Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Suggestions => Topic started by: Rich.h on June 01, 2020, 04:08:53 PM
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Could we get the auto assignment tick box to also apply to admin commands, or have a second tick box that only does admin. I am finding that once I get a fully fledged out navy with many different admin roles it becomes a micro nightmare after a few years. It is so bad now that barely 3-6 months go by without either a death or retirement.
I fully understand some folks might not like how this takes away a part of the RP factor, but if it an optional box and you can still manually assign positions then it should be a way to please everyone.
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Could we get the auto assignment tick box to also apply to admin commands, or have a second tick box that only does admin. I am finding that once I get a fully fledged out navy with many different admin roles it becomes a micro nightmare after a few years. It is so bad now that barely 3-6 months go by without either a death or retirement.
I fully understand some folks might not like how this takes away a part of the RP factor, but if it an optional box and you can still manually assign positions then it should be a way to please everyone.
I would not be against that even if I prefer to assign my higher command myself... what I do want is to know when an admin command is vacated in separate event so I can flag it with a separate colour. Right now it is a pain when I have to look at every retirement and death to see if they were commanding an admin command. Sure I can flag them as a story character but that is sort of not fair... i want them to be able to retire and have their own lives. But for now I HAVE to flag them as story characters to remain sane and then sack them myself at a certain age.
The admin command structure tend to become quite advanced at a certain stage so keeping track of them through the even log is not realistic at that point.
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I think a simple solution would be a drop down on the Admin command that had all the relevant skills (e.g. Logistics) as well as an options for "Any" and "Manual". If you choose a skill, then auto-assignments would weight the people with that skill higher, but with some randomness so that it's not the same two people bouncing back and forth. If you choose Any, then it just assigns any valid officer to that position. And if you select Manual (the default) it would work like it works now.
Same thing could work for Planetary Administrators, Sector Commanders, Academy Commandants (except here you'd choose Leader Type and possible scientific specialty), as well as any future leader position.
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Could we get the auto assignment tick box to also apply to admin commands, or have a second tick box that only does admin. I am finding that once I get a fully fledged out navy with many different admin roles it becomes a micro nightmare after a few years. It is so bad now that barely 3-6 months go by without either a death or retirement.
I fully understand some folks might not like how this takes away a part of the RP factor, but if it an optional box and you can still manually assign positions then it should be a way to please everyone.
I would not be against that even if I prefer to assign my higher command myself... what I do want is to know when an admin command is vacated in separate event so I can flag it with a separate colour. Right now it is a pain when I have to look at every retirement and death to see if they were commanding an admin command. Sure I can flag them as a story character but that is sort of not fair... i want them to be able to retire and have their own lives. But for now I HAVE to flag them as story characters to remain sane and then sack them myself at a certain age.
The admin command structure tend to become quite advanced at a certain stage so keeping track of them through the even log is not realistic at that point.
That part also would be very nice to have those things as enireley seperate events.
I think it can be easily solved by simply doing this:
1. Look at the commanders listed in the lowest rank requirement for the position. If none are available then move to the next rank up and repeat.
2. Find commanders having the skill for the position. If none are availbe then move straight to 3.
3. Pick the commander with the highest promotion score.
This would mean for example you need a logistic captain, you would always get the captain with the highest promotion score amongs those who have logistics, if none were available then move up and get a commadore. This way at least you have a very rough simulation on a real naval type job assignment.
In theory you shouldn't get the same few folks repeating the job, a commander will hold their job until they either retire, die, or you manually reassign them (admirals still managing the latrine movements division). I am sure others suffer the same problem that I have, at a certain point, you only really show an interest in the careers of your higher rank officers, and those few characters for specific reasons (your captain Kirks etc). I don't really care which of my 80+ Commanders take up the job role of running my towing group, as long as it is dealt with.
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Manual assignment
Interrupt when relevant commands are lost due health/promotion
Sectors
Admin Command
Planetary Governor
Academies
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Manual assignment
Interrupt when relevant commands are lost due health/promotion
Sectors
Admin Command
Planetary Governor
Academies
Yes to all of the above...
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Assigning rules to any command what officers abilities should be preferred for that position and the. Auto assign. Send off a special warning message when a posting could not be auto assigned so you can take care manually.
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Could we get the auto assignment tick box to also apply to admin commands, or have a second tick box that only does admin. I am finding that once I get a fully fledged out navy with many different admin roles it becomes a micro nightmare after a few years. It is so bad now that barely 3-6 months go by without either a death or retirement.
