Suggestions Thread for v2.4.0

[Steve Zax]

QOL Suggestion:

Show the ages of scientists as part of the information given when choosing someone to head a project.

May not be relevant to everyone but I've been playing a slower paced game (40% research speed, with Limited Research Admin) and I've run into the problem whereby I'll start the research and then a couple of months later the scientist retires as they reach their mid 60s. Having their age listed when choosing from the list would make it a lot easier to avoid that, whilst also giving players a better idea of when it would be a good idea to switch to a less experienced scientist to train them up.

That would be a useful "minor change."
A _major change_ that would be "better" would be an age increasing research line to increase the retirement age of all officers.

[tastythighs]

I started to use boarding shutles as standard equipment on my warships, so captured ships end up with multiple small formations still on board them.  Which in turn can mean many clicks to return them to their shuttles.
I'd like to suggest a "load all ground units from stationary fleet" order and/or a "load ground templates from stationary fleet" order.

[Droll]

As it stands, when you tell a fleet to unload ordnance, every ship will unload everything, which unfortunately includes loaded decoys. Normally this is fine, except in situations where you are moving ordnance between colonies using colliers that have military escorts which have decoys - who alongside their ammo transports, will happily unload their decoys.

It would be nice if the "unload ordnance to colony" order had a checkbox option "exclude decoys".

[Kiero]

Comets around companion stars. 

[Droll]

You know how in the civilian/flags tab the game shows the amount of cargo bays an installation takes in parentheses? Also do that when the "Load Installation" movement command is selected.

Bonus points if you also do a similar thing next to the cargo capacity value of the fleet (eg Cargo Capacity 12,500 (0.5)).

[ExecCrawfish]

It would be nice to have a few additional tools for managing system name themes - a button to rename all systems according to the current naming theme and one to select a name from the current list would be nice.

[nakorkren]

QOL request...

Could the shipyard size limitation be changed to be a modifier on efficiency, rather than a hard limit? E.g. if you want to build a ship that is 20,103 tons, and your shipyard capacity is only 20,000, you'd get a multiplier on your build rate of something like (20,000/20,103)^2. That way you don't have to fuss with adding 103 tons of capacity every time your ship design comes in slightly over, but there's still an incentive to build your shipyards big enough?

Presumably it would only apply in cases when the shipyard is too small, and multiplier would be capped at max of 1.0 (i.e. for when the shipyard is bigger than needed).

[captainwolfer]

QOL request...

Could the shipyard size limitation be changed to be a modifier on efficiency, rather than a hard limit? E.g. if you want to build a ship that is 20,103 tons, and your shipyard capacity is only 20,000, you'd get a multiplier on your build rate of something like (20,000/20,103)^2. That way you don't have to fuss with adding 103 tons of capacity every time your ship design comes in slightly over, but there's still an incentive to build your shipyards big enough?

Presumably it would only apply in cases when the shipyard is too small, and multiplier would be capped at max of 1.0 (i.e. for when the shipyard is bigger than needed).

Just use the continuous expansion function to expand it to the proper size. Adding a few hundred tons of capacity would only take like a month, probably

[Louella]

From the user JOSHUAWOOD on discord

is there no conditional order for "cargo hold full" ?
automatic salvaging just salvages untill full and keeps going

A slight problem exists in that salvage ships set to "salvage nearest wreck", will eventually fill their cargoholds with recovered components and minerals, but then continue to salvage more wrecks, effectively wasting most of the value of those wrecks.

So a conditional order for "Cargo Hold Full" and relevant actions to unload at colonies, would be good.
This could perhaps be included as part of a rework of Orbital Mining if that is ever planned.

Currently orbital mining platforms and ships will deposit minerals on the surface, requiring a colony to be set up, and then there is the management of mass-driving the minerals off the asteroid to somewhere more useful. This can be quite fiddly and fills the colony list with lots of small mining colonies of little other value.
If orbital mining ships were changed to behave more like the sorium harvesting ships, the "Cargo Hold Full" order could be used there too. Orbital mining platforms and ships could still deposit on the surface, but a behaviour more like sorium harvesters might be beneficial when dealing with lots of small asteroids - ships would move to an asteroid with minerals, begin mining, then drop the minerals off when full, and repeat.

[xenoscepter]

  -- So, off the cuff idea for Meson Cannons.

Currently, Meson Cannons larger than 30cm are strictly and progressively worse, since they fire slower and have no damage scaling, thus rendering the range increase worthless.

What if it was altered so that larger Meson Cannons had a higher effective rate of fire by making them more energy efficient per shot as they got bigger?

So unlike Railguns and Gauss Cannons, which fire multiple shots per increment and thus have multiple chances to hit as a result, Meson Cannons would instead fire more often by requiring less capacitors per shot as their caliber increased.

