Author Topic: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions  (Read 345291 times)

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Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #570 on: October 06, 2018, 12:57:05 PM »
Do you mean weapon assignments? Orders are at the fleet level.

No I meant conditional orders such as refueling/surveying.

They are also at the fleet level.
 

Offline MasonMac

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #571 on: October 06, 2018, 01:48:27 PM »
Not per fleet. Like say I wanted two fleets that survey individual systems, that should have the same conditional orders, I could simply select a preset of conditional orders, so like.

Code: [Select]
"Geo-Survey Preset"

Default Orders:
>Survey nearest body

Conditional Order A:
>If fuel is under 30%, refuel

And so I could apply it to each fleet.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #572 on: October 07, 2018, 08:09:58 AM »
A fleet consisting of 25 14.000t Asteroid Miners is detected at the same distance as a single 14.000t Asteroid Miner. I think there should be some ‚penalty‘ for large assemblies of ships in terms of detectability. EM value accumulates for a civilization. Likewise it should for larger fleets. Not in a 1 to 1 scale, but something like: 10 ships a 14.000t  should be detectable like 1 ship a 28.000t.
 

Offline tobijon

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #573 on: October 07, 2018, 08:21:29 AM »
A fleet consisting of 25 14.000t Asteroid Miners is detected at the same distance as a single 14.000t Asteroid Miner. I think there should be some ‚penalty‘ for large assemblies of ships in terms of detectability. EM value accumulates for a civilization. Likewise it should for larger fleets. Not in a 1 to 1 scale, but something like: 10 ships a 14.000t  should be detectable like 1 ship a 28.000t.
This has a big problem when going by fleet: you can simply put all of the ships in different fleets, which would then be at the same location without increasing the detectable range. If you go by ships on one exact spot, that can be easily solved by letting all of the ships get near each other instead of on the sames spot. If you go by distance on the other hand, it would be very complicated calculation when which ship would be detected. In any case, i dont see how this could realisticly be implemented.
 
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Offline King-Salomon

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #574 on: October 07, 2018, 10:15:18 AM »
This has a big problem when going by fleet: you can simply put all of the ships in different fleets, which would then be at the same location without increasing the detectable range. If you go by ships on one exact spot, that can be easily solved by letting all of the ships get near each other instead of on the sames spot. If you go by distance on the other hand, it would be very complicated calculation when which ship would be detected. In any case, i dint see how this could realistically be implemented.

Well, you are right that the player could game the system like you wrote ... the AI would not as it would not know how.. so it would only be a problem if the player wants to "game the system" himself.. as it is a singleplayer game and no MP I don't see a problem.. if the player whats to game the system in C# let him.. his/her loose...

I like the point TMaekler had... a fleet with more than 1 ship should have a higher energy output... 

but I guess this should wait till the next version of C# - I could think about a reason or two to have to re-balance the detection range again (lower again) than it is planed in C# so would just like to see how it works in C# as it is/is supposed to be
 

Offline Peroox

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #575 on: October 07, 2018, 12:36:51 PM »
Will be good to have more complexity in passive detection and electronic warfaree.  Imagine to use a bouy that generate passive footprint of ship and only a active scan can reveal that (or player because of ship behaviour).  There is a lot of things that can be add laterin C# version, but they are less important now. 
 

Offline Whitecold

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #576 on: October 07, 2018, 03:17:51 PM »
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.

The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
 
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Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #577 on: October 07, 2018, 05:00:11 PM »
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.

The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
This is a very good suggestion and something that has happened in actual military history. Morale could represent both the mental willingness to fight, as well as the general organization and cohesion of the unit, as well as their fatigue level. So repeated combat brings it down, being on defensive keeps it static, staying in the rear increases it slowly and being out of combat zone altogether makes it go up fast.
 
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Offline jonw

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #578 on: October 07, 2018, 08:03:02 PM »
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.

The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.

Seconded - isn't this kind of how it works in the gary grigsby games, with attack value (=morale) something you spend to attack, and which gets decreased by any attack, whether succesful or not?
 

Offline Adseria

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #579 on: October 08, 2018, 07:08:09 AM »
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.

The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.

It could also mean that it would be worth keeping front line units in reserve, rather than just throwing everything you have at the enemy right at the start; that way, when the troops in the front line start to get worn down, you can pull them back and replace them with reserves, exactly the way it's happened throughout history.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #580 on: October 08, 2018, 07:51:42 AM »
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.

The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
This is a very good suggestion and something that has happened in actual military history. Morale could represent both the mental willingness to fight, as well as the general organization and cohesion of the unit, as well as their fatigue level. So repeated combat brings it down, being on defensive keeps it static, staying in the rear increases it slowly and being out of combat zone altogether makes it go up fast.

