C# Suggestions

[kenlon]

The cause of this pain - is the fact, that new-built formations are ideally fit, and veterans are not.
Make all of them not-ideal, only close to fit - and players will see it as normal state of things (as it is in real life), and it will be micromanagement to deal with very important operations only (as it is in real life, too).

The solution to "veteran units end up with ragged TO&E after a campaign is over and people don't like it" is not to make newly built units suddenly start missing pieces! Logistics are the cornerstone of a military, and while you should totally end up cramming together ad-hoc formations in the middle of a campaign, once things are over and you get back to friendly territory, putting your units back in order should not require micromanagement.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

The cause of this pain - is the fact, that new-built formations are ideally fit, and veterans are not.
Make all of them not-ideal, only close to fit - and players will see it as normal state of things (as it is in real life), and it will be micromanagement to deal with very important operations only (as it is in real life, too).

The solution to "veteran units end up with ragged TO&E after a campaign is over and people don't like it" is not to make newly built units suddenly start missing pieces! Logistics are the cornerstone of a military, and while you should totally end up cramming together ad-hoc formations in the middle of a campaign, once things are over and you get back to friendly territory, putting your units back in order should not require micromanagement.

Maybe an option to rebuild a formation to template at a training center, much like ships can be repaired at a shipyard?  If it can be queued then the micromanagement would be greatly reduced.  A default 'rebuild all present units' order would be ideal.

[kenlon]

Maybe an option to rebuild a formation to template at a training center, much like ships can be repaired at a shipyard?  If it can be queued then the micromanagement would be greatly reduced.  A default 'rebuild all present units' order would be ideal.

Yes, this would be the straightforward way to do it. And also to upgrade units, if there was a way to link obsolete unit classes to their replacements so it knows what to swap out.

[Father Tim]

Maybe an option to rebuild a formation to template at a training center, much like ships can be repaired at a shipyard?  If it can be queued then the micromanagement would be greatly reduced.  A default 'rebuild all present units' order would be ideal.

Yes, that is what most people suggest so I expect we'll see it sometime in the next couple of months.

[smoelf]

In the 'Autoroute by System' list, certain systems are colored based on the type of colony they contain. It would be nice if that list would also color systems, in which we don't have colonies but space stations. A temporary solution is of course to create an empty colony in those systems, where we might have a deep space base, but that would be impossible if the space station is located in an entirely empty system.

Perhaps a check could be made for stationary ships with the 'Space Station' tag, while colonies would take precedence in deciding the color of the system name.

[Bremen]

This may have already been suggested, but the ability to zoom or otherwise scale the galactic map would be handy for those larger games.

[skoormit]

The auto-assignment algorithm does not place high enough priority on my ships' non-commander positions (science officer, XO, etc.).

We can fine-tune the auto-assign priority of the commander positions for our ship classes, but the auto-assigner assigns command positions for all ships before assigning any non-command positions.
As a result, I often have to fight with the auto-assigner.
For example, an officer that would be a fine XO, but also has a 5% logistics bonus, will be auto-assigned as captain of some random freighter or tug.

I would like some way to modify this behavior.

Here is perhaps a workable approach:
Under the "Commander Priority" value on the Misc tab of Class design, add a dropdown that has the Primary Assignment Priority groupings and their associated bonus, plus a 10th item:

Code: [Select]

1 Geo Survey or Grav Survey, Bonus: Survey
2 Protection Values > 0, Bonus: Crew Training
3 Military Vessel, Bonus: Crew Training
4 Construction Ship, Bonus: Production
5 Terraformer, Bonus: Terraforming
6 Harvester, Bonus: Mining
7 Asteroid Miner, Bonus: Mining
8 Salvager, Bonus: Production
9 All Others, Bonus: Logistics
10 None
The default selection is 10 None.
If a non-default is selected, auto-assignment will assign non-commander positions for this ship design before assigning commanders of the selected priority group.


Another idea: let me flag a commander for a specific role.
Perhaps a dropdown on the commander details pane next to the checkboxes for "Story Character" and "Do not Promote".
The dropdown contains all of the non-command officer role types (Science, Engineering, XO, etc.), plus a default "None".
If a non-default is selected, auto-assignment will assign this officer to that role, if one is available, before assigning this officer as a ship commander.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

The ability to delete unused hull types from the list.  Alternatively the ability to have selectable hull type themes.