I fully understand some folks might not like how this takes away a part of the RP factor, but if it an optional box and you can still manually assign positions then it should be a way to please everyone.
I am opposed. Not because I think your suggestion wouldn't "please everyone" but because I think no two people would agree on how such auto-assignments should be handled, and thus people would be forever bugging Steve to "make it work like this" and "no, make it work like this instead," or "can we have buttons to independently turn these six things on or off?" It would end up costing weeks of programming time that I would rather Steve spend on other features.
I think making the death or retirement of an Admin Commander, Governor, or academy commandant a separate and interrupt-causing event is by far the best compromise. It reinforces the idea that these positions are special, and their non-auto-assignability is because you should care enough about them to select them yourself. It would also take only an hour or two to program.
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Could we get the auto assignment tick box to also apply to admin commands, or have a second tick box that only does admin. I am finding that once I get a fully fledged out navy with many different admin roles it becomes a micro nightmare after a few years. It is so bad now that barely 3-6 months go by without either a death or retirement.
I fully understand some folks might not like how this takes away a part of the RP factor, but if it an optional box and you can still manually assign positions then it should be a way to please everyone.
I am opposed. Not because I think your suggestion wouldn't "please everyone" but because I think no two people would agree on how such auto-assignments should be handled, and thus people would be forever bugging Steve to "make it work like this" and "no, make it work like this instead," or "can we have buttons to independently turn these six things on or off?" It would end up costing weeks of programming time that I would rather Steve spend on other features.
I think making the death or retirement of an Admin Commander, Governor, or academy commandant a separate and interrupt-causing event is by far the best compromise. It reinforces the idea that these positions are special, and their non-auto-assignability is because you should care enough about them to select them yourself. It would also take only an hour or two to program.
Honestly, consider the scale of colonies that are possible. I've had 40 colonies before, just in a few systems. I've just ended up ignoring the minor posting, focusing on my primary worlds, but I know am I losing out by doing that.
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You say you are losing out, but you are making a choice that the additional improvements are not worth the effort of searching out every little colony and admin command and filing it with an appropriate officer. Only major commands and colony /sector governors produce an adequate return on your time. You are absolutely right, but an automated system will not do much better, and could do much worse if you have realistic promotion turned on and politically connected toadies are the ones being assigned.
Welcome to the national government where a billion dollars is a rounding error and the larger a department gets the less efficient it is.
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You say you are losing out, but you are making a choice that the additional improvements are not worth the effort of searching out every little colony and admin command and filing it with an appropriate officer. Only major commands and colony /sector governors produce an adequate return on your time. You are absolutely right, but an automated system will not do much better, and could do much worse if you have realistic promotion turned on and politically connected toadies are the ones being assigned.
Welcome to the national government where a billion dollars is a rounding error and the larger a department gets the less efficient it is.
The current military assignment code takes into account components and commander attributes when making assignments. Planetary governor assignment could use the same scheme by taking into account installations and available population space. If people want to put in the effort to do better than that then they are free to use manual assignment, just like with military commanders.
If realistic promotions are turned on then that is in fact what is being asking for.
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Ultimately 'my time' should not be a balancing factor in a game. This is not some grindy mobile game which is designed to waste my effort and time to make me finally spend money.
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Ultimately 'my time' should not be a balancing factor in a game. This is not some grindy mobile game which is designed to waste my effort and time to make me finally spend money.
Correct. It is a game which gives you an incredible number of knobs and levers, and lets you decide which ones are fun to play with.
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Correct. It is a game which gives you an incredible number of knobs and levers, and lets you decide which ones are fun to play with.
Indeed, and in many cases that is fine. The issue is situations when if you don't play with the knobs and levers, you end up badly hurting your playthrough. Now this can be taken too far, such as ship design, since that is the very soul of the game. But something as micro heavy as assigning people to every single tiny colony is a bit more...something that could handle itself.
Maybe have the rule simply be that colonies at 0 can't support a governor? That would at least level the playing field, and limit your pool of decisions to the important colonies.
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Correct. It is a game which gives you an incredible number of knobs and levers, and lets you decide which ones are fun to play with.
Indeed, and in many cases that is fine. The issue is situations when if you don't play with the knobs and levers, you end up badly hurting your playthrough. Now this can be taken too far, such as ship design, since that is the very soul of the game. But something as micro heavy as assigning people to every single tiny colony is a bit more...something that could handle itself.
