Post by: sloanjh on August 08, 2009, 06:35:56 PM
Run a campaign that has populations which tolerate ultra-low gravity, i.e. which have a lower G limit of 0.0. At the same time, introduce "mining companies" into the civilian sector who will produce mines and create populations on worlds with high mineral concentrations.
The game-play driver here is to enhance the civilian sector, and to make it a little (or potentially a lot) cheaper to develop a system. At present, most of the bodies in a system can only be mined using automatic mines, which cuts the number of populations (and hence variation in demand for trade goods) a lot. If populations could be established on asteroids and there was commercial sector generation of mines, however, then the civie sector could drive the colonization of the small bodies in a system, which in turn would drive trade with the miners of such civilian sector essentials as "Betelgeuse Girls Gone Wild" DVDs.
Another game play advantage would be that it would give player races something else to spend wealth on. Planetary populations could have demand for TN elements (hence the companies mining them), and you could add a mechanism for a player race to "out-bid" them, i.e. state a price which it will pay for particular minerals at a particular population.
The "cheaper to develop a system aspect" would come from a reduction in the need for automated mines, which at present (at least in my campaigns) consume a huge percentage of the output of factories and greatly slow economic growth.
I can think of three places where the current version of Aurora might have problems:
1) Divide-by-zero problems if the lower end of a populations G rating is 0.0.
2) Terraforming: you shouldn't be able to put an atmosphere on an asteroid.
3) Temperature: there shouldn't be a big difference in colonization cost between an asteroid near the orbit of Mars and one near Jupiter; I would vote that the temperature penalty (at least for worlds that can't take an atmosphere) only apply on the "too hot" side.
Hmmm - item #2 above got me thinking about terraforming. There's probably a nasty formula for just how much gas it takes to create one atmosphere of pressure on a particular world - small worlds should require less, but they also will typically have lower gravity which would require more. I think the current model is ok, since most planets that will be terraformed will be big enough that it's not worth thinking about the complexity, but I remember how much emphasis you put on getting the physics right in your world generation routines. If you want me to think about a formula for a "terraforming difficulty" multiple, i.e. a factor that multiples the rate of terraforming, let me know - I can probably come up with something that scales correctly at the extremes, even if it isn't strictly correct.
John
Post by: sloanjh on August 09, 2009, 10:48:58 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Hmmm - item #2 above got me thinking about terraforming. There's probably a nasty formula for just how much gas it takes to create one atmosphere of pressure on a particular world - small worlds should require less, but they also will typically have lower gravity which would require more. I think the current model is ok, since most planets that will be terraformed will be big enough that it's not worth thinking about the complexity, but I remember how much emphasis you put on getting the physics right in your world generation routines. If you want me to think about a formula for a "terraforming difficulty" multiple, i.e. a factor that multiples the rate of terraforming, let me know - I can probably come up with something that scales correctly at the extremes, even if it isn't strictly correct.
I got curious this morning and decided to see if I could figure out the formula. It turns out it's pretty simple, if you neglect the fall-off of gravity with altitude. Basically, the amount (in terms of number of molecules) of gas you need to add to raise the pressure by one atmosphere is some constant times (planet_radius^2 / (molecular_weight*planet_surface_gravity)). Note that this goes to infinity as the gravity goes to zero, and also scales with the surface area of the planet. So I would recommend adding a "terraforming efficiency" property to each body that is the ratio of (radius^2/gravity) to that of Earth. You could also add a gas-type dependent factor based on the gas' molecular weight, but there's lots of other factors that would make e.g. "safe greenhouse gas" more or less difficult to produce than oxygen, so it's probably not worth it.
This efficiency factor would take care of the asteroid problem - (radius^2/gravity) should go roughly like the radius of the body (since surface gravity goes like density*radius), so an asteroid with a radius of 6 km should be roughly 1000 times harder to terraform.
************************
EDIT: Oh bleep, no it doesn't (solve the asteroid problem) - a body with a radius of 6 km would be roughly 1000 easier to terraform. That means that the reason that you can't put a significant atmosphere on an asteroid is that its height would be many times the radius of the asteroid, or the mass of the atmosphere begins to swamp the mass of the asteroid and you're into a "gas giant" situation with a core atmosphere tuned to the pressure you want. In any event, your're into the yukky calculation discussed below.
************************
One interesting thing is that this relationship doesn't depend on the temperature. That's because of my assumption neglecting the fall-off of gravity with height in the atmospheric column - all that temperature really does is expand or contract the atmosphere. Getting rid of that assumption is where the calculation would get nasty - then you'd have to model temperature, density, and pressure for the entire column, rather than just bundling it all into a simple effective height H.
John
Post by: waresky on August 09, 2009, 01:18:43 PM
And pls...can u adding: Kkree (Traveller @) ...Zhodani (Traveller @)...Vegans (Solomani Rim Sector-traveller)...and at last..Merseians (Dominic Flandry's Earth Empire)..
and...MOTIES?...:D
Post by: waresky on August 09, 2009, 01:58:35 PM
do u remember Traveller yeah?
An imperial Naval base are cohmprensive and wide range WHOLE System.
Weapons Range,testing ground..etc.etc..
Pleas..in UR program can u put an.."testing range" for New ships design?..a simulations for testing NEW ships design..are VERY NEEDED
e.g.: ive a newly missile Cruiser..(cost in maintenance same as 6 System Defence Boat "Striker I" Class..and am need to test if 6 Striker's are BETTER than a single Missile Cruiser..
only that:)))
Post by: welchbloke on August 09, 2009, 02:28:20 PM
Quote from: "waresky"
STEVE please...ERASE the "RABBIT" picture from RACE's ALIENS encounter or NPR generations...PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAASE:DDDDDEver seen Monty Python's Life of Brian? Some rabbits can be VERY ferocious
And pls...can u adding: Kkree (Traveller @) ...Zhodani (Traveller @)...Vegans (Solomani Rim Sector-traveller)...and at last..Merseians (Dominic Flandry's Earth Empire)..
and...MOTIES?...:D
Post by: waresky on August 09, 2009, 02:29:41 PM
okok..but Precursors RABBITS on Space?...bleah...blast'em..
Post by: sloanjh on August 09, 2009, 03:30:52 PM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Quote from: "waresky"STEVE please...ERASE the "RABBIT" picture from RACE's ALIENS encounter or NPR generations...PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAASE:DDDDDEver seen Monty Python's Life of Brian? Some rabbits can be VERY ferocious
And pls...can u adding: Kkree (Traveller @) ...Zhodani (Traveller @)...Vegans (Solomani Rim Sector-traveller)...and at last..Merseians (Dominic Flandry's Earth Empire)..
and...MOTIES?...:D
I was thinking of Tunnel in the Sky....
John
Post by: waresky on August 10, 2009, 11:18:17 AM
More interesting,just in case if u,Steve,will use some "graphical" effort on Aurora.
u know..am LOVE SHips icons,same as traveller's "Spinward Marches Campaign" game.-.-
Post by: rdgam on August 10, 2009, 06:31:16 PM
Post by: Beersatron on August 10, 2009, 11:14:10 PM
i.e. I am getting some freezes and it looks like it may be in regard to the Duranium shortage that somebody mentioned in the bug thread. But, I guess there is the possibility that it is due to some other activity - maybe?
It would mean that if I had selected to have this optional indicator displayed whilst an NPR was engaged in something that was going to take 30 seconds or so of CPU time then I would be less hasty to End Task on the process.
I realize that different PCs will be capable of more or less depending on the setup, the 20 seconds was just an example number. I have actually left Aurora running for 2 hours once when it hung - just to be sure
Post by: Paul M on August 11, 2009, 03:42:11 AM
Is it possible to add mobile shipyard vessels or else the possibility to pre-fab bases and then assemble them using planetary industry or even both? I am not a fan of tractor beams I'm afraid and this would allow of the creation of space based defensive and industrial infrastructure. I'd limit the mobile yards to just assembly tasks though otherwise they might be too effective but since there are the construction ships this makes some sort of sense.
Post by: sloanjh on August 11, 2009, 10:17:43 PM
John
Post by: IanD on August 14, 2009, 03:26:01 AM
Quote
John wrote
One interesting thing is that this relationship doesn't depend on the temperature. That's because of my assumption neglecting the fall-off of gravity with height in the atmospheric column - all that temperature really does is expand or contract the atmosphere. Getting rid of that assumption is where the calculation would get nasty - then you'd have to model temperature, density, and pressure for the entire column, rather than just bundling it all into a simple effective height H.
But isn’t the asteroid or other body to which you are trying to add an atmosphere to required to be above the boiling point of the gas? That's 77K for nitrogen.
I would prefer to see a race’s tolerance to gravity be skewed so they can endure 0g on airless asteroids with infrastructure but have an upper limit of (say) 1.5g not 2g if your optimum is 1g.
In fact I would argue that you should only have an upper limit for gravity, but increasing requirements for infrastructure for lower gravity depending on how far from the race norm it is, my rationale being that infrastructure includes such things as gyms with centrifuges etc.
This will enable you to colonise your mining colonies. In 4.1 I had civilian freighters dumping infrastructure on Titan when it was only an archaeological dig. I assume the shipping lines would do the same for your mining colonies once you have placed your seed infrastructure in 4.26.
Regards
Post by: IanD on August 14, 2009, 05:02:28 AM
From the NASA hyper gravity experiments a planet with a gravity of 2g is probably too high to be a realistic colonisation target. So lets assume a colonist from Earth could colonise a planet with a gravity of 1.5g, accepting the lowered life expectancy etc. Thus as a starting point lets allow your race to be able to tolerate 0g to 1.5g with the optimum at 1g.
However matters then get complicated. While colonists from Earth could colonise Mars its doubtful whether colonists from Mars could colonise Earth or any other 1g planet. Since Mars has a gravity about a third that of the Earth your Martian colonists would have a maximum tolerance of approximately 0.5. While your colonists from the 1.5 g world could, after adapting (however long that may take) colonise a planet with a gravity of 2.25. Thus you end up with divergent populations with different g tolerances. In addition while the human body appears to adapt to low g environments quite rapidly it is likely to adapt to high g environments quite slowly over generations.
The end result for me is that in future games I will reduce my optimum g tolerance to 0.75-1.25 although this may still be too large a spread. I would still like to have the ability to colonise 0g environments but with an irreducible infrastructure requirement. Thus Mars would have an atmosphere penalty and a gravity penalty. With terraforming I can eliminate the former, but unless Steve introduces artificial gravity there is nothing to be done about the latter. So I would like the habitability index to consist of two numbers, one for the atmosphere and one for the gravity which sum to give the total habitability index. I am sure Steve could knock this off in an evening :wink: .
Anyone have any other thoughts?
Regards
Post by: waresky on August 14, 2009, 10:24:34 AM
So i prefer found a H,instead a Sorium.
Why,Steve,u put a "Sorium" minerals on Gas Giant?..in Traveller are Hydrogen the Fuel..
gas Giant,not all obviously,are MAINLY resource for a battle Fleet (remember Spinward marches Campaign and Imperium)
And an H2O Planet are STRATEGICAL interesting than others..
But in Traveller an planet with a less 1 digit in H20 = zero water...so my question are:
Steve u can CHANGE whole Refuel system and make them more real?
Hydrogen instead Sorium.
Are too hard?
Difference between "raw" Hydrogen than a refined H?
Post by: Steve Walmsley on August 14, 2009, 01:33:02 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
This came up as a side topic in my discussion of my first seven years:The current restrictions on small populated bodies are in for three reasons. Firstly, current research suggests it would be very difficult for a human population to exist long-term in a low gravity environment. Secondly, I used to hate the massive number of colonies in Starfire :)
Run a campaign that has populations which tolerate ultra-low gravity, i.e. which have a lower G limit of 0.0. At the same time, introduce "mining companies" into the civilian sector who will produce mines and create populations on worlds with high mineral concentrations.
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on August 14, 2009, 09:02:53 PM
Quote from: "IanD"
I have had a few more thoughts on gravity and the tolerance thereof.
From the NASA hyper gravity experiments a planet with a gravity of 2g is probably too high to be a realistic colonisation target. So lets assume a colonist from Earth could colonise a planet with a gravity of 1.5g, accepting the lowered life expectancy etc. Thus as a starting point lets allow your race to be able to tolerate 0g to 1.5g with the optimum at 1g.
However matters then get complicated. While colonists from Earth could colonise Mars its doubtful whether colonists from Mars could colonise Earth or any other 1g planet. Since Mars has a gravity about a third that of the Earth your Martian colonists would have a maximum tolerance of approximately 0.5. While your colonists from the 1.5 g world could, after adapting (however long that may take) colonise a planet with a gravity of 2.25. Thus you end up with divergent populations with different g tolerances. In addition while the human body appears to adapt to low g environments quite rapidly it is likely to adapt to high g environments quite slowly over generations.
The end result for me is that in future games I will reduce my optimum g tolerance to 0.75-1.25 although this may still be too large a spread. I would still like to have the ability to colonise 0g environments but with an irreducible infrastructure requirement. Thus Mars would have an atmosphere penalty and a gravity penalty. With terraforming I can eliminate the former, but unless Steve introduces artificial gravity there is nothing to be done about the latter. So I would like the habitability index to consist of two numbers, one for the atmosphere and one for the gravity which sum to give the total habitability index. I am sure Steve could knock this off in an evening :wink: .
Anyone have any other thoughts?
Regards
I like the idea of a skewed range. Rather than colony cost, I would put an additive (as opposed to multiplicative) penalty on the growth rate, e.g. if your max G was 1.5, then at 2G you might have a -10%/year penalty on the growth rate (i.e. flat if there's no governor modifier) and -20%/year at 2.5G. Or maybe it should be e.g. 5% at 0.1G over and double after that for each 0.1G. Probably shouldn't be nearly as severe at the low end....
I would ignore the "different populations" effects - it's just too hard to track. Hmmmm - except....
Should there be a MAJOR penalty for ground troops on high G (by their standards) worlds?
(Another thought after typing the pop penalty stuff above) - Maybe colonists being transplanted could have a "die-off" if they're landed on a world with signficantly heavier G. So going from Mars to Earth might kill of 20% of the colonists....
My one concern about a permanent habitability cost for low G worlds (like Mars) is that there's no way to stop population growth, and eventually the population grows so much that the number of workers in the manufacturing sector goes to zero. I would want a tweak to the mechanism so that I don't end up with e.g. 20M people on the moon who aren't producing anything before I would want to have a permanent terraforming cost. Actually, I would like an adjustment to this anyway - something like a relative cut to the %devoted to manufacturing, rather than an absolute cut. So you'd the number of workers available for mines on a cost 2 world might only be 90% of that of a cost 0 world; it might be 50% on cost 10 and 0% on cost 20 (the environment is so hostile that the colony can't do anything effective).
John
Post by: Steve Walmsley on August 15, 2009, 10:30:06 AM
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on August 15, 2009, 11:06:58 AM
Each Civilian Mining Complex is equivalent to ten automated mines and has a mass driver built in. It will cost the Mining Company 2500 wealth to create. At the moment, I plan to abstract the setting up so it will just appear at the designated location. As it is within the same system as a pop, I am assuming minor in-system traffic will be used. What I am struggling with at the moment is the hire cost. Assuming the Mining Company plans on a ten year return on investment, the annual hire cost would be 250 per complex. Assuming a racial mining output of say 16 tons, the player would receive up to 160 tons of each accessibility 1.0 mineral and smaller amounts of other minerals for his 250 wealth. The problem will be that at that rate of return, it will be ten years before a second mining complex is established so it will take a long time for the civilian mining sector to grow to any appreciable size. There are several ways around this and I am open to comments on the best one.
1) Reduce the cost of the CMC while retaining the same hire cost. Not keen on this because the current build cost represents the same cost as 10 automated mines and a cut-down mass driver.
2) Increase annual rental. If the rental was say 500 per CMC, the ROI would be 5 years but it starts to get very expensive for the player.
3) Have a high chance of new mining companies forming. This wouldn't increase the rate at which a company created new CMCs but it would increase the number overall. Might get overrun with mining companies though
4) Assume the mining companies receive new investment on a regular basis based on their performance. In other words, if a mining company is showing a steady income, they may be able to borrow money to build the next complex or corporate investors may pump money into the company. In game terms, there would be a chance of new lump sums appearing in the company accounts based on their income. The drawback here is that the same should probably apply to Shipping Lines and I would prefer to leave them alone as they seem to be working OK.
Any other suggestions or comments welcome
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on August 15, 2009, 12:24:45 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
I have been looking further at civilian mining. My plan at the moment is to have civilian Mining Companies that function in much the same was as civilian Shipping LInes.
[SNIP]
Any other suggestions or comments welcome
0) Cool!!
1) Let's start with the simple suggestion I logged on to make ... Post a "civilian economy event" (same category as the existing "shipping line X has bought a ship" message) whenever a corporation forms or goes bankrupt.
2) I've noticed that some of my shipping lines can go for years without shipping anything, and still go bankrupt. I would recommend a fixed "run rate" charge on a corporations capital infrastructure (ships, CMCs, ....) - something like 5-10% of the initial cost. That will drive companies into bankruptcy more quickly and avoid "zombie companies". Don't know if you've got bankruptcy code in or not - I would suggest making the capital assets, possibly giving the player an opportunity to buy them first (i.e. the "the civilian sector is offering X for sale at Y"). Another possibility - put the assets up for sale and have them be snatched up when another company is looking to expand its business.
3) If you go with the fixed run rate, then you might want to track profit/loss on a per installation (ship, CMC, ....) basis - if an asset loses money for e.g. 2 years the company should destroy it or offer it for sale. This would be a way to get obsolete designs out of the civie sector.
4) On mineral costs, how about trying to set a market price? Here's my thoughts on a possible algorithm:
- Give each population a demand for a fixed amount each mineral, equal to some factor times the population size times (break_even_accessibility - actual_accessibility) where break_even_accessibility (I was going to say 0.5, but I think you might want to go even lower e.g. 0.3 or 0.2) is a global constant for all populations and is the accessibility for which a minerals surplus/deficit is zero. actual_accessibility would the the world's actual accessibility for that mineral - if it's bigger than break_even (i.e. negative answer for the demand) then that world is a producer of minerals, if it's less then that world is a consumer.
Add a MineralPrice table which assigns a price for each mineral at each population. This is the price at which the world will buy that mineral. Every year that demand is unmet this price grows at a rate proportional to the %unmet demand (e.g. doubling for 100% unmet); every year that demand is met the price falls.
- Problem1: Inflation - you probably will need to find the most expensive commodity and rescale prices (but not cash balances) so that it always costs e.g. 2 wealth (or maybe even 5 or 10). You should also probably have the initial cost and run rate of civie installations be based on their mineral requirements, so if it's Mercassium that's the most expensive mineral and Duranium is 10X cheaper, the run rate on CMC will be 10X lower than if Duranium were the price-setting mineral.
Problem2: Population Wealth - a tiny little colony shouldn't be able to produce endless amounts of cash and thereby jack the price of e.g. duranium up to infinity - this is another aspect of the inflation problem. OTOH if prices are capped by the most expensive mineral this might not be a problem. Another possibility for solution to the would be to assign a fixed wealth/mineral (e.g. 10) beyond which the price can't go - this would represent the diminishing demand for the mineral as its price rises. AHA!! Here's an idea - slow the growth/fall rate by the ratio of the price to 1.0. So if the price were already at 5.0, then it would double every 5 years, as opposed to every year, on a world with 100% unmet demand and drop every 1/5th of a year on a world with met demand.
The buyer's price would control sales, but a seller wouldn't sell unless that price was better than its sell price (instead it would hold onto the minerals and let its sell price drop while buy prices went up). A little trick I learned from the Communications of the ACM is to set the price equal to the
The military economy (player-controlled) could then have player-set buy and sell prices and demands for each population, which would bid against the civie populations (and each other!!). This should maybe be set up as a range (max buy/min sell) and then allowed to float according to the market just like a civie population.
Note that the actual minerals would be moved around by civie freighters, just like civie commodities; this adds more things for shipping lines to do.
[/list]
You'll probably have better ideas on how to set up civie trade in minerals - the main intent of the above suggestions is to give a flavor of how prices might be able to float without going out of control.
5) Allow both automated and non-automated CMC. The non-automated should be 1/2 as expensive and 1/2 the run rate, but can only be installed on habitable worlds (which includes worlds which require infrastructure) and automatically open the world for colonization (i.e. they create a demand for colonists). You might have to make the run rate more expensive for high infrastructure worlds, or you could base it on the %population available for manufacturing (which would also bias manned facilities towards the colonies and their cheap labor) - otherwise you'd end up putting manned CMC on e.g. Venus, with ridiculously high infrastructure costs. Perhaps the initial cost of placing a manned CMC (which affects the run rate) should include the cost of infrastructure to support e.g. 0.25M pop.
That's all I can think of for now (and it's probably enough
).John
Post by: sloanjh on August 15, 2009, 12:35:07 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
As a result of the discussion on the difficulty in building a lot of mines, particularly automated mines, due to the reliance on Duranium, I have decided to change the mineral requirements to half Duranium and half Corundium. The latter mineral is only used for laser-based tech so this will increase the requirement for an under-used mineral and it fits well because the mining installation could quite easily rely on lasers for mining. While this doesn't reduce the build time or the overall cost, it will at least significantly reduce the reliance on Duranium.
Thanks Steve - I really like this solution.
John
Post by: sloanjh on August 15, 2009, 01:34:42 PM
1) The obvious - a button on the history screen that pops up a text box.
2) A button on various other screens that opens the same box - System map (F3) seems like a good one.
3) A button on the population (F2) and possibly race (ctrl-F2) screen that will log a snapshot of the race's economy, i.e. population, #factories, # mines, ... either globally or on a per-population basis. What I'm thinking of here are the annual "state of the race" reports that you and others put into your write-ups.
4) An option to log the same information as in #3 on a particular date every year. The reason for this is twofold - first so you don't have to remember to push the button every January 1st (those hangovers make one forgetful); second is that this could also be turned on for NPRs so that players could see what the NPRs were doing during the game, as can be done with the movie-replays in Civilization.
5) This one's fuzzier (and probably bigger to code) - some sort of "battle report" button that could be pushed by the player. The player would push the button and be prompted for a name (could default to e.g. "Nth Battle of SystemName" where N and SystemName are filled in by Aurora). Aurora would then grab statistics for ship losses, crew losses, captures, etc. since some previous point in time - this could be done with "fog of war", i.e. a race would have exact knowledge of its own losses and that of the enemy which it captured, but (the player) would have to decide whether to mark contacts that have disappeared as destroyed, damaged (and perhaps heavy vs light), or disengaged. Maybe Aurora could open a battle automatically when weapons are first launched or detected and prompt the player regularly as to whether the battle should be declared over (along with having a button to do so). Note that you could also do the same thing for ground wars - this is easier to track automatically - it should just last as long as one party has ground troops in an offensive stance (attacking) another party.
I wanted the above tools for me
, but realized that they might help you a lot for your big fiction-producing campaign (i.e. to keep track of the histories of all the various power blocks). Note that the idea here is not to simply all the (tactical) events associated with a race - instead it's to record "strategic" events for the various races/empires.John
Post by: IanD on August 15, 2009, 02:29:36 PM
Quote
John wrote
I would ignore the "different populations" effects - it's just too hard to track. Hmmmm - except....
Should there be a MAJOR penalty for ground troops on high G (by their standards) worlds?
I was thinking of Steves last campaign, where the population of Earth effectivily moved to Mars, which would mean that in a shoirt space of time the pop would have great difficulty in returning to Earth, look at how weak the Russian cosmonaut were who spent a year in orbit.
