Exploit involving crew grade.

[iceball3 (OP)]

I guess it may be less of a bug and more just a possible need in change of mechanics, but by the looks of things, the most direct way to increase crew grade is to have your ship take damage at all. At which point, it just becomes an exchange of duranium for crew grade, as the Manual Damage button can just be spammed at 1 damage with only occasional repairs needed.
And if you are avoiding the manual damage due to it seeming magical, you can get roughly the same effect by passing gauss fighters into the possesion of a hostile empire, then shooting them down when training is done.
Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions to make based on this? We can assume that "just don't powergame" has already been considered.

[83athom]

Its a thing, don't fight it. None of us does this in our games anyway (I hope). Its metagame that's there for Role Players (for different reasons, including "simulated" training battles).

[MarcAFK]

Oh cool, Aurora has danger rooms, Time to test out firing active sensor equipped AMM at waypoints near my own ships.

[iceball3 (OP)]

Oh cool, Aurora has danger rooms, Time to test out firing active sensor equipped AMM at waypoints near my own ships.

Last i checked, you can not directly engage your own ships, mines have faction identity.
That said, there isn't much stopping you from mounting an engineless gauss fighter/PDC and generously donating it to a jostile empire.

[MarcAFK]

Sadly you are correct, I can't even use thermals to target my own ships

[Garfunkel]

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions to make based on this? We can assume that "just don't powergame" has already been considered.

I hope that one day Steve adds another methods for crews to gain grade but, Aurora being what it is, there are so many different methods for "powergaming" that it's pretty much pointless. There is no goal for the game, except for what you make up for yourself, SM allows you to "cheat" as much as you want, you can configure the game start to give you as many bonuses as you care and so on.

[Steve Walmsley]

I guess it may be less of a bug and more just a possible need in change of mechanics, but by the looks of things, the most direct way to increase crew grade is to have your ship take damage at all. At which point, it just becomes an exchange of duranium for crew grade, as the Manual Damage button can just be spammed at 1 damage with only occasional repairs needed.
And if you are avoiding the manual damage due to it seeming magical, you can get roughly the same effect by passing gauss fighters into the possesion of a hostile empire, then shooting them down when training is done.
Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions to make based on this? We can assume that "just don't powergame" has already been considered.

You can also use SM mode to give yourself a fleet of million ton battleships with max tech

Aurora intentionally provides a great variety of ways to 'cheat' the game, so you can set things up any way you want. There are also inadvertent ways such as the one you describe which are plainly exploits. However, this is (mostly) a single player game, so the only thing you are affecting by using exploits, or SMing changes to the world, is your own enjoyment of the game. It's up to you to decide whether your enjoyment is enhanced or reduced by using them.

[sloanjh]

Last i checked, you can not directly engage your own ships, mines have faction identity.
That said, there isn't much stopping you from mounting an engineless gauss fighter/PDC and generously donating it to a jostile empire.

You can do even better than this.  You can create a player-controlled NPR and donate ships to it to act as an OpFor within a game.  Think of it as your empire setting up the space equivalent of the National Training Center or Top Gun, except using live rounds.  And at that point, voila - you're not power gaming/exploiting any more, you're working within the game and using SM mode as it was intended to be used.

Or if you want to do design studies, you can start a side game, SM in order of battles and initial starting locations, and fight it out.  The downside in both cases is you'll have to play both sides of the battle so you lose fog-of-war (which probably minimizes the point of long range sensors), but it still should give you a good idea of how well different fleet mixes would do in a slugging match.

John

PS - jostile empire - is that an empire that tries to destroy your ships by angrily bumping into them? O:-)  Sorry - had to do it....

[alex_brunius]

Id rather look at this as a place where there is room for improvement.

What is it that makes a real crew more "experienced" in combat?

The thing that would yield the most experience IMHO is actual total failure, ship destruction and escape in escape pods. Crew that manages to survive will come out of it with tons of more experience how combat, damage control, escape and the harshness of space works. That is why rescuing crews should be extra important.

Experience from ship damage feels like it should scale with severity of damage, so that these 1 damage spam don't make a crew elite so quickly. And it is also a good idea to make actual repairs of components yield experience due to the improvisation nature required that would be very useful both in future combat and damage control. Even repairs of maintenance breakdowns would make the crew know the ship ( and it's quirks ) better so they can adapt to them and knows what systems are likely to fail first in combat and can take measures.


Experience of actual combat also includes success, and most importantly seeing the effects weapons actually have on the target. What I would like to have here is a new mechanic where you can "inspect" wrecks with the military ships on site right after combat, to learn both about the effectiveness of your weapons, and of the weakness of the enemy ships. Think of it as a kind of boarding mechanic that involves a risk to a small part of the crew ( depending on size of destroyed ship/ships), but rewards you with most of the knowledge you would get from salvaging + extra crew grade.

I think this also would be really great for story telling! Just imagine all the stories of crew and captain boarding and inspecting shot up enemy ships or unknown derelicts floating in space...

And after all what military would not inspect the enemy wrecks after battle if the time for it exists? ( which most of the time it does ). Spacesuits should exist in abundance on most military ships and few defeated enemy ships are intact so boarding is generally not a problem.

Perhaps you would also need say 1 crew per 250 ton enemy ships, so that a fighter with a crew of 2 can't inspect an enemy Battleship ( but could very well inspect a knocked out enemy fighter ).

The danger associated with inspection should scale downward with time elapsed from destruction, 30 days after it should be minimal but 1 hour after destruction you could have everything from secondary explosions, hull breakups, structural collapses, fires, electrical shocks, defense AIs and stray survivors causing trouble for the crew you send over...