Maybe have the rule simply be that colonies at 0 can't support a governor? That would at least level the playing field, and limit your pool of decisions to the important colonies.
Assigning civilian admins to every single tiny colony has almost zero effect on your playthrough.
Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have all these trivial leaders assigned to trivial outposts without me needing to do anything.
But leaving those outposts leaderless is not going to affect the overall power of my empire. It just doesn't matter.
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Assigning civilian admins to every single tiny colony has almost zero effect on your playthrough.
Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have all these trivial leaders assigned to trivial outposts without me needing to do anything.
But leaving those outposts leaderless is not going to affect the overall power of my empire. It just doesn't matter.
It seems that having admins assigned you are raising them in the terms of their bonuses, so no assignments for junior admind - much worser future senior admins - much weaker major administrations bonuses - very considerable loss of strength and tempo.
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Assigning civilian admins to every single tiny colony has almost zero effect on your playthrough.
Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have all these trivial leaders assigned to trivial outposts without me needing to do anything.
But leaving those outposts leaderless is not going to affect the overall power of my empire. It just doesn't matter.
It seems that having admins assigned you are raising them in the terms of their bonuses, so no assignments for junior admind - much worser future senior admins - much weaker major administrations bonuses - very considerable loss of strength and tempo.
Assigned leaders seem to get bonus increases more often, but unassigned leaders definitely do get them.
In my game, I assign all civ admins to a colony. If I don't have a colony to assign when a recruit shows up, I'll make a new one.
After many decades I end up with a large number of useless admins, and the handful of useful ones that are running my important colonies were already useful (or near-useful) on the day they first arrived.
I feel that I could ignore all the "Administration 3 Terraforming 5% Logistics 5%" nobodies from day one and lose almost nothing in the long run.
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Assigned leaders seem to get bonus increases more often, but unassigned leaders definitely do get them.
That was how it worked in VB, which was why research farming was a thing. The exploit that allowed it (0 research facilities assigned to an active project) has since been closed, but I don't think skill improvements have changed.
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I don't use obvious exploits (such as creating empty colonies to train admins), and usually don't have enough small colonies to give long exp to all my junior admins, and so I'm usually choosing only the most promising of them to have such exp. And it's obvious that with admins it's not so important even in short run to have some good leader, as with research. It's still going to signifantly affect the overall power of the empire, it's just going to make considerable result in the future, smth like 25-50 years at least.
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Assigning rules to admin commands might be a solution for job automation.
Once a new post is created you can declare it either as
- automatic
- automatic via rule
- manual
If set to automatic the commander is assigned fully automatic by game default parameters.
If set to automatic via rule, you can define a selection rule for the command post and if a fitting commander is found by the assigning routine, he gets assigned to the post. A rule would look like this:
If mining >10 assign commander
If logistics =0 AND mining >10 assign commander
If logistics >5 OR mining >5 assign commander
If set to manual every vacant position gives you an entry in the event log so you can fill it manually.
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I don't use obvious exploits (such as creating empty colonies to train admins), and usually don't have enough small colonies to give long exp to all my junior admins, and so I'm usually choosing only the most promising of them to have such exp. And it's obvious that with admins it's not so important even in short run to have some good leader, as with research. It's still going to signifantly affect the overall power of the empire, it's just going to make considerable result in the future, smth like 25-50 years at least.
One man's exploit is another man's RP is another man's workaround.
The way I see it, any empire with population in the billions would have jobs for civ admins other than running entire colonies.
Minister of Production. Chief of Logistical Planning. Grand Panjandrum of Terraforming. Assistant to the Assistant Director of the Department of Redundancy Department. Etc.
The game does not offer these, so I make tiny colonies rather than leave my presently unneeded CAs unassigned.
Calling it an exploit assumes that the cost of doing it "by the book" is non-trivial.
But the cost is trivial. Infrastructure to support 50k colonists (and the freighter bandwidth to move it) costs almost nothing, and you don't need that many.
I'm 40 years into my current game. Having built the home academy up to level 3 early on, I now have 38 CAs.
I have 2 sectors, 8 colonies that matter, and 10 CMCs I purchase minerals from. That leaves 18 CAs assigned to busywork colonies on otherwise useless bodies in the home system, all of which I seeded with infrastructure in the first five years of the empire. Seeding is cheap and easy, and seems like something the populace of an empire would be keen to do upon developing TN technology.