If you are trying to fight on a 1g world and you come from a 0.33g world, you are three times heavier, I think you can rule out foot patrols, the best you could come up with would be some form of augmented suit, so may be you should have to reseach "fighting on high grav planets" to be able to do it at all, and additionally suffer a steady loss of troops, think of the strain on the cardiovasculr system
Quote
John wrote.
(Another thought after typing the pop penalty stuff above) - Maybe colonists being transplanted could have a "die-off" if they're landed on a world with signficantly heavier G. So going from Mars to Earth might kill of 20% of the colonists....
Not a bad idea. Any colonists from a low grav planet are going to suffer much larger losses unless they can "acclimatise" somehow on the journey to their new home
Regards
Post by: welchbloke on August 15, 2009, 10:24:40 PM
Post by: Steve Walmsley on August 16, 2009, 12:08:06 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
1) Let's start with the simple suggestion I logged on to make ... Post a "civilian economy event" (same category as the existing "shipping line X has bought a ship" message) whenever a corporation forms or goes bankrupt.I have added a message for the formation of new shipping lines
Quote
2) I've noticed that some of my shipping lines can go for years without shipping anything, and still go bankrupt. I would recommend a fixed "run rate" charge on a corporations capital infrastructure (ships, CMCs, ....) - something like 5-10% of the initial cost. That will drive companies into bankruptcy more quickly and avoid "zombie companies". Don't know if you've got bankruptcy code in or not - I would suggest making the capital assets, possibly giving the player an opportunity to buy them first (i.e. the "the civilian sector is offering X for sale at Y"). Another possibility - put the assets up for sale and have them be snatched up when another company is looking to expand its business.That shouldn't really happen in the latest versions. The max dividend was reduced to half of the wealth balance so even if a shipping line is not making any runs for a while, it should still survive. However, I have considered allowing the balance to fall below zero and in that case the best solution would be, as you suggest, to put its ships up for sale so that the player or other shipping lines could but them.
Quote
3) If you go with the fixed run rate, then you might want to track profit/loss on a per installation (ship, CMC, ....) basis - if an asset loses money for e.g. 2 years the company should destroy it or offer it for sale. This would be a way to get obsolete designs out of the civie sector.I did have running costs in an earlier version of the shipping lines but eventually removed it. Partly because a problem arises if all the shipping lines can deal with far off colonies (the extra costs can run them out of money due to the lack of income) and partly because player freighters don't require maintenance. I assume that fuel costs are factored into the charges made by the shipping lines.
Quote
[4) On mineral costs, how about trying to set a market price? Here's my thoughts on a possible algorithm: (snip)After playing around further with the Mining Companies idea, I have decided to adopt a fairly simple approach to start with. The Shipping Lines evolved from earlier, simpler versions of civilian shipping and I am at that very early stage now with civilian mining. Rather than try to get something complex working first time, I have added a basic version and will play with it after I get some playtest reports.
5) Allow both automated and non-automated CMC. The non-automated should be 1/2 as expensive and 1/2 the run rate, but can only be installed on habitable worlds (which includes worlds which require infrastructure) and automatically open the world for colonization (i.e. they create a demand for colonists). You might have to make the run rate more expensive for high infrastructure worlds, or you could base it on the %population available for manufacturing (which would also bias manned facilities towards the colonies and their cheap labor) - otherwise you'd end up putting manned CMC on e.g. Venus, with ridiculously high infrastructure costs. Perhaps the initial cost of placing a manned CMC (which affects the run rate) should include the cost of infrastructure to support e.g. 0.25M pop.
There won't be individual mining companies (at least for now) - there will just be a civilian mining colonies. The CMCs still exist and the mechanics are still as described in my earlier post. In brief:
1) Each Civilian Mining Complex is equivalent to ten automated mines and has a mass driver built in.
2) The parent race can purchase mineral output from the mines by a simple on/off switch on the population created by the civilians. When the switch is set to 'Purchase Mineral Output', the minerals will either be placed in the population stockpile for the player race to pickup or they will be sent by mass driver to a location of the player's choice within the system. When the switch is set to 'Minerals go to Civilian Sector' the minerals still disappear from the planetary deposits and are permanently lost (on the assumption that civilian industry is using them).
3) The annual purchase cost for the entire output of a CMC is 250 wealth. Assuming a racial mining output of say 16 tons, the player would receive up to 160 tons of each accessibility 1.0 mineral and smaller amounts of other minerals for his 250 wealth.
4) If the output from a colony is not purchased by the player, he will instead receive 50 wealth per year in taxation income per CMC.
What has changed from my earlier post is the way that the civilian mining colonies are created. Each 5-day increment a random number is generated between 1 and 1 million. If that number is lower than the annual racial income, a new mining colony will be created. This is based on the assumption that the racial income reflects the size of the civilian economy and is therefore will serve as a reasonable method of determiing the liklehood of new mining colonies being established. If a colony is established, the first step is to determine the system in which the new colony will be located. This is done by listing the populations of the Empire greater than ten million in size in descending order of population size and working through the list. As each pop is checked, there is a 50% chance that the system in which that pop is located will be selected, at which point the system selection is complete. Obviously this favours the systems in which larger pops are located. If the entire list is checked and no pop is selected, the system in which the largest pop is located will be used.
Once the system is selected, the program looks for suitable surveyed system bodies without an existing colony orbiting the same star as the selected population with an orbital distance no greater than 80 AU. On the first run through, the program checks for those system bodies which have either 25,000 tons of Duranium or 25,000 tons of Sorium at an accessibility of 0.8 or greater. Once those are found, the program works out the total mineral deposits for each world, multiplying the total tonnage of each deposit by its accessibility and ignoring any with an accessibility less than 0.5. The world with the greatest total tonnage is selected. If none are found that meet the criteria, a second check is made using 15,000 tons of Duranium or Sorium at an accessibility of 0.7 or greater. If worlds within these criteria are found, the total tonnage check is performed again to select one.
When the mining colony is created, it has 1-3 CMC, a deep space tracking station and a single Garrison division named after the system body.
In addition to the check for new mining colonies, all existing colonies are checked during each 5-day increment and there is a chance they will be expanded by adding one extra CMC. At the moment the check is the same 1-1,000,000 as the new colonies but I might increase that number depending on playtest.
While this is not as detailed as the shipping lines, it will increase the minerals available to the player if he is prepared to pay for them, increase the number of colonies to protect and perhaps create those colonies on some worlds that the player might not have considered. In my own game during playtest of the new code, the civilians created a mining colony on the Moon, which has 320,000 tons of accessibility 1.0 Duranium and 950,000 tons of 0.7 Tritanium. One of Neptune's moons is actually a better mining target but already has a colony.
I am quite happy to refine the selection criteria for the colony locations if anyone can suggest a better apporach.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on August 16, 2009, 12:21:21 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
I was thinking of Steves last campaign, where the population of Earth effectivily moved to Mars, which would mean that in a shoirt space of time the pop would have great difficulty in returning to Earth, look at how weak the Russian cosmonaut were who spent a year in orbit..
(Another thought after typing the pop penalty stuff above) - Maybe colonists being transplanted could have a "die-off" if they're landed on a world with signficantly heavier G. So going from Mars to Earth might kill of 20% of the colonists....
This a potential can of worms
. If I started getting into this in a serious way, you would have to eventually start treating colonists who landed on a world considerably different to the homeworld (or at least their descendants) to be a different species for purposes of colonization. Also, how would you differentiate between recently-arrived colonists and the descendants of those who had been there for decades. This is more detailed/complex than I would really want to get into. I think the easiest way is to treat all members of the same species as having the same tolerances, even if they were born on a different planet. Steve
Post by: sloanjh on August 16, 2009, 01:16:54 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
This a potential can of worms
I agree with the can of worms comment. The die-off idea was an attempt to abstract it away so you wouldn't need to keep detailed histories etc. - it was simply that a colony ship would "remember" the gravity of the last population it loaded - if it offloaded at a planet with a significantly greater gravity (e.g. 2x or more) then you'd get a die-off percentage. OTOH, the added realism probably isn't worth the coding....
John
Post by: ShadoCat on August 16, 2009, 11:48:06 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Some form of civilian mining operation is a possibility. I can see several ways to handle this. The civs could build asteroid mining ships, which already exist in the game. I could add some form of orbital colony that would provide manpower to the planet around which it orbited - this would work for both civilians and player-controlled colonies. Maybe I could add artifical gravity as a tech and you would need both infrastructure and 'gravity plating'.
I've long wanted to see a 4x game with O'Neil colonies. I just don't see how useful they would be in the game. Once built, they would be self sufficient and could hold any environment you choose to build in it. A civilian version could be built with conventional tech (no TN). However, it's movement would start very slow (~.1G acceleration). In order to have a more mobile colony, you would need TN engines and a Duranium structure (to keep it from crumpling like an empty beer can when the engines start). I would say that a conventional colony would not even be able to be towed at TN speeds.
Since a conventional O'Neil colony would would neither consume nor produce resources, they are simply a way of holding population. This isn't generally an issue in Aurora since population shortages are the norm. Though it might be a temporary solution for a race that has nowhere else to go. They could also be built in an asteroid field and then provide a semi mobile population source that can roam from asteroid to asteroid in the filed.
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
This might be tricky to manage. I guess one way would be for a colony to be flagged as civilian and any minerals it mined would normally simply vanish into the ether. The player (or maybe any friendly race) could bid for minerals by selecting a cost they will pay per ton. The race with the highest bid would get the minerals. In fact, flagging the colony as civilian might get complicated if the player adds his own installations to the planet. Perhaps instead there is a new installation called Civilian Mining Complex. The civilians (Mining Companies?) would build these on existing colonies and maybe setup new colonies. The complexes remove minerals from the planet but those minerals only appear in your stockpiles if you pay for them. Rather than bidding, perhaps a flat fee per ton would be easier, or even easier a flat fee per complex which would avoid the complexity of sorting out which types of minerals you want and don't want.
So to summarise my ramblings. Civilian Mining Companies (CMC) build Civilian Mining Complexes (CMX). These are similar to automated mines and don't require supporting manpower. The CMC will build their CMX on existing colonies or they will set up new colonies where appropriate, including small low-grav bodies. The CMX will mine at a rate to be determined and the minerals from vanish from the planet's reserves as they are mined. You will have the option to 'hire' the CMX at an annual fee to be determined and in that case, its output appears at the colony for you to collect. Or as an added bonus, the CMX could be large installations equivalent to several AMs plus a mass driver and they will shoot the minerals to anywhere in the same system for no extra charge. How does that sound?
My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians. I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize. The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians. Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....
Post by: sloanjh on August 16, 2009, 02:35:47 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "sloanjh"This came up as a side topic in my discussion of my first seven years:The current restrictions on small populated bodies are in for three reasons. Firstly, current research suggests it would be very difficult for a human population to exist long-term in a low gravity environment. Secondly, I used to hate the massive number of colonies in Starfire :-)
Run a campaign that has populations which tolerate ultra-low gravity, i.e. which have a lower G limit of 0.0. At the same time, introduce "mining companies" into the civilian sector who will produce mines and create populations on worlds with high mineral concentrations.
My main driver for this suggestion was SF. Mostly, I'd like to see lunar colonies, but I also like to think of e.g. Niven's Belter culture. I even would like to see orbital constructs that aren't tied to a body, i.e. the O'Neil colonies mentioned by ShadoCat. I understand your Starfire frustration - what I like about the way that Aurora's going with the civie sector is that you should be able to have a bustling civilian economy that's colonizing lots of little rocks, but that's just a background to the military sector which deals with far fewer installations. Hmmm - that made me realize that you might want to distinguish civie populations (e.g those with CMC) from "military" populations like Earth - the civie populations would have a much less detailed internal structure than military ones. This would give you the best of both worlds - lots of little civie populations that are essentially terrain for the military game.
On looping over lots of habitable planets - yep, this is one of the things I was afraid would break if I just expanded my race's gravitational range to include zero. Actually, this was my primary worry (I could have just set the lower bound to e.g. .0001 to avoid divide-by-zeros) - I'm surprised I didn't mention it.
On the medical effects of low G: I view this as a question of whether you want to support it in the game. If you want to support it, then you could make up technobabble about some magic drug which offsets the effects of low G.
[SNIP] - you've already worked through the CMC stuff, so I'm skipping that discussion.QuoteWould it be fair to say that your real goal is easier exploitation of a system's mineral resources and that the low-gravity colony is really a means to that end rather than an end in itself? If we could find some way of accessing the minerals in all those small bodies, probably by the CMXs, the low-gravity colony is no longer required?I don't think so (in other words I was bringing easier explotation up as a beneficial side effect, rather than a goal). My vision is to have an alien race jumping into the Sol system see something that looks like DW's description of the first jump into a Home Hive - civilian installations everywhere, with lots of traffic between them. As mentioned above, I also think it's much more exciting to have people spread throughout the system, as opposed to being trapped on a few medium-gravity rocks. So this whole discussion started from "Wow!! It would be really cool to be able to have low gravity colonies. Gee! I can do it myself. Uh-oh, I'll kill the game engine if I do that."
John
Post by: Paul M on August 17, 2009, 06:30:27 AM
But a change in birthrate makes the most sense for a different gravity then your nominal range. I would not mind seeing orbital habitates or hollowed asteroids spun up to provide artificial gravity. I'm just not sure what they should cost to set up. They could then have everything except for mines and terraformers that a regular colony could have.
On the civillian companies for mining.
1. I can't imagine the government ownes the mines in the game, those must represent companies and the player is giving them incentives to expand. This is neither here not there though. I think it would be better to start by looking into what can the civillian mining groups do that the player isn't likely to do rather than setting up what amounts to competion. I would think the two areas that might make sense are asteroid mining and gas giant fuel processing. These are two areas that the player is less likely to be involved in anyway and they can be a major help. Also they are a near sure fire return on investment at least for the fuel processing.
2. For the civillian mining complexes I think that you should have a few requirments for them. There must be a insystem colony of a certain size to support the mine. There must be in system civillian shipping available to set it up. Government approval must be granted to exploit the minerals in question (probably best to initially start with it all set to off and then allow it to be toggled on). This sort of thing prevents wild cat exploiters and ensures a reasonable chance of profitability.
It is possible I am being too paranoid about the affects the civillian mining might have but I think easing into this is safer.
On duranium. Steve, can you look into your building requirements and perhaps diversify more? I know you are looking at mines but at the moment the sole driver for your economy is duranium. And for your heavy industry duranium and neutroniun in terms of shipyards and such. Perhaps change HQ units to require different mineral inputs since these are mostly REMFs anyway. Speaking of which could you add a button to re-name the type of infantry unit? So I can set my default Assault Infantry to Marines etc? Automatic mines could then have a much higher demand for secondary resources (higher Uridium to represent the teleop links) rather than simply double the duranium demand. It is just very odd that for the most part the only thing you need to grow your economy is duranium (and neutronium) and all other minearls just accumulate and are only useful in ship construction/maintenance. The only other critical material appears to be solarium but then that is TN's equivelent of black gold.
I'd suggest going at this slow though possibly changing this will have unintentional consiquences but a more diverse economy seems like a net benifit to the game. I know right now I rate a planet largely by its duranium availablity and amount rather than what else it has. I can't recall shipping anything but duranium by cargo vessels though I had lots of other stuff flying about in packets. I found it better to ship duranium to the home system and build the facility there and ship it back rather than shipping duranium to the colony to have them build things. I only shipped other minerals to aid in assembly of PDCs if the planet in question lacked them or to set up terraformers and a research lab one time but routine shipping was otherwise restricted to duranium.
Post by: Randy on August 17, 2009, 09:13:42 AM
Aurora is a finite resource game.
Witht the situation of you either pay for the CMC minerals, or permanently loose them, I know I would be sending the troops in every time a CMC was set up and expropriate it to governmental control. The potential loss of resources (or forced purchase at a time you may not be able to afford them) to me is not worth any potential benefit...
If they did not eliminate resources, then it would be okay.
Perhaps this can be alleviated by including a geo team in the CMC that over time will keep it from permanently destroying minerals...
Post by: SteveAlt on August 17, 2009, 11:13:32 AM
Quote from: "Randy"
One thing that scares me about the CMC - and makes me ensure at present I would not want them:This is a little like sending in the troops to control the Earth's oil resources so those pesky civilians don't use them. It is a finite resource too
Aurora is a finite resource game.
Witht the situation of you either pay for the CMC minerals, or permanently loose them, I know I would be sending the troops in every time a CMC was set up and expropriate it to governmental control. The potential loss of resources (or forced purchase at a time you may not be able to afford them) to me is not worth any potential benefit...
If they did not eliminate resources, then it would be okay.
Perhaps this can be alleviated by including a geo team in the CMC that over time will keep it from permanently destroying minerals...
However, I will make this an optional rule so you can turn them off if desired. Don't forget they only appear in populated systems and there won't be many of them so they are not really going to eat up the galaxy's mineral resources. Also, don't forget yopu can still establish your own mines on the same system bodies if you don't want to pay the civs.
Steve.
Post by: SteveAlt on August 17, 2009, 11:19:50 AM
Quote from: "ShadoCat"
My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians. I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize. The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians. Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....If you compare it to the real world, most of the world's strategic resources (Oil, Uranium, etc) are mined by civilians and them some of them are sold to governments. In Aurora, the governments have a much greater ability to mine their own resources even with the CMCs involved. If you want to be a slime ball
, you can add your own mines and installations to the colonies that civilians establish. Anything your installations mine you will receive directly and you choose whether or not to pay for the civilian mining at the same colony. In terms of cost, you will be able to decide on a colony by colony basis whether you think buying the minerals is worth the investment. You will also get some tax income from CMCs when you don't buy the minerals.Steve
Post by: Brian Neumann on August 17, 2009, 11:23:05 AM
Brian
Post by: SteveAlt on August 17, 2009, 01:12:01 PM
Quote from: "Brian"
A check box on the race screen allowing it to be assigned to computer control. Or alternately a check box at the end of race generation that would allow me to create a race under specific conditions, but let the computer control it. Currently if I want it to be a NPR I do not get any control over the makeup of the race. I was interested in starting a multi government single planet start and could not find any way to make all three nprs using the same race, and all starting with conventional industry.At the moment you can't have NPRs with conventional industry. There is no logic set up for them to handle that situation.
You can control the creation of NPRs though. If you set up the game with new races generated as NPRs then any manually created races on the F9 window will be NPRs
Steve
Post by: schroeam on August 17, 2009, 05:46:21 PM
Adam.
Post by: SteveAlt on August 18, 2009, 03:09:38 PM
Quote from: "adradjool"
How about adding scroll bars to the list of companies in the shipping line window.There should already be scroll bars
In some versions before v4.26, the window was too wide so the scroll bars were cut off. Just to check this is still a problem, are you using v4.26?
Steve
Post by: ShadoCat on August 18, 2009, 03:40:30 PM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
Quote from: "ShadoCat"My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians. I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize. The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians. Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....If you compare it to the real world, most of the world's strategic resources (Oil, Uranium, etc) are mined by civilians and them some of them are sold to governments. In Aurora, the governments have a much greater ability to mine their own resources even with the CMCs involved. If you want to be a slime ball
Steve
Yeah, but there is no in game substitute for TN. The only reason that we still use oil is that it is still one of the cheapest energy production/storage mediums. We have other options available.
If you have a 1000 star game, then when the last resource is used, all you do is spend the rest of your time waiting for ships to rot.
Instead of using oil in the analogy, try using uranium. If you dig uranium out of the ground, your allowed customers are very few.
Post by: Kurt on August 18, 2009, 05:16:21 PM
Quote from: "ShadoCat"
Quote from: "SteveAlt"Quote from: "ShadoCat"My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians. I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize. The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians. Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....If you compare it to the real world, most of the world's strategic resources (Oil, Uranium, etc) are mined by civilians and them some of them are sold to governments. In Aurora, the governments have a much greater ability to mine their own resources even with the CMCs involved. If you want to be a slime ball
Steve
Yeah, but there is no in game substitute for TN. The only reason that we still use oil is that it is still one of the cheapest energy production/storage mediums. We have other options available.
If you have a 1000 star game, then when the last resource is used, all you do is spend the rest of your time waiting for ships to rot.
Instead of using oil in the analogy, try using uranium. If you dig uranium out of the ground, your allowed customers are very few.
Theoretically, your statement about the resources running out is valid, however, assuming standard survey luck, almost every player will discover truly tremendous amounts of TN resources in the course of surveying a relatively low number of systems. The usual problem is that most of the resources, including the biggest deposits (usually in the 10-100 million + range) are at very low availability levels. Assuming those sorts of discoveries, what will usually happen if a game goes on long enough, is that all of the higher availability deposits will be mined out, forcing the players to concentrate their mines on high volume/low availability resource deposits that will last for a very long time. Depending on the size of the empire it might take a long time to run out, depending on new construction and such, but I'm willing to be that with a couple of those sorts of deposits most empires could keep running for longer than most people are going to run the game.
Kurt
Post by: sloanjh on August 18, 2009, 10:40:19 PM
Quote from: "ShadoCat"
If you dig uranium out of the ground, your allowed customers are very few.
I think that's because it can be made to go boom. Big boom, in fact
John
Post by: IanD on August 19, 2009, 05:00:53 AM
Quote
Paul M wrote
Also I am dubious there would be large scale adaptation to different gravity wells by most races without genetic engineering. A human born and living their entire life in zero G would likely never adapt back to 1 G living without major medical intervention but their children would.
I agree, which is why I suggested that there should be a permanent infrastructure requirement for low g planets representing facilities for the population to retain some higher g tolerance, or banks of uterine replicators kept under homeworld gravity to provide those higher g colonists. With the shipping companies its not as though it would cost the player time or duranium
. Quote
Paul M wrote
Its also important to realize that a lot of things are not easy to untrain and how you respond to your local gravity well is one of them
Which is why I suggested a tech to enable you to fight on higher g worlds, but this could easily give you a range of g conditions where you could fight with out (or with a reduced) penalty. For example if your home planet is 1g, then ground combat level 1 could give you the ability to fight on planets with a range .075-1.25g.
Regards
Post by: Paul M on August 19, 2009, 06:08:33 AM
What I can't see happening is actually maintainly large numbers of say centfuges and the like to keep your colonists in G tolerance. I read that the astronauts on the ISF spend 2-3 hours a day working out which strikes me as not something your average 9-5 employee at the local store is going to do. It would cost a lot of money to keep facilities of this sort open and likely they would be only available to a small fraction of the population. This is where my whole "no idea what it should cost" in game terms comes from. Beyond that we seem to be agreeing with each other.
As for technology I'd say give the penalty at full and let the technology level modify this up to a maximum of reducing it to say 33-50% of what it should be. This gives the overall problems of moving in an unfamilier gravity field. But on the other hand I also think this is pretty nitty gritty detailed stuff but I don't see us dissagreeing on anything but the details.
I still would like to see can-cities or spun up asteriods (something that might make asteroids more interesting) as they could be then used for military bases and asteroid processing centres.
Post by: IanD on August 19, 2009, 08:18:54 AM
Quote
Paul M wrote
*grins* Is my duranium position that clear *laughs* Yes suffering through 3 duranium crunches tends to make me paranoid about the whole topic
I always go through a Duranium crunch or two :wink: .
Quote
this is pretty nitty gritty detailed stuff
Again I agree, but it is an (in my view at least) important detail. Would it be easier to colonise a planet with an atmosphere you can change in 20 years game time (or less) or a high g planet just within your racial tolerance that you can't change? At the moment it’s the latter. Steve said he wanted a more realistic game than Starfire :D . Nice to find we agree on so much
Regards
Post by: sloanjh on August 19, 2009, 08:40:29 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
Which is why I want skewed g tolerance in the first place.
