Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Suggestions => Topic started by: Jiman on July 09, 2012, 01:01:21 PM
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I think Aurora is a fun and fantastic game. Its in depth, its complex and you can tell even though it is complex, time has been taken to organize it in a way where its easy to interact with.
The only issue i have though with Aurora and everything it offers is combat. I simply can not stand the combat. It does not seem realistic to me, its cumbersome, it destroys the flow of the game.
I dont have any specific suggestions to improve this part of the game, but I felt that I needed to share my prospective in hopes that it eventually is improved upon so I may once again enjoy the game to its fullest.
Edit:
I do realize that it would be more productive to state specifically why I feel this way. I will do this once I have more times on my hands.
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I was just going to respond and then saw your quick edit.
Everyone here seems to welcome discussion of the positives and negatives with equal reverence to both. But to state that you dislike something it will be beneficial if you can elaborate on what you dislike.
In some case, myself included, incorrect menus or functions are being used thus giving an undesirable experience. For combat there is more then one screen where you can administrate your warships and one of the pages is all but non-functional.
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i dont have much experiance with combat, but a few things i think can be improved, or maybe someone can tell me a better way todo it.
my first problem is, that the Combat Assignments Overview window is not updated between combat turns, opening it every turn again is realy no fun =(
my 2. problem was with an enemy missile ship
i think it fired about 300 missiles at me, in volley of 8 or so, i used beam ships, so there was not much offence for me, so i needed to fly thrue all of thouse missiels which took me about 10 game mins or so - in 1-5s time frames Oo.
i see that it is neccessary in some way to give me all the information about thouse size 1 missiles(hits/misses/dmg reports/pd).
but it was not much fun to play.
3. is about crew training - in close combat i got the msg "not ready to fire yet". i know now that it means that my crew was untrained, but maybe the msg could be changed in some way to reflect, that it is connected with crew training.
that new players dont get confused/enraged about it, without a chance to understand without searching the forums =)
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Combat for me was incredibly frustrating, and then I figured it out. it still does some annoyances, but that is for balance reasons rather than poor design as far as I can see.
Missiles take a while to get through, but that is the nature of the game(which is mp focused acutally). You want the time to react and respond to threats. You can pass through them faster though, by forcing increments, space time bubbling the system in question, and having an extremely robust final defensive fire setup.
As far as ships not firing, that is inexperienced crews, or ships trying to synchronize their fire with other ships that are not yet ready to fire. On one occasion I had my ships in a synch fire -> autofire loop where they refused to fire, so be careful with those options.
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i dont have much experiance with combat, but a few things i think can be improved, or maybe someone can tell me a better way todo it.
my first problem is, that the Combat Assignments Overview window is not updated between combat turns, opening it every turn again is realy no fun =(
Just select the system from the dropdown near the top. That will refresh the info.
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Am play Aurora from early stage..with enormous enthusiasm (apologize my english,mates..)
But combat r a hardest part in whole game.
Sometimes ive tell Steve for change some..
But arent easy.
Steve and me,have been play at Megatraveller for ages...but am fear "Traveller Combat System" are too strategical for Aurora..but...
Hope Steve sit down and think another Combat system,one day or later.
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Nothing is too challenging or too strategic in gaming. I hate when people like to dumb things down. That is why most are on the aurora forum and no sin of the solar empire or what not. It the challenge, I think the more in depth the better the game as long as the UI and the maths coprocessor can handle it.
If anything for me combat become a little easy to predict. Normally it who has the most missile stock or can fire the most waves wins. Where bunching of space craft is more preferable then squadrons on different vectors. I think the biggest game changer would be if Steve made splash damage due to ships in a squadron breaking apart, then you would be question how many to put in a squadron.
Also I would prefer missile to not be as effective with more chance for missing and doubling laser range in general, this might take away the missile centrix combat that exists.
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The problem is that laser range is limited by how far it could travel in a single 5sec increment due to the speed of light. Steve has said in the past that he didn't want to have to handle laser packets flying around.
