in whole game.

Sometimes ive tell Steve for change some..

But arent easy.

Steve and me,have been play at Megatraveller for ages...but am fear "Traveller Combat System" are too strategical for Aurora..but...

Hope Steve sit down and think another Combat system,one day or later.

[ardem]

Nothing is too challenging or too strategic in gaming. I hate when people like to dumb things down. That is why most are on the aurora forum and no sin of the solar empire or what not. It the challenge, I think the more in depth the better the game as long as the UI and the maths coprocessor can handle it.

If anything for me combat become a little easy to predict. Normally it who has the most missile stock or can fire the most waves wins.  Where bunching of space craft is more preferable then squadrons on different vectors. I think the biggest game changer would be if Steve made splash damage due to ships in a squadron breaking apart, then you would be question how many to put in a squadron.

Also I would prefer missile to not be as effective with more chance for missing and doubling laser range in general, this might take away the missile centrix combat that exists.

[metalax]

The problem is that laser range is limited by how far it could travel in a single 5sec increment due to the speed of light. Steve has said in the past that he didn't want to have to handle laser packets flying around.

Additional tech to give ecm a chance to simply cause missiles to miss/prematurely detonate rather than only reducing the tracking range of the missile firecontrol may be a good idea. As it is you simply oversize your firecontrols and can then ignore any enemy ECM for your missile ships.

[Haji]

The two things I'd like to change in the current combat are: log entries and energy based combat.

As of now, there are simply too many log entries for me. Every hit is logged and dipslayed. Give option to display more compact form, that show only a total result of the past increment - total hits on targets, total misses and maybe a list of destroyed components. As it is, in a battle as small as six ships vs nine (replaying campaign, six sides, I control them all) the amount of log entries made me completely ignore them. I was checking the status on my ships in the ships screen every increment, because it was more convenient.

As for energy based combat. I'm just repeating here what have been said many times: make it more competitive. I'm not sure I know how. I guess, the easiest way would be to increase the costs of missiles. The second thing that may help, would be to make some kind of AI tracking for missile defence. I remember my first time in combat when I had inexperienced crew, rather weak sensors and because of this my point defence never engaged, because they couldn't react fast enough (meaning three five second increments). Adding an AI tracking component (that may have it's problems, like decreased chance to hit) that would always react on time would probably help a lot to blunt the effectiveness of missiles.

[Hawkeye]

The two things I'd like to change in the current combat are: log entries and energy based combat.

As of now, there are simply too many log entries for me. Every hit is logged and dipslayed. Give option to display more compact form, that show only a total result of the past increment - total hits on targets, total misses and maybe a list of destroyed components. As it is, in a battle as small as six ships vs nine (replaying campaign, six sides, I control them all) the amount of log entries made me completely ignore them. I was checking the status on my ships in the ships screen every increment, because it was more convenient.

As for energy based combat. I'm just repeating here what have been said many times: make it more competitive. I'm not sure I know how. I guess, the easiest way would be to increase the costs of missiles. The second thing that may help, would be to make some kind of AI tracking for missile defence. I remember my first time in combat when I had inexperienced crew, rather weak sensors and because of this my point defence never engaged, because they couldn't react fast enough (meaning three five second increments). Adding an AI tracking component (that may have it's problems, like decreased chance to hit) that would always react on time would probably help a lot to blunt the effectiveness of missiles.

Hm, if you set-up your ships right, they should _allways_ engage incoming missiles. You do _not_ have to give orders to your AMM launchers and PD-turrets. If you do this, unexperienced crew will indeed never fire. You have to set up your defenses on the Battle Window (F8). There you tell your ships computers how many AMMs to launch at each detected hostile missile and how your PD-turrets are supposed to act.

Select a missile fire-con
Select how many AMMs will be launched at each enemy missile (0 to 5)

Select a beam fire-con
Select the defense mode:

Area Defense engages the incoming missiles as far out as possible, trying to get a second shot in (usually _very_ hard to achieve and rarely worth the reduced to-hit chance at long range)
Final Defensive Fire engages any incoming missile, that targets a ship in its own taskgroup
Final Defensive fire (self only) engages only incoming missiles, that target this one ship
Both final defensive fire modes shoot, when the missile reaches 10.000 km, which is the minimum range of combat in Aurora and which gives the best to-hit chance.

You can copy those settings for all ships of that type in the taskgroup, in the system or throughout your empire (buttons on the right)

Attention: If your ship has both, AMMs and turrets and you set-up your turrets first, the range, your AMMs will engage the enemy missiles will by default be the range of your turrets. You have to change that range manually (yes, I lost a few ships before I could figure out why they would not engage the hostile ASMs)

[Haji]

Ah, thanks a lot. I was using "manual" missile defence until this time 

[Victuz]

*cough* I actually like the fact that combat takes forever and is quite unwieldy.
I still remember my first fight against the precursors that I've won. It probably took somewhere around 3 real world hours and technically we fought at an astonishing distance of one AU but it was fun and exciting, whenever one of my ships got very close to blowing to smithereens I got tense, whenever one of their ships turned into a wreck I let out a "YUSS!!!" and did a victory dance (yes).