You can emulate a skewed g tolerance in the current game simply by moving the central value on the Race (ctrl-F2) screen.
John
Post by: Paul M on August 20, 2009, 02:27:59 AM
But for places away from your gravity sweet spot giving a lower manufacturing efficiency and birthrate are certainly realistic. Say for for each 5% the planets gravity differs from your homeworlds you loose 1% manufacturing efficiency and x% birthrate. You could use something similiar for ground combat efficiency.
I'd also add that lack of a hydrosphere should be a multiplier as well. Water is vital to life. I'd also suggest a variable amount for a biosphere either + or - in this case. Egads consider that any PR will be NOT the friends of the Interstellar Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Non-Sentient Life Forms (ISPCNSLF) given our tendancy to "x"-form the atmosphere into leathal poison as far as the native non-sentient life forms are concerned.
Steve is probably either: (1) throwing up his hands in disgust or (2) rolling on the floor laughing I'd imagine.
Post by: IanD on August 20, 2009, 02:59:08 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
But for places away from your gravity sweet spot giving a lower manufacturing efficiency and birthrate are certainly realistic. Say for for each 5% the planets gravity differs from your homeworlds you loose 1% manufacturing efficiency and x% birthrate. You could use something similiar for ground combat efficiency.
I'd also add that lack of a hydrosphere should be a multiplier as well. Water is vital to life. I'd also suggest a variable amount for a biosphere either + or - in this case. Egads consider that any PR will be NOT the friends of the Interstellar Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Non-Sentient Life Forms (ISPCNSLF) given our tendancy to "x"-form the atmosphere into leathal poison as far as the native non-sentient life forms are concerned.
I like the idea!
As for the latter case I wouldn't worry to much, I think "realistically" the only gas other than O2 that’s been identified which could possibly fulfil the same role was carbon disulphide (the one that smells like rotting cabbage), and Steve doesn't have atmospheres of that around :D .
Regards
Post by: waresky on August 20, 2009, 08:23:05 AM
PLEASE re-mind my Suggestion: left "SORIUM" and change on HYDROGEN
So can let more STRATEGICAL Water-World..
more realistic for GAS Giant operation's Fleet on refuel from them (raw Hydrogen>>>refined Hydroegn power plant (rememebr TRAVELLER,Steve please)
i like more Hydrogen than "gravity trouble":D
Post by: sloanjh on August 22, 2009, 05:00:53 PM
In my conventional start campaign, I've yet to build a jump gate construction ship - I still don't have a SY big enough to take one. Even when I've got one built, there are worlds several jumps away that I'd like to colonize - for example I've discovered some ruins that have mines, terraformers and construction factories, and I'd like to ship people and minerals there. With the new standard hold sizes, the smallest colony ship I can build that can still move at a decent speed is a little under 6kton; the smallest cargo ship is more like 10kton. So in order to get a few hundred units of minerals to the ruins colony, I have to build 10kton cargo and jump ships, with the cargo ship going e.g. 90% empty on the run to take minerals. What I would like to do is build small freighters and colony ships that would make lots of trips.
A related suggestion which I threw out there previously is to let construction factories and mines be broken up so they can be shipped on ships with fewer than 5 holds.
John
Post by: sloanjh on August 23, 2009, 12:24:35 PM
Once another empire has given you trade access, you should be able to see the demand (i.e. the stuff in the wealth tab) for each of its populations (or at least the ones that your civies can reach).
Off hand, I can think of two ways to do this:
1) Have more special tabs on the intel (ctrl-F5) screen that present the same info as on the wealth tab of the population (F2) screen.
2) Allow access to other races in the wealth tab of the population (F2) screen. So if the Blarg have granted me trade priviledges and the Cetans are at war with me, then I'll have both "Terran Federation" and "Blarg" available in the F2 pull-down, but I won't have the Cetans. Switching to the Blarg shows me all of their populations (in read-only mode), but all of the tabs except "wealth" come up blank.
The reason I like this one is that it seems an easy generalization of SM mode (you've got two modes you can be in rather than three (SM and normal) and the new mode has even fewer permissions to do anything than "normal" does), and it's easily generalized to higher levels of treaty. For example, getting access to tech might let me see the Research tab, while full alliance might give me access to all tabs, along with (maybe) the F5 and F6 screens.
You might also couple this sort of thing to espionage teams, e.g. an espionage team on a planet might unlock access to screens that are more protected than the current treaty status.
BTW, I noticed someone mentioning a while back that failed espionage attempts should have a negative impact on diplomatic relations. With the new point system that should be fairly easy to do - just treat it as a negative event.
John
Post by: sloanjh on August 23, 2009, 01:56:06 PM
John
Post by: waresky on August 28, 2009, 11:59:35 AM
Duranium are an "rare" and precious noble metal in ur mind?
Ok..why for some "very low tech" we must use this rare raw?
example: Naval Academy...1200 TONNS of Duranium.(for me r an CRAZY quantity....)
i think Duranium r for SPACE industry,because (my 2 cent opinion) r an heavy metal and hard to breack on Space..
So..for some LANDING construction i think r very useless..
So let free Duranium for VERY hard colonization and use on Space..
no?:)
ty
Post by: sloanjh on August 30, 2009, 01:22:36 PM
At the 5 day updates, a civilization with whom you have comms (I'm not clear on what that means as to who can talk to who, btw) could deliver a set of diplomatic notes to you complaining about negative events. For example, if they detected your ships in their populated systems, then they could protest "task force x encroached on our territory".
The kicker would be to let NPR take diplomatic notes from players. So if you told an NPR that you were uncomfortable with it sending a Combat Action Group into your home system for a "port call" at your home world without friendly relations, that could feed into the NPR AI as to whether it would turn around and leave the system or if it would just get more pissed off (or both).
John
Post by: Paul M on September 10, 2009, 04:59:32 AM
Otherwise I just have to make do with sending a lot of engineers and scrounge up enough to transit a colony ship and a tramp freighter for moving minerals and infrastructure.
Post by: waresky on September 10, 2009, 05:48:39 AM
120.000/4600=..u become Elder.
probably Steve upload 4.4 ver before u finish'em to research..
DDAnother request:
1)drop below dramatically somme "DURANIUM" requirement on some Critical infrastructures:Naval Academy etc.etc..
hope Steve re-think Duranium requirement...i think some r very high.
Post by: IanD on September 10, 2009, 08:27:29 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
Steve, can I ask for the ability to subdivide facilities (construction facilities, and mines being the most critical here) so they can fit into a single hold. I may be able to make some sort of tramp freighter to do interstellar colonization but the jump engine requirement for a 5 hold freighter at jump efficiency 3 is well 120,000 or research...and I currently do 4600 a year...quote]
Is it faster to research the jump gate construction module? I have started a trial 4.26 game where the Terran Federation "forgot" :) ) second. (This is obviously not from a pre-TN start.)
Regards
Post by: waresky on September 10, 2009, 10:22:07 AM
Obviously better explore a newly discovered System,before gate construction on..
then are much better and confortable for raw transports and commerce an road gate,than a Jump ship.
but careful for Aliens.
Post by: Paul M on September 11, 2009, 03:19:23 AM
Post by: alanwebber on September 11, 2009, 07:02:50 AM
Would it be possible to have an overview of where teams are operating and, for geological teams, some history as to where they've been? This would prevent me transporting them to a location only to find it already been surveyed out.
I'm having enough trouble following where six or seven teams are let alone if the numbers increase further as the game proceeds.
Regards
Alan
Post by: waresky on September 11, 2009, 01:19:52 PM
become crazy to follow where r all my puny and lonely desperately teams in void scattered Planets...
Post by: Beersatron on September 13, 2009, 12:35:49 AM
i.e. I have 10 on Earth and 4 on 4 different asteroids all pointing to Earth. I then want to direct some minerals to Mars and Venus, but I can only direct to the one.
I guess one thing to do would be to treat each MD as a separate entity and provide the option to link one MD on one celestial body with that on another celestial body.
So, you could have 4 of the MDs on Earth tied directly to each MD on each Asteroid. Then another MD on Earth tied to the MD on Mars and one MD on Earth tied to the MD on Venus.
MD 1 on Earth: Asteroid 1 -> Earth
MD 2 on Earth: Asteroid 2 -> Earth
MD 3 on Earth: Asteroid 3 -> Earth
MD 4 on Earth: Asteroid 4 -> Earth
MD 5 on Earth: Earth -> Mars
MD 6 on Earth: Earth -> Venus
MD 7 on Earth: unassigned
MD 8 on Earth: unassigned
MD 9 on Earth: unassigned
MD 10 on Earth: unassigned
Make sense?
Post by: alanwebber on September 14, 2009, 02:49:02 AM
Would it be possible to get a message if you try to load something that doesn't exist? I'm mainly thinking of a situation where you're shipping a lot of infrastructure from one colony to another (e.g. after terraforming) and you set the orders to cycle mode. If you're not careful, you run out of installations but the freighters keep moving from one place to another empty.
Alan
Post by: James Patten on September 14, 2009, 06:22:07 AM
Quote from: "alanwebber"
Would it be possible to get a message if you try to load something that doesn't exist? I'm mainly thinking of a situation where you're shipping a lot of infrastructure from one colony to another (e.g. after terraforming) and you set the orders to cycle mode. If you're not careful, you run out of installations but the freighters keep moving from one place to another empty.
I get that all the time, if freighers run out of something or have a problem.
Post by: IanD on September 14, 2009, 07:16:37 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
It probably is faster to research jump gates, but then I have to build a jump gate construction ship and then the gate. I am opposed to building gates early in the game, as it makes little sense. It is too great a risk. If need be I'll just explore and only colonize my home system which has a huge amount of potential...gads the darn thing has 2 super jovians and 500 asteroids or so plus a half a dozen other gas giants.
In my current game all went well until I suddenly lost my geo-survey squadron in the second system I had opened up with a jump gate. I think its probably precursors. They could not see the construction ship and left it alone, which is all to the good as all I could afford to build with the pre-build points was a mere two missile frigates :)
Regards
Post by: sloanjh on September 14, 2009, 07:42:10 AM
Quote from: "alanwebber"
Steve
Would it be possible to get a message if you try to load something that doesn't exist? I'm mainly thinking of a situation where you're shipping a lot of infrastructure from one colony to another (e.g. after terraforming) and you set the orders to cycle mode. If you're not careful, you run out of installations but the freighters keep moving from one place to another empty.
Alan
Are you playing 4.26? 4.2x has a new feature where a ship will pause its orders and pop an error message if it can't fulfill its load orders. Veeeeeery useful
John
Post by: waresky on September 14, 2009, 08:10:48 AM
If u send a Freighters for pick up minerals,and above planets arent none,a error message comein.
Super.So u can check if ored are aknowledge from crew..or ur are dumb..otherwise all r done but need time for minerals grew up
Post by: IanD on September 14, 2009, 09:01:18 AM
Regards
Post by: waresky on September 14, 2009, 09:09:47 AM
Bottom are "New Armor".
Post by: IanD on September 14, 2009, 09:36:29 AM
Quote from: "waresky"
Ian
Bottom are "New Armor".
Sigh! I really must get new glasses
Thanks.Regards
Post by: waresky on September 14, 2009, 10:35:25 AM
Am think who sometimes are very needed another strangity : DESTROY JUMP GATE Building.
Or u help us in another features capabil: MINEFIELD...
i wanna destroy my Jumpgates:)
Post by: Paul M on September 14, 2009, 02:17:45 PM
Post by: Beersatron on September 14, 2009, 02:31:41 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
As I just experienced a blue screen of death upon updating my game (I don't know if Aurora was to blame or not) and when I tried to resume my campaign I discovered that the database has been corrupted and I get a bizallion error messages including one that seems never ending on "UpdateAllSensors" Steve do you think you could add an automatic backup system? I think everyone will benifit from this.
I have started to regularly take a copy of Stevefire and rename it 'SaveXXX_mm-dd-yyyy_hh-mm' the date and time being the Game time and not real time. I get an updateAllSensors error after each industry increment and was getting a few other errors around fleets so I was backing up the DB and then 'pruning' it to see if I could fix the errors that way. No joy unfortunately, but it has meant that I can now revert to a recent enough game time if I give some utterly moronic command
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 14, 2009, 05:44:54 PM
Quote from: "IanD"
When using the copy button to upgrade current designs on the F5 screen can there be a way to chose the latest armour? If there is already I have failed to find it.After you copy it, press the New Armour button. 4th from left on bottom row.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 14, 2009, 05:47:20 PM
Quote from: "waresky"
Steve:You can already create minefields in Aurora. Here is a link to the thread where I explained it. It is a version or two out of date but the essentials should still be the same.
Am think who sometimes are very needed another strangity : DESTROY JUMP GATE Building.
Or u help us in another features capabil: MINEFIELD...
i wanna destroy my Jumpgates:)
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1312&p=10909&hilit=minefield#p10909 (http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1312&p=10909&hilit=minefield#p10909)
Steve
Post by: James Patten on September 15, 2009, 06:21:57 AM
Post by: waresky on September 15, 2009, 06:26:13 AM
And am pray Steve..who found a..some little more easy and handling on "COmbat Windos" ..i cant explain but sometimes and with many ships become very hard to assign,follow,(aknowledge)understand where when who fire at whom..
my 2 cents:)
Post by: Paul M on September 15, 2009, 09:00:50 AM
Post by: waresky on September 15, 2009, 09:12:29 AM
and am make a second backup named: Stevefire2.mdb..for security
Post by: sloanjh on September 15, 2009, 11:05:51 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
Is there anything I can do to save my game state right now and continue or am I stuck in restarting everything from scratch? Autosave for the win!
I used to stop the game in order to save the database, but recently I've been simply copying the DB while the game was running (albeit in a "waiting for player input" state as opposed to actually working on an update). Doesn't seem to have caused any problems so far....
Note that I've assumed you know the answer to the question "How do I save my game state" - it's "copy Stevefire.mdb into another location".
John
Post by: waresky on September 16, 2009, 03:55:22 AM
Post by: IanD on September 16, 2009, 06:48:37 AM
Regards
Post by: IanD on September 16, 2009, 08:11:20 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
But it's just waiting for me to develop a tractor beam tow it home and dismantle it (hopefully ).
Can you infact scrap a ship which is not under your control? I know you cannot "salvage" one as I tried that
Regards
Post by: Paul M on September 16, 2009, 09:05:10 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Quote from: "Paul M"Is there anything I can do to save my game state right now and continue or am I stuck in restarting everything from scratch? Autosave for the win!
I used to stop the game in order to save the database, but recently I've been simply copying the DB while the game was running (albeit in a "waiting for player input" state as opposed to actually working on an update). Doesn't seem to have caused any problems so far....
Note that I've assumed you know the answer to the question "How do I save my game state" - it's "copy Stevefire.mdb into another location".
John
Nah this was more a "can I somehow save the game so I can reload it without the errors" and since that seems impossible I just bit the bullet and restarted. I may spend another hour doing random system creation as I'm not thrilled with the one I finally got. I do wish there was a way to save a race and custom ranks and such so I didn't have to recreate that from scratch as well.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 16, 2009, 10:55:07 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
I have been surprised by the actions of a precursor ship. Having engaged and destroyed 3 other precursor ships for the cost of my missile frigates, I closed in on the survivor which just sat there :) ). Should it not at least have hidden itself in a remote part of the system, tried to ram my FACs or self-destructed? Is this difficult to code for?Normally they run away or head for reloads when out of ammunition. Is it possible you destroyed its engines during the battle?
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 16, 2009, 10:57:40 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
Quote from: "IanD"But it's just waiting for me to develop a tractor beam tow it home and dismantle it (hopefully ).
Can you infact scrap a ship which is not under your control? I know you cannot "salvage" one as I tried that :). I haven't bothered because of the difficulty involved in boarding ships moving at several thousand kilometers per second. However, disabled ships and shipyards would be possible targets for boarding.
Steve
Post by: welchbloke on September 16, 2009, 06:10:07 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "IanD"Boarding combat actions against static targets really appeals to me, but, looking at all the other updates you're doing, if you spread yourself any thinner you'll be transparentQuote from: "IanD"But it's just waiting for me to develop a tractor beam tow it home and dismantle it (hopefully ).
Can you infact scrap a ship which is not under your control? I know you cannot "salvage" one as I tried that :). I haven't bothered because of the difficulty involved in boarding ships moving at several thousand kilometers per second. However, disabled ships and shipyards would be possible targets for boarding.
Steve
Post by: IanD on September 17, 2009, 02:42:01 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Normally they run away or head for reloads when out of ammunition. Is it possible you destroyed its engines during the battle?
No, as far as I know its untouched, I did not engage it. I think this was the ship which destroyed my geo-survey ships and probably my FGs from way outside my missile range. All I had left were laser armed FACs that closed the contact, which just sat there instead of blowing me away. It has a thermal of 1500 and is 14700 tons, and while there were a couple of alien wrecks in system from which I didn't get tech data on salvage, I assumed they were ancient, not recent NPR (I could be in error but it was the second system I entered and having been two systems beyond found nothing.) I have continuously kept a FACs squadron on top of it since the battle (they have better endurance than my FGs).
This ship has sat there over, it turned out a ruined city for about 4 years while I scrambled to rebuild my navy and upgrade ship yards and eventually build more geo-survey ships, which have just located a precursor listening post. We will see what happens when I invade the precursor installation. If I had thought it could reload I would not have left it untouched for so long
.Regards
Post by: IanD on September 18, 2009, 07:33:42 AM
Regards
Post by: waresky on September 18, 2009, 07:41:55 AM
A)
A Realistic "Hot and Damage from Near STAR prossimity".
B)
And a "realistic hidding behind planets mass for radar cover"
Are difficult to manage'em?
i think go and near a Star r too risky,only shileds can manage (motie's example)
and for intriguing Fleet management and escaping tactics,radar coverage from Planet Mass
no?:)
Post by: Brian Neumann on September 18, 2009, 10:36:32 AM
Brian
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 18, 2009, 03:33:09 PM
Quote from: "IanD"
Steve, are ellipses much more difficult to code for? In Aurora all planetary orbits look circular, while they would actually be elliptical. Since you are going to the trouble of adding the near star catalogue, it would be a nice touch to have "realistic planetary orbits" to go with it, not necessary you understand but nice to have.I have looked at ellipses in the past. The system generation code already includes generation of orbital eccentricities for each star/system body but it is currently commented out. I haven't added the code though for the actual mechanics of elliptical orbits. It is tricky but I am sure it could be overcome. The main problem however is that the colony cost of planets/moons would change over the course of their year, quite considerably in some cases. This means I would have to recalculate the colony cost of every colony after every orbital movement phase. I would have to recalculate the atmosphere, temperature and albedo of every system body in the game because changing temperatures may cause ice caps to form and melt as well as causing different gases to freeze out and later turn back to vapur. I would also have to find a way to display the range of possible colony costs for each colony and each potential colony and the effects of terraforming on all of that range. The player would have to plan colonization more carefully as he may well need infrastructure for parts of the year. I would also have to modify the pop growth code so that the worst possible colony cost was used, not the current one, otherwise the pop might grow and then die off at different times of the year. There are no doubt other complications I can't think of off-hand. I came to the conclusion that the complexities weren't worth the potential increase in realism and gameplay and abandoned that effort.
I may still look at it in the future but it would be a considerbale task.
Steve
Post by: georgiaboy1966 on September 19, 2009, 08:20:46 AM
Loading 500 assault troops for an invasion is a pain.
Post by: waresky on September 19, 2009, 11:49:31 AM
it's true.
hope steve,in many thing going to finish'em,found time to make more easy troops management.
Recover'it into PDC,multiple selection of them...etc.etc..
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 21, 2009, 10:09:37 AM
Quote from: "georgiaboy1966"
Steve, been runnig into an irritating problem for a while now. That is the loading of troops. Is it possible to load troops like minerials instead. So do not having to load each individual troop, I can load a specific number or max of a troop type.That isn't a problem I have run into but It sounds like your campaign must have reached a considerable size
Loading 500 assault troops for an invasion is a pain.
. I assume you just want to be able to load a particular type of division instead. Load All Heavy Assault, for example?Steve
Post by: welchbloke on September 21, 2009, 03:45:44 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "georgiaboy1966"Steve, been runnig into an irritating problem for a while now. That is the loading of troops. Is it possible to load troops like minerials instead. So do not having to load each individual troop, I can load a specific number or max of a troop type.That isn't a problem I have run into but It sounds like your campaign must have reached a considerable size :)
Loading 500 assault troops for an invasion is a pain.
Post by: georgiaboy1966 on September 21, 2009, 04:09:23 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "georgiaboy1966"Steve, been runnig into an irritating problem for a while now. That is the loading of troops. Is it possible to load troops like minerials instead. So do not having to load each individual troop, I can load a specific number or max of a troop type.That isn't a problem I have run into but It sounds like your campaign must have reached a considerable size
Loading 500 assault troops for an invasion is a pain.
Steve
Yes loading individual types would be nice. Similiar to the minerals loading/unloading would be nice.
Post by: backstab on September 22, 2009, 09:40:54 PM
Post by: welchbloke on September 22, 2009, 10:14:41 PM
Quote from: "backstab"
The ability to sell/trade complete systems .... eg a race develops the A-1 Railgun and sells / trades it to another race instead of sell/tradeing each individual componantTo take this suggestion one step further how about selling complete weapon systems? Sell 10x A-1 Railguns without giving the tech. I see backstab's suggestion as giving the information to 'licence produce' a system. Whereas, what I'm suggesting is just like selling Typhoon to Saudi Arabia. Of course you could retro-engineer the system maybe destroy the system to give you a random number of RP on the tech?
Post by: IanD on September 24, 2009, 03:55:48 AM
Regards
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 26, 2009, 10:12:33 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
The ability to sell/trade complete systems .... eg a race develops the A-1 Railgun and sells / trades it to another race instead of sell/tradeing each individual componantThis would be fairly straightforward in terms of programming but without the background knowledge, would the second race be able to build it? For example, if the US gave Albania the plans for the latest Patriot missile, could Albania actually manufacture the missiles?
Quote from: "backstab"
To take this suggestion one step further how about selling complete weapon systems? Sell 10x A-1 Railguns without giving the tech. I see backstab's suggestion as giving the information to 'licence produce' a system. Whereas, what I'm suggesting is just like selling Typhoon to Saudi Arabia. Of course you could retro-engineer the system maybe destroy the system to give you a random number of RP on the tech?This is harder from a programming and gameplay perspective but probably more realistic. The problem is how you model the 10x A-1 railguns. Does Race A have to bulid them before giving them to Race B and if so, how do I account for that in the game. If instead you just say Race B can bulid 10 railguns and the program keeps track, that is no different than giving them the plans and if they are building it, how do you stop them building more?
This area of the game is very interesting but full of pitfalls. One option I have considered in the past is having Industrial Capacity (IC) instead of construction, fighter and ordnance factories. You have a pool of unused IC and you can devote a number of IC points to building a certain type of installation, missile or fighter. Once a production run is complete, you can build more of the same, leave the IC setup to build the same thing but dormant or 'release' the IC back into the pool. If the IC is released, there would be a period when it would be unavailable (6 months?) as it is being retooled. This mechanic could be reversed so that when unused IC is devoted to a new task, there is a retooling period before construction begins - this is more realistic but the former is easier. This would create more diverse industrial output and you could have a lot of different items being produced at the same time.