Additional tech to give ecm a chance to simply cause missiles to miss/prematurely detonate rather than only reducing the tracking range of the missile firecontrol may be a good idea. As it is you simply oversize your firecontrols and can then ignore any enemy ECM for your missile ships.
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The two things I'd like to change in the current combat are: log entries and energy based combat.
As of now, there are simply too many log entries for me. Every hit is logged and dipslayed. Give option to display more compact form, that show only a total result of the past increment - total hits on targets, total misses and maybe a list of destroyed components. As it is, in a battle as small as six ships vs nine (replaying campaign, six sides, I control them all) the amount of log entries made me completely ignore them. I was checking the status on my ships in the ships screen every increment, because it was more convenient.
As for energy based combat. I'm just repeating here what have been said many times: make it more competitive. I'm not sure I know how. I guess, the easiest way would be to increase the costs of missiles. The second thing that may help, would be to make some kind of AI tracking for missile defence. I remember my first time in combat when I had inexperienced crew, rather weak sensors and because of this my point defence never engaged, because they couldn't react fast enough (meaning three five second increments). Adding an AI tracking component (that may have it's problems, like decreased chance to hit) that would always react on time would probably help a lot to blunt the effectiveness of missiles.
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The two things I'd like to change in the current combat are: log entries and energy based combat.
As of now, there are simply too many log entries for me. Every hit is logged and dipslayed. Give option to display more compact form, that show only a total result of the past increment - total hits on targets, total misses and maybe a list of destroyed components. As it is, in a battle as small as six ships vs nine (replaying campaign, six sides, I control them all) the amount of log entries made me completely ignore them. I was checking the status on my ships in the ships screen every increment, because it was more convenient.
As for energy based combat. I'm just repeating here what have been said many times: make it more competitive. I'm not sure I know how. I guess, the easiest way would be to increase the costs of missiles. The second thing that may help, would be to make some kind of AI tracking for missile defence. I remember my first time in combat when I had inexperienced crew, rather weak sensors and because of this my point defence never engaged, because they couldn't react fast enough (meaning three five second increments). Adding an AI tracking component (that may have it's problems, like decreased chance to hit) that would always react on time would probably help a lot to blunt the effectiveness of missiles.
Hm, if you set-up your ships right, they should _allways_ engage incoming missiles. You do _not_ have to give orders to your AMM launchers and PD-turrets. If you do this, unexperienced crew will indeed never fire. You have to set up your defenses on the Battle Window (F8). There you tell your ships computers how many AMMs to launch at each detected hostile missile and how your PD-turrets are supposed to act.
Select a missile fire-con
Select how many AMMs will be launched at each enemy missile (0 to 5)
Select a beam fire-con
Select the defense mode:
Area Defense engages the incoming missiles as far out as possible, trying to get a second shot in (usually _very_ hard to achieve and rarely worth the reduced to-hit chance at long range)
Final Defensive Fire engages any incoming missile, that targets a ship in its own taskgroup
Final Defensive fire (self only) engages only incoming missiles, that target this one ship
Both final defensive fire modes shoot, when the missile reaches 10.000 km, which is the minimum range of combat in Aurora and which gives the best to-hit chance.
You can copy those settings for all ships of that type in the taskgroup, in the system or throughout your empire (buttons on the right)
Attention: If your ship has both, AMMs and turrets and you set-up your turrets first, the range, your AMMs will engage the enemy missiles will by default be the range of your turrets. You have to change that range manually (yes, I lost a few ships before I could figure out why they would not engage the hostile ASMs)
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Ah, thanks a lot. I was using "manual" missile defence until this time :-[
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*cough* I actually like the fact that combat takes forever and is quite unwieldy.
I still remember my first fight against the precursors that I've won. It probably took somewhere around 3 real world hours and technically we fought at an astonishing distance of one AU but it was fun and exciting, whenever one of my ships got very close to blowing to smithereens I got tense, whenever one of their ships turned into a wreck I let out a "YUSS!!!" and did a victory dance (yes).
