Apologies in advance for the huge block of text, but I'll try to format it as logically as possible.
I created a game recently where earth had been taken over by a huge socialist group, and the rest of the world had been evicted on large sleeper ships. Of course, to emulate the socialists being able to build up their empire while the sleepers were in transit, I set up a game where the 3 empires to challenge the rule of these socialists, The Commonwealth (Britain, most of the old British empire and the US), Europa (built up of mainly Mediterranean and mid-european countries) and the Outcasts (made up of the stragglers, mainly from Scandinavia). I kept the invaders, swarm and
After sitting through 88 months in my current game doing nothing as I waited for the socialites to build up their empire, I was subject to the best part of an hour wait as the AI broke down into standoffs at numerous points, running through a total of nearly 20 hours game-time on minute-long increments. Which brings me to the first of my suggestions...
1 - An optimisation to the AI - when in standoffs when neither side has any missiles remaining or no way to engage the foe, perhaps they should opt to retreat and keep the conflict short. Only if it makes sense with the AI though, more aggressive AIs may resort to more... suicidal tactics. Which brings about suggestion 2:
2 - Collision detection and the ability to ram enemy vessels, acting like large warhead-less missiles. Speed and mass should be factored in, so a gigantic warship would be able to deal a fair amount of damage if travelling at speed, but a gunboat could potentially deal more as it can impact the target quicker. Drawbacks to such an order could include inexperienced or unpatriotic crews refusing to follow orders, or delaying them for much longer periods than usual (as they brace themselves for certain death) as well as the attacking ship taking equal damage. A large battleship could potentially deal heavy damage to a target and only destroy a few forward bulkheads, whereas a fighter travelling around 12000 km/s would likely crater the target in destroying itself. On normal orders, ships should attempt to go around one another (including over, which could be represented as a loss in speed - see suggestion 5)
I understand that Aurora doesn't follow conventional physics, but a few things have always bugged me. I'll list them here:
3 - Turn rates. It doesn't make sense to me that a huge warship travelling at even only 3000 km/s can double back on itself practically instantaneously. Perhaps adding a new engine-related system (Thrusters) to provide power to a grid of turning thrusters across the ship, which impact the turn rates. Say a fighter, with a small weight and a moderately powerful thruster could turn say 900 degrees every 5 seconds (2 and a half complete turns, same as a full 180 every second) whereas a huge battlecruiser could take over 30 seconds to turn around completely. Using this, we could then even choose where to mount weapons - on the fore, aft, port or starboard, with turrets able to cover much larger arcs. Using this, battles could become far more tactical, with gunboats flanking a cruiser to avoid the huge fore-mounted lasers. The system could then easily be expanded to missiles, using the existing agility statistic as a new 'turn rate', meaning that PD missiles will have to capitalise on agility. This leads into suggestion 4...
4 - More logical ship tracking. When you take a turn, the game tracks the movement of ships in a trail, but it's always straight - which has caused me a few issues as a newbie. In the least, I feel that they should track every move a ship has made since the last 'turn', so if it has moved a zig-zag course between a few waypoints, the game shows a zig-zagged path for the trail rather than a straight line. If you include turn rates, then it could track it at say 10 points during the time lapse, so a curved path would show as 10 joined lines curving as the ship turned.
5 - Vertical movement. Even though I doubt this could be easily modelled and represented in aurora, I'd like to see the ability to move my ships over enemies, or under them, expanding the game to the 3 dimensions that space represents. I'd suggest (as a fellow, if much less experienced programmer) using a 3rd integer to measure the z position, the distance from the galactic plane, and then being able to set this for waypoints, to allow them to move under and over one another, perhaps limited to a sensible distance like 7500km to stop people from exploring systems by going lightyears 'below' them.
6 - 'Real' Star Distances - the 'distance to system' view on the galactic map traces the position through jump points, which is okay (I guess) but as a bit of a perfectionist I'd like to see the option to measure distance between systems 'as the crow flies' (or not, as they won't fly long in space). Even if only so with a bit of loci we can determine roughly where each system is relative to each other.
That's all I can think of for now. Anyway, Kudos to you Steve, as you have already created what I'd class as one of the greatest 4X/Grand Strategy games I've ever played (and I've seen a fair few).
