Author Topic: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread  (Read 107624 times)

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Offline IanD

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #540 on: February 24, 2015, 02:33:33 AM »
The actual shuttle was only 100 tons, but I agree, maybe there could be a tech line that increases capability of maintenance facilities?

The mass was taken from Wiki and I believe included the boosters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle), so it was the launch mass.

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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #541 on: February 24, 2015, 06:01:06 AM »
I think that Maintenance facilities are grossly overpriced and overmanned. Currently one maintenance facility in Aurora employs 50,000 workers and can maintain 200 tons of ship. NASA when operating the Space Shuttle (Mass 2030 tons) only employed approximately 58,000 people including contractors. I suggest allowing one maintenance facility be able to maintain 2000 tons and employ 5,000-10,000 workers. After all its meant to be an advanced maintenance facility, isn't it?

Ian

Remember that a single maintenance facility can handle unlimited amounts of ships though, so you can have 30 destroyers, 20 cruisers, 10 battleships and 10 carriers = 70 ships all served by the same maintenance facility. And these aurora military ships have alot more complex weapons systems then the shuttles have also. Look at military maintenance procedures compared to civilian ones and you will often find ships spending 10 maintenance hours for every active hour in flight, unlike civilian airplanes that would be the other way around ( 10 hours in flight for every hour on the maintenance floor ). The difference is again factor 100.

So all in all I think the numbers are "good enough".
 

Offline xeryon

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #542 on: February 24, 2015, 07:55:22 AM »
I agree that the current arrangement works well for game balance purposes.  That being said if you add up the numbers the requirements to support and maintain a single craft in Aurora are staggering.  A 10,000 ton warship requires 50 maintenance facilities each employing 50,000 workers for a total of 2500000 people, roughly, dedicated to servicing one single ship.  I know they can actually service an unlimited number of ships at those numbers but at a minimum 2.5M people are required to change the oil on one destroyer is kind of a funny thought.

Some additional realism in this category could be that shipyards are required for maintaining and overhauling ships instead of maintenance facilities.  That would fix the imbalance between 2.5M to service one and the same 2.5M to service 100.  Maintenance facilities could be shifted to producing maintenance supplies (seems like a no brainer).  Requiring a shipyard for maintenance also fixes a substantial gap in realism that I always struggled with as well.  When a maintenance facility is performing maintenance where is the maintenance taking place?  In orbit or at a landing site?  If it is in orbit why isn't the maintenance or overhaul taking place at a shipyard and if it's on the surface why are ships built in orbit?
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #543 on: February 24, 2015, 08:41:29 AM »
Some additional realism in this category could be that shipyards are required for maintaining and overhauling ships instead of maintenance facilities.  That would fix the imbalance between 2.5M to service one and the same 2.5M to service 100.

Or perhaps maintenance facilities could be handle much like shipyards instead? Where you need to specify both amount of slots and size of slots and the final number of workers needed is a multiplication of the two.

That way you the same workers could overhaul/maintain a few large ships, or many smaller ones.

Or make it dynamic so 100'000 ton capacity is needed to overhaul 10x 10k ton destroyers at the same time. ( Requiring a substantial reduction of price and worker needs for the maintenance facilities for balance ).

For code complexity reasons it's probably better to just allow any shipyard of sufficient size and type to handle the overhaul, and simplify maintenance by saying if the base has a shipyard large enough it can maintain the ships also.
 

Offline DFDelta

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #544 on: February 24, 2015, 06:57:37 PM »
Replace the facilities with maintenance yards.
Similar stats to shipyards (capacity/slips) and are built and extended in the same way.
Able to serve as many ships simultaniously as they have slips and each one will have the full capacity overhauled each month (rounded up to the next production cycle). Would probably also need to be "normalized" towards one month that figures in production cycles somehow. I think the best solution would be a formula of "capacity / (30 days as seconds / cycle lenght as seconds)".

Example:
My yard has a 10.000 cap/month and 4 slips. Cycle lenght is 5 days.
This would mean it can service "10.000tons / (30days / 5days)" tons  of spaceship per cycle. That is 1.667tons per cycle for those who don't want to do math.
A 1.800 ton ship would therefore need 2 cycles to finish overhaul, (since it is rounded up to the next cycle) as would a 3.200 ton ship.
A 1.600 ton ship would be finished in a single cycle, since it is less then the capacity/cycle but gets rounded up to the next full cycle anyways.

Since it has 4 slips it can service 4 ships at the same time, and each one would be serviced with the full 1.667tons/cycle.



Sounds more convulted when written then it sounded in my head :/
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Offline xeryon

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #545 on: February 24, 2015, 08:30:12 PM »
No matter what suggestion someone comes up with it has to be relatively simple to be viable.  Anything that adds to the micro-management without adding to gameplay is just more buttons to click without more fun.
 

Offline DIT_grue

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #546 on: February 24, 2015, 11:18:38 PM »
Maintenance used to be a shipyard function (in fact, I think that was inherited from the way it works in StarFire?) and was changed to the current system because it was apparently a royal pain to manage.  So any suggestion to change it back is probably going to need to be very well thought-out and argued to have a real chance of persuading Steve.  Especially since I recall having seen pretty much identical suggestions brought up at least a couple of times.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2015, 11:20:37 PM by DIT_grue »
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #547 on: February 25, 2015, 12:52:31 AM »
What about just a simple limit to maintenance equalling your current shipyard size, leave everything else as is, but have a number showing total naval yard capacity, when a ship is overhauling subtract tonnage from that number.
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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #548 on: February 25, 2015, 03:16:29 AM »
No matter what suggestion someone comes up with it has to be relatively simple to be viable.  Anything that adds to the micro-management without adding to gameplay is just more buttons to click without more fun.