How did we get here? We are discussing if an auto-assign feature for civ admins would be useful.
And sure, it would. At least a little.
If all it did was assign any new CA to a colony right away, it would save me a few clicks every game year (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11615.msg136168#msg136168).
Making it do much more than that would take non-trivial development effort. Only Steve can decide if that effort is worthwhile. In my opinion, there are better things to spend it on. There's no game balance issue here.
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In terms of Academy and characters I would like the game to eventually handle this quite differently.
In my opinion there is no real need to generate the character until you actually need them and the Academy should basically generate points into separate pools you then can spend to recruit or rather automatically recruit someone when they are needed. You should also be able to choose how much point will go to each pool depending on the needs of your empire.
When you need a character one are created weighted with the skills you are searching for... there is no reason why we could not get characters that are weighted for the role we selected them for. But there should always be some randomness here.
There can then be times when there are less jobs than characters and then characters that don't have a job go into some assistance mode for a while. The more time that pass and you have not found a new job for them there would be a chance they retire from their position to pursue other careers in civil service.
I also would like a mode where we can't really choose which character take which position at all and there is a process for how they attain their positions with skills such a political contact being quite prominent over pure skill. I would like experienced and well decorated characters to get into positions high prominence and be promoted when there is a position open for them to fill. Every time you fill a high position in the hierarchy it should also cost some academy point as you increase the administration.
I don't like the current model of having a certain number of people at each level as that makes no sense, promotions should occur based on needs not on how many people you have running around doing nothing at the ground level. I think it is better to abstract the junior officers and administrators in a pool instead.
In fact such as system could potentially use the pool for other purposes as well that represent needed administration and officer competence. When you build a ship you would pay both crew and academy points to represent officers and enlisted crew. The same with military formations. When you build a Naval Headquarter, Sector commands, labs you lower the number of points you get in the academy pool every year as you need to continually staff these with experienced personnel.
Academies also should cost population to support as in real life allot of people are needed to staff, work and get educated there... actually hey allot of people. This would give more credence to population as an intellectual commodity and not just a resource commodity. Numbers obviously up to game balance of course.
I could also see that costs to run labs, headquarters and officer cores should have maintenance cost in academy points per year as well, the more advanced the hierarchy they more wealth and people you need to administrate it. So this would serve as a function to prevent too deep structures unless you have the population or economy to do it. You also could have some technology to increase the points generated by academies as well.
Also, the administration level should be both a skill and something you pay for when used and the cost should be higher the more you use. That is giving 10 labs to a scientist might cost you 20 points per year while 1 lab cost you 1 point per year from the science academy pool.
If you pay admin cost and it increases for planets you might want to add a mechanic that if you place an academy locally you reduce the cost of that planets administration by some fraction. This would be realistic as developed colonies would start to demand education and even labs. So there could be a reason to spread them around when colonies get large enough. Or, you get less and less point for each academy you build on the same planet, that would also make sense as a mechanic. Or tie it into the total population on the system so there is a cap in how many academies you can build and be efficient on each colony.
In general a system that work more automatically but you should be able to force character into positions and promotions for RP purposes, but in general otherwise it should run by itself if you want it to. There should be no need to create useless colonies to train administrators as that is just plain and simple dumb that you should have to do that. instead that would give you an increase in cost in the need to support those colonies with qualified people. The higher the admin rating of a colony the more point it will cost you to support it with administration.
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I am actually in favor of a significantly more complex system for assigning civilian administrators. I think there is a great amount of room to grow in terms of making your governmental choices in the race window have an impact on gameplay.
For example, a democratic government might have elections every few years at each colony and elect new leaders. A republic might have a different automatic leader selection system. A monarchy would again be different. And a dictatorship different again. Etc...
This would of course take a huge amount of programming effort, so I doubt it will ever happen, but I can still dream.
I do seem to remember at least being able to chose a government type back in the VB version, though I'm not sure it had any real impact on gameplay.
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I am actually in favor of a significantly more complex system for assigning civilian administrators. I think there is a great amount of room to grow in terms of making your governmental choices in the race window have an impact on gameplay.
For example, a democratic government might have elections every few years at each colony and elect new leaders. A republic might have a different automatic leader selection system. A monarchy would again be different. And a dictatorship different again. Etc...
This would of course take a huge amount of programming effort, so I doubt it will ever happen, but I can still dream.
I do seem to remember at least being able to chose a government type back in the VB version, though I'm not sure it had any real impact on gameplay.