If the above was in place, you could take it a step further (a step too far, probably :)
If that paradigm was in place, then one race could quite easily pass on or sell manufactured components to another (the 10x Railgun mentioned above for example
Steve
Post by: Father Tim on September 26, 2009, 10:27:00 AM
Post by: welchbloke on September 26, 2009, 06:13:09 PM
Post by: sloanjh on September 26, 2009, 11:28:07 PM
John
Post by: waresky on September 27, 2009, 06:02:26 AM
Same as Master Of orions,we have some ResLabs ok?..but are possible who 200 labs research same area? no i think..
Are possible diferent labs can assign different Area tech to research at same time?
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 27, 2009, 10:12:37 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
I also like this paradigm but I am cognisant of the possibility of generating huge amounts of micromanagement without necessarily improving the gaming experience. How about treating component manufacture in the same manner as mines etc? Have a multiple selection tree for contruction factories something like the officers window for command opportunities. In the components selection have all of the racial designed components available for construction. So if a player wants to build some components to sell they do it that way. If they want to build a ship they don't need to build components (the shipyard handles it). I like the idea of getting components back if you scrap a ship. These components then become available for sale. I suppose, if its possible, the stockpiled components could be used to reduce the construction time of a ship in the slipyards. Reduce time of construction by the percentage of the mass of the component? Anyway these are my (probably random) musings :) but the more I think about it, the more I think you might have hit on an ideal solution that would suit everyone.
Shipyards would remain as they are now - same cost, same mechanics etc. with one exception. When they begin building a ship, they check for available components stockpiled on the planet. If any are available, they are removed from the stockpile and the ship construction prtogress advances to a percentage equal to the cost required for the stockpiled components. For example, assume you had stockpiled engines, either by building them or recovering them from a scrapped ship, and you built a survey ship with six engines for which the engines comprised thirty percent of the cost. When you pressed the Add Task button, the six engines would be removed from the stockpile and the progress percentage would start at 30%. After that, construction would continue normally. It's a little more complex because the mineral consumption for the rest of the task would be incorrect but I could fix that in the background at the start of the task. If you had no components stockpiled, the ship would be built by the shipyard in exactly the same way it is built now.
This method allows for players who want to build components or re-use them and also for players who want to ignore the idea entirely. It also means I wouldn't have to modify the NPR construction code.
What does everyone think of the idea of replacing construction/ordnance/fighter factories with Industrial capacity (IC). This would essentially be the same as having just construction factories but you could build multiple items at once. Any IC that was returned to the pool would be unavailable for a time while it was retooled - I think 3 months is probably reasonable. Any new build IC would be immediately available.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 27, 2009, 10:29:06 AM
Quote from: "waresky"
Steve.This is different to construction because each research task lasts quite some time. There is essentially no difference between researching five projects in a row and five projects simultaneously, except in the former case you get some of them earlier than you would in the latter case. One of the advantages of creating different colonies is that you can split up your research labs and take advantage of the tech bonuses of different officers.
Same as Master Of orions,we have some ResLabs ok?..but are possible who 200 labs research same area? no i think..
Are possible diferent labs can assign different Area tech to research at same time?
Steve
Post by: Shinanygnz on September 27, 2009, 10:34:50 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
<snip>
What does everyone think of the idea of replacing construction/ordnance/fighter factories with Industrial capacity (IC). This would essentially be the same as having just construction factories but you could build multiple items at once. Any IC that was returned to the pool would be unavailable for a time while it was retooled - I think 3 months is probably reasonable. Any new build IC would be immediately available.
Steve
Sounds great to me. Do it, do it now. :wink:
Stephen
Post by: sloanjh on September 27, 2009, 09:47:00 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
What does everyone think of the idea of replacing construction/ordnance/fighter factories with Industrial capacity (IC). This would essentially be the same as having just construction factories but you could build multiple items at once. Any IC that was returned to the pool would be unavailable for a time while it was retooled - I think 3 months is probably reasonable. Any new build IC would be immediately available.
I'm happy with the current system.
John
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 28, 2009, 12:45:55 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
What does everyone think of the idea of replacing construction/ordnance/fighter factories with Industrial capacity (IC). This would essentially be the same as having just construction factories but you could build multiple items at once. Any IC that was returned to the pool would be unavailable for a time while it was retooled - I think 3 months is probably reasonable. Any new build IC would be immediately available.
Quote from: "Shinanygnz"
Sounds great to me. Do it, do it now. :)
I have been playing around with the Industrial capacity / simultaneous build ideas and realised the code and the interface for this whole area needs a real clean up. So one way or the other, I am going to rewrite construction/ordnance/fighter factories to create a cleaner model. Below is my half finished idea for how this will look. Several of the buttons for the setup, etc are missing and the grids will probably end up different sizes but you get the idea. The various stockpile lists for missiles, fighters, PDC components and now Ship Components (if you choose to use that option) will be on a separate tab. The list on the left shows installations but the dropdown above has options for Fighters, Missiles, Ship Components, PDCs, Prefab PDCs, Assemble PDCs and Refit PDCs. As you click the options the build cost and materials appear in the bottom left listbox.
[attachment=0:139ey60g]IC.JPG[/attachment:139ey60g]
If you like the existing model you can use 100% of the industry for any one task but I think over time, players will probably set up part of the IC for various background production tasks such as fighters, missiles or infrastructure. My main concern is that with no restrictions, players could devote 100% of industry to fighters or missiles and churn them out very quickly. At the moment, missile construction is a significant constraint on missile ships and restricts their usefulness in a strategic rather than tactical sense. With the ability to instantly increase missile production to levels that could not be achieved in the past, this could make missile ships far more potent. I have considered a retool time similar to shipyards but the more I think about this, the less happy I am. There is no retool time at the moment for construction so it would be an added constraint that doesn't currently exist and building smaller items and buildings is not the same as building ships. However, I do want to do something to restrain the huge missile output so I have a couple of ideas.
One option is simply to place a limit on the percentage of industrial capacity that can be used for fighters and missiles. That percentage could be increased through research projects that would replace the existing projects for increasing ordnance and fighter production rates. The second option is a little more detailed but probably more realistic. In Aurora at the moment, you can simply cancel construction projects half-way through at any time. In reality, that wouldn't be as simple. So option two is to not allow cancellation of any construction projects once they are underway. It could be assumed that the necessary materials and trained manpower have been made available and cancelling all that at the drop of a hat simply isn't possible. In essence, you have to plan ahead a little more in terms of what you build. it would probably be a good idea to retain some capacity for short-term projects in case an emergency arose or perhaps generally devote percentages of construction to certain areas. However, it has occurred to me that one unintended consequence of the 'no cancellation' idea might be that players only built small quantities of items to avoid being stuck with long production times and that would lead to micromanagement. Therefore if I went with that idea, I think I would also add some type of mass production bonus so that the more of something you ordered, the cheaper it would be per item. A variant on option 2 would be to allow cancellation but at some cost and delay - perhaps construction is halted but you don't get the capacity back for 3 months. Not sure how that would affect a mass production bonus though.
I have added the ability to build ship components. As I noted in another post, this is optional but the components will be used to shorten build times for ships if they are available. Also, when you scrap a ship you no longer get 25% of the wealth/materials. Instead you get all the various components added to the component stockpile of the population, with a few exceptions. The ship components that you cannot bulid and are lost when a ship is scrapped are as follows:
Armour
Crew Quarters (and smaller versions)
Engineering (and smaller versions)
Fuel Storage (and smaller versions)
Cargo Holds
Hangars
PDC Barracks
Bridge
it also occurred to me that the current method of bulding PDC components could be changed. You would build the actual components rather than the existing "Split the PDC into Chunks" method. The components would be transported to their destination where engineers or IC would get a huge head start on building the PDC depending on which components you shipped. This is just a thought at the moment and perhaps could be used alongside the existing method instead if replacing it
Steve
Post by: backstab on September 28, 2009, 03:28:05 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"What does everyone think of the idea of replacing construction/ordnance/fighter factories with Industrial capacity (IC). This would essentially be the same as having just construction factories but you could build multiple items at once. Any IC that was returned to the pool would be unavailable for a time while it was retooled - I think 3 months is probably reasonable. Any new build IC would be immediately available.
I'm happy with the current system.
John
The more I think about it, the more I agree with John. If you think about it , how long would a Mcdonald Douglas Factory that assembles Fighters take to retool and make missiles ? It would most probably be cheaper to just build a new one.
Post by: IanD on September 28, 2009, 05:00:53 AM
Quote from: "backstab"
The more I think about it, the more I agree with John. If you think about it , how long would a Mcdonald Douglas Factory that assembles Fighters take to retool and make missiles ? It would most probably be cheaper to just build a new one.Quote from: "sloanjh"Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
The time required to build a new missile could simply be the time required to plug in a memory stick with the new missile design spec on it. You have already spent the time in developing the design in your R&D screen; do you really need to do it twice? Or you could simply delete the requirement to research every design.
You would only need more time to retool if the current machinery could not manufacture it. Even in the middle of the last century tank factories were running machine tools off paper tape programmes, change the tape, produced new /different components.
Regards
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 28, 2009, 06:24:26 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
I have been giving this more thought overnight. Whatever the new system is, I am going to avoid any retool time. Given the number of different items you can potentially build, it would just add too much micromanagement. I will likely add some restriction instead on the percentage of factories that can work on fighters and missiles. One other option is to have dedicated percentages for construction, missiles and fighters, which you could change through some type of conversion task.Quote from: "backstab"The more I think about it, the more I agree with John. If you think about it , how long would a Mcdonald Douglas Factory that assembles Fighters take to retool and make missiles ? It would most probably be cheaper to just build a new one.The time required to build a new missile could simply be the time required to plug in a memory stick with the new missile design spec on it. You have already spent the time in developing the design in your R&D screen; do you really need to do it twice? Or you could simply delete the requirement to research every design.
You would only need more time to retool if the current machinery could not manufacture it. Even in the middle of the last century tank factories were running machine tools off paper tape programmes, change the tape, produced new /different components.
Steve
Post by: IanD on September 28, 2009, 07:51:45 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
One other option is to have dedicated percentages for construction, missiles and fighters, which you could change through some type of conversion task.
This looks like a good workable idea. Aircraft factories make aircraft, missile factories make missiles, but to have car plants make aircraft, while not impossible would take time to retool. The above looks quite rational. I like it.
Regards
Post by: sloanjh on September 28, 2009, 09:07:31 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Given the number of different items you can potentially build, it would just add too much micromanagement.
This was the part I was worried about, so I'm a lot happier.
Thanks,
John
Post by: waresky on September 28, 2009, 10:20:46 AM
More difference,more management=more realistic BUT more help for more players.
Same as many Research lab= more project initiated..
Post by: Kurt on September 28, 2009, 12:20:47 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "IanD"I have been giving this more thought overnight. Whatever the new system is, I am going to avoid any retool time. Given the number of different items you can potentially build, it would just add too much micromanagement. I will likely add some restriction instead on the percentage of factories that can work on fighters and missiles. One other option is to have dedicated percentages for construction, missiles and fighters, which you could change through some type of conversion task.Quote from: "backstab"The more I think about it, the more I agree with John. If you think about it , how long would a Mcdonald Douglas Factory that assembles Fighters take to retool and make missiles ? It would most probably be cheaper to just build a new one.The time required to build a new missile could simply be the time required to plug in a memory stick with the new missile design spec on it. You have already spent the time in developing the design in your R&D screen; do you really need to do it twice? Or you could simply delete the requirement to research every design.
You would only need more time to retool if the current machinery could not manufacture it. Even in the middle of the last century tank factories were running machine tools off paper tape programmes, change the tape, produced new /different components.
Steve
"Retool time" is probably more realistic, but Aurora already has enough stuff that could be considered micromanagement, making it worse would probably not be a good idea. I like the idea of general IC's, and the ability to build more than one thing at a time, but you already are including specialized factories for fuel and maintenance production. How about dividing IC's into Heavy IC and Light IC. Light IC would be used for missiles, fighters, and ship/PDC component construction, and Heavy IC would be used for everything else. That way you couldn't concentrate all of your construction capacity on surge-producing missiles or fighters, and in any case it doesn't make sense to say that a factory producing heavy industrial tools for other factories one month can be switched over to producing missiles next month, or at all. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that such a factory could be converted from producing heavy industrial production equipment to heavy mining equipment, but it is a much bigger leap to producing intricate electronics like missiles or fighters.
Kurt
Post by: James Patten on September 28, 2009, 01:37:15 PM
I also like the idea of components for ships.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 28, 2009, 01:43:53 PM
Quote from: "Kurt"
"Retool time" is probably more realistic, but Aurora already has enough stuff that could be considered micromanagement, making it worse would probably not be a good idea. I like the idea of general IC's, and the ability to build more than one thing at a time, but you already are including specialized factories for fuel and maintenance production. How about dividing IC's into Heavy IC and Light IC. Light IC would be used for missiles, fighters, and ship/PDC component construction, and Heavy IC would be used for everything else. That way you couldn't concentrate all of your construction capacity on surge-producing missiles or fighters, and in any case it doesn't make sense to say that a factory producing heavy industrial tools for other factories one month can be switched over to producing missiles next month, or at all. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that such a factory could be converted from producing heavy industrial production equipment to heavy mining equipment, but it is a much bigger leap to producing intricate electronics like missiles or fighters.I agree that retool time would probably be the most realistic but as you say, that would involve a lot of micromanagement and the realism gain probably isn't worth the gameplay penalty.
The Heavy/Light IC is an interesting idea. It is similar to the idea of restricting the missile/fighter percentages but it would also restrict the heavy industry percentage, although I am not that bothered about restricting heavy construction as I don't believe that would cause a balance problem. My concern is that I want to try and streamline the construction into a single interface with a single overall industrial capacity and Heavy IC and Light IC would lie about halfway between the current situation and the one I am aiming for. It would effectively combine fighter and ordnance factories but leave them separate to construction factories. I also mentioned the idea of converting industry from fighter/missile to heavy in a post earlier today, which would result in similar mechanics to the Heavy/Light concept. After further thought though I think that using that mechanic could cause some issues around the percentage allocated to each construction project.
I went for the concept of a percentage of industrial capacity allocated to each construction project (as shown in the screenshot in the earlier post) so that adding IC or removing IC from a planet wouldn't cause problems with existing allocation. The other option was allocating a specific number of factories to a particular project but in that scenario, removing factories would require a decision on which projects would be affected while adding new factories would result in unallocated capacity, both of which could lead to micromanagement. With the percentage concept, you can add and remove factories without worrying about existing allocations to projects. However, with a light/heavy concept or a conversion concept, the problem would return as you would have to specify whether you were adding/removing heavy or light. Within the overall percentage concept, the mechanic of restricting the total percentage you could dedicate to fighters or missiles would effectively create a section of light industry. The non-fighter and non-missile percentages (the heavy industry) wouldn't be able to produce fighters or missiles. The reverse wouldn't be true as 'light' industry (the max percentage that could be dedicated to fighters/missiles) would still be able to carry out 'heavy' tasks but that is far less of a concern from a game balance perspective.
Steve
Post by: ShadoCat on September 28, 2009, 01:50:41 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
I have added the ability to build ship components. As I noted in another post, this is optional but the components will be used to shorten build times for ships if they are available. Also, when you scrap a ship you no longer get 25% of the wealth/materials. Instead you get all the various components added to the component stockpile of the population, with a few exceptions.
Can you scrap components to get 25% back?
That will help keep the database clean since you won't have to track warehouses full of 50 year old items that you'll never use.
Post by: mavikfelna on September 28, 2009, 03:05:20 PM
Quote
"Steve Walmsley wrote:I have added the ability to build ship components. As I noted in another post, this is optional but the components will be used to shorten build times for ships if they are available. Also, when you scrap a ship you no longer get 25% of the wealth/materials. Instead you get all the various components added to the component stockpile of the population, with a few exceptions. "
Can you scrap components to get 25% back?
That will help keep the database clean since you won't have to track warehouses full of 50 year old items that you'll never use.
Quote
Armour
Crew Quarters (and smaller versions)
Engineering (and smaller versions)
Fuel Storage (and smaller versions)
Cargo Holds
Hangars
PDC Barracks
Bridge
Also, from the non-component parts list, you should get some scrap value out of that.
--Mav
Post by: welchbloke on September 28, 2009, 05:51:49 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "welchbloke"I also like this paradigm but I am cognisant of the possibility of generating huge amounts of micromanagement without necessarily improving the gaming experience. How about treating component manufacture in the same manner as mines etc? Have a multiple selection tree for contruction factories something like the officers window for command opportunities. In the components selection have all of the racial designed components available for construction. So if a player wants to build some components to sell they do it that way. If they want to build a ship they don't need to build components (the shipyard handles it). I like the idea of getting components back if you scrap a ship. These components then become available for sale. I suppose, if its possible, the stockpiled components could be used to reduce the construction time of a ship in the slipyards. Reduce time of construction by the percentage of the mass of the component? Anyway these are my (probably random) musings :) but the more I think about it, the more I think you might have hit on an ideal solution that would suit everyone.Not bad for an idea that I had at OMG it's earlier whilst doing a night shift
Shipyards would remain as they are now - same cost, same mechanics etc. with one exception. When they begin building a ship, they check for available components stockpiled on the planet. If any are available, they are removed from the stockpile and the ship construction prtogress advances to a percentage equal to the cost required for the stockpiled components. For example, assume you had stockpiled engines, either by building them or recovering them from a scrapped ship, and you built a survey ship with six engines for which the engines comprised thirty percent of the cost. When you pressed the Add Task button, the six engines would be removed from the stockpile and the progress percentage would start at 30%. After that, construction would continue normally. It's a little more complex because the mineral consumption for the rest of the task would be incorrect but I could fix that in the background at the start of the task. If you had no components stockpiled, the ship would be built by the shipyard in exactly the same way it is built now.
This method allows for players who want to build components or re-use them and also for players who want to ignore the idea entirely. It also means I wouldn't have to modify the NPR construction code.
What does everyone think of the idea of replacing construction/ordnance/fighter factories with Industrial capacity (IC). This would essentially be the same as having just construction factories but you could build multiple items at once. Any IC that was returned to the pool would be unavailable for a time while it was retooled - I think 3 months is probably reasonable. Any new build IC would be immediately available.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 29, 2009, 03:03:25 PM
[attachment=0:aud78eny]NewInd.JPG[/attachment:aud78eny]
I have removed the stop/start maintenance production section and added that as an option for general construction. You can also modify existing projects by changing the amount remaining and the percentage of capacity devoted to that task. The old SM capability of adding to stockpiles has been added to this window for missiles, fighters, ship components and maintenance supplies. PDC and installations are already handled by the Fast OOB and SM Mods windows.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 29, 2009, 03:04:27 PM
Quote from: "ShadoCat"
Yes, you will be able to scrap components.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"I have added the ability to build ship components. As I noted in another post, this is optional but the components will be used to shorten build times for ships if they are available. Also, when you scrap a ship you no longer get 25% of the wealth/materials. Instead you get all the various components added to the component stockpile of the population, with a few exceptions.
Can you scrap components to get 25% back?
That will help keep the database clean since you won't have to track warehouses full of 50 year old items that you'll never use.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 29, 2009, 03:06:11 PM
Quote from: "mavikfelna"
I think I will increase the component scrap value to 30% and ignore the non-scrappable items.QuoteArmourAlso, from the non-component parts list, you should get some scrap value out of that.
Crew Quarters (and smaller versions)
Engineering (and smaller versions)
Fuel Storage (and smaller versions)
Cargo Holds
Hangars
PDC Barracks
Bridge
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 29, 2009, 03:08:27 PM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Yes, that's my intention, although I haven't coded it yet. I'll probably set up PDC construction in a similar way.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"Shipyards would remain as they are now - same cost, same mechanics etc. with one exception. When they begin building a ship, they check for available components stockpiled on the planet. If any are available, they are removed from the stockpile and the ship construction prtogress advances to a percentage equal to the cost required for the stockpiled components. For example, assume you had stockpiled engines, either by building them or recovering them from a scrapped ship, and you built a survey ship with six engines for which the engines comprised thirty percent of the cost. When you pressed the Add Task button, the six engines would be removed from the stockpile and the progress percentage would start at 30%. After that, construction would continue normally. It's a little more complex because the mineral consumption for the rest of the task would be incorrect but I could fix that in the background at the start of the task. If you had no components stockpiled, the ship would be built by the shipyard in exactly the same way it is built now.Now that you have settled on the IC method for construction are you still going to use the shipyard methodology outlined above?
Steve
Post by: Beersatron on September 29, 2009, 06:16:51 PM
I like the idea of making ship components and then having the Shipyard use them from stores to speed up construction.
I envisage a point where I have spare IC and a new class of ship to build but no slips available. Start construction on the engines for the new class whilst you wait for the slip to become available, and then when its ready it should boost the construction time nicely!
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 29, 2009, 07:34:15 PM
Quote from: "Beersatron"
Can you remove the 'Convert Con Ind...' options when there are no Conventional Industry installations left? Just to tidy it up.Already done
. if you look at the two screenshots of the new layout, the list of tasks on one where the pop has no conventional industry excludes the convert conv ind optionsQuote
I like the idea of making ship components and then having the Shipyard use them from stores to speed up construction.Yes, that will definitely be one of the benefits.
I envisage a point where I have spare IC and a new class of ship to build but no slips available. Start construction on the engines for the new class whilst you wait for the slip to become available, and then when its ready it should boost the construction time nicely!
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on September 29, 2009, 07:58:34 PM
I have also added the code for the restriction on ordnance and fighter production. Initially you are restricted to 10% of industrial capacity for each. So if you had 400 industrial capacity, you could spend 40 on ordnance, 40 on fighters and up to the whole 400 on anything else (assuming no fighters/ordnance production). When trying to begin ordnance or fighter-related projects or when the program is looking at queued fighter/ordnance-related projects, the overall available percentage and the fighter or ordnance-related available percentages are both checked. All three available percentages are shown at the bottom of the project list
If you wanted to use the new system in the same way as the old, you could create a series of projects, all of which were 100%, or perhaps 80% if you wanted to leave space for ordnance and fighter production.
[attachment=0:w48xs4q3]Queued2.JPG[/attachment:w48xs4q3]
Steve
Post by: Thorgarth on September 29, 2009, 08:36:58 PM
A couple of wish list items. Separate Civilian from Military Shipyards. Separate Civilian from Military ships. Just to make it easier for me. LOL.
Post by: welchbloke on September 29, 2009, 09:09:49 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Initially you are restricted to 10% of industrial capacity for each. So if you had 400 industrial capacity, you could spend 40 on ordnance, 40 on fighters and up to the whole 400 on anything else (assuming no fighters/ordnance production).Are you are going to have a research line to increase the percentage that can be used for fighter/ordinance production? Really looking forward to givving this a 'test drive' BTW
Steve
Post by: waresky on October 01, 2009, 08:09:53 AM
Because am 4th time am rebuild a whole campaign for strange bugs (same in trust): jump through a unknow JP and Game stop forever.
Hope u have explored this strange bug in uR cmpaign and fix,it-
ty and apologize for my english:)
George
Post by: James Patten on October 01, 2009, 09:09:57 AM
Post by: SteveAlt on October 01, 2009, 06:20:32 PM
Quote from: "waresky"
Steve,am hope,4.3 incomingDid you get any error messages before the problem? Was it a crash or a freeze? Also, what happens when you restart tyhe game - can you get back in?
Because am 4th time am rebuild a whole campaign for strange bugs (same in trust): jump through a unknow JP and Game stop forever.