It can totally understand why it's not fun to fiddle with overhaul in yards manually if you field 20 destroyers that each have 1 year maintenance life. So what you would need is some way to overhaul en entire taskgroup with a single order and still have ships go in the appropriate shipyards...

Perhaps each ship ( or class of ships ) is assigned a "home" shipyard that will be used as a preference when doing overhaul? ( assuming there are free slipways ). And perhaps a game mechanic where if there are no free slipways ships are simply put in "waiting for free slipway to overhaul" mode until one is available?

That way we can still have simple one click overhaul of taskgroup like today, but with the added fun of having to make sure we have capacity and the added gameplay of modelling capacity in a much better way.
« Last Edit: February 25, 2015, 03:20:25 AM by alex_brunius »
 

Offline swarm_sadist

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #549 on: March 06, 2015, 03:40:05 AM »
Wouldn't it just be easier to simply have the maintenance facilities maintain a certain tonnage of ships based on their size?

EX:
20,000 tonnes of maintenance facilities could house 10 2000 tonne frigates, or 2 10,000 tonne cruisers

If it comes down to picking which ships to maintain, it could be as simple as a new order "base here", or just have the maintenance facilities rotate which ships they maintain every construction cycle.

I for one don't use maintenance due to the AI not using it, so my opinion should be taken with some table salt.
 

Offline iceball3

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #550 on: March 07, 2015, 02:41:18 PM »
May be rather complex, but how about fuzzier thermal detection? For instance, a task group appearing as one big thermal signature rather than many distinct ones at the far range of a sensor and perhaps even blurring together signatures of nearby ships at the furthest range? Nearby signatures would still be rather distinctive, but i am having fun imagining this if stars also maintained a signature as well.
 

Offline 83athom

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #551 on: March 10, 2015, 09:51:54 AM »
May be rather complex, but how about fuzzier thermal detection? For instance, a task group appearing as one big thermal signature rather than many distinct ones at the far range of a sensor and perhaps even blurring together signatures of nearby ships at the furthest range? Nearby signatures would still be rather distinctive, but i am having fun imagining this if stars also maintained a signature as well.
I think this would be perfect, for lower tech. I think, yes the passives should be changed to be a little less clear, that it would be easy to distinguish between multiple small contacts and a big one at a medium/high tech level. It is an interesting thought for the mixing the signatures, and that could be put in as a TG order to fly in close formation to mix signatures (has some risk/adds additional hit chance on those ships (enemies firing at close formation ships/TG get a hit chance bonus)). And I think that another tech should be added with this, Sensor Clearness (name debatable) that does exactly what is says, a multiplier to how clear passive contact(s) are (affected by close formation).

A side note for another feature that would go well with this is possible contacts. Based on their speed and thermal (and EM if aplicable) it would display the most probable contact (based on percentage somehow). This would be with the aforementioned sensor clearness (to make the %) so it wouldn't be automatically based on number of similar designs (ie a 4000 km/s 4800 thermal beam ship, a 4000 km/s 4800 thermal missile ship, ect.) (also affected by close formation). Also changing he ship speed in the orders would change the percent as it gives a different speed and thermal than what the ship is capable of (but still a possibility as that ship is capable of that s/t because of speed scaling).
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Offline DIT_grue

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #552 on: March 11, 2015, 12:38:37 AM »
Quote from: 83athom link=topic=5896. msg78777#msg78777 date=1425998000
I think you are confusing maintenance facilities with something else.  They don't "house" ships, that is hangars and that is exactly how those work already.  The facility is able to work on ships up to a size (not total size of all ships but the individual ship) and I think that is the most simple it can get.  And are you sure the AI don't build maintenance facilities, how else are they able to keep their military ships operational? Although you have been here a long time.
He's not confused, he's participating in an ongoing conversation about potential models for a change in how they function.  In fact, not only was that post essentially reiterating an earlier point, how did you miss the immediately preceding post he was responding to? Myself, I think I prefer the current system to any of the proposals I've seen; it seems to get the balance between micromanagement and interesting simulation about right.

As for fuzzy passive contacts, I agree that it would add an interesting bit of gameplay value, but suspect that it would be a pain in the neck to implement; probably more of a hassle than it would be worth.
 

Offline Desdinova

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #553 on: March 17, 2015, 04:47:32 PM »
1st post here but here goes

I'd like to be able to sort and select multiple officers for awarding medals.  For example I'd like to be able to award every ship commander in a system that's the site of a major battle the "Alpha Centauri Campaign Medal" or something.  I've been doing it just for flavor reasons to keep track of where people have served but it gets tedious when you have 100 junior officers in FACs and fighters to track down.
 

Offline Paul M

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Re: Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread
« Reply #554 on: March 20, 2015, 07:25:00 AM »
Disable the formation of new shipping lines if any line has a share value <2.  Clearly if there is not enough work to keep all the current lines working there is no incentive for new lines to enter the market.

When a new line forms it should spend its starting money within 3 months on ships.  I've quite often seen the money sit there and get used for dividends with the result that the shipping line has but a single ship.

If a shipping line share drops too low (share value <1), it should sell its ships to an existing line and exit the market.

The price of fuel from civillian fuel harvesters should be increased a factor of 2 or 3 at a minimum.  Fuel is very valuable, the current cost is essentially 0.