In VB6 it didn't matter because the various stats weren't actually used. Governments would only affect things like xenophobia etc. so it was purely flavour.
In C# it would make a difference because of stuff like occupation resistance actually relying on stats like determination, militancy and xenophobia actually existing. As steve starts to involve the other stats I'm sure we will see further impacts.
A C# rendition of governments could also affect stuff like population growth/density, productivity and research rates. Overall allowing for more differentiation.
But how does the player change governments in a campaign?
If a player colony declares independence how do they choose their government if it is to be different?
Will we delve into unrest caused purely by political dissidence?
Can the player subvert other NPR governments and cause rebellions?
Can I "liberate" a NPR population by force and install a matching government to make friends?
Theres so much that could be done with such a system but as mentioned it would require massive effort on Steve's part.
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But how does the player change governments in a campaign?
If a player colony declares independence how do they choose their government if it is to be different?
Will we delve into unrest caused purely by political dissidence?
Can the player subvert other NPR governments and cause rebellions?
Can I "liberate" a NPR population by force and install a matching government to make friends?
Theres so much that could be done with such a system but as mentioned it would require massive effort on Steve's part.
Some of my thoughts:
1. A UI button which gives the player the option to 'reform government' which allows for a player to change a player race's government from one type to another. This process should take some significant amount of time. During 'reformation' there should be a malus to relevant empire statistics. For example, manufacturing capacity should be dramatically reduced and possibly ships/troops respond to orders more slowly (similar to jump shock or the effects of crew training). Possibly also there is an increased chance of rebellion or secession on colonies during a reformation. If a player declares a player race colony independent, that colony should select a random government type (possibly weighted towards the original player race government type) and enters a reformation as previously discussed.
2. The game does not currently implement political dissidence, only unrest. I am not sure this system needs to change at all except that I believe that if the political stability of a colony reaches 1% or less, the colony should enter a reformation and randomly select either to remain in the current player empire or secede and start a new government. Secession and rebellion should, I think, be handled somewhat differently, with secessions being relatively peaceful and rebellions being more destructive, resulting in the destruction of ground installations, infrastructure, orbital facilities, and possibly ships and troops. Of course, one always reserves the option to declare war on a recently seceded colony, turning things more violent, but secessions in my opinion should not be inherently bloody.
3. I think that would be interesting from a RP perspective. Perhaps it would make diplomacy and espionage more engaging and rewarding than in it's current form.
4. I think there is a lot that could be done here. For example you might consider the option of fighting galactic wars of liberation, whereby you liberate oppressed populations from their authoritarian overlords. Or alternatively you could enslave all life in the galaxy. This should be left up to the player in my opinion. My suggestion for this mechanic is that following a 'conquest' event during a planetary invasion, the 'conquered' population should enter a reformation and the player should have the option of choosing the new government type, or alternatively have the conquered population join the player empire as some sort of imperial citizen (not necessarily a fully fledged citizen, but this should also be a player option). Some examples of citizen types for newly conquered populations might be: slaves, vassals, serfs, limited citizens, full citizens, etc... Again it should be a player choice as to how newly conquered populations are integrated into the player empire.
I'm fumbling around in the dark a bit here because governments have never really been implemented, even in VB. The current system seems to tie race/species to most of the things I would usually associate with government-level traits. There is probably an argument to be made for a dedicated government window, or at least a section on the race/species window. Additionally, I would expect that each colony in a particular empire would share the same form of government, otherwise I don't think 'empire' or 'colony' would really be the correct terms to use.
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I think there is a lot that could be done here. For example you might consider the option of fighting galactic wars of liberation, whereby you liberate oppressed populations from their authoritarian overlords. Or alternatively you could enslave all life in the galaxy. This should be left up to the player in my opinion. My suggestion for this mechanic is that following a 'conquest' event during a planetary invasion, the 'conquered' population should enter a reformation and the player should have the option of choosing the new government type, or alternatively have the conquered population join the player empire as some sort of imperial citizen (not necessarily a fully fledged citizen, but this should also be a player option). Some examples of citizen types for newly conquered populations might be: slaves, vassals, serfs, limited citizens, full citizens, etc... Again it should be a player choice as to how newly conquered populations are integrated into the player empire.
I definitely second the idea of being able to decide what rights each species gets in the empire what you suggested especially at the end of the quoted paragraph is actually really similar to how stellaris lets you handle things.