[surprise]

Minor quality of life suggestion:

Currently, if you train 9 company formations then train a HQ formation, the suggested name is "10th HQ". It would be nice if the ground unit construction tracked the unit numbers (1st Company, etc) by template rather than globally. I think it would be a relatively simple thing to track, and would make unit construction a smoother experience.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Something I find myself wanting to do ALL the time is double click on ships in the "Logistics" view of the fleet manager to get the map to center on that the fleet with that ship in it.

If you were even more thorough then if you click in the ship you open the fleet view with that ship pre-selected. if you click on the fleet in the same column you just center the map on that fleet instead.

This would be a very good QoL service for me... no I have to manually find where the ship are exactly and then find it in the fleet view among all the task-forces and fleets I have in there.

I think there could be more similar ways of automatic focusing on stuff similar to this throughout the entire game, but this is one view I use often to check for the general status of my ships.

[kenlon]

The ability to delete unused hull types from the list.  Alternatively the ability to have selectable hull type themes.

I would stab something for hull type themes. Possibly two things.

[hostergaard]

Some way to select to show only commercial tech like in old aurora and also tech for space stations. Not sure if there is a difference, but I noted some military components can't be put on space stations. Space station can only have commercial components or is there also some commercial ones they can't have and its like its own thing? If so then a button to only display space station components, perhaps when no armor is selected as aparently that is what makes it a space station anyway.

[hostergaard]

A way to turn prototypes into real tech easily and quickly. Like, this prototype, make it a real tech as I wanna use it and don't wanna fiddle about with options to replicate the damn thing when I have been spending time designing ships and forgot the exact specs. Like, maybe a button in ship design that says something like "Research Prototypes" that turn all the prototypes used in the class into a real design.

In fact, why have prototypes as a separate thing? Why not make all designed tech that have yet to be researched be prototypes automatically? The moment you research them they are not prototypes anymore but real tech, but until then they could work as prototypes do now.

(I post this is in a seperate post, cause I figured it was a separate suggestion and I decided one suggestion per post was best since I do not want it to get it lost to people who skim post, hope that is acceptable. If not then write to me and I will move it all to one post and delete this one)

[QuakeIV]

A way to turn prototypes into real tech easily and quickly. Like, this prototype, make it a real tech as I wanna use it and don't wanna fiddle about with options to replicate the damn thing when I have been spending time designing ships and forgot the exact specs. Like, maybe a button in ship design that says something like "Research Prototypes" that turn all the prototypes used in the class into a real design.

In fact, why have prototypes as a separate thing? Why not make all designed tech that have yet to be researched be prototypes automatically? The moment you research them they are not prototypes anymore but real tech, but until then they could work as prototypes do now.

(I post this is in a seperate post, cause I figured it was a separate suggestion and I decided one suggestion per post was best since I do not want it to get it lost to people who skim post, hope that is acceptable. If not then write to me and I will move it all to one post and delete this one)

This is supposed to already exist, however I haven't acutally had success with it the one time I tried to use it.

[hostergaard]

Prototype ships/ship variants In the vein of the previous posts. A way to kinda make prototype ships. I sometimes fiddle about with ships design and often try out multiple designs would enjoy if there where a effective way to say save each design on the fly. To add to this, I always found the whole additional eligible classes to be too arbitrary and I made previous suggestion about designing ship chassis (on which systems could be fitted on later) rather than ships, but perhaps a middle ground could be achieved? What if I could select a ship as base class so to speak, and the click a button to create variants, each variants would then be classed in a submenu under that ships and extended like how ships are classed in submenues according to hulls now. Then when you design variants they would enforce the requirements to be in the same class so you could only select systems in a way that allowed it to eligible to be produced in the shipyard. Having to go between tabs and checking back and forth for every single system changed to see if they were eligible to be produced in the same shipyard was a PITA and made the whole thing egregious in the old Aurora. With a few small changes like this I think it could become a useful QoL feature instead

Edit: Now that I think about it, I haven't checked if the whole additional eligible classes is still a thing in Aurora C#. Then I guess it would be a suggestion on how to implement it.