Hope u have explored this strange bug in uR cmpaign and fix,it-
ty and apologize for my english:)
George
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on October 01, 2009, 06:23:07 PM
Quote from: "Thorgarth"
Steve,I'm not sure what you mean, or if you mean commercial rather than civilian. The commercial and military shipyards are already separate. You can tell by the N or C in the Type column on the Shipyard tab. Commercial and military ship designs have a line at the bottom stating if they are commercial or military
A couple of wish list items. Separate Civilian from Military Shipyards. Separate Civilian from Military ships. Just to make it easier for me. LOL.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on October 01, 2009, 06:45:22 PM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Yes, that is already in. The old ordnance production and fighter production tech lines have been replaced by new Max Ordnance Industrial Capacity and Max Fighter Industrial Capacity. Base is 10% and the steps go up 12%, 14%, 16%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35% and 40%.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"Initially you are restricted to 10% of industrial capacity for each. So if you had 400 industrial capacity, you could spend 40 on ordnance, 40 on fighters and up to the whole 400 on anything else (assuming no fighters/ordnance production).Are you are going to have a research line to increase the percentage that can be used for fighter/ordinance production? Really looking forward to givving this a 'test drive' BTW
Steve
Steve
Post by: backstab on October 01, 2009, 06:48:40 PM
Any plans to introduce bording parties ?
Post by: welchbloke on October 01, 2009, 07:09:21 PM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
Cool.Quote from: "welchbloke"Yes, that is already in. The old ordnance production and fighter production tech lines have been replaced by new Max Ordnance Industrial Capacity and Max Fighter Industrial Capacity. Base is 10% and the steps go up 12%, 14%, 16%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35% and 40%.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"Initially you are restricted to 10% of industrial capacity for each. So if you had 400 industrial capacity, you could spend 40 on ordnance, 40 on fighters and up to the whole 400 on anything else (assuming no fighters/ordnance production).Are you are going to have a research line to increase the percentage that can be used for fighter/ordinance production? Really looking forward to givving this a 'test drive' BTW
Steve
Steve
Post by: waresky on October 02, 2009, 05:10:14 AM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
zero messagge.Quote from: "Thorgarth"Steve,I'm not sure what you mean, or if you mean commercial rather than civilian. The commercial and military shipyards are already separate. You can tell by the N or C in the Type column on the Shipyard tab. Commercial and military ship designs have a line at the bottom stating if they are commercial or military
A couple of wish list items. Separate Civilian from Military Shipyards. Separate Civilian from Military ships. Just to make it easier for me. LOL.
Steve
program frozen and EVERYtme am ctrl+canc and reopen campaign,advance time,my explorer try to jump..program stopp forever..and ever.
zero chance
Post by: waresky on October 02, 2009, 05:11:30 AM
Post by: tanq_tonic on October 03, 2009, 12:14:26 PM
One problem that is aggravating as heck. The lists of items always reset to the top in the Officer/Posting menu.
It is terribly aggravating when I am doing the "search for office attibutes" for the 40th unit on the list, and when I assign to that post it automatically pops the unit list back to the top.
I always seem to have to do the "pick unit by scolling down the list to the next part of the pulldown menu from the top", assign, then repeat. I would really like the scroll menu for the unit at that point to stay fixed.
Relatedly, when I am culling my officers, the same thing happens. So when I have 300 lt. commanders and I am culling, the issue is "delete officer 170", which pops me back to the top of the lt commander list. I have not made a mental note of whom I just culled, it is problematic. Further, having to go down to 171 from the top every time is not horribly fun.
A nitpick from an awesome achievement.
Post by: georgiaboy1966 on October 03, 2009, 12:32:31 PM
On the completed tech screen, can we have a check button to hide obsolete tech, so when get new tech components is easier to find the old and mark obsolete and hide them from the list.
Like on the ship construction/design page for hiding old/obsolete ships.
Post by: tanq_tonic on October 04, 2009, 10:41:10 AM
In the menu dealing with the selection of commanding criteria for a class, there is a scroll down menu that allows one to pick a theme for the naming convention.
These themes are a gret idea, but they seem to be fixed.
It would be nice to allow one to dynamically add themes to that list (i.e. a user wants to input a file that lists volcano names (US ammo supply ships) along with a first line tag that says "volcano names").
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 04, 2009, 01:31:37 PM
Quote from: "tanq_tonic"
First time post here. Have only had this about two week, but awesomely detailed game. Kudos.Thanks - it's been a lot of fun to create it and it's good to hear that others enjoy playing it.
Quote
Relatedly, when I am culling my officers, the same thing happens. So when I have 300 lt. commanders and I am culling, the issue is "delete officer 170", which pops me back to the top of the lt commander list. I have not made a mental note of whom I just culled, it is problematic. Further, having to go down to 171 from the top every time is not horribly fun.I switched the post around because this one is a lot easier to fix. The selection now moves to the officer after the one you deleted and the scroll bar stays in the same position (well that is what it looks like but eveything is repopulated and the selection is reset
)Quote
One problem that is aggravating as heck. The lists of items always reset to the top in the Officer/Posting menu. It is terribly aggravating when I am doing the "search for office attibutes" for the 40th unit on the list, and when I assign to that post it automatically pops the unit list back to the top. I always seem to have to do the "pick unit by scolling down the list to the next part of the pulldown menu from the top", assign, then repeat. I would really like the scroll menu for the unit at that point to stay fixed.This is slightly more tricky because of the Eligible Only checkbox. It's possible that when you select different officers, you may have a different list of potential assignments and therefore I can't just freeze the list in the same place. What I could do is freeze the list if the Eligible Only checkbox isn't checked.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 04, 2009, 01:55:16 PM
Quote from: "tanq_tonic"
Another issue that would be neat. (this is not into the function, but more like window dressing.....)I have added this for v4.3. There is now an Add Ship Names option on the Game menu. To use it, create a text file called ShipNames.txt with one ship name per line. You will be prompted to enter a name for the theme.
In the menu dealing with the selection of commanding criteria for a class, there is a scroll down menu that allows one to pick a theme for the naming convention.
These themes are a gret idea, but they seem to be fixed.
It would be nice to allow one to dynamically add themes to that list (i.e. a user wants to input a file that lists volcano names (US ammo supply ships) along with a first line tag that says "volcano names").
Also, if you have a particular theme you want in every version, send me the text file and I will add it to the master database.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 04, 2009, 09:56:07 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
Steve, can I ask for the ability to subdivide facilities (construction facilities, and mines being the most critical here) so they can fit into a single hold. I may be able to make some sort of tramp freighter to do interstellar colonization but the jump engine requirement for a 5 hold freighter at jump efficiency 3 is well 120,000 or research...and I currently do 4600 a year...In v4.3, every installation you can transport can now be broken down into single cargo holds, so the 5 cargo hold ship is no longer a necessity, although it would still be useful. I've rewritten the transport code so that everything uses the same piece of code but with a database table listing the various tables and fields required, rather than having separate sections of code for each installation (a situation which had arisen as new installations were added).
Otherwise I just have to make do with sending a lot of engineers and scrounge up enough to transit a colony ship and a tramp freighter for moving minerals and infrastructure.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 04, 2009, 09:58:17 PM
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on October 05, 2009, 01:25:47 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "Paul M"Steve, can I ask for the ability to subdivide facilities (construction facilities, and mines being the most critical here) so they can fit into a single hold. I may be able to make some sort of tramp freighter to do interstellar colonization but the jump engine requirement for a 5 hold freighter at jump efficiency 3 is well 120,000 or research...and I currently do 4600 a year...In v4.3, every installation you can transport can now be broken down into single cargo holds, so the 5 cargo hold ship is no longer a necessity, although it would still be useful. I've rewritten the transport code so that everything uses the same piece of code but with a database table listing the various tables and fields required, rather than having separate sections of code for each installation (a situation which had arisen as new installations were added).
Otherwise I just have to make do with sending a lot of engineers and scrounge up enough to transit a colony ship and a tramp freighter for moving minerals and infrastructure.
Steve
COOL!!!!!
Thanks, Steve.
John
Post by: waresky on October 05, 2009, 10:16:58 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Just a note to let everyone know that you will be able to move the new ship components around using freighters.Damn awesome capability.
Steve
Cool ty
Post by: tanq_tonic on October 05, 2009, 05:58:03 PM
Post by: Father Tim on October 06, 2009, 03:35:24 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
There is now an Add Ship Names option on the Game menu. To use it, create a text file called ShipNames.txt with one ship name per line. You will be prompted to enter a name for the theme.
Also, if you have a particular theme you want in every version, send me the text file and I will add it to the master database.
Steve
I have one small problem with the 'automatic select from theme' names - the first unused name is chosen, every time. This means that if there's a typo in the name, or I simply don't like the 'next' name in the list, changing it just makes the next next ship/system use the unwanted name. Thus in the French theme, you can live with a system called 'Le Harve' or manually rename every system after 'le Havre'. I'd really love it if the list 'ignored' a name after I've rejected/edited it. The classes list seems to do this.
Post by: Paul M on October 06, 2009, 05:11:51 AM
Post by: James Patten on October 07, 2009, 06:19:00 AM
I have some suggestions to make it better. Currently I highlight a ship in the left part of the window, but when I go to any of the other parts of the window the highlight disappears from the left part. Could you keep the highlight there or better yet would be something at the top telling me what ship I'm looking at. Also horizontal scroll bars on the contacts part of the window, so that I can find out what the distances are for longer named ships.
Thanks to this window I discovered how to put my beam weapons on PD mode against missiles!
Post by: IanD on October 09, 2009, 05:14:17 AM
Regards
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 09, 2009, 01:11:08 PM
Quote from: "tanq_tonic"
An "unassign all" would be helpful for officers. Not "auto assign", but a quick "wipe the slate clean"I've added this for v4.3. The only exception is that officers assigned to teams are not unassigned as that would cause a lot of complications.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 09, 2009, 01:20:26 PM
Quote from: "James Patten"
I discovered the Combat Overview window (or whatever it's called - the one that lists all ships in a system along with fire controls, missile launchers, missiles, and contacts). This is a really handy window and I like it a lot. Thanks for putting it together.Some of the problems you have are due to the restrictions built into the controls I am using. Once the treeview loses focus, the highlight is lost and Microsoft list boxes don't have horizontal scroll bars. However, for the treeview control I have used your suggestion to put the selected item in the title bar of the window and for the contact list I have added a toggle that allows you to temporarily extend the horizontal size of the box over the Weapon and Fire Control Summary section.
I have some suggestions to make it better. Currently I highlight a ship in the left part of the window, but when I go to any of the other parts of the window the highlight disappears from the left part. Could you keep the highlight there or better yet would be something at the top telling me what ship I'm looking at. Also horizontal scroll bars on the contacts part of the window, so that I can find out what the distances are for longer named ships.
Thanks to this window I discovered how to put my beam weapons on PD mode against missiles!
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 09, 2009, 01:54:06 PM
Quote from: "IanD"
When a ship is refitted with new armour it seems strange that battle damage is not repaired at the same time! Would it not be sensible for battle damage to be figured in to the cost of a refit, especially if that particular component is being replaced?That's a good point. I've changed it so that In v4.3 if the armour type is changed during a refit then all armour damage is repaired.
Steve
Post by: Beersatron on October 10, 2009, 12:26:28 AM
Would be handy for keeping track of what has been dried up for definite.
Post by: schroeam on October 10, 2009, 10:02:30 AM
Quote from: "Beersatron"
Not sure if this is already in there, but would it be possible to flag somewhere on the economy screen to state that a 5man Geological team has already surveyed a planet/moon/asteroid?Additionally, we used to get an event every 5-day if a survey team is on a planet, moon, etc that has been surveyed out telling us that there is nothing further to be gained by additional survey. Somewhere along the chain of revisions this reminder went away. I found it useful if I didn't have a ship available right away as a reminder to pick them up. Any way to get this back?
Would be handy for keeping track of what has been dried up for definite.
Adam.
Post by: schroeam on October 10, 2009, 11:53:49 AM
Long story short, how about changing the mechanism for colony transport from cryogenic freezing to something more akin to the current cruise liners?
Just a thought.
Adam.
Post by: Father Tim on October 10, 2009, 01:45:51 PM
Post by: schroeam on October 10, 2009, 04:46:30 PM
The biggest difference between a race that starts pre-TN and one that starts with TN is the civilian economic growth, i.e. colony ships and freighters assigned to civilian corporations. Maybe some mechanism to generate the equivalent number of civilian ships to support an equivalent level of economic expansion.
Adam.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 08:09:39 PM
Quote from: "adradjool"
The discussion of using colony ships as emergent troop transports has led me to think about the current mechanism for colonist transport. Imagine saying good bye to your family, going to the SolTrak terminal, stripping down, going through the showers (assembly line process), putting on a grey jumpsuit, entering your coffin (destined for Titan), going to sleep (deep freeze), being loaded on the ship, one day later ship leaves Earth, next day arrives at Mars, coffin unloaded at local SolTrak terminal, defrost process and you wake up with the worst cold of your life (sneeze), you get back in line, strip down again, new shower (hot water heaters malfunctioning), new jumpsuit, look out a window and wonder at the redness of Titan, and read the "Welcome to Mars" sign, Anger, Disgust, and finally, submission as you are escorted to your new fully furnished apartment. You are given your new provincial citizen number (non-voting status) and a map from your apartment to your work site (oh, by the way your career path has been changed from administrative assistant to construction worker putting up more apartments at the foot of Mons Olympus). This would have never happened if you had never had to go through that damned cold-causing deep freeze treatment (long term side effects still under investigation). Two weeks later word arrives that a new class of colony ship is to be built that will ship colonists without the cryogenic freezing. By the time it is completed you are firmly entrenched into the Martian society and due to a lack of workers all requests to move to Titan are denied. You walk up to an airlock, equalize pressure, enter the airlock, equalize pressure with the outside, sit down to await your death, only to realize as the outside door slides open that the long term terraforming project has produced the minimal amount of oxygen to keep a human alive. You fail again.The reason for the cryo transport is to keep the size of the colony modules within a reasonable limit. If each person only occupies a coffin-sized cryo chamber then the 2500 ton size of the cryo module is reasonable - it's about 1/4 ton and 0.005 HS per person. If they are conscious and moving around then the size requirement would be much higher. However, as someone else pointed out, there is nothing to stop you roleplaying it differently in your own campaign. You could change the name of the module and maybe even the size/cost.
Long story short, how about changing the mechanism for colony transport from cryogenic freezing to something more akin to the current cruise liners?
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 08:17:01 PM
Quote from: "adradjool"
I've put the message back inQuote from: "Beersatron"Not sure if this is already in there, but would it be possible to flag somewhere on the economy screen to state that a 5man Geological team has already surveyed a planet/moon/asteroid?Additionally, we used to get an event every 5-day if a survey team is on a planet, moon, etc that has been surveyed out telling us that there is nothing further to be gained by additional survey. Somewhere along the chain of revisions this reminder went away. I found it useful if I didn't have a ship available right away as a reminder to pick them up. Any way to get this back?
Would be handy for keeping track of what has been dried up for definite.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 08:23:14 PM
Quote from: "Beersatron"
Not sure if this is already in there, but would it be possible to flag somewhere on the economy screen to state that a 5man Geological team has already surveyed a planet/moon/asteroid?I have added a line on the summary tab for Geological Team Survey.
Would be handy for keeping track of what has been dried up for definite.
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on October 10, 2009, 09:12:12 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "adradjool"Long story short, how about changing the mechanism for colony transport from cryogenic freezing to something more akin to the current cruise liners?The reason for the cryo transport is to keep the size of the colony modules within a reasonable limit. If each person only occupies a coffin-sized cryo chamber then the 2500 ton size of the cryo module is reasonable - it's about 1/4 ton and 0.005 HS per person. If they are conscious and moving around then the size requirement would be much higher. However, as someone else pointed out, there is nothing to stop you roleplaying it differently in your own campaign. You could change the name of the module and maybe even the size/cost.
Quote from: "Father Tim"
If you rename the ship component to 'Luxury Passenger Accomodations' nothing is stopping you from defining how it works any way you want. I'm not sure if you have to go all the way into the databse, or if the F2 'Population & Production' screen, 'Research' tab will enable such a change.
I think that, between these posts, there's a suggestion that troop transport holds be able to load and transport a small number of colonists as luxury passengers. From a role-playing point of view it sounds cool; from a game mechanics point of view I doubt it would have much effect (unfortunately).
John
Post by: welchbloke on October 10, 2009, 09:16:46 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Depends what you mean by luxuryQuote from: "Steve Walmsley"Quote from: "adradjool"Long story short, how about changing the mechanism for colony transport from cryogenic freezing to something more akin to the current cruise liners?The reason for the cryo transport is to keep the size of the colony modules within a reasonable limit. If each person only occupies a coffin-sized cryo chamber then the 2500 ton size of the cryo module is reasonable - it's about 1/4 ton and 0.005 HS per person. If they are conscious and moving around then the size requirement would be much higher. However, as someone else pointed out, there is nothing to stop you roleplaying it differently in your own campaign. You could change the name of the module and maybe even the size/cost.Quote from: "Father Tim"If you rename the ship component to 'Luxury Passenger Accomodations' nothing is stopping you from defining how it works any way you want. I'm not sure if you have to go all the way into the databse, or if the F2 'Population & Production' screen, 'Research' tab will enable such a change.
I think that, between these posts, there's a suggestion that troop transport holds be able to load and transport a small number of colonists as luxury passengers. From a role-playing point of view it sounds cool; from a game mechanics point of view I doubt it would have much effect (unfortunately).
John
I would expect troop transport ships to have 30 or so people to a room (platoon formations) with shared ablutions and the rest of the space taken up with firing ranges, gyms, office space, armouries etc. I think of it as how the John Rogers is described in the book 'Starship Troopers'.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 09:18:29 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
How about a Luxury Passenger Accomodation module that is the same size as the cryo modules but carries far fewer passengers. It may not be of much use to a player but if the civs used it to build 'liners', I could actually increase the tax and shipping line wealth benefits compared to the regular number of colonists based on the fact that each passenger would be paying a lot more. The disadvantage would be less colonists but the advantage would be a little more income. It would really be a civ-only system though designed to add a little more flavour to the game.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"Quote from: "adradjool"Long story short, how about changing the mechanism for colony transport from cryogenic freezing to something more akin to the current cruise liners?The reason for the cryo transport is to keep the size of the colony modules within a reasonable limit. If each person only occupies a coffin-sized cryo chamber then the 2500 ton size of the cryo module is reasonable - it's about 1/4 ton and 0.005 HS per person. If they are conscious and moving around then the size requirement would be much higher. However, as someone else pointed out, there is nothing to stop you roleplaying it differently in your own campaign. You could change the name of the module and maybe even the size/cost.Quote from: "Father Tim"If you rename the ship component to 'Luxury Passenger Accomodations' nothing is stopping you from defining how it works any way you want. I'm not sure if you have to go all the way into the databse, or if the F2 'Population & Production' screen, 'Research' tab will enable such a change.
I think that, between these posts, there's a suggestion that troop transport holds be able to load and transport a small number of colonists as luxury passengers. From a role-playing point of view it sounds cool; from a game mechanics point of view I doubt it would have much effect (unfortunately).
Steve
Post by: welchbloke on October 10, 2009, 09:25:06 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
If you are feeling generous Steve, then why not? I'm all for flavour. It's part of what makes Aurora fun. That and the fact I like the idea of conducting unrestricted warfare against the civilian freighters and lners of my next enemy
How about a Luxury Passenger Accomodation module that is the same size as the cryo modules but carries far fewer passengers. It may not be of much use to a player but if the civs used it to build 'liners', I could actually increase the tax and shipping line wealth benefits compared to the regular number of colonists based on the fact that each passenger would be paying a lot more. The disadvantage would be less colonists but the advantage would be a little more income. It would really be a civ-only system though designed to add a little more flavour to the game.
Steve
I wonder how long it will be before they adopt a convoy system?
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 09:33:24 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
These were the suggestions that started me down the whole ship components route, which from my own playtesting works very well and seems completely natural now. With components working, I decided to revisit the above. Despite my initial pessimism regarding whether passing on manufactured components to another race was workable, I have found a way to make it work. The ability to manufacture components is now in the game, so that's no problem. Transferring to another race is easy enough as well. I can just bring up a list of races on the new stockpile section and allow you to transfer components to another pop on the same planet, although that is really only workable in a multi-Earth start or in a game with mutiple player-controlled races. The ability to use components built by another race does open up a couple more significant possibilities though which I'll get back to later. However, the real problem is the one that John pointed out.Quote from: "welchbloke"The ability to sell/trade complete systems .... eg a race develops the A-1 Railgun and sells / trades it to another race instead of sell/tradeing each individual componantThis would be fairly straightforward in terms of programming but without the background knowledge, would the second race be able to build it? For example, if the US gave Albania the plans for the latest Patriot missile, could Albania actually manufacture the missiles?Quote from: "backstab"To take this suggestion one step further how about selling complete weapon systems? Sell 10x A-1 Railguns without giving the tech. I see backstab's suggestion as giving the information to 'licence produce' a system. Whereas, what I'm suggesting is just like selling Typhoon to Saudi Arabia. Of course you could retro-engineer the system maybe destroy the system to give you a random number of RP on the tech?This is harder from a programming and gameplay perspective but probably more realistic. The problem is how you model the 10x A-1 railguns. Does Race A have to bulid them before giving them to Race B and if so, how do I account for that in the game. If instead you just say Race B can bulid 10 railguns and the program keeps track, that is no different than giving them the plans and if they are building it, how do you stop them building more?
Quote from: "sloanjh"
I'm worried about the micromanagement. How often do we think that we're going to be trading components between races? I can see it for a multi-civ earth game, but not of a game involving a single player race with lots of alien NPR. It also seems like it would vastly complicate class design - how do you specify a class that contains "alien" components? It seems that this might be more trouble to implement than it's worth.This was what had me stumped - how do you design a class that contains components that you haven't researched yet? At the moment the tech you have researched is contained in the RaceTech table. This database table is the whole basis of your technical knowledge. The class design window will list all class components that are contained within (or in reality linked to) this table. At first I started playing around with extra columns to differentiate actual knowledge and temporary knowledge but it was too complex because as you can imagine the RaceTech table is referenced in a lot of places and I was also concerned it would screw up research and pre-requisite techs, etc.. Then I had a light-bulb moment
I have added a new table to the database called RaceDesignTech. This contains a list of the systems you can use in ship designs but that you don't have the knowledge to build yourself. RaceTech remains as it is and none of the areas of the program that reference this table are affected. However, when you open the class design window it now contains all the tech systems from both RaceTech and RaceDesignTech, allowing you to design classes containing systems you can't build. The name of any design-only system on the Design View is preceded by (D) and there is a checkbox that allows you to hide all design-only systems. When you research a system that is in RaceDesignTech, it is deleted from that table and added to RaceTech
When you attempt to create a shipbuilding task for either construction of a class that contains design-only system or a refit to a class with design-only systems, the program checks the component stockpile for that population to see if the necessary components exist. For construction it is very simple. If the required amount of design-only components are in the stockpile then they are consumed and the ship construction goes ahead. As normal (for v4.3) the cost of the ship is reduced by any stockpiled components, including the design-only ones. If insufficient components are available, a popup message informs you of that and you are unable to build the ship. For refits, it is slightly more complicated from a programming POV (but not from a user POV) because I have to check which components are actually needed for the refit. Some design-only components may already be in the ship that is being refitted so they wouldn't need to be in the stockpile.