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Since we barely touched the surface of the "politico" part of the game I would like to weight in both supporting what done from Steve so far and just asking for slight changes more in line with what done already and with less coding involved.
I think the aurora already handles well some things such as:
police forces - they are there and they do the job, so a militaristic dictatorship that relies on police is entirely supported
independence - colonies can already rebel if conditions are met
morale (bonus and penalties) - these are possible through overcrowding, better administrator, police, protection of the system and so on
trade - civilian needs resources and wealth
taxes - aurora does include taxation
Now what would be nice:
Adding a another modifier to the race that includes the political stability, so a more stable race for instance are more easy to sort out low morale and penalties
Morale should take also into account how rich such colony is considering the amount of people divided by the wealth generated. A poor colony is an unhappy colony
Trade should either provide stability if all resources are available or instability if one or more resources are scarce
Taxes should be modular with a standard rate set up by race which if exceeded generates penalties and if lowered generates happiness
Finally a political bonus (that simulates elections) where you receive a bonus if happiness is over a certain value at the beginning of x amount of years to be decided at start or a penalty if below
Overall I firmly believe the tools are there and should be fairly possible to add some small feature from a release to another and slowly build up the government management even more.
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Since we barely touched the surface of the "politico" part of the game I would like to weight in both supporting what done from Steve so far and just asking for slight changes more in line with what done already and with less coding involved.
I think the aurora already handles well some things such as:
police forces - they are there and they do the job, so a militaristic dictatorship that relies on police is entirely supported
independence - colonies can already rebel if conditions are met
morale (bonus and penalties) - these are possible through overcrowding, better administrator, police, protection of the system and so on
trade - civilian needs resources and wealth
taxes - aurora does include taxation
Now what would be nice:
Adding a another modifier to the race that includes the political stability, so a more stable race for instance are more easy to sort out low morale and penalties
Morale should take also into account how rich such colony is considering the amount of people divided by the wealth generated. A poor colony is an unhappy colony
Trade should either provide stability if all resources are available or instability if one or more resources are scarce
Taxes should be modular with a standard rate set up by race which if exceeded generates penalties and if lowered generates happiness
Finally a political bonus (that simulates elections) where you receive a bonus if happiness is over a certain value at the beginning of x amount of years to be decided at start or a penalty if below
Overall I firmly believe the tools are there and should be fairly possible to add some small feature from a release to another and slowly build up the government management even more.
I am not sure I agree with your assertion that colonies are able to rebel... I have several very 'oppressed' colonies which have not rebelled despite several decades of horrible conditions.
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I think there is a lot that could be done here. For example you might consider the option of fighting galactic wars of liberation, whereby you liberate oppressed populations from their authoritarian overlords. Or alternatively you could enslave all life in the galaxy. This should be left up to the player in my opinion. My suggestion for this mechanic is that following a 'conquest' event during a planetary invasion, the 'conquered' population should enter a reformation and the player should have the option of choosing the new government type, or alternatively have the conquered population join the player empire as some sort of imperial citizen (not necessarily a fully fledged citizen, but this should also be a player option). Some examples of citizen types for newly conquered populations might be: slaves, vassals, serfs, limited citizens, full citizens, etc... Again it should be a player choice as to how newly conquered populations are integrated into the player empire.
I definitely second the idea of being able to decide what rights each species gets in the empire what you suggested especially at the end of the quoted paragraph is actually really similar to how stellaris lets you handle things.
I am guilty of being inspired by both Stellaris and Distant Worlds in some of my contemplations of what would be best in Aurora.
Though I must admit that though both of those games are excellent, neither can hold a candle to the depth and complexity of Aurora.
Stellaris is shiny, for certain, and has quite a good musical accompaniment, but Distant Worlds beats it in terms of strategic depth.
Aurora beats both in terms of tactical and strategic depth, lacking only in shiny graphics and nice music. Graphics can be imagineered and music is available from other venues, so for me, Aurora is my top preference in the 4x catergory and will probably remain there until I develop my own version of the game... someday many moons from now.
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Since we barely touched the surface of the "politico" part of the game I would like to weight in both supporting what done from Steve so far and just asking for slight changes more in line with what done already and with less coding involved.