There were some annoyances but I quickly understood why they exist, the most noticeable one was the fact that the bad guys were shooting missiles in 5 second intervals while I fired everything I had pretty much instantly (now I know that's one of the worst things to do if I want to beat the AMM's) this took 40-50, 5 second intervals and than a very tense hour as I was manually assigning targets for my AMM's to save as many ships as humanly possible when faced against a seemingly unending wave of missiles.
It was all glorious and despite the fact that most of it was shown through static screens and text it was probably the most fun I've had in months.

So yeah the combat system is really close to perfection in my mind. The only way it could be improved is probably by making it more complex and for that I don't know what aspects of the game could possibly increase in complexity without breaking the rest.

The only ONLY thing I could say needs to be fixed is player error. And that is making a stupid mistake and pressing 8 hours instead of 3 hours or something like that and than realizing that all your ships have been blown to bits because the game didn't stop processing even though your amm's were on. It should stop as soon as one of the ships takes damage, it might be too late anyway but it should.

[sloanjh]

The only ONLY thing I could say needs to be fixed is player error. And that is making a stupid mistake and pressing 8 hours instead of 3 hours or something like that and than realizing that all your ships have been blown to bits because the game didn't stop processing even though your amm's were on. It should stop as soon as one of the ships takes damage, it might be too late anyway but it should.

This is why saving early and often is recommended, especially during combat (or during approaches to potential combat situations, like exploring a new system).

John

[swarm_sadist]

Not sure if this is necroing or off topic.

There are some major issues with combat:
1. The interfaces are cluttered are fairly easy for new players to get lost in. They are also rather frustrating.
2. A single missile ship will grind the game to a halt.
3. The text information will all smash together, thus providing you with ugly clutter that tells you nothing.
4. Too much useless information is presented in the info dump.
5. The list of enemies becomes hard to look through and select.
6. The fire control systems are hard to set up and individually target.
7. The fleet management and the ability to handle advanced formations is hard to pull off at best, and broken at worst.

1. Having a CIC tab that has all combat information and control in one screen would help, perhaps similar to the economy screen (F2) and it's many tabs.
2. I have no idea how the game is set up to run sub-pulses, but maybe make it so that a successful intercept does not stop the time, or that armour damage won't interrupt.
3. Perhaps another map that, instead of text, would show generic symbols with contact numbers (Sierra-4, Vampire-2, or maybe a NATO symbol, etc), which could then be expanded if information is required by the player.
4. Stack the information. Instead of 20 lines of weapon recharges with show events ticked, it will show "20x weapons recharging this tick" in one line. Maybe even make it only show out of the ordinary messages or negative status.
5. Maybe make it so the list box is larger, or that the information is presented neatly, without requiring the extend button.
6. Make it so fire control can be set up from the design window? I got nothing else.
7. Fix task forces so that a task force is actually a task force. Make it so units will actively support other units in it's task force.

Note that all of ^these^ are problems with the game engine, layout or time pulses. Nothing here has anything to do with balance issues or AI. Also some issues that people (not necessarily me) that people like to talk about:
1. The whole missile issue (large missiles vs small missiles)
2. Electronic warfare
3. Large meson cannons late game
4. Large microwave weapons late game
5. Fighters and their formations and flights
6. Planning attacks using passive information, such as thermal or optics
7. Boarding, pirating, privateering
8. etc...

[se5a]

to add to this, now I've finaly had my first real combat experience and didn't really like it:

default combat orders, things like:

auto enable fighters and parasites to land on their assigned mothership when empty, and relaunch when re-armed(and especially in the case of box launchers reloaded)

fighters really need some sort of - go find and attack the nearest non disabled enemy of List[shipclass] then return and rearm. the list would be a prioritized list of ship classes for a specific class of fighter(or any ship design really) to attack, with some default quick ordering like largest at top, smallest at top etc.
you'd have to add some range fudge into that too though, ie, how far out of their way will they go to attack their ideal target when there's another less ideal one close by? gets complicated. let the player decide as much as possible.

movement orders where ships will attempt to keep out of range of the enemy weapons while still be in range of their own. in the case of beam weapons this will be a little trickier since the closer you are the better the chance to hit, and with lasers the more damage dealt. missiles would be easier since they can just keep at max range. 

being able to set things like, fire x number of y type(series?) of missile at z enemy ship class. or in the case of a new and unset ship class z would be size.


just things to reduce the tedium of combat. it's one thing to sit and wait for it, it's another to have to give lots of little repetitive orders over and over and over again.

the whole thing ofc could get quite complex. which is not a bad thing if there's some half decent defaults. add yet another dimension to the game.