This method makes designing ships with alien components very easy and the check on shipyard tasks means you can't build ships that use alien components you don't have stockpiled. As John pointed out though, the situation where an alien race gives you components may not happen very often. However, as I mentioned earlier, this ability to use alien components in your ships opens up a couple of new possibilities. The first one is that you can find ship components in ruins. You may find a cache of Improved Gravitational Sensors, perhaps some 20cm Ultraviolet Lasers or just some old Cyogenic Tranport Modules. Or perhaps one or two very advanced systems. These can then be transported to a planet with shipyards and incorporated in a special class of ship. When you find components in ruins, the program will automatically add those components to the new RaceDesignTech table so you can use them in ship designs. The second is related to the new scrapping method for v4.3. When you scrap one of your own ships in v4.3, you now have the components of that ship moved into the stockpile for the planet rather than receiving minerals. You can them scrap the individual components if you wish or use them in new designs. In the case of a captured alien ship, which you may capture using the new boarding combat, the same method will now apply. The alien components will be added to your component stockpile for use in your own ships and any components that you can't already build will be added to the RaceDesignTech table.
Once you have alien components in your stockpile, whether they be from a friendly alien race, a ruin or an scrapped alien vessel, an alternative to using them within your own ships will be to try and learn tech data by taking them apart. I haven't decided on the exact mechanics of this yet but I'll post the details to this thread when I do. Obviously you will lose the component in this case and the chance of gaining data will be limited so you will have to make a choice between using the component to gain a tactical advantage or expending it in an effort to gain some tech data.
I hope all of the above will add a new dimension to ship design.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 09:47:27 PM
1) I was reading an article on the Mauretania the other day and found out that the British government loaded money to Cunard and increased their mail subsidy to support the building of Mauretania and Lusitania. That reminded me that governements will subside commercial organizations (particularly banks at the moment) when it is in the national interest to do so. Therefore there is now a Subsidy button on the Shipping Lines window. if you select a shipping line and click the button, 1000 weath is passed from your wealth stockpile to that of the shipping line. The advantage for the player is that he can increase the amount of colony ships and freighters without using up minerals but the disadvantage is that he has little control over what is built and how it is used.
2) As Industrial Capacity has replaced Construction Factories, Fighter Factories and Ordnance Factories, I decided to change the mineral requirement accordingly. Therefore the 120 BP Industrial Capacity installation requires 60 Duranium, 30 Tritanium and 30 Vendarite.
Steve
Post by: welchbloke on October 10, 2009, 09:48:59 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Steve, this looks great. I have one question though. Is there a higher cost (wealth/resources) if you try to fit a captured/discovered/bought system to your ship rather than researched and home grown system? I'm just thinking that, for example, Race A might use 300v 100Hz electricity to power their system whilst Race B uses 120v 50Hz this would require some kind of interface system to allow you to interface the systme with your ship.Perhaps just adding additional mass would do?
When you attempt to create a shipbuilding task for either construction of a class that contains design-only system or a refit to a class with design-only systems, the program checks the component stockpile for that population to see if the necessary components exist. For construction it is very simple. If the required amount of design-only components are in the stockpile then they are consumed and the ship construction goes ahead. As normal (for v4.3) the cost of the ship is reduced by any stockpiled components, including the design-only ones. If insufficient components are available, a popup message informs you of that and you are unable to build the ship. For refits, it is slightly more complicated from a programming POV (but not from a user POV) because I have to check which components are actually needed for the refit. Some design-only components may already be in the ship that is being refitted so they wouldn't need to be in the stockpile.
This method makes designing ships with alien components very easy and the check on shipyard tasks means you can't build ships that use alien components you don't have stockpiled. As John pointed out though, the situation where an alien race gives you components may not happen very often. However, as I mentioned earlier, this ability to use alien components in your ships opens up a couple of new possibilities. The first one is that you can find ship components in ruins. You may find a cache of Improved Gravitational Sensors, perhaps some 20cm Ultraviolet Lasers or just some old Cyogenic Tranport Modules. Or perhaps one or two very advanced systems. These can then be transported to a planet with shipyards and incorporated in a special class of ship. When you find components in ruins, the program will automatically add those components to the new RaceDesignTech table so you can use them in ship designs. The second is related to the new scrapping method for v4.3. When you scrap one of your own ships in v4.3, you now have the components of that ship moved into the stockpile for the planet rather than receiving minerals. You can them scrap the individual components if you wish or use them in new designs. In the case of a captured alien ship, which you may capture using the new boarding combat, the same method will now apply. The alien components will be added to your component stockpile for use in your own ships and any components that you can't already build will be added to the RaceDesignTech table.
Once you have alien components in your stockpile, whether they be from a friendly alien race, a ruin or an scrapped alien vessel, an alternative to using them within your own ships will be to try and learn tech data by taking them apart. I haven't decided on the exact mechanics of this yet but I'll post the details to this thread when I do. Obviously you will lose the component in this case and the chance of gaining data will be limited so you will have to make a choice between using the component to gain a tactical advantage or expending it in an effort to gain some tech data.
I hope all of the above will add a new dimension to ship design.
Steve
Feel free to tell me to foxtrot oscar on this
I for one am just glad you've added components use to the game.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 10:00:49 PM
An Obsolete Tech button has been added, which allows you to declare a tech system obsolete without having to open up the View Tech window
A Refresh Tech button has been added, which allows you to refresh the list of available components without having to reselect the Empire.
A Show Obsolete Tech checkbox has been added, which allows you to include all obsolete tech in the list of available components. If the Obsolete Tech button is used on an obsolete tech system, it removes the obsolete flag.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 10:04:43 PM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
From a realism perspective, you are definitely correct. From a gameplay perspective, it could get complex. Should the extra wealth/cost increase if the system is way beyond your tech, rather than just alien-produced versions of components that are not that different to what you could produce anyway. I don't think the extra complexity involved would provide any real gameplay benefit.QuoteI hope all of the above will add a new dimension to ship design.Steve, this looks great. I have one question though. Is there a higher cost (wealth/resources) if you try to fit a captured/discovered/bought system to your ship rather than researched and home grown system? I'm just thinking that, for example, Race A might use 300v 100Hz electricity to power their system whilst Race B uses 120v 50Hz this would require some kind of interface system to allow you to interface the systme with your ship.Perhaps just adding additional mass would do?
Feel free to tell me to foxtrot oscar on this
Steve
Post by: welchbloke on October 10, 2009, 10:28:52 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "welchbloke"QuoteI hope all of the above will add a new dimension to ship design.Steve, this looks great. I have one question though. Is there a higher cost (wealth/resources) if you try to fit a captured/discovered/bought system to your ship rather than researched and home grown system? I'm just thinking that, for example, Race A might use 300v 100Hz electricity to power their system whilst Race B uses 120v 50Hz this would require some kind of interface system to allow you to interface the systme with your ship.Perhaps just adding additional mass would do?
Feel free to tell me to foxtrot oscar on this :D It was just a random thought.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 10, 2009, 11:07:45 PM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"If you are feeling generous Steve, then why not? I'm all for flavour. It's part of what makes Aurora fun. That and the fact I like the idea of conducting unrestricted warfare against the civilian freighters and lners of my next enemy :)
How about a Luxury Passenger Accomodation module that is the same size as the cryo modules but carries far fewer passengers. It may not be of much use to a player but if the civs used it to build 'liners', I could actually increase the tax and shipping line wealth benefits compared to the regular number of colonists based on the fact that each passenger would be paying a lot more. The disadvantage would be less colonists but the advantage would be a little more income. It would really be a civ-only system though designed to add a little more flavour to the game.
Steve
The new Luxury Passenger Accomodation module has been added for v4.3. It is the same size and cost as the Cryogenic Transport Module but requires 100 crew instead of 10 and transports 250 passengers instead of 10,000 colonists. The tax and shipping line profit per passengers is forty times greater than per per colonist, which works out to the same amount for one Luxury Passenger Accomodation as for one Cryogenic Transport Module. The disadvantage of the Luxury Passenger Accomodation is obviously the massively reduced amount of colonists being transported. The advantage is that while the liner containing the Luxury Passenger Accomodation modules will only pick up at colonies of 25m+ (as with colony ships), it can drop off at any colony - not just a colonist destination. It will effectively be the same as the old Transatlantic Liners, providing a passenger service between colonies as well as making the occasional run to new colonies. Because the liner will often be carrying passengers both ways, it will make more money for the shipping line and the government than a colony ship. It is still classed a colony ship in several ways though, including the fact that it will prefer to visit a colony that doesn't currently have an inbound colony ship. This new ship should add some flavour and provide more income than a regular colony ship in exchange for its minimal capacity. A quick example...Code: [Select]Mauretania class Luxury Liner 27400 tons 836 Crew 1118.8 BP TCS 548 TH 1650 EM 0Steve
3010 km/s Armour 1-80 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 26 MSP Max Repair 38 MSP
Passengers 1250 Cargo Handling Multiplier 10
Commercial Ion Engine (11) Power 150 Fuel Use 7% Signature 150 Armour 0 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 93.8 billion km (360 days at full power)
This design is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposes
Post by: mavikfelna on October 10, 2009, 11:20:18 PM
And I assume we can scrap surrendered ships to get components from them?
Thanks,
--Mav
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 11, 2009, 12:26:53 AM
Quote from: "mavikfelna"
With the new component rules, Can we get an option to recover some components from wrecks when they are being salvaged with a salvage module? Particularly with precursor wrecks?Usually, by the time a ship is destroyed, all the components have been destroyed first. However, it is possible for a ship to still have one or two components left undamaged when it finally blows up so I will record any components that remain and add them to the cargo holds of the salvage ship when salvage is completed.
Quote
And I assume we can scrap surrendered ships to get components from them?Yes, that will already work as things stand now.
Steve
Post by: welchbloke on October 11, 2009, 12:44:02 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
As usual I have gone slightly further than I intended 8)Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"The new Luxury Passenger Accomodation module has been added for v4.3. It is the same size and cost as the Cryogenic Transport Module but requires 100 crew instead of 10 and transports 250 passengers instead of 10,000 colonists. The tax and shipping line profit per passengers is forty times greater than per per colonist, which works out to the same amount for one Luxury Passenger Accomodation as for one Cryogenic Transport Module. The disadvantage of the Luxury Passenger Accomodation is obviously the massively reduced amount of colonists being transported. The advantage is that while the liner containing the Luxury Passenger Accomodation modules will only pick up at colonies of 25m+ (as with colony ships), it can drop off at any colony - not just a colonist destination. It will effectively be the same as the old Transatlantic Liners, providing a passenger service between colonies as well as making the occasional run to new colonies. Because the liner will often be carrying passengers both ways, it will make more money for the shipping line and the government than a colony ship. It is still classed a colony ship in several ways though, including the fact that it will prefer to visit a colony that doesn't currently have an inbound colony ship. This new ship should add some flavour and provide more income than a regular colony ship in exchange for its minimal capacity. A quick example...Looks entertaining, be nice to see a few space liners plowing the space lanes. Will they avoid comets and other icey bodies or can I expect the Titanic to hit a comet?Code: [Select]Mauretania class Luxury Liner 27400 tons 836 Crew 1118.8 BP TCS 548 TH 1650 EM 0Steve
3010 km/s Armour 1-80 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 26 MSP Max Repair 38 MSP
Passengers 1250 Cargo Handling Multiplier 10
Commercial Ion Engine (11) Power 150 Fuel Use 7% Signature 150 Armour 0 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 93.8 billion km (360 days at full power)
This design is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposes
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 11, 2009, 01:15:04 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Looks entertaining, be nice to see a few space liners plowing the space lanes. Will they avoid comets and other icey bodies or can I expect the Titanic to hit a comet? :)
I did consider having unrest at both the starting and destination pop if a liner is destroyed, due to the presumed influence of the passengers. If 50,000 colonists cop it, then the glitterati will presumably express their profound sadness at the demise of the hoi polloi and quickly move on
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 11, 2009, 01:22:28 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Once you have alien components in your stockpile, whether they be from a friendly alien race, a ruin or an scrapped alien vessel, an alternative to using them within your own ships will be to try and learn tech data by taking them apart. I haven't decided on the exact mechanics of this yet but I'll post the details to this thread when I do. Obviously you will lose the component in this case and the chance of gaining data will be limited so you will have to make a choice between using the component to gain a tactical advantage or expending it in an effort to gain some tech data.I have added the ability to disassemble components in an attempt to gain tech knowledge. When this takes place, you have a 5% chance to gain each background tech related to the component. So if there are three associated background techs, you get three rolls and you might even get all 3. As you can retrieve components by scrapping captured alien ships in v4.3, this new disassembly option replaces the existing chance to gain tech directly from scrapping alien ships. Once the ship is scrapped then you can use the components in your own ships or risk dissasembling them for the chance of tech data.
If the background tech you gain is too high for you, you will get the next level of the tech. For example, if you scrap a 30cm laser and make the roll for the focal size, you will get the 30cm tech if you already know the 25cm tech. Otherwise you will get the tech above the one you already know (20cm if you know 15cm, etc.).
Steve
Post by: welchbloke on October 11, 2009, 01:30:49 AM
Post by: Beersatron on October 11, 2009, 02:07:03 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
All of this new functionality is going to need testing. Are you going to release a Beta version?
this!
Post by: schroeam on October 11, 2009, 10:13:03 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"As usual I have gone slightly further than I intended 8)Although maybe not communicated well, this is pretty much exactly what I was talking about. Awesome work Steve!Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"The new Luxury Passenger Accomodation module has been added for v4.3. It is the same size and cost as the Cryogenic Transport Module but requires 100 crew instead of 10 and transports 250 passengers instead of 10,000 colonists. The tax and shipping line profit per passengers is forty times greater than per per colonist, which works out to the same amount for one Luxury Passenger Accomodation as for one Cryogenic Transport Module. The disadvantage of the Luxury Passenger Accomodation is obviously the massively reduced amount of colonists being transported. The advantage is that while the liner containing the Luxury Passenger Accomodation modules will only pick up at colonies of 25m+ (as with colony ships), it can drop off at any colony - not just a colonist destination. It will effectively be the same as the old Transatlantic Liners, providing a passenger service between colonies as well as making the occasional run to new colonies. Because the liner will often be carrying passengers both ways, it will make more money for the shipping line and the government than a colony ship. It is still classed a colony ship in several ways though, including the fact that it will prefer to visit a colony that doesn't currently have an inbound colony ship. This new ship should add some flavour and provide more income than a regular colony ship in exchange for its minimal capacity. A quick example...Looks entertaining, be nice to see a few space liners plowing the space lanes. Will they avoid comets and other icey bodies or can I expect the Titanic to hit a comet?Code: [Select]Mauretania class Luxury Liner 27400 tons 836 Crew 1118.8 BP TCS 548 TH 1650 EM 0Steve
3010 km/s Armour 1-80 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 26 MSP Max Repair 38 MSP
Passengers 1250 Cargo Handling Multiplier 10
Commercial Ion Engine (11) Power 150 Fuel Use 7% Signature 150 Armour 0 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 93.8 billion km (360 days at full power)
This design is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposes
Adam.
Post by: sloanjh on October 11, 2009, 11:14:32 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
I think of it as how the John Rogers is described in the book 'Starship Troopers'.John Rogers or Rodger Young? (And now I've got that song in my head again....
)John
Post by: Father Tim on October 11, 2009, 12:59:09 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
If the Obsolete Tech button is used on an obsolete tech system, it removes the obsolete flag.
Is the text on the button going to change, like the 'Lock/Unlock Design' button on the F5 window, depending on whether the system is currently obsolete or not? I'm not sure what the correct term for unobsolete is - perhaps 'Set as Current'?
Post by: Father Tim on October 11, 2009, 01:14:33 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "mavikfelna"And I assume we can scrap surrendered ships to get components from them?Yes, that will already work as things stand now.
Steve
What about tech that doesn't appear in components? I'm thinking primarily armour (though I suppose that occurs in magazines and armoured engines, etc.) - actually, while trying to come up with other examples (thermal reduction, ECM, tracking time vs missiles) I realized that everything does show up in ship components. Yet another example of what an excellent game you've created Steve.
Now if only my scientists could figure out how to scrap captured personnel for racial capabilites . . .
#:-]
Post by: welchbloke on October 11, 2009, 04:01:34 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Quote from: "welchbloke"I think of it as how the John Rogers is described in the book 'Starship Troopers'.John Rogers or Rodger Young? (And now I've got that song in my head again.... :oops:
John Rogers was one of my physics lecturers at Uni
Post by: welchbloke on October 11, 2009, 04:19:23 PM
Quote from: "Father Tim"
Perhaps you should just assimilate them.....Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"Quote from: "mavikfelna"And I assume we can scrap surrendered ships to get components from them?Yes, that will already work as things stand now.
Steve
What about tech that doesn't appear in components? I'm thinking primarily armour (though I suppose that occurs in magazines and armoured engines, etc.) - actually, while trying to come up with other examples (thermal reduction, ECM, tracking time vs missiles) I realized that everything does show up in ship components. Yet another example of what an excellent game you've created Steve.
Now if only my scientists could figure out how to scrap captured personnel for racial capabilites . . .
#:-]
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 13, 2009, 10:06:08 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
All of this new functionality is going to need testing. Are you going to release a Beta version?I need to do some basic testing first to make sure there aren't any showstoppers. I will probably follow the same pattern as v4.2 though with an initial beta release followed by several small patches.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 13, 2009, 10:42:55 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
You can find ship components in ruins. You may find a cache of Improved Gravitational Sensors, perhaps some 20cm Ultraviolet Lasers or just some old Cyogenic Tranport Modules. Or perhaps one or two very advanced systems. These can then be transported to a planet with shipyards and incorporated in a special class of ship. When you find components in ruins, the program will automatically add those components to the new RaceDesignTech table so you can use them in ship designs.I have been expanding a little on this area. As I have mentioned elsewhere, ruins in In v4.3 are going back to being from different alien races. When those extinct races are created, they are also given a tech level from 1 to 5 which I will use to generate ship components. Using a subset of the NPR design code, different tech systems, such as engines, weapons, etc., are generated for that extinct race when those ship components are recovered from ruins. One generated, those designs are recorded so they can be used more than once when recovering components from the same race. This means that if you recover two sets of engines from the same ruin, or from two different ruins of the same extinct race, it will be the same engine design in both cases. If you then recover a number of laser weapons, they will be of a comparable tech level to the engines. This should add a reasonable level of internal consistency and create a feel of different technology for each extinct race.
Steve
Post by: tanq_tonic on October 14, 2009, 01:27:55 PM
Post by: georgiaboy1966 on October 14, 2009, 06:40:52 PM
Can we have a way to sinchronize weapons fire to be able to better overwelm point defence.
Post by: georgiaboy1966 on October 14, 2009, 07:59:55 PM
Is there a way to clear all targets at once instead of having to clear each ship individually.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 16, 2009, 04:04:16 AM
Quote from: "georgiaboy1966"
another suggestion for the fire control page.I have added a button that will clear all targets for all ships within the same fleet
Is there a way to clear all targets at once instead of having to clear each ship individually.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 16, 2009, 04:08:33 AM
Quote from: "tanq_tonic"
On the Officer screen, when "Vacancies" is pressed, the fleet vacancies *and* the shipping line vacancies are displayed. It would be nice not to have to look at the shipping line vacancies.Fixed for v4.3
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 16, 2009, 05:03:56 AM
I thought about a more restrained version. Perhaps adding an amount of radiation to any planets within the system, based on the size of the flare and the distance from the star. Flares would be fairly rare so they would be a risk rather than a certainty and within a known stars game you would know which stars might flare. What does the panel think?Steve
Post by: Brian Neumann on October 16, 2009, 06:29:33 AM
Example if the terraforming rate is .004 atm/year then have the radiation cleanup rate be .008% of the current radiation level. It would take a lot of terraformers to quickly remove all the radiation, and it is unlikely that a colony would have that many available. They would probably also be shut down until there is a flare so the 6 month warmup period would apply.
Brian
Post by: Paul M on October 16, 2009, 07:15:50 AM
But frankly a solar flare that increased solar radiation by a factor of greater than x2 would be lethal. It isn't just x-rays that are emitted (we just detect those) but also protons, and other solar wind particles plus more regular (IR-visible-UV) light levels. If the flare lasted any appreciable amount of time you can assume a substantial rise in global temperature (melting of ice caps), substantial damage due to increased UV levels to things that use eyes. Evolutionary adaptions would be required for any animals and plants (animals likely would tend to burrow underground or be amphibeous). Plants would have to be right hardy.
These flares would be accompanied by serious climatic variation and possible damage to the planetary atmosphere (chemical reactions with the constituent gases catalysed by the UV would be my first guess) such as building lots of ozone or the destruction of certain molecules. The fact that say the event is shorter than a day will cause a serious weather zone to form as tons of water vapour would be driven into the atmosphere.
Unless this was a newly starting event I would think the planet would have lots of evidence on it for flare activity. I'm not sure there is a real game play advantage to adding this to the game when it is all said and done.
Post by: sloanjh on October 16, 2009, 08:14:47 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
When I was adding all the real star system, I noted that quite a few are Flare Stars. These are stars that suddenly increase their luminosity by anything from double to 100x or more. it happens within a few minutes and lasts for anything from a few minutes to a few hours. The effect apparently resembles a solar flare but on a far greater scale. I am considering having such an effect in the game but I haven't decided how to replicate it in terms of gameplay. The limited information I can find states that the flares produce vast quantities of x-rays which would be lethal to humans. As that it is a good reason to avoid such systems entirely
Random observations:
- This will probably make it even harder to find a good colony site.
I'm not sure, but I'd be surprised if any one flare would increase the long-term radiation level of the planet. In other words, the current radiation rating for a planet is produced by the decay of long-lived isotopes, and I suspect the flare is unlikely to produce anything energetic enough to convert stable isotopes into unstable ones. The upshot of this is that it's probably not realistic to model this through the current mechanism.
On the other hand, let's say a flare lasted a day, and put out 356x times the amount of radiation produced by a 1pt warhead. It seems reasonable to have an instantaneous drop of population equivalent to 1 year's worth of 1pt radiation.
If you really want to go down this road, then you could also model planets' magnetospheres (radiation shielding) and steady-state solar and cosmic radiation. Presumably a hot white dwarf puts out more dangerous radiation than a cool red dwarf, plus each planet should have some level of naturally occuring radioactives in its crust. The magnetosphere could cut some percentage of the solar radiation (but not planetary). In this model, (planetary + shielding*solar) would be a floor to the amount of radiation present on the planet, and a nuclear war would temporarily increase the level of "planetary". A flare would then give a big pulse to "solar" in the 5-day increment in which it occured. One nice side-effect of this is that you might also be able to model radiation poisoning of ships' crews (with armor or shields possible cutting radiation levels, and/or armor cells becoming "hot" due to missile strikes).
On the gripping hand, it seems like the change in planetary game-play would simply be to make the population growth rate variable for certain planets, i.e. the change in game play might not be worth the effort. OTOH, it would be a real drag to have an unshielded ship in a system during a flare and have 1/2 the crew die off. If you put the ship possibility in, I would also add a "hide" order that would allow a ship to go to the dark side of a planetary body for shielding.
John
Post by: welchbloke on October 16, 2009, 09:15:32 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
I'm with John on this I think that there is a huge amount of extra work required that may lead to little extra game enjoyment. One option might be to treat a flare like a an EM weapon and just apply an x strength EM shot againt viable ships. It then comes down to was the ship shielded/hidden behind a planet etc. I'm not keen on this idea.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"When I was adding all the real star system, I noted that quite a few are Flare Stars. These are stars that suddenly increase their luminosity by anything from double to 100x or more. it happens within a few minutes and lasts for anything from a few minutes to a few hours. The effect apparently resembles a solar flare but on a far greater scale. I am considering having such an effect in the game but I haven't decided how to replicate it in terms of gameplay. The limited information I can find states that the flares produce vast quantities of x-rays which would be lethal to humans. As that it is a good reason to avoid such systems entirely
Random observations:This will probably make it even harder to find a good colony site.
