Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Any chance you could set up something where there are 3-4 slots to assign different fire control to in the ship design stage.  Then each slot can be activated individually at the ship level.  This way when I design a ship I can assign all of my res 1 sensors to slot 1, my res 16 sensors to slot 2, ect.  When I go to the individual ship display (F6) the toggle for sensors on becomes 4-5 buttons.  One for each slot, and one to activate/deactivate all of them.  This way you get away with out making an entire new table, just expanding the ship table a bit.  Which slot I use is my choice, although it would probably help to keep similiar purpose sensors in the same slots.  

Brian

Its not that simple . The fire controls aren't on the Ship table. The original component is in the ShipDesignComponents table. Whether a class has that system and how many it has is recorded in the ClassComponent table. Individual ships only have records of which components are damaged, using the DamagedComponent table. Otherwise the ship uses the components from the ClassComponent table for its class. What I really need is a table that links Ships to ClassComponent (with a check on DamagedComponent) to handle the on/off for individual components.

Steve

[Brian Neumann]

Its not that simple . The fire controls aren't on the Ship table. The original component is in the ShipDesignComponents table. Whether a class has that system and how many it has is recorded in the ClassComponent table. Individual ships only have records of which components are damaged, using the DamagedComponent table. Otherwise the ship uses the components from the ClassComponent table for its class. What I really need is a table that links Ships to ClassComponent (with a check on DamagedComponent) to handle the on/off for individual components.

Steve

Dratt.  Oh well, chalk that one up to not looking into the database.

Brian

[davidr]

Steve,

In the Population and Production Screen ( Industrial production ) under the drop down menu "construction options" , would it be possible to sub divide the list of Ship Components into the different items various categories -  Engines , sensors , weapons     etc - instead of having all components in one long list. This would assist in deciding which components to construct.

DavidR

[voknaar]

Can you make the Commercial only filter a into a three optional selection sorting between Commerical components military only components and show all? When theres a large list of components to select from can make looking that much more intuitive i think.

[sloanjh]

This one's for a future release, since it requires a DB change and is fairly major change in mechanics....

Modify the population accounting so that more than one race can be present in the same population.

I just did my first genetic engineering gig - I created a low-grav race "Lunies" to colonize the moon (note that I expanded the range of human grav tolerance to +/-0.8 in SM mode to bring lunar gravity within reach).  Once I started creating Lunies I ended up with a logistical nightmare in my colony management (ok, it wasn't a nightmare, but the colony management was a LOT more cluttered and error-prone):

1)  I already had a lunar colony, but it was for humans.  I had to make a new one and kill the old one.
2)  Around the same time, I decided to run some colonists to Mars.  Unfortunately, I clicked on the wrong Earth colony for pickup, and ended up creating a Lunie population on Mars.
3)  I now have multiple Earths on the F2 and F12 screens that I need to be careful choosing between.
4)  My Lunies can't work in earth industry once they've been converted; they're a completely separate colony.  For example, I had to transfer troops to the Lunie earth to keep unrest down, rather than having the troops stationed in Human earth take care of it.
5)  Growth rate for the Lunies on Earth is treated as if the planet is empty, it's much higher than for the humans.

Implementation suggestion: I think there needs to be another level in the world/population structure, call it sub-population, which differentiates on the basis of race.  So if I have 990,000 Humans and 10,000 Lunies in a population on a planet, then it should show as 99% Human and 1% Lunie.  The Lunie and Human populations would have separately tracked colonization costs (and infrastructure requirements), unrest levels, political status, and growth rates (but growth rate would be mostly determined by the overall population or even world head-count).  Infrastructure, mines, etc. would be pooled at the population level.

Now that I think about it, this might just be a (BIG) coding change (as opposed to a DB change).  You probably have a table with populationID, raceID, and headcount; if the populationID were non-unique you could simply use different rows with the same populationID as different sub-populations.  (You'd have to create queries that summed over all the entries with the same populationID  and empireID for things like number of CFs etcs.)  This would also make it easy in situations where you conquer another race's colony - you'd simply change the populationID of the conquered population's entries to match the conquerer's populationID on that world.

I'm aware that even without a DB change, this would be a complex change that would probably be buggy for a while due to missed-out spots.  It might be more robust to do it as a DB change, introducing a whole new table to manage the sub-populations and leaving the existing tables as aggregators of total population.