So I'm thinking every three caliber techs or so, a Meson Cannon would gain one extra shot, but without needing more capacitors to do it. So 10cm to 15cm Meson Cannons would have one shot as they currently do. 20cm to 30cm Meson Cannons would have twice as many shots, 35cm to 45cm would have thrice as many, and so on and so forth with each new threshold adding one shot.

Incidentally, High-powered Microwaves have this issue as well, whereby the lack of damage scaling means that HPMs over 30cm are just outright worse.

Also incidentally, this change could be applied to HPMs to make calibers over 30cm no longer useless while still preserving their "Secondary Weapon" flavor.

[nuclearslurpee]

  -- So, off the cuff idea for Meson Cannons.

Currently, Meson Cannons larger than 30cm are strictly and progressively worse, since they fire slower and have no damage scaling, thus rendering the range increase worthless.

What if it was altered so that larger Meson Cannons had a higher effective rate of fire by making them more energy efficient per shot as they got bigger?

So unlike Railguns and Gauss Cannons, which fire multiple shots per increment and thus have multiple chances to hit as a result, Meson Cannons would instead fire more often by requiring less capacitors per shot as their caliber increased.

So I'm thinking every three caliber techs or so, a Meson Cannon would gain one extra shot, but without needing more capacitors to do it. So 10cm to 15cm Meson Cannons would have one shot as they currently do. 20cm to 30cm Meson Cannons would have twice as many shots, 35cm to 45cm would have thrice as many, and so on and so forth with each new threshold adding one shot.

Incidentally, High-powered Microwaves have this issue as well, whereby the lack of damage scaling means that HPMs over 30cm are just outright worse.

Also incidentally, this change could be applied to HPMs to make calibers over 30cm no longer useless while still preserving their "Secondary Weapon" flavor.

Personally, the change I would like to see for mesons is that the caliber tech should also influence the attenutation rate and we can remove that third tech line. It is ridiculous IMO that an underpowered weapon type like mesons is also hamstrung strategically by having higher research requirements than strong weapons like lasers and railguns. Since this would be a net nerf to smaller-caliber mesons as they stand, I would also suggest rescaling the attenuation techs and I have previously suggested how to do this by simply reconfiguring the values to follow the 25% change per tech level that is standard in Aurora (e.g. 40% -> 32% ->25% ->20% instead of the current 40% -> 32% -> 28% -> 24%).

For HPMs I think something like this could work but we can perhaps reframe it as a boost to damage rather than shots, but much less so than for other beam weapons. Here I am thinking of fractional damage which would impact effectiveness vs shields and provide better ability to damage electronics as tech increases (making the EM hardening techs more attractive as well). For example, 10cm HPM would hav 1.0 damage, 12cm would have 1.25, 15cm would have 1.5, 20cm would have 1.75, and so on. This would require Steve to handle fractional values for internal damage calculations which he previously avoided when implementing fractional missile warheads but I think it would be worthwhile. This could also be a viable alternative change to mesons if the above idea is not satisfactory.

For both cases, the problem with changing the number of shots is that we hit major tech level breakpoints where certain techs are super-critical and intermediate techs are not. This doesn't fit Aurora's tech modeling very well and would create an unsatisfying progression for the player IMO. Fractional damage should accomplish substantially the same thing with a smoother progression.

[xenoscepter]

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13437.msg167781#msg167781

I wrote up something cleaner and more comprehensive here.

@nuclearslurpee

 --- I disagree, since my main gripe with BOTH weapon systems is that at higher caliber they fire slower, their range exceeds Beam FCS without any damage scaling to benefit from it, they are bigger and require more power to shoot in the first place thus needing higher capacitor tech.

 --- Honestly, the easiest solution is just to remove any size larger than 30cm for both Mesons and HPMs, but that's boring and also means less content overall. I proposed an effective RoF increase so as to eliminate the uselessness of those bigger guns, while also not nerfing the smaller ones, and giving these weapons a bit more character all at the same time.

[mike2R]

QoL suggestion:  When you press the Create Project button on the Research tab, it would be great if the newly created project was selected so that you could queue up another project on the same scientist without going hunting for it. 

[alex_brunius]

It probably always was like this but not as apparent as Jump Capability was not locked in place... But now it seems silly that the components for more advanced Jump Drives are cheaper to research and build because they are smaller.

Efficiency 6 for 3000t ship costing me 50 BP and 500 RP (380t JD size)
Efficiency 4 for 3000t ship costing me 75 BP and 612 RP (570t JD size)

[captainwolfer]

It probably always was like this but not as apparent as Jump Capability was not locked in place... But now it seems silly that the components for more advanced Jump Drives are cheaper to research and build because they are smaller.

Efficiency 6 for 3000t ship costing me 50 BP and 500 RP (380t JD size)
Efficiency 4 for 3000t ship costing me 75 BP and 612 RP (570t JD size)

More advanced tech means more can be done with less materials. I think it's fine. Cloaking devices are the same way.