I'm not sure, but I'd be surprised if any one flare would increase the long-term radiation level of the planet. In other words, the current radiation rating for a planet is produced by the decay of long-lived isotopes, and I suspect the flare is unlikely to produce anything energetic enough to convert stable isotopes into unstable ones. The upshot of this is that it's probably not realistic to model this through the current mechanism.
On the other hand, let's say a flare lasted a day, and put out 356x times the amount of radiation produced by a 1pt warhead. It seems reasonable to have an instantaneous drop of population equivalent to 1 year's worth of 1pt radiation.
If you really want to go down this road, then you could also model planets' magnetospheres (radiation shielding) and steady-state solar and cosmic radiation. Presumably a hot white dwarf puts out more dangerous radiation than a cool red dwarf, plus each planet should have some level of naturally occuring radioactives in its crust. The magnetosphere could cut some percentage of the solar radiation (but not planetary). In this model, (planetary + shielding*solar) would be a floor to the amount of radiation present on the planet, and a nuclear war would temporarily increase the level of "planetary". A flare would then give a big pulse to "solar" in the 5-day increment in which it occured. One nice side-effect of this is that you might also be able to model radiation poisoning of ships' crews (with armor or shields possible cutting radiation levels, and/or armor cells becoming "hot" due to missile strikes).
On the gripping hand, it seems like the change in planetary game-play would simply be to make the population growth rate variable for certain planets, i.e. the change in game play might not be worth the effort. OTOH, it would be a real drag to have an unshielded ship in a system during a flare and have 1/2 the crew die off. If you put the ship possibility in, I would also add a "hide" order that would allow a ship to go to the dark side of a planetary body for shielding.
John
Post by: sloanjh on October 16, 2009, 11:05:56 PM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
I'm with John on this I think that there is a huge amount of extra work required that may lead to little extra game enjoyment. One option might be to treat a flare like a an EM weapon and just apply an x strength EM shot againt viable ships. It then comes down to was the ship shielded/hidden behind a planet etc. I'm not keen on this idea.
I didn't actually mean to vote against it - I think the extra consistency in treating radiation would be neat. I've just got a feeling that in practice it wouldn't change much in terms of the flavor of the game, other than to introduce a random (potential) ship-killer event. OTOH, since Aurora is a vehicle for Steve's fiction, then it might be interesting to have a ship get caught in a flare and have to make a run for the nearest planet....
Hmmm - after thinking some more about "random ship-killer events", there is one way in which these have the potential to significantly change play. At present, if you send a ship through a WP and it doesn't come back, then it's almost certainly enemy action. If there were a chance that some natural event destroyed the ship, then that would make life a lot more uncertain - similar to the black-hole WP in SF. Unfortunately, the player would know what happened IRL, and so would have to role-play the uncertainty (similar to the fleets picketing black holes in the Diary).
John
Post by: waresky on October 17, 2009, 04:44:52 AM
U need to EXPLORE with a ship for leave this "fog"
u think r possible?
And obviously research a some of "sensor" to pass through "fog" for "only see" a planets..hope u understand what am mean.
A sort of FOG but obviously planets are "visible"..hmm..or an "?" in place at planet ..some sort of "probabilty planetary contact".-
For simulated an "real uncertain" situations,and are more real on game than a ALL visible Solar system..
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 17, 2009, 11:31:03 AM
Quote from: "waresky"
Steve a very curiosity: it's possible put on "Solar System" map a sort of "fog-of-war" system?I have thought about a optional rule where you would have to detect planets, moons, asteroids, etc.. There are a few problems though. The first is that there are a LOT of system bodies in the game so the event log could become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of "System Body Discovered' events. You would soon get tired of looking at the systems every time a few of these messages popped up. The second problem is that it would mess surveying up as you might find yourself having to go back and survey systems several times after new planets were discovered. A third problem is that I would have to keep track of which race had found which system body, which would mean a lot of record-keeping, and I would have to look this up every time I did anything in the game that involved a system body, which would have an impact on performance. So I guess the bottom line is that while this would initially seem cool, in practice it would probably get tiresome fairly quickly.
U need to EXPLORE with a ship for leave this "fog"
u think r possible?
And obviously research a some of "sensor" to pass through "fog" for "only see" a planets..hope u understand what am mean.
A sort of FOG but obviously planets are "visible"..hmm..or an "?" in place at planet ..some sort of "probabilty planetary contact".-
For simulated an "real uncertain" situations,and are more real on game than a ALL visible Solar system..
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 17, 2009, 12:53:03 PM
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 17, 2009, 06:38:19 PM
Steve
Post by: ShadoCat on October 18, 2009, 01:04:08 AM
RE: Asteroid Mining Modules
I think that will work nicely.
Post by: Charlie Beeler on October 18, 2009, 08:38:15 AM
Turrets
Tracking speeds are way behind similair tech level missiles as well as max (x4) tracking speed of same level beam fire control.
My suggestion is to change turret tracking speed to match to (x4) max tracking speed of the same level beam fire control. Also adjust the cost to match base cost for the same level (x1) beam fire control.
Gauss Cannon
Currently to sizes are .5 to 6 hull spaces. (50 - 300 tons) When we were first talking about a weapon subsystem for fighters that could also function as a point defense subsystem I invisioned something sized like an M61 Vulcan (200 - 300 lbs) not mk45 5" deck gun (21+ tons). Actually just something that is proportionally smaller that 10cm rail gun as the M61 is to the mk45.
My suggestion is to change the current sizes to .1 - 1 hull space. This would make the GC's proportionally smaller than main beam armorments and combat viable for fighters as secondary subsystems. Yes it will as make quad GC turrets more mass viable for ship design. They would be more inline with the concepts of the current CIWS systems.
Summary
I've made these changes in my database and they do work.
Yes it makes gun fighters more effective. Frankly it makes them viable. Unless a ship is using really thin armor gun only fighters are a minimal threat. I've found gun fighters to be most effective at fighter/gunboat supression and layered missile defense.
The combination makes GC PD turrets viable on most combat ships without being overwhelming to missile combat, they can still be swamped. Unless your running really tight combat formations they are only really effect for final defense.
Post by: waresky on October 18, 2009, 09:42:36 AM
In StarsWars the Torpedoes Boat are the maximum threath who an "fighter" Class can give an Warship..
So the point are: Or Fighters r armed with Boxed Heavy missiles..or a Fighter become an very useless,overbudget (Carrier design,shipyard,spares,missiles,systems and so on) cost and far to become a VERY good Human vs others Decisive WeaponsSystem.
I think a effective on battleFront are Torpedoes Fighter or Heavy Missiles armed Fighters.Fast,2 Class-8 or 10 BoxMissiles and END of history.
for complication on antimissile Screen design,system and management of 200..nor 2000 fighters..am never will become crazy to manage a A-missile fighters combat system.
Post by: Kurt on October 18, 2009, 10:41:55 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
I have been playing around with Asteroid Mining Modules to try and make them more attractive. They are currently size 250 and cost 250 BP and I don't think that makes them very useful, especially as once a ship is built around them their cost goes up. Furthermore, asteroid miners only work with asteroids and they tend to be much slower than the freighters that can move automated mines around. The Fuel Harvesters work well so I decided to follow the same general principles for the mining module in terms of size and cost. The Fuel Harvester is size 100 and an automated mine is the same size as a refinery so the Asteroid Mining Module is now size 100 too. The fuel harvester is half the cost of a refinery at 60 BP, so I have made the mining module half the cost of an automated mine at 120 BP. The effective cost per module will be higher than that once you build a ship around it and they are less capable than automated mines anyway as they are restricted in their potential mining sites. I think these changes will make them far more viable as a potential use of (always limited) shipyard space.
Steve
I have been experimenting with asteroid mining modules lately. To be honest, the reason I didn't use them in the past was because the ships they were mounted on had to be monitored and sent back for overhauls periodically, which was a pain that I avoided by using automated mines instead. Now that commercial ships no longer accumulate time on their clocks I have changed my mind on these and will likely start using them. The changes above mean they will be even more useful.
Kurt
Post by: waresky on October 18, 2009, 01:53:37 PM
Percentage are very useful and seems "realistic"
Awesome work.
Hope one day or another we can "show" the planetary surface same as MARS (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VgbOrdteh5w/S ... 2-full.jpg (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VgbOrdteh5w/StsIYMdLIyI/AAAAAAAACUU/vvwVMS8l_xk/s1600-h/391243main_mer20091002-full.jpg)),for struggle,for dream,and for a "real sensations"..
Or a planetary explorations same as UR-Quan Master old game:)) simple but addictive ehhehe
Post by: welchbloke on October 18, 2009, 03:53:36 PM
Quote from: "Charlie Beeler"
I'm going to revisit a couple of suggetions I've made in the past related to turrets and gauss cannons.I have to admit that I handn't really thought about these points until Charlie mentioned them; however, they do make sense to me. In particular, due to the mass penalties, close in weapons systems are limited to specialist ships or large combatents. If we use modern naval designs as a model then the Aurora CIWS are overmassed in comparison. I haven't used fighters enough to really have a handle on what the GC changes would mean but they seem reasonable. I think a change in tracking speeds would not change the game dynamic too much. I have my body armour on and I'm ready to take flak for my views
Turrets
Tracking speeds are way behind similair tech level missiles as well as max (x4) tracking speed of same level beam fire control.
My suggestion is to change turret tracking speed to match to (x4) max tracking speed of the same level beam fire control. Also adjust the cost to match base cost for the same level (x1) beam fire control.
Gauss Cannon
Currently to sizes are .5 to 6 hull spaces. (50 - 300 tons) When we were first talking about a weapon subsystem for fighters that could also function as a point defense subsystem I invisioned something sized like an M61 Vulcan (200 - 300 lbs) not mk45 5" deck gun (21+ tons). Actually just something that is proportionally smaller that 10cm rail gun as the M61 is to the mk45.
My suggestion is to change the current sizes to .1 - 1 hull space. This would make the GC's proportionally smaller than main beam armorments and combat viable for fighters as secondary subsystems. Yes it will as make quad GC turrets more mass viable for ship design. They would be more inline with the concepts of the current CIWS systems.
Post by: Father Tim on October 18, 2009, 05:32:41 PM
I suggest changing the political status modifier and the way it is calculated. A newly Conquered population should begin at 0% production/trade/wealth, and each production cycle increase its modifier by a factor calculated from the amount by which the current Occupation Strength exceeds the required minimum. Perhaps cap the increase rate at some amount, so a small mining outpost doesn't immediately jump to full imperial citizenship. Then a simple derivative ( 1/2 * a * t^2 ) tells you the effective rate at which production occurred over the previous increment. (Where a is the rate for that increment, and t is the time in seconds.)
The political status of the colony would then be determined by the current modifier, rather than the other way around:
0% to 20% Conquered
>20% to 40% Occupied
etc.
I would expect the Trade & Wealth modifiers to increase more quickly than the Production modifier, maye double - after all, the government still makes money on rebuilding things. Tremendous profits came out of Europe in the late forties and fifties rebuilding after World War II.
Oh, and a minor thing. At the bottom of the left panel of the F2 'Population & Production' window is an option to display extra 'Summary Information' in the colony list. Could we please have production modifiers added as an option? And have Maintenance Facilities, Maintenance Supplies, and Fuel combined into one option (I'm not sure there's enough space to display all three, in which case I'd still like Supplies & Fuel combined in one entry).
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 05:36:06 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
I need to take the time to look at the numbers for these ideas. My immediate reaction is that it would blow away all other weapons in terms of point blank effectiveness against other ships (in terms of damage per HS) and gauss cannon are really supposed to be an anti-missile weapon rather than anti-ship. I am also worried that such a dramatic improvement in anti-missile firepower (in terms of effectiveness per HS) could make missiles almost useless. I'll respond properly once I get time to really think it through. In terms of Aurora fighters - they are a lot larger than F-16s, more like small missile boats really, so the 5" gun is really a much better analogy for their armament than the M61 vulcan.Quote from: "Charlie Beeler"I'm going to revisit a couple of suggetions I've made in the past related to turrets and gauss cannons.I have to admit that I handn't really thought about these points until Charlie mentioned them; however, they do make sense to me. In particular, due to the mass penalties, close in weapons systems are limited to specialist ships or large combatents. If we use modern naval designs as a model then the Aurora CIWS are overmassed in comparison. I haven't used fighters enough to really have a handle on what the GC changes would mean but they seem reasonable. I think a change in tracking speeds would not change the game dynamic too much. I have my body armour on and I'm ready to take flak for my views
Turrets
Tracking speeds are way behind similair tech level missiles as well as max (x4) tracking speed of same level beam fire control.
My suggestion is to change turret tracking speed to match to (x4) max tracking speed of the same level beam fire control. Also adjust the cost to match base cost for the same level (x1) beam fire control.
Gauss Cannon
Currently to sizes are .5 to 6 hull spaces. (50 - 300 tons) When we were first talking about a weapon subsystem for fighters that could also function as a point defense subsystem I invisioned something sized like an M61 Vulcan (200 - 300 lbs) not mk45 5" deck gun (21+ tons). Actually just something that is proportionally smaller that 10cm rail gun as the M61 is to the mk45.
My suggestion is to change the current sizes to .1 - 1 hull space. This would make the GC's proportionally smaller than main beam armorments and combat viable for fighters as secondary subsystems. Yes it will as make quad GC turrets more mass viable for ship design. They would be more inline with the concepts of the current CIWS systems.
Steve
Post by: Brian Neumann on October 19, 2009, 06:00:22 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Steve, if you are worried about the mass/damage effectivness you could remove the range multiplier for gauss cannon. This would limit them to final protective fire only and make it much harder to use them against ships. Alternativly you could make the size scale from .1 to 1 hs linear with 1 hs being a 50% hit rate and then scale from 1 to 4 hs to get 100% hit rate. This would make the smaller installations more useable for fighters and gunboats, while still keeping the overall size for a 100% hit rate up there. If you want your full chance to hit, then you need the specialist ships. If you don't mind the reduced chances then lots of 1hs units works well, untill they are shooting at a target with even a point or two of ecm that is not countered. Then their to hit chances are horrible, while the large units are still getting thier hits.Quote from: "Charlie Beeler"I'm going to revisit a couple of suggetions I've made in the past related to turrets and gauss cannons.
Gauss Cannon
Currently to sizes are .5 to 6 hull spaces. (50 - 300 tons) When we were first talking about a weapon subsystem for fighters that could also function as a point defense subsystem I invisioned something sized like an M61 Vulcan (200 - 300 lbs) not mk45 5" deck gun (21+ tons). Actually just something that is proportionally smaller that 10cm rail gun as the M61 is to the mk45.
My suggestion is to change the current sizes to .1 - 1 hull space. This would make the GC's proportionally smaller than main beam armorments and combat viable for fighters as secondary subsystems. Yes it will as make quad GC turrets more mass viable for ship design. They would be more inline with the concepts of the current CIWS systems.
Brian
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 06:21:42 AM
Quote from: "Brian"
The increase in hit rate still has to be linear. If a 1HS installation could hit at 50% and the 4 HS installation at 100%, then a ship would always be far better off with 4x 1HS installations than a single 4 HS installation. The problem I am trying to avoid is the one that plagues a lot of 4x games. Fighters are given powerful weapons and then for some reason ships don't use the small powerful weapons that fighters have. For example in Starfire, why don't ships just mount massed batteries of fighter lasers or fighter primaries or carry launchers capable of firing fighter missiles. if I was to create a 0.1 HS gauss cannon, even with a 10% to hit chance, then escort ships would just carry several hundreds of those. 300 0.1 HS installations with a 10% chance to hit is little different than 30 1HS installations with a 100% chance to hit. Try getting a missile wave though that.Quote from: "welchbloke"Steve, if you are worried about the mass/damage effectivness you could remove the range multiplier for gauss cannon. This would limit them to final protective fire only and make it much harder to use them against ships. Alternativly you could make the size scale from .1 to 1 hs linear with 1 hs being a 50% hit rate and then scale from 1 to 4 hs to get 100% hit rate. This would make the smaller installations more useable for fighters and gunboats, while still keeping the overall size for a 100% hit rate up there. If you want your full chance to hit, then you need the specialist ships. If you don't mind the reduced chances then lots of 1hs units works well, untill they are shooting at a target with even a point or two of ecm that is not countered. Then their to hit chances are horrible, while the large units are still getting thier hits.Quote from: "Charlie Beeler"I'm going to revisit a couple of suggetions I've made in the past related to turrets and gauss cannons.
Gauss Cannon
Currently to sizes are .5 to 6 hull spaces. (50 - 300 tons) When we were first talking about a weapon subsystem for fighters that could also function as a point defense subsystem I invisioned something sized like an M61 Vulcan (200 - 300 lbs) not mk45 5" deck gun (21+ tons). Actually just something that is proportionally smaller that 10cm rail gun as the M61 is to the mk45.
My suggestion is to change the current sizes to .1 - 1 hull space. This would make the GC's proportionally smaller than main beam armorments and combat viable for fighters as secondary subsystems. Yes it will as make quad GC turrets more mass viable for ship design. They would be more inline with the concepts of the current CIWS systems.
Steve
Post by: Brian Neumann on October 19, 2009, 07:25:46 AM
Quote
The increase in hit rate still has to be linear. If a 1HS installation could hit at 50% and the 4 HS installation at 100%, then a ship would always be far better off with 4x 1HS installations than a single 4 HS installation. The problem I am trying to avoid is the one that plagues a lot of 4x games. Fighters are given powerful weapons and then for some reason ships don't use the small powerful weapons that fighters have. For example in Starfire, why don't ships just mount massed batteries of fighter lasers or fighter primaries or carry launchers capable of firing fighter missiles. if I was to create a 0.1 HS gauss cannon, even with a 10% to hit chance, then escort ships would just carry several hundreds of those. 300 0.1 HS installations with a 10% chance to hit is little different than 30 1HS installations with a 100% chance to hit. Try getting a missile wave though that.There are two reasons behind my idea. Most people can confirm that it is fairly easy to get the first 60-80% of accuracy on just about anything that you do. The last bit is much harder and for fire control would take much more precise weapons to be able to track and hit with this sort of precesion. The second part is that under normal conditions you are right. It would be better for people to take the mass of less accurate weapons instead of fewer but more accurate installations. Where this breaks down in your game is that every time a penalty to hit is applied for an ecm difference it is a flat 10%/level. A weapon that had a base 90% chance to hit, modified by its 50% for being a small system has a 40% chance. Take 10 from that and you are at 30%. A 4hs weapon with a 90%-10% is at 80% effective. If instead of doing it this way against missiles you first figure the to hit chance based on it's speed, say 30% per shot divide in half for the 50% modifier and then take 10 from that you only get a 5% to hit chance. The larger installation has a 20% chance to hit. At this point the chance of intercepting the missile is equal. If it is a 20% reduction then the larger installation still has a 10% chance while the smaller does not even fire as it's chance is below 0%.
Steve
I don't know about you, but only my biggest ships can afford to mount multiple full size eccm to cover all of the fire control. Most ships end up having one full size eccm and the rest are the compact eccm. This means that if the missiles have a full hs devoted to ecm from a comparable tech culture that the defensive fire control is probably operating at that 10% penalty to start with. If you want a little more linear between the first 50% make that 2hs and the 100% 6hs with 4hs being 75%. This will obviously change the numbers above but it should still work to make the larger installations have a purpose. Smaller ones will tend to be on smaller ships where they just don't have the tonnage for a full turret, while larger ones will be on the larger, or more specialized ships.
Brian
Post by: Charlie Beeler on October 19, 2009, 08:06:44 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
I need to take the time to look at the numbers for these ideas. My immediate reaction is that it would blow away all other weapons in terms of point blank effectiveness against other ships (in terms of damage per HS) and gauss cannon are really supposed to be an anti-missile weapon rather than anti-ship. I am also worried that such a dramatic improvement in anti-missile firepower (in terms of effectiveness per HS) could make missiles almost useless. I'll respond properly once I get time to really think it through. In terms of Aurora fighters - they are a lot larger than F-16s, more like small missile boats really, so the 5" gun is really a much better analogy for their armament than the M61 vulcan. Steve
And I think a system with the intended function of fighter-v-fighter and/or missile defense should be superior at ship-v-ship ranges vs other systems. A system for that function should be substantually less massive as well. Whether we're talking about a 12 ton F16(A versions were in this range) or a 500 ton Aurora fighter, the mass differential between a system to be used as a fighter gun should be segnificantly smaller that that of a system intended (even at the low end) as main gun for a combat ship.
In the ship-v-ship role this is not going to be a dominating change. About the only time they'd come into play is if the combatants started at very close ranges. My experience has been that fighters are toast before they can get close enough to use GC's...once fire controls are live. In both cases the GC's act as sand blasters (stripping away the outer layers of armor) and rarely penetrate to do internal damage. If a ship has enough damage for the GC's to really be dangerous it either has extremely weak armor (1-2) or has already taken segnificant hits and the GC's really making much of an impact on the outcome.
My goal is two fold. First to make a game standard system that gives fighters an effective weapon against other small ships (fighters and GB mainly) that is not a missile or full sized beam. Second is to have subsytem that allows for a PD turret that is effective without a major reduction in mass available for offensive systems for a combat ship under 10k tons.
Keep in mind I'm not asking for a change in beam fire control. To take advantage of the turret tracking speed change the beam fire control is still going to 4x the mass of the base fire control.
Can these changes be gamed to be situationally dominating? Yes. So can just about everything in the game.
Is this going to impact game balance? Yes to a degree. It's going to help make fighters and dedicated point defense turrets more viable choices.
Nor am I suggesting that the to hit numbers be changed. Maybe reduce the velocity increments and increase the cost per increment to offset the lower mass.
Charlie
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 08:51:59 AM
Quote from: "Brian"
That's not how it works. The modifer to hit for smaller gauss cannon is applied after ECM has been accounted for, not before. Assume you had a 30% chance to hit after ECM has been accounted for. If you had a full size gauss cannon with a 100% modifier to hit, your chance to hit would still be 30%. If you had a 1/2 size gauss cannon with a 50% modifier to hit then the chance to hit would be 15%. Which is why I have to reiterate my point that the modifier to hit must be linear in comparison with the size. If we had the original example of a 4HS 100% gauss cannon compared to a 1HS 50% gauss cannon, then vs the ECM situation above you would get four shots at 15% compared to one shot at 30%. Which means an actual chance of a missile kill of 48% for four small GC compared to 30% for one large GC. The 48% is derived from multiplying 85% x 85% x 85% x 85% and deducting the result from 100, which is the chance of all four shots missing. The 4 small GC have a further advantage in that they could kill up to four missiles while the single large GC can never kill more than one.QuoteThe increase in hit rate still has to be linear. If a 1HS installation could hit at 50% and the 4 HS installation at 100%, then a ship would always be far better off with 4x 1HS installations than a single 4 HS installation. The problem I am trying to avoid is the one that plagues a lot of 4x games. Fighters are given powerful weapons and then for some reason ships don't use the small powerful weapons that fighters have. For example in Starfire, why don't ships just mount massed batteries of fighter lasers or fighter primaries or carry launchers capable of firing fighter missiles. if I was to create a 0.1 HS gauss cannon, even with a 10% to hit chance, then escort ships would just carry several hundreds of those. 300 0.1 HS installations with a 10% chance to hit is little different than 30 1HS installations with a 100% chance to hit. Try getting a missile wave though that.There are two reasons behind my idea. Most people can confirm that it is fairly easy to get the first 60-80% of accuracy on just about anything that you do. The last bit is much harder and for fire control would take much more precise weapons to be able to track and hit with this sort of precesion. The second part is that under normal conditions you are right. It would be better for people to take the mass of less accurate weapons instead of fewer but more accurate installations. Where this breaks down in your game is that every time a penalty to hit is applied for an ecm difference it is a flat 10%/level. A weapon that had a base 90% chance to hit, modified by its 50% for being a small system has a 40% chance. Take 10 from that and you are at 30%. A 4hs weapon with a 90%-10% is at 80% effective. If instead of doing it this way against missiles you first figure the to hit chance based on it's speed, say 30% per shot divide in half for the 50% modifier and then take 10 from that you only get a 5% to hit chance. The larger installation has a 20% chance to hit. At this point the chance of intercepting the missile is equal. If it is a 20% reduction then the larger installation still has a 10% chance while the smaller does not even fire as it's chance is below 0%.