John

[sloanjh]

Allow players to toggle the interrupt status of events, in the same way they can set BG and text color and/or hide them.  Provide a "Reset Default Interrupt Status" button for people who mess up and want to go back to the defaults.

I just started producing genetically engineered "Lunies" on Earth.  Every 5-day, I now get a "Unrest Increasing"/"Unrest Ruthlessly Suppressed by Ground Forces" pair of messages which interrupt auto-turns.  I assume it's coming from "Unrest Increasing", and I'd like to turn it off.  Note that I'm in a conventional game and still haven't made it out of Sol, so I'm running 5-day turns, i.e. the interrupt is forcing me into 1-click-per-turn mode.

I think there are two problems with the previous strategy of changing the hard-wired interrupt status of events in the game as people complain:

1) There's always another one, like the one above, that got missed out.
2) Some of these are a "two right answers" situation, where some players (or the same player at different times) will want different interrupt statuses for the same event.  The only way to manage this is to provide a default behavior which can be overridden by the player.

John

[Mel Vixen]

Would i be possible to update the Sol system a bit? Namely by including some of the more noteable trans-neptunian objects? I mean eris, sedna etc. . It would be fair since pluto isnt an "Planet" anymore.

[UnLimiTeD]

population

As a start for sooner, wouldn't it be earlier to just allow one colony (population) to use the industry and Ground Forces of another population on the same planet as well?
And have an automatic (Racename) behind a colony in all windows where that isn't obvious, like ship orders?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

This one's for a future release, since it requires a DB change and is fairly major change in mechanics....

Modify the population accounting so that more than one race can be present in the same population.

I just did my first genetic engineering gig - I created a low-grav race "Lunies" to colonize the moon (note that I expanded the range of human grav tolerance to +/-0.8 in SM mode to bring lunar gravity within reach).  Once I started creating Lunies I ended up with a logistical nightmare in my colony management (ok, it wasn't a nightmare, but the colony management was a LOT more cluttered and error-prone):

1)  I already had a lunar colony, but it was for humans.  I had to make a new one and kill the old one.
2)  Around the same time, I decided to run some colonists to Mars.  Unfortunately, I clicked on the wrong Earth colony for pickup, and ended up creating a Lunie population on Mars.
3)  I now have multiple Earths on the F2 and F12 screens that I need to be careful choosing between.
4)  My Lunies can't work in earth industry once they've been converted; they're a completely separate colony.  For example, I had to transfer troops to the Lunie earth to keep unrest down, rather than having the troops stationed in Human earth take care of it.
5)  Growth rate for the Lunies on Earth is treated as if the planet is empty, it's much higher than for the humans.

Implementation suggestion: I think there needs to be another level in the world/population structure, call it sub-population, which differentiates on the basis of race.  So if I have 990,000 Humans and 10,000 Lunies in a population on a planet, then it should show as 99% Human and 1% Lunie.  The Lunie and Human populations would have separately tracked colonization costs (and infrastructure requirements), unrest levels, political status, and growth rates (but growth rate would be mostly determined by the overall population or even world head-count).  Infrastructure, mines, etc. would be pooled at the population level.

Now that I think about it, this might just be a (BIG) coding change (as opposed to a DB change).  You probably have a table with populationID, raceID, and headcount; if the populationID were non-unique you could simply use different rows with the same populationID as different sub-populations.  (You'd have to create queries that summed over all the entries with the same populationID  and empireID for things like number of CFs etcs.)  This would also make it easy in situations where you conquer another race's colony - you'd simply change the populationID of the conquered population's entries to match the conquerer's populationID on that world.

I'm aware that even without a DB change, this would be a complex change that would probably be buggy for a while due to missed-out spots.  It might be more robust to do it as a DB change, introducing a whole new table to manage the sub-populations and leaving the existing tables as aggregators of total population.

John

This is something I have been thinking about for a while. Also, while I am making population in terms of people separate from industry, I would also try to make populations separate from system bodies, to allow deep space habitats, etc. This is obviously a major change and it is something I was planning to include in Aurora II. However, I seem to be more focused on Aurora I lately. I think in terms of scale of change, this may be up there with the 'Loading into Memory' change to movement and detection but I may take the plunge at some point anyway.