I think the aurora already handles well some things such as:
police forces - they are there and they do the job, so a militaristic dictatorship that relies on police is entirely supported
independence - colonies can already rebel if conditions are met
morale (bonus and penalties) - these are possible through overcrowding, better administrator, police, protection of the system and so on
trade - civilian needs resources and wealth
taxes - aurora does include taxation
Now what would be nice:
Adding a another modifier to the race that includes the political stability, so a more stable race for instance are more easy to sort out low morale and penalties
Morale should take also into account how rich such colony is considering the amount of people divided by the wealth generated. A poor colony is an unhappy colony
Trade should either provide stability if all resources are available or instability if one or more resources are scarce
Taxes should be modular with a standard rate set up by race which if exceeded generates penalties and if lowered generates happiness
Finally a political bonus (that simulates elections) where you receive a bonus if happiness is over a certain value at the beginning of x amount of years to be decided at start or a penalty if below
Overall I firmly believe the tools are there and should be fairly possible to add some small feature from a release to another and slowly build up the government management even more.
I am not sure I agree with your assertion that colonies are able to rebel... I have several very 'oppressed' colonies which have not rebelled despite several decades of horrible conditions.
Probably does not happen automatically, however all functions are there. Then this would also be another easy implementation.
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I think we have to also realise that Aurora is suppose to be a "role-play" platform which sort make too much detail into allot of the government mechanic hard to implement and still allow the player themselves to decide the fate of the political climate of his planets and empire. We are suppose to imagine what limits that politics make on the development of the empire. Hom much emphasis are put into the wellbeing of the people versus the militarization of space forces or how much of an independence a colony long for and how colony government influence the structures that are built there.
If you play the game from your, the players perspective, and just do everything from your perspective then you will usually find a very efficient but sterile empire that might not reflect what you would have seen in real life, that is due to game mechanics. But here is where RP comes in if you like that sort of thing. Perhaps planetary governments and governors have their own ideas and agendas over time. Political ideas will likely change over time etc...
Right now we as players are suppose to role-play when a planet declare independence, there even is a button to turn a colony into an NPR independent colony if you like. If you want to control the colony yourself you can SM in a new faction and transfer it to there.
There is a reason why some of these things are a bit simple but there are powerful tools to mess with them. This is the reason I don't want too much detail in how population reacts to treatments and such things, it has to be kept simple and functional.
Do you play the game from your, the gamers, perspective OR the perspective of the people living in that world? The choice is up to you in this game...
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Do you play the game from your, the gamers, perspective OR the perspective of the people living in that world? The choice is up to you in this game...
I play mostly as a gamer, but I make nods to the perspective of the people.
These are mostly for the fun factor, but also to make some of the strategic decision-making easier.
For example, rather than constantly assess and re-assess the strategic tradeoffs of building research labs (instead of something else immediately useful), I generally decide what percentage of total income my people want to spend for ongoing research, and I build labs at a constant percent of Earth industry to maintain research spending at the target percentage.
I also establish minimum requirements that the people have for moving population to new systems: grav survey complete, all jump points explored (and monitored by sentry platforms), all neighboring systems free of hostile presence, etc. These restrictions make my empire expand in a fashion that respects the risk perception of the people of a live empire, rather than my own as a gamer.
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I think we have to also realise that Aurora is suppose to be a "role-play" platform which sort make too much detail into allot of the government mechanic hard to implement and still allow the player themselves to decide the fate of the political climate of his planets and empire. We are suppose to imagine what limits that politics make on the development of the empire. Hom much emphasis are put into the wellbeing of the people versus the militarization of space forces or how much of an independence a colony long for and how colony government influence the structures that are built there.
If you play the game from your, the players perspective, and just do everything from your perspective then you will usually find a very efficient but sterile empire that might not reflect what you would have seen in real life, that is due to game mechanics. But here is where RP comes in if you like that sort of thing. Perhaps planetary governments and governors have their own ideas and agendas over time. Political ideas will likely change over time etc...
Right now we as players are suppose to role-play when a planet declare independence, there even is a button to turn a colony into an NPR independent colony if you like. If you want to control the colony yourself you can SM in a new faction and transfer it to there.
There is a reason why some of these things are a bit simple but there are powerful tools to mess with them. This is the reason I don't want too much detail in how population reacts to treatments and such things, it has to be kept simple and functional.
Do you play the game from your, the gamers, perspective OR the perspective of the people living in that world? The choice is up to you in this game...
You are right of course, RP is at the heart of this game and it is probably impossible to build a perfect RP engine that will please all players. Trying to simulate a concept as broad as government is also a huge challenge and if human history is any indication, not everyone will agree on what is best in terms of government options.