I've been giving this some thought. What I am calling 'morale' is more like troop quality, improved by both training and combat experience but also potentially reduced by losses. What is described in the suggestion above as 'morale' is  a combination of combat fatigue and organizational disruption.

Both versions of 'morale' have an impact on fighting ability, although the quality aspect is long-term while combat fatigue is short-term and could recover within a few days. Perhaps we should have both with different designations.
 
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Offline zatomic

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #581 on: October 08, 2018, 10:25:42 AM »
After a few days of thinking based on the Academy thread that became about the requirement for a jump-ship to be at least as big as any other ship it wants to transit (in addition to a big enough jump-drive), I got to thinking about the whole jump-drive system. I've seen lots of threads where players were confused about this requirement and also the military/civilian distinction.

So, my thought is instead of civilian and military jump drives, to instead create two different types of drives based on two different ways to transit a jump point.

1st is the gate-drive. It opens a temporary gate of it's rated size allowing any number of ships of that size or less to pass. Transiting a gate would cause effects similar to a standard transit under the current rules, or whatever effects are desired to make a gate transit unappealing when potentially heading into combat. Gate-drives would be cheap for their size like current rules civilian jump drives. There would be no requirement on the size of the ship carrying the drive other than being less than or equal to the drive capacity. The effects could be consolidated with the current jump-gate functionality, where a gate-stabilization ship can create an arbitrarily large permanent gate allowing any ship to gate-transit.

2nd is the jump-drive. It functions like the current rules military jump drive able to move a number of ships each with a size up to it's rating in a squadron jump with minimal negative effects, ideal for opposed jump-point assaults and general military operations in unsecured territory where ambushes are possible.

In summary, the gate-drive and stabilized gates allow something like the current standard transit while the jump-drive allows something like current squadron transits, all without any need to worry about the civ/mil distinction.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #582 on: October 08, 2018, 12:18:07 PM »
Both versions of 'morale' have an impact on fighting ability, although the quality aspect is long-term while combat fatigue is short-term and could recover within a few days. Perhaps we should have both with different designations.
Hearts of Iron 3 solved this with using Strength and Organization values for each units. Strength was literally the Hit Points of an unit - the game did not model individual soldiers or equipment - where as Organization was a catch-all for all non-physical elements of a unit. So a high-quality, well-trained unit would have a higher Organization than a low-quality, poorly-trained one. What made the system really work was the "hidden" attribute of Morale, that determined how fast Organization could be recovered after a battle. So while the military doctrines of a country might allow the training of units with high Organization values, without the investment in propaganda etc that improved Morale, the units would only fight a single battle, and then require days if not weeks to recover. Units, no matter how much Strength they had left, would be immediately routed when their Organization hit zero and if they could not path to safety, would surrender.

In the Operational Art of War series, which did model individual pieces of equipment and squads of soldiers, each unit had a numerical Quality rating, determined by scenario designer, that could improve during the game, but it affected literally everything. How well the unit did in combat, how easily it could recover after combat, would it fight to death or retreat quickly, and so on. There was no morale check, rather unit quality was checked against its orders when the unit suffered casualties, to see whether it would keep following the orders or not, and on defence whether it would stand still or retreat. This was separate from Supply altogether.

The Gary Grigsby games used Quality as a catch-all value for units, that represented training level, morale, organization and more, and again it affected everything that the unit did except for movement rate. Units had to be ordered to Train to improve their Quality, though as the differences between good and bad units could be massive, this wasn't always useful. Quality decreased after new recruits were used to replenish losses in units, and could not be regained on its own. Though I think at very low levels it did improve slowly on its own.

Anyway, some food for thought there. Personally I think that renaming Morale to Quality and adding a Cohesion value would probably be the best system for Aurora C#. The Quality will only slowly increase due to Commander Training and combat, replenishing losses would bring it down, but otherwise it would be static. Cohesion value would be static in peace time, go automatically down in combat, recover slowly when unit is part of a campaign but not at front lines, and recover fast when unit is completely out of the war zone. The benefits of this system would be that it encourages players to rotate their combat units instead of just dropping a massive DOOM STACK on a planet, which makes ground campaigns more immersive. There would be a solid mechanical reason to create a R&R ship(s) or stations, where mauled ground units could be replenished and recover their Cohesion before being sent back to the meat grinder. And Cohesion could be something that would allow flavour between races - a Psychic Hive Mind could have insanely high Cohesion values when compared to Humans.
 