There were some annoyances but I quickly understood why they exist, the most noticeable one was the fact that the bad guys were shooting missiles in 5 second intervals while I fired everything I had pretty much instantly (now I know that's one of the worst things to do if I want to beat the AMM's) this took 40-50, 5 second intervals and than a very tense hour as I was manually assigning targets for my AMM's to save as many ships as humanly possible when faced against a seemingly unending wave of missiles.
It was all glorious and despite the fact that most of it was shown through static screens and text it was probably the most fun I've had in months.
So yeah the combat system is really close to perfection in my mind. The only way it could be improved is probably by making it more complex and for that I don't know what aspects of the game could possibly increase in complexity without breaking the rest.
The only ONLY thing I could say needs to be fixed is player error. And that is making a stupid mistake and pressing 8 hours instead of 3 hours or something like that and than realizing that all your ships have been blown to bits because the game didn't stop processing even though your amm's were on. It should stop as soon as one of the ships takes damage, it might be too late anyway but it should.
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The only ONLY thing I could say needs to be fixed is player error. And that is making a stupid mistake and pressing 8 hours instead of 3 hours or something like that and than realizing that all your ships have been blown to bits because the game didn't stop processing even though your amm's were on. It should stop as soon as one of the ships takes damage, it might be too late anyway but it should.
This is why saving early and often is recommended, especially during combat (or during approaches to potential combat situations, like exploring a new system).
John
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Not sure if this is necroing or off topic.
There are some major issues with combat:
1. The interfaces are cluttered are fairly easy for new players to get lost in. They are also rather frustrating.
2. A single missile ship will grind the game to a halt.
3. The text information will all smash together, thus providing you with ugly clutter that tells you nothing.
4. Too much useless information is presented in the info dump.
5. The list of enemies becomes hard to look through and select.
6. The fire control systems are hard to set up and individually target.
7. The fleet management and the ability to handle advanced formations is hard to pull off at best, and broken at worst.
1. Having a CIC tab that has all combat information and control in one screen would help, perhaps similar to the economy screen (F2) and it's many tabs.
2. I have no idea how the game is set up to run sub-pulses, but maybe make it so that a successful intercept does not stop the time, or that armour damage won't interrupt.
3. Perhaps another map that, instead of text, would show generic symbols with contact numbers (Sierra-4, Vampire-2, or maybe a NATO symbol, etc), which could then be expanded if information is required by the player.
4. Stack the information. Instead of 20 lines of weapon recharges with show events ticked, it will show "20x weapons recharging this tick" in one line. Maybe even make it only show out of the ordinary messages or negative status.
5. Maybe make it so the list box is larger, or that the information is presented neatly, without requiring the extend button.
6. Make it so fire control can be set up from the design window? I got nothing else.
7. Fix task forces so that a task force is actually a task force. Make it so units will actively support other units in it's task force.
Note that all of ^these^ are problems with the game engine, layout or time pulses. Nothing here has anything to do with balance issues or AI. Also some issues that people (not necessarily me) that people like to talk about:
1. The whole missile issue (large missiles vs small missiles)
2. Electronic warfare
3. Large meson cannons late game
4. Large microwave weapons late game
5. Fighters and their formations and flights
6. Planning attacks using passive information, such as thermal or optics
7. Boarding, pirating, privateering
8. etc...