I myself enjoy the naval combat aspects of the game and the ship design portion especially. Finally succeeding at building a capable battle fleet after losing battle after battle after battle against a technologically superior foe is rewarding for me. Planetary invasions follow naturally in most of my own self-made stories and so the concept of government comes up a lot in my thinking about game mechanics.
The elegance of the current system is that there really isn't any governmental-level interface at all. You basically just pick a name for your empire and that's about it, aside from assigning colonial administrators.
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Do you play the game from your, the gamers, perspective OR the perspective of the people living in that world? The choice is up to you in this game...
I play mostly as a gamer, but I make nods to the perspective of the people.
These are mostly for the fun factor, but also to make some of the strategic decision-making easier.
For example, rather than constantly assess and re-assess the strategic tradeoffs of building research labs (instead of something else immediately useful), I generally decide what percentage of total income my people want to spend for ongoing research, and I build labs at a constant percent of Earth industry to maintain research spending at the target percentage.
I also establish minimum requirements that the people have for moving population to new systems: grav survey complete, all jump points explored (and monitored by sentry platforms), all neighboring systems free of hostile presence, etc. These restrictions make my empire expand in a fashion that respects the risk perception of the people of a live empire, rather than my own as a gamer.
This sounds generally how I do most of my multi-faction games... as I need to manage many empires I will have to set up long term goals and also have rules of how quick those goals can be changed depending on the climate of the internal political stability of said faction. It also makes things allot easier as projects are not finished every few months but run over very long times, sometimes over many decades as a colony expands its own construction, infrastructure and mining efforts. I only have to check in to adjust the ratios so it produce enough construction factories versus infrastructure and mines to grow and give enough jobs to fill for increase in population.
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Manual assignment
Interrupt when relevant commands are lost due health/promotion
Sectors
Admin Command
Planetary Governor
Academies
The problem is that not everyone will want an interrupt for those. At some point I will add optional interrupts for some events but leave some as fixed interrupts
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Manual assignment
Interrupt when relevant commands are lost due health/promotion
Sectors
Admin Command
Planetary Governor
Academies
The problem is that not everyone will want an interrupt for those. At some point I will add optional interrupts for some events but leave some as fixed interrupts
That I understand, however what are the chances of a civilian admin to be killed and or retire? We looking at a possible 5% per year? Also that Admin should be assigned to a position so you could potentially going on 10 year without an interruption.
However, looking at the report and interrupt yourself or even worse check every single command every year can become pretty tedious fast, at least for me. Also if not for all position mentioned I still believe that Admin Commands should be always manned, so that our fleets can always be with right hierarchy in place as it is already annoying enough to make sure all flag bridges are manned as well. I love to have them manually set and I don't want them full auto at all but, because of that, I have to know if all position are filled properly as it should be.
I have seen people creating fake fleets just to ensure the game stops every now and then so they can run a checklist ensuring all is working fine and I did steal that because is quite clever but in conclusion (and this is my point of view) I don't think we should prioritize fast turns over good management and QOL.
I can put in all the good management needed as I am already doing but without the QOL it just feels like wasted work sometimes.
PLEASE NOTE: I love and respect your work and I will go with whatever is there and you'll decide; I just wanted to give a feedback on something I already know some people wants square and some others round making it very hard to accommodate everybody.
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Manual assignment
Interrupt when relevant commands are lost due health/promotion
Sectors
Admin Command
Planetary Governor
Academies
The problem is that not everyone will want an interrupt for those. At some point I will add optional interrupts for some events but leave some as fixed interrupts
My solution is to manually parse my admin commands once every 5 or 10 years, assigning new leaders as necessary. Yes, it is tedious, but it has become part of my creative process for generating compelling stories. I lose out occasionally on some administrative bonuses but overall it is easier to manage than if I were to replace each administrator as he/she retires.
A game-driven interrupt is not required in my opinion.
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My solution is to manually parse my admin commands once every 5 or 10 years, assigning new leaders as necessary. Yes, it is tedious, but it has become part of my creative process for generating compelling stories. I lose out occasionally on some administrative bonuses but overall it is easier to manage than if I were to replace each administrator as he/she retires.
A game-driven interrupt is not required in my opinion.
That is what I am doing as well. Just check every now and then. Role-play reasoning: It just took them so long to find someone out of the ordinary...
I though support the idea of giving us the option to choose which messages should interrupt the flow and which shouldn't; that would be really nice :-)