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Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #583 on: October 08, 2018, 01:29:17 PM »
Anyway, some food for thought there. Personally I think that renaming Morale to Quality and adding a Cohesion value would probably be the best system for Aurora C#. The Quality will only slowly increase due to Commander Training and combat, replenishing losses would bring it down, but otherwise it would be static. Cohesion value would be static in peace time, go automatically down in combat, recover slowly when unit is part of a campaign but not at front lines, and recover fast when unit is completely out of the war zone. The benefits of this system would be that it encourages players to rotate their combat units instead of just dropping a massive DOOM STACK on a planet, which makes ground campaigns more immersive. There would be a solid mechanical reason to create a R&R ship(s) or stations, where mauled ground units could be replenished and recover their Cohesion before being sent back to the meat grinder. And Cohesion could be something that would allow flavour between races - a Psychic Hive Mind could have insanely high Cohesion values when compared to Humans.

Yes, that sounds like a good approach. The way that morale currently works, it could be renamed to Quality with minor changes to functionality. Cohesion would be added on top.

Combat would only increase Quality (for the survivors) while Cohesion would fall based on a base rate for being in combat, modified by losses. Quality would decrease as a result of replacements being added (as morale does now), but would still move up to 100 relatively quickly (about 100 per year) and above 100 more slowly, again per the current morale rules. Rather than cohesion being higher for a 'hive mind', maybe it would just fall much more slowly.
 
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Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #584 on: October 08, 2018, 02:58:35 PM »
Well, if you are going to redo the Morale system, I've a few suggestions.


I'd say that ground forces have 3 non-physical stats. These stats are Morale, Cohesion and Training.


Morale would have a linear connection with casualties; although more severe losses will cause more severe morale loss, the real threat to morale is slow attrition. Likewise, although inflicting losses on enemy forces raises morale, it does not raise it as much as taking the same losses does in damage. Units in Support and Rear Echelon positions take worse morale hits when engaged and recover less when inflicting losses. Units that have been engaged in combat during a construction increment do not recover morale. This would encourage players to cycle forces, but the time spent should be something reasonable. Morale normally doesn't exceed the Formation's maximum value, but a properly skilled CO can increase the cap and/or recovery as currently in the rules.

It should be noted that, during WW2, the Americans reckoned a soldier could remain on station for nearly 3 months at a time, while the British cycled their troops every 12 to 14 days, giving them 4 days of leave.


Cohesion would have an exponential connection with casualties; constantly bleeding a few troops every combat round will slowly decrease Cohesion, taking a large number of casualties for the formation all at once drastically impacts its Cohesion and ability to provide a united front. Likewise is the loss of an HQ unit in the formation or the CO due to a combat injury something that can cause potentially heavy hits to Cohesion, but if they've got non-generic COs under them the hit is less (on the presumption that the chain of command keeps going), while the loss of an HQ has limited effect as long as it's not the last HQ. Having more than 1 HQ in the formation is a boost for Cohesion, if one with strongly diminishing returns, as is a commander with the right skills.

Generally speaking a military unit can cope quite well with the slow loss of troops; it's something they train and prepare for because losses are inevitable in war. Losing command and coordination, as would happen if the HQ of the unit is lost or a large chunk of its personnel is killed in a short amount of time is far more devastating.Putting down Cohesion as an explicit value does mean that you can get an idea how likely it is a given unit is going to falter and enable an enemy Breakthrough. High Cohesion also translates into having a high chance of performing a Breakthrough though.


Training would take the place of the current Morale value. I would say it's much more stratified than the current system, with the levels of Conscript, Green, Trained, Regular, Veteran and Elite. GFTF's on a planet can be instructed to train formations to a certain standard, which impacts the time and wealth it takes to train. Minerals is independent and only cares for the end equipment. Conscript troops train quickly and cheaply but take severe maluses to Morale and Cohesion, Trained troops have standard Morale and Cohesion, and Elites have high Morale and Cohesion but take a long time and are expensive to train and maintain. A CO with the proper skills can get even the worst Conscript unit up to Elite eventually, but that will take a lot of time of money in comparison to just selecting Elite training in the GFTF.

Training is something that's accumulated not unlike the way crew skill levels are. And like with crew skill levels, it's something that's averaged between all members of the unit. You can absolutely shove Green troops into an Elite formation, it just means the unit becomes on the average less skilled and may lose a level of Training depending on how much the unit is expanded from current size, but likewise can you shove some Elite or Veteran troops into a much less skilled unit as a cadre to stiffen them up a bit.

I deliberately picked some tresholds so as to let you pick a few values for each level instead of having to insert a calculation system that can get... odd as skill point values become more extreme.


I've got more ideas for the ground combat system, although I'll admit I'd basically shamelessly plunder Paradox grand strategy games for ideas.