Steve

[sloanjh]

This is something I have been thinking about for a while. Also, while I am making population in terms of people separate from industry, I would also try to make populations separate from system bodies, to allow deep space habitats, etc. This is obviously a major change and it is something I was planning to include in Aurora II. However, I seem to be more focused on Aurora I lately. I think in terms of scale of change, this may be up there with the 'Loading into Memory' change to movement and detection but I may take the plunge at some point anyway.

Yep, that's about what I thought the scale would be (although I hadn't put it into the "Loading into Memory" context).

As a stop-gap, I liked UnLimiTed's suggestion of fixing the orders (F12) tab/screen so that the full colony name (including "(race)") shows up it the list of orders that have been given.  This would at least give some visual feedback that one had messed up....

John

[davidr]

Steve,

May I reiterate what Nibelung44 proposed on 6.10.10 in that Hull names should be able to be deleted from the drop-down list when designing a ship.
As it is at present the Hull names can be added but then are there "in perpetuity" . Even if one has made a typographical error there is currently no way to remove the entry and also players may wish to use their own designations and not use any of the current names, which cannot be removed.

DavidR

[sloanjh]

It looks like alien-constructed Jump Gates are not present on the system map (F3) when you don't have any ships in the system.  (They are indicated on the orders selection in the F12 screen for that system, though.)  Could we please see them at all times after first detecting them?  I see two ways to do this:

1)  Make them always visible as an attribute of the WP.  This is the easy way.
2)  Give jump gates a detection signature, and put records in the DB indicating which race has detected which jump gates.  This would require a DB change, but it solves the issue of jump gates magically becoming visible once a WP is detected.  I realize one could make technobabble to get around this issue, but I think of jump gates as the B5 thingeys (actually, I've started picturing them more as a really big stargate, like in late SG-1) and it seems like a physical structure would have detection characteristics, especially for active sensors.

As an extension of #2, you could have gates and/or regular jumps give off a burst of EM or Thermal radiation when something transits them (proportional to the wormhole size?) which would show up in game mechanics as an instant check for all sensors in the system to see if they detected it....

John

[ardem]

I was thinking about an extra options for missile design and armour.

Currently missiles explosions behave like a sharp charge, in a very triangle pattern on the side of the armour. Like modern tanks, there are ways of minimizing these missile with reactive armour.

Whereas timed detonated sabot missiles have a armour cap and then a delay in detonation, they bury through the armour, but the explosive force is more thermal so components can be destroyed, but armour is minimally impacted.

My changes for missiles would include 3 styles of missiles Regular, Shaped, Armoured.

Regular missiles can be as they are but a shallower destruction depth to show much of the force is pushed externally due to the nature of explosions against a barrier.

Shaped charged missiles, can be like a triangle but you can add a layer of reactive armour to counter act the effects.

Armoured do very little damage if they do not breach the hull, but if they do, they do a huge amount of component damage, naturally armoured missiles are much heavier so, adding to how many layers of armour, does reduce the explosive force dependant on missile size. It would still be a fine balance and not a one size fits all.

-----------------------------------

Why would this be beneficial, when I find a new class of ship I just do a mass launch of missiles, and pounder the sucker, there is very little gamble in it, but with this style of design, there is a gamble that perhaps you choose the wrong style of missile making it a tougher fight.

[Beersatron]

Can we have an HQ for the Marine Company since they are a quarter of the size of a standard unit?

It feels wrong to have a BHQ as the parent to 4 small Companies and the only way to get the Marine Company training is to put them in with an HQ, so when it comes to transporting them you can't really use a special marine transport design or some such.

[sloanjh]

Can we have an HQ for the Marine Company since they are a quarter of the size of a standard unit?

It feels wrong to have a BHQ as the parent to 4 small Companies and the only way to get the Marine Company training is to put them in with an HQ, so when it comes to transporting them you can't really use a special marine transport design or some such.

Seconded.

I've had a similar issue in the other direction - construction brigades.  I've been using brigade HQ for groups of four and calling them divisions - I'll call the division HQ (when I can spare one) a corps.  I figure this is ok, since a construction brigade is acting at the same "level" as a combat battalion in terms of game mechanics.  In other words, I prefer what I'm doing with the construction brigades (using a combat brigade HQ to represent a division HQ) to requiring a division HQ for groups of construction brigades.  BTW, what would be really nice would be if the (construction) division commander could improve the xeno rating of the units.

John