C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions

[JustAnotherDude]

I've been thinking about simulating on the squad level for smegs and giggles, pump out lots and lots of ground focus military academies. It's pointlessly granular except maybe for marines, but I love this sort of stuff.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Its probably not going to be useful to go down below company level, that smallest HQ are 1250 ton so that would probably be a rather typical company sized formation or a really large platoon for some reason.

Steve changed that. HQs are now much more modular:

Ah... that I did not remember... that makes me happy... I gladly model my forces at platoon level if possible.

I just wonder how easy it will be to fill up the templates after losses if I do though.

[Hazard]

Frankly, you'd be replacing units whole sale in that case, because you're not losing 'most of a battalion in an engagement' but entire platoons.

Quite frankly, I'd be more worried about having to constantly churn them out in the GFTFs without some way of queuing them up like with ground construction, rather than having to do it like with ship construction where every ship needs a button press.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have been playing Aurora for the last week or two and there are something that I would like to revisit... I know that you Steve have talked about electronic warfare, stealth and the like before. I just wanted to add some to that.

It is a bit "boring" to constantly build highly specialised ship with one large sensor on it. I know that sensors will work differently and that building larger and larger sensors now will have a diminishing return so spreading out smaller scouts are going to be a thing.

But there still is no real point adding active and passive sensors on every ship as long as you have a one or two in each task group, this really make no sense as sensors are one of the more sensitive and easily disrupt able and damageable components of any military vessel, from tanks to ships or planes or whatever. For example.. a modern tank are so reliant on sensors that even firing on it with machine guns can effectively knock them out without too much luck as a valid fighting machine.

There are a few things that I would like to take up as potential interesting mechanic to deal with sensors.

1. Sensors should be way more susceptible to chock damage than most other components. Sensors almost always need to be to some degree in vulnerable parts of a ship and therefore are more susceptible to being damaged through near misses and general mayhem. Having sensors often just degraded by damage impacts in general could also work.

2. Allow us to use Microwave technology in missiles and use them as area effect weapons that have the potential to harm or at least temporarily disable or degrade sensors. You shoot missiles and instead of a normal charge the missile have technologies similar to microwave beams. You should be able to choose between range or strength. These missiles are rarely knocking sensor equipment out like beams but will degrade them and randomly effect all ships within range and those close by less the further they are away. The range should not be huge, say increments of 5.000km per strength level or something.

3. Active jamming technology that randomly can degrade enemy sensors. I think such devices should be directed against targets and not effect everything around them. Jamming technologies usually work best when directed specifically against something. You should be able to confuse both active and passive sensors if you know what to target.


All or even some of these would make it worth while to put sensors on most warships at least to some degree. It would still make sense to have dedicated sensor ships designed with hardened sensor equipment, but you could never truly depend on one or two of such ships in any serious fleet or task-group.

[Father Tim]

I *already* put sensors on all my ships, but I think the increased effectiveness of small sensors is going to encourage a lot of other people to do likewise.

For anything more than that, I want to play with C# Aurora first and see what it's like before starting down the EW rabbit hole.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I *already* put sensors on all my ships, but I think the increased effectiveness of small sensors is going to encourage a lot of other people to do likewise.

For anything more than that, I want to play with C# Aurora first and see what it's like before starting down the EW rabbit hole.

I would like sensors to be a lot less deterministic, it certainly would enhance multi-faction campaigns allot in my opinion. I also know that Stave have discussed electronic warfare and stealth not too long ago, so this were just some suggestion for those ideas. We also have ELINT now as well so it is sort of an extension to that as well.

Electronic warfare is almost more important than actually firing missiles at each other in reality. Knowledge is is the ultimate power in many ways.

[Kelewan]

Its probably not going to be useful to go down below company level, that smallest HQ are 1250 ton so that would probably be a rather typical company sized formation or a really large platoon for some reason.

Steve changed that. HQs are now much more modular:

Ah... that I did not remember... that makes me happy... I gladly model my forces at platoon level if possible.

I just wonder how easy it will be to fill up the templates after losses if I do though.

Recently I made a suggestion on managing ground forces
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10498.0
But I think for managing forces at platoon level multi-select is
really needed

[AlStar]

According to Steve's latest campaign notes, the spoilers that he's currently battling appear to completely ignore organics  - up to and including dissolving the infrastructure right out from under colonists, leaving them to die in a hostile biosphere.

I feel like at least some percentage of that kind of spoiler should hate letting all that biomass go to waste - and instead should convert colonist populations on conquered planets into ground units.  Ideally, these would be unique units, so that the player can appreciate how they've failed those poor innocents they were supposed to protect while they're getting their own colonists thrown at them.

[Hazard]

Yeah, biosphere possessing/inhabited planets should make those spoilers a lot more terrifying than they already are. Even if it's just (x tons of disposable ground troops) per however many colonists seem appropriate.

[vorpal+5]

I'm not sure about if Aurora C# will allow space factories where you can output ships from A to Z, in deep space, provided you have the construction materials?

[MultiVitamin]

Just a thought while reading through the Real World 21st Century Ground Unit Templates thread.

To give a bit more variation between Light, Medium, Heavy, Super Heavy and Ultra Heavy weapon components, why not make it so that lighter versions have more shots?

So for example, Infantry Personal Weapons have 1 shot, but Light Personal Weapons have 2, or Crew-Served Anti Personnel (again, infantry) have 9 shots, and Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel has 6 shots.

Just thought on weapon based components, since they're not as diverse in terms of differences in size except in AP and, well, Size.

Maybe rapid versions of those components that have more shots then normal, but less damage/AP?

[Hazard]

'Number of shots' is not how many times they actually fire. Rather, it's an abstraction to how likely they are to fire a shot that is likely to destroy a target when engaged. For things like personal weapons and crew served anti personnel that's quite a lot of shots, but things like suppression fire, covering fire and recon by fire (shooting a bunch of cover to see if the enemy responds to having been 'found') are not considered.

The abstraction is not perfect, especially given the hours long length of a given turn and a number of other factors, but things like bombardment weapons have high number of shots for their weight because those are basically abstractions of area carpeting weapons of limited effectiveness against armour, while things like AA or AV weapons tend to have heavier damage and armour penetrating stats with a single shot per turn because they either generally are kept from engaging until necessary/beneficial or just don't really get a good target presented to them that often.

[MultiVitamin]

'Number of shots' is not how many times they actually fire. Rather, it's an abstraction to how likely they are to fire a shot that is likely to destroy a target when engaged. For things like personal weapons and crew served anti personnel that's quite a lot of shots, but things like suppression fire, covering fire and recon by fire (shooting a bunch of cover to see if the enemy responds to having been 'found') are not considered.

The abstraction is not perfect, especially given the hours long length of a given turn and a number of other factors, but things like bombardment weapons have high number of shots for their weight because those are basically abstractions of area carpeting weapons of limited effectiveness against armour, while things like AA or AV weapons tend to have heavier damage and armour penetrating stats with a single shot per turn because they either generally are kept from engaging until necessary/beneficial or just don't really get a good target presented to them that often.

Ah, I was operating under the assumption that Shots was the amount of attacks made per turn with that component by a unit. Thanks for the info.

[Coleslaw]

Will we be able to utilize cloaking technology when it comes to ground units? Perhaps makes the unit with it harder to hit/detect from orbit?

[Hazard]

No.

Cloaking technology is something that is currently space only. Hiding things on planet is currently solely the province of the Fortification mechanic IIRC.