Steve
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 10:46:49 AM
I will use 8000 RP as the max tech level for this. All the systems below will use the following fire control for missile defence, which is a standard 4x Speed system.
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Fire Control
50% Accuracy at Range: 32,000 km Tracking Speed: 16000 km/s
Size: 4 HS HTK: 1 Cost: 77 Crew: 20Code: [Select]
Full size GC without turret
Damage Output 1 Rate of Fire: 3 shots every 5 seconds Range Modifier: 3
Max Range 30,000 km Size: 6 HTK: 2Code: [Select]
Max GC in a triple turret
Damage Output 1x9 Rate of Fire: 5 seconds Range Modifier: 3
Max Range 30,000 km Turret Size: 24 Armour: 0 Turret HTK: 6
Maximum Tracking Speed: 16000km/sCode: [Select]
Min Size GC with 8% modifier to hit
Damage Output 1 Rate of Fire: 3 shots every 5 seconds Range Modifier: 3
Max Range 30,000 km Size: 0.5 HTK: 0
This weapon has a penalty to accuracy. Chance to hit is multiplied by 0.08Code: [Select]
Min GC in a triple turret
Damage Output 1x9 Rate of Fire: 5 seconds Range Modifier: 3
Max Range 30,000 km Turret Size: 2 Armour: 0 Turret HTK: 0
Maximum Tracking Speed: 16000km/sLets assume an incoming wave of missiles with a speed of 20,000 km/s. The turret tracking speed and fire control tracking speed are both the same at 16,000 km/s. The Fire control has an 84% chance to hit at 10,000 km/s and the final chance to hit is Chance to hit x (Tracking Speed / MissileSpeed), which is 67.2%. For the small GC turret the chance to hit will be 67.2 x 0.08, which is 5.4%. However, you can fit eight small turrets in the same space as one large one so the real comparison is nine shots at 67.2% vs seventy-two shots at 5.4%
Lets compare this to a 10cm laser turret of similar size and a non-turreted 10cm railgun, both of which are popular anti-missile systems. Both these systems also need power plants so those will have to be taken into account as well within the 24HS.
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Twin 10cm C3 Ultraviolet Laser Turret
Damage Output 3x2 Rate of Fire: 5 seconds Range Modifier: 4
Max Range 120,000 km Turret Size: 8 Armour: 0 Turret HTK: 2
Power Requirement: 6 Power Recharge per 5 Secs: 6
Maximum Tracking Speed: 16000km/sA pair of twin 10cm Ultraviolet lasers plus power planets is 20 HS. If we assume a twin and a triple, it actually works out to 25HS but that is close enough. That setup allows for five shots at 67.2%, compared to the nine of the equivalent GC. Although that makes the GC almost twice as good, that is acceptable because the laser can also be used in an anti-ship mode. The anti-ship capability of the laser vs GC even at point blank range is 15 vs 9 and the laser has a longer range as well.Code: [Select]
10cm Railgun V4/C3
Damage Per Shot (4): 1 Rate of Fire: 5 seconds Range Modifier: 4
Max Range 40,000 km Railgun Size: 3 HS Railgun HTK: 1
Power Requirement: 3 Power Recharge per 5 Secs: 3Now the railgun tracking speed is limited to the speed of the ship. Lets assume 4000 km/s for an Ion-engine escort. The chance to hit is therefore only about 16.8% (84% fire control x 4000 ship / 20,000 missile) but the railgun gets four shots. Each railgun is only 3 HS so allowing for enough power plants (2/3HS per railgun), that gives us approximately 6 railguns with 24 shots at 16.2%. The railguns are reasonable at point blank range against ships as they have a higher potential damage output than the lasers but only against slower targetsSo that gives us an anti-missile comparison:
Large GC: Nine shots at 67% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 6)
Lasers: Five shots at 67% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 3)
Railguns: Twenty-four shots at 17% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 4)
Small GC: Seventy-two shots at 5.4% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 4)
Lets also assume an anti-ship role vs a 4000 km/s target at point blank range
Large GC: Nine 1 point shots at 84% (estimated damage 7.6)
Lasers: Five 3 point shots at 84% (estimated damage 12.6)
Railguns: Twenty-four 1 point shots at 84% (estimated damage 20.1)
Small GC: Seventy-two 1 point shots at 6.7% (estimated damage 4.8)
The railguns look good in anti-ship mode but they have a max range of 40k and the GC have a max range of 30k. The laser can shoot out to 120,000 km.
Now lets make the GC one-sixth the size and run the numbers again.
Anti-missile comparison:
Large GC: Fifty-four shots at 67% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 36)
Lasers: Five shots at 67% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 3)
Railguns: Twenty-four shots at 17% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 4)
Small GC: Four hundred and thirty-two shots at 5.4% (Estimated Missiles Destroyed: 23)
Lets also assume an anti-ship role vs a 4000 km/s target at point blank range
Large GC: Fifty-four 1 point shots at 84% (estimated damage 45)
Lasers: Five 3 point shots at 84% (estimated damage 12.6)
Railguns: Twenty-four 1 point shots at 84% (estimated damage 20.1)
Small GC: Four hundred and thirty--two 1 point shots at 6.7% (estimated damage 29)
Now it may just be me, but that makes gauss cannon amazingly, game-breakingly good. A single escort is going to be mowing missiles down in hundreds, not to mention completely obliterating anything that appears through a jump point. Here is a 7500 ton escort with eighteen triple GC turrets that are 4HS each instead of 24HS. It can put out one hundred and sixty-two shots every 5 seconds with a 100% modifier to hit. That means assuming 20,000 km/s missiles, it will kill more than one hundred missiles every 5 seconds! If used as a jump point picket ship, it could inflict 136 points of damage every 5 seconds vs a transiting ship moving at 4000 km/s. Bearing in mind that it takes 30 seconds or do to recover from transit, this ship is going to able to inflict 1000 points of damage before anyone could respond.
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Tennessee class Cruiser 7500 tons 1675 Crew 3180.4 BP TCS 150 TH 600 EM 0
4000 km/s Armour 1-34 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 4 PPV 72
Annual Failure Rate: 112% IFR: 1.6% Maintenance Capacity 1060 MSP Max Repair 138 MSP
Ion Engine (10) Power 60 Fuel Use 70% Signature 60 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 150,000 Litres Range 51.4 billion km (148 days at full power)
Triple GC R3-100 Turret (18x9) Range 30,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 3 ROF 5 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control (3) Max Range: 64,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 84 69 53 38 22 6 0 0 0 0
Active Search Sensor (1) GPS 21 Range 210k km Resolution 1Now I don't mind if players want to change the stats of weapons within Aurora, it is that type of game after all, but based on the above I just cannot see any way I could drastically reduce the size of gauss cannon. I went through a similar exercise when I created them, which is why they are the size they are now.Steve
Post by: waresky on October 19, 2009, 11:04:33 AM
Steve.
Can set a RESEARCH capability same as Industrial "begin project2 with percentage solution?
With 100 research Center can manage 1 by 1 with a single or more or aggregated project?
10 study Engine
5 another ecc..ecc...?
R very real no?
Post by: Charlie Beeler on October 19, 2009, 11:55:40 AM
I also said that the system could be gamed. The counter to the escort loaded with GC turrets sitting on the jump point is easily 1 of several options. Built a jump gate and send a swarm of gun fighters through. Jump engines with jump distance of say 200. Box launchers and Thick armor and Armored missiles. etc etc etc.
Point blank battles are the exception not the rule. In most cases anyone that finds themselves there has usually done something drasticly wrong and pays for the mistake.
You do not agree with me and I can live with that.
Post by: Beersatron on October 19, 2009, 12:42:11 PM
GC beats missiles
Rails beats GC if ship faster
Laser beats Rails is ship faster
Missiles beat Rails at range
Missiles beat Laser at range
From what I understand, the GC is only good for use in final-self-defense due to the short range, right? So it would be a very specialized boat, either a JP picket or a purpose built missile magnet sent ahead of the fleet to soak up the fire and deplete enemy magazines.
In the JP picket role, if the GC can keep within range of it's target then it will absolutely own it, otherwise the target will be able to get out of range and keep it there, firing it's rails and laser with impunity. Also, would point blank missiles have a better chance to hit because of the reduced tracking time?
The easiest way to counter a GC fighter is with a laser fighter. They will both likely have similar speeds but the reach on the laser will give the first shot to the laser fighter. You could up the armor on the GC to survive the first shot but then you would be running slower than the laser fighter.
Hmm, I appear to arguing in circles with myself and I can not decide what I like the best.
End of the day, it is your game Steve
Post by: Andrew on October 19, 2009, 12:48:34 PM
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 01:38:24 PM
Quote from: "Charlie Beeler"
Which is why GC should never have equivilant ranges to main beams. Personally I'd be content with them only ever having a max range of 10k. Start the velocity at 1 and advance by .5 per level. etc.The gun fighters would be GC as well so that doesn't solve the uber-GC problem. The rest are possibilities but would cost far too much in comparison to the 3000 BP escort. A box launcher design might throw out similar firepower but only once. The GC escort can dish out massive firepower every 5 seconds forever.
I also said that the system could be gamed. The counter to the escort loaded with GC turrets sitting on the jump point is easily 1 of several options. Built a jump gate and send a swarm of gun fighters through. Jump engines with jump distance of say 200. Box launchers and Thick armor and Armored missiles. etc etc etc.
Quote
Point blank battles are the exception not the rule. In most cases anyone that finds themselves there has usually done something drasticly wrong and pays for the mistake.Point blank battles are the rule in a jump point defence, which is where the 1/6th GC would be overpowering. No equivalent cost missile-ship would have a prayer of overcoming its defences so the only way to kill it would be in deep space with a faster beam ship, assuming the beam ship could get into the system.
Quote
You do not agree with me and I can live with that.Well, it's not really about the anti-ship capability anyway. That was just a side-effect. My main concern is the anti-missile ability of the much smaller GC. Assuming that the 1/6th size GC had NO anti-ship capability, it would still be massively overpowered as a pure anti-missile weapon. How would a missile-using race overcome the escort I designed using the 1/6th GC without outnumbering it at least 5-1 in cost terms? Don't forget that on average it can kill 100+ missiles every 5 seconds if the missiles are 20,000 km/s.
I am sorry if I sound like I am being negative about your idea and I understand your desire for a small fighter weapon but the reality is that Aurora fighters are not fighters in a wet-navy sense. They are more like fast missile craft. An equivalent to a wet navy fighter would be perhaps 0.5 hull spaces as a maximum and I really don't want to have hordes of tiny ships running around as it would kill performance. I think the underlying problem is that weapons in Aurora are larger as a proportion of ship size than in a modern navy. This is mainly because I have not bothered to model all the other systems that are needed in a modern warship and take up much of the hull space and therefore weapon assume a much greater importance in terms of a proportion of hull size. The fact that weapons are large means that making a smaller equivalent results in a very low powered weapon. However, I really, really don't want to have the Starfire problem of uber-fighter-weapons that ships don't carry for some inexplicable reason.
There is probably some workable idea for creating a fighter-sized beam weapon that wouldn't be attractive to ships. However, I really don't believe the answer is to make existing weapons significantly smaller without any real penalty so they fit on fighters because then ships would just carry hordes of that weapon and kill game balance. Perhaps an alternative to the low chance to hit idea of the small GC or the low reload rate of the reduced-size laser is a low chance to damage. Perhaps a laser that is much smaller than a ship laser but when it hits armour it only has a 10% chance to actually cause any damage. This would result in fighters doing a lot of shooting at one another but only causing infrequent damage. This would still work over dogfight timescales as the weapons are likely to be firing every 5 seconds so hits might be scored every minute or so. It obviously wouldn't be that useful against a warship but how often do fighters strafe warships in modern combat? It would be perfectly useful however against a freighter that couldn't shoot back. I'll give this some further thought.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 01:44:11 PM
Quote from: "Beersatron"
GC beats missilesI think I introduced a red herring with my somewhat tongue-in-cheek comparison of anti-ship capability for the proposed mini-GC. The real problem is its anti-missile capability. With that 1/6th GC in the game you can pretty much forget using missiles. One single escort of the type I designed would be able to hold off an entire fleet of missile ships. Even the existing GC is very good against missiles - killing missiles is the whole point of the weapon. Making it six times better than the existing best anti-missile weapon would obviously cause some game balance problems
Rails beats GC if ship faster
Laser beats Rails is ship faster
Missiles beat Rails at range
Missiles beat Laser at range
Steve
Post by: Beersatron on October 19, 2009, 01:57:13 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "Beersatron"GC beats missilesI think I introduced a red herring with my somewhat tongue-in-cheek comparison of anti-ship capability for the proposed mini-GC. The real problem is its anti-missile capability. With that 1/6th GC in the game you can pretty much forget using missiles. One single escort of the type I designed would be able to hold off an entire fleet of missile ships. Even the existing GC is very good against missiles - killing missiles is the whole point of the weapon. Making it six times better than the existing best anti-missile weapon would obviously cause some game balance problems
Rails beats GC if ship faster
Laser beats Rails is ship faster
Missiles beat Rails at range
Missiles beat Laser at range
Steve
Does the final defense setting on PD cover the whole fleet or just the ship that has the PD installation? I ask because of the relatively short GC distances involved and I have noticed before when using laser PD that area defense shoots after the missile has made it's move.
So, I guess what I am asking is does final defense fire before the missile gets it's move turn? And does it protect the whole fleet?
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 02:14:02 PM
Quote from: "Beersatron"
Does the final defense setting on PD cover the whole fleet or just the ship that has the PD installation? I ask because of the relatively short GC distances involved and I have noticed before when using laser PD that area defense shoots after the missile has made it's move.There are two settings for final defensive fire. One that covers any nearby ship and one that only covers the firing ship. The latter would probably only be used for a high value ship such as a carrier so that it wouldn't expend its shots saving an escort. Final defensive fire is different to area defence as it takes place during the missile's movement phase. Just as the missile salvo is about the hit the ship, the game pauses the missiles 10,000 km from the target, carries out the firing at 10,000 km for the target ship's weapons and perhaps further away if another ship is providing the defensive firepower, and then checks for missile hits after defensive fire is complete. That is why defensive fire is so effective as it is using the best possible chance to hit at the last possible moment. Area defence takes place during the fire phase after missiles have moved and will fire at any missiles within range.
So, I guess what I am asking is does final defense fire before the missile gets it's move turn? And does it protect the whole fleet?
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on October 19, 2009, 02:19:12 PM
Steve
Post by: Charlie Beeler on October 19, 2009, 04:00:38 PM
The designed CLE is only death to 3 missile salvos per 5 sec cycle. Easily overwhelmed with multiple small salvos.
I think I'd be willing to pit 2 of these 7500ton ships in a BPV battle. Point blank. (missile load cost 466.56)
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Victory class Destroyer 7500 tons 789 Crew 1039.4 BP TCS 150 TH 900 EM 0
6000 km/s Armour 1-34 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 2 PPV 30
Annual Failure Rate: 225% IFR: 3.1% Maintenance Capacity 173 MSP Max Repair 30 MSP
Magazine 480
Ion Engine E6 (15) Power 60 Efficiency 0.60 Signature 60 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 150,000 Litres Range 60.0 billion km (115 days at full power)
Size 1 Missile Launcher (30) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
Missile Fire Control FC10.5-R100 (10) Range 31.5m km Resolution 100
SS-1-2 (480) Speed: 28,300 km/s End: 1.8m Range: 3m km WH: 2 Size: 1 TH: 94 / 56 / 28
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes20 salvos of 3 every 10 seconds against 3 fire controls. Unless I've been playing the fire controls wrong, the CLE will stop 9 missiles only. Fire control saturation is the issue. Ignore the incoming and get hammered, each missile that hits does internals.
Only chance is to disable both ships before their system come alive. Which is why these should be brought in by a jumpship with at least a jump distance of 100 or better if a GC CLE is expected.
Worse 3 of these for the same BPV
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Agincourt class Cruiser 7450 tons 727 Crew 1073 BP TCS 149 TH 600 EM 0
4026 km/s Armour 6-33 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 4 PPV 36
Annual Failure Rate: 111% IFR: 1.5% Maintenance Capacity 360 MSP Max Repair 154 MSP
Ion Engine E6 (10) Power 60 Efficiency 0.60 Signature 60 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 100.7 billion km (289 days at full power)
Quad 12cm C4 Infrared Laser Turret (2x4) Range 40,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 16-16 RM 1 ROF 5 4 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S08 64-16000 (1) Max Range: 128,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 92 84 77 69 61 53 45 37 30 22
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 AR-1 (8) Total Power Output 36 Armour 1 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor S10.5-R100 (1) GPS 1050 Range 10.5m km Resolution 100
This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposesAs I said, the smaller GC is not that overwhelming. Armor is cheap. Before the CLE can peel one of these enough to do internals it's taking internals. Close and every hit starts punching through (lasers don't scour, they penetrate). Keep the range open and this ship can step outside the GC range and still hit. Scenarios can be gamed.
Gunboats are worse still.
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Ark Royal class Gunboat 1000 tons 75 Crew 150.4 BP TCS 20 TH 120 EM 0
6000 km/s Armour 3-8 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 2
Annual Failure Rate: 8% IFR: 0.1% Maintenance Capacity 94 MSP Max Repair 30 MSP
Magazine 92
GB Ion Engine E60 (1) Power 120 Efficiency 6.00 Signature 120 Armour 0 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres Range 15.0 billion km (28 days at full power)
Size 1 Missile Launcher (2) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 10
Missile Fire Control FC10.5-R100 (1) Range 31.5m km Resolution 100
SS-1-2 (94) Speed: 28,300 km/s End: 1.8m Range: 3m km WH: 2 Size: 1 TH: 94 / 56 / 28
Active Search Sensor S10.5-R100 (1) GPS 1050 Range 10.5m km Resolution 100
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes13 of these (missile cost 91.368 each) will quickly overwhelm the lone CLE with salvos.
Yes, these are very beardy designs. So is the CLE. But they do demonstrate that the reduced scale GC is not overwhelming at point blank ranges against exist weapons systems. And existing systems are actually cheaper for the slugging ranges than GC's.
Steve has made clear reasons for not adopting my suggestions. As I said earlier, I can live with that.
This was only intended to demonstrate that some of the objections did not take several things into consideration. Part of the difference is that I've been playing with these changes for several months. At first I thought as well that the reduced size coupled with the faster turrets was death on missiles. The fire control is the primary fail point for that though. Mass for mass and cost for cost missiles can overwhelm GC only defenses. Used in conjunction with counter-missiles and then you start to really need beam sluggers. If anything, the reduced size GC reduces the missiles dominance outside of nebulas.
Post by: sloanjh on October 19, 2009, 11:18:44 PM
Quote from: "Kurt"
I have been experimenting with asteroid mining modules lately. To be honest, the reason I didn't use them in the past was because the ships they were mounted on had to be monitored and sent back for overhauls periodically, which was a pain that I avoided by using automated mines instead. Now that commercial ships no longer accumulate time on their clocks I have changed my mind on these and will likely start using them. The changes above mean they will be even more useful.
Ditto. My sentiments exactly - in the past the maintenance run rate was a huge tax on the utility of the miners.
John
Post by: IanD on October 22, 2009, 11:13:55 AM
This may hopefully be covered under the new components mechanism, but can you arrange so missiles or any ordnance can be transported from planet to planet by cargo holds rather than requiring magazines. The rational for this is if I want to resupply my missile ships in space I need an auxiliary and the magazines there to me represent specialist handling gear. While if I want to transfer bulk stocks between planets then a standard hold will do. I would like to see a separation of the two roles. Remember in WW2 if you crewed on a ship transporting munitions across the Atlantic in the convoys they were not specialist merchantmen, you even got a good night’s sleep, but perhaps you didn't wake up again!
Regards
Post by: WHCnelson on November 07, 2009, 07:12:53 PM
I have a suggestion for the next update to Aurora. I believe that if you had a check box for having the computer do the development of
your available Technology; instead of doing the technology and ship design. I know that would have helped me some.... Still, I like what I
see so far...
Post by: waresky on November 08, 2009, 01:41:21 AM
show WHAT r ULTIMATE suggestion's version:)))
4.3 are ELDER:
now we r on 4.61!!!
because 4.6 are out..obviously NEXT r 4.61:D
are TOO MANY TREAD.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on November 09, 2009, 08:31:23 AM
Quote from: "WHCnelson"
Steve,Do you mean..
I have a suggestion for the next update to Aurora. I believe that if you had a check box for having the computer do the development of
your available Technology; instead of doing the technology and ship design. I know that would have helped me some.... Still, I like what I
see so far...
1) Just select technology pre-game and not do ship design
or
2) Let the computer choose which technology to develop next once the game is running
If it is 1) then you can choose that option on the New Game window. If 2), then I could probably add someting along those lines.
Steve
Post by: ussdefiant on November 09, 2009, 09:41:08 AM
Post by: WHCnelson on November 09, 2009, 01:38:12 PM
Quote
Do you mean..
1) Just select technology pre-game and not do ship design
or
2) Let the computer choose which technology to develop next once the game is running
If it is 1) then you can choose that option on the New Game window. If 2), then I could probably add someting along those lines.
Steve
Steve Walmsley
Aurora Designer
I was thinking of Number 1 for Pre-game.... and maybe even a place to actually select the type of vessel and let the computer put the approprate tech on.
Example: I want a Missile Destroyer at 6500 tons and the computer designs it after all of the tech has been developed...
Because right now it designs quite a few vessels and I don't think you need all that is designed....
I will soon submit some new vessel designs for review and comment.....
Free Willy....
Post by: waresky on November 09, 2009, 02:33:28 PM
Can post SUGGESTIONS for NEXT NEW version?
r too many "suggestions" open,and am think Steve FOLLOW only the LATEST for the PROX version of game..
ty and apologize for my bad englishEDIT for Moderators: pls ERASE older Suggestion and pls take open the latest ty again
Post by: Steve Walmsley on November 10, 2009, 01:15:01 AM
Quote from: "waresky"
Guys pls..For new questions, suggestions or bugs then it is best to post in the latest thread. However, for existing questions and discussion I don't mind finishing the conversation in the older thread.
Can post SUGGESTIONS for NEXT NEW version?
r too many "suggestions" open,and am think Steve FOLLOW only the LATEST for the PROX version of game..
EDIT for Moderators: pls ERASE older Suggestion and pls take open the latest ty again
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on November 10, 2009, 01:20:23 AM
Quote from: "WHCnelson"
I was thinking of Number 1 for Pre-game.... and maybe even a place to actually select the type of vessel and let the computer put the approprate tech on.OK, that sounds reasonable. The first part of what you after after can be done already on the New Game window by selecting tech development but not ship design. This will research suitable background tech. Then you want to specify a role and a hull size and let the program design both the various tech components required and then create an actual ship design, which you could modify if desired. Does that sound right?
Example: I want a Missile Destroyer at 6500 tons and the computer designs it after all of the tech has been developed...
Because right now it designs quite a few vessels and I don't think you need all that is designed....
I will soon submit some new vessel designs for review and comment.....
Free Willy....
Steve