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to add to this, now I've finaly had my first real combat experience and didn't really like it:
default combat orders, things like:
auto enable fighters and parasites to land on their assigned mothership when empty, and relaunch when re-armed(and especially in the case of box launchers reloaded)
fighters really need some sort of - go find and attack the nearest non disabled enemy of List[shipclass] then return and rearm. the list would be a prioritized list of ship classes for a specific class of fighter(or any ship design really) to attack, with some default quick ordering like largest at top, smallest at top etc.
you'd have to add some range fudge into that too though, ie, how far out of their way will they go to attack their ideal target when there's another less ideal one close by? gets complicated. let the player decide as much as possible.
movement orders where ships will attempt to keep out of range of the enemy weapons while still be in range of their own. in the case of beam weapons this will be a little trickier since the closer you are the better the chance to hit, and with lasers the more damage dealt. missiles would be easier since they can just keep at max range.
being able to set things like, fire x number of y type(series?) of missile at z enemy ship class. or in the case of a new and unset ship class z would be size.
just things to reduce the tedium of combat. it's one thing to sit and wait for it, it's another to have to give lots of little repetitive orders over and over and over again.
the whole thing ofc could get quite complex. which is not a bad thing if there's some half decent defaults. add yet another dimension to the game.
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A CAP airmode for fighters would solve most of those problems. Fighters assigned to CAP rotate in squadrons and protect the carrier (attacking anything that comes near thats hostile automatically landing to rearm and so forth). This would take out micro managing individuals fighters and mean that smaller squadrons of X size would be beneficial. It also makes combat a little simpler for carrier based fleets.
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A CAP airmode for fighters would solve most of those problems. Fighters assigned to CAP rotate in squadrons and protect the carrier (attacking anything that comes near thats hostile automatically landing to rearm and so forth). This would take out micro managing individuals fighters and mean that smaller squadrons of X size would be beneficial. It also makes combat a little simpler for carrier based fleets.
The other way would be for the computer to determine flights inside of squadrons automatically, switching active flights inside of a single squadron.
So First Squadron could have three flights; A, B, C which rotate on an 8 hour shift around the carrier. The computer could just pick the fighters and pilots who are in the best shape whenever a crew shift happens.
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I know its quite late but,
@se5a
there are a few automation tools to make what you are talking about easier. Most importantly the Same Loc (Multi Targets) button in the combat overview.
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What the game really needs is a formation editor. It is extremely difficult to position ships in the current display. Something like in Harpoon would be wonderful, but equally effective would be something that allowed you to select a ship as the reference point and then position your formation with respect to it.
I would love to have my two terriers 5000 km appart as a base and the London 30k km ahead of them (making a triangle) with the pinnance 60 k km ahead of the London.
It is also hard enough to position your forces on the system map since the accuracy of your clicking is limited. There is no grid for reference so again maintaining a formation is all but impossible.
Most of these problems could be solved with a formation editor or some kind or another.
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I would love to have my two terriers 5000 km appart as a base and the London 30k km ahead of them (making a triangle) with the pinnance 60 k km ahead of the London.
You can do this without a TON of trouble. Put each of your ships into its own TG. Set your London TG as the superior formation for the other two. Then set Terrier 1 to Protect Threat Axis as follows:
Threat: Protected TG Destination
Task Group: London
Distance: 30.1k km
Offset Bearing: 5 degrees clockwise.
Set your other Terrier to the same settings, except 5 degrees counterclockwise.
You have to do a little right-triangle trig to get these values, but you could always just round them and be slightly less precise. As long as the two Terrier TGs are escorting with mirrored settings, you'll have your triangle. Importantly, you can now use 'Save Escorts' on the London TG, and then freely use Recall and Deploy escorts to reform and redeploy.
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That is good to know, thank you. I figured there was a way to do it if I broke the ships up into individuals and played with the orders. I just would rather not have to break them up...lazy of me I know. I guess I just really really really like the formation editor in Harpoon.
I will do this next battle and see how it goes. Thanks again.
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It would be even more fun if the final fire setting would fire at anything in range. Currently it only protects their own TG. So if you split them up and even if they are just 10k km apart they can no longer use their short range beam weapons to fire at incoming missiles.
Hopefully there will be some change in these mechanics in the future.
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It would be even more fun if the final fire setting would fire at anything in range. Currently it only protects their own TG. So if you split them up and even if they are just 10k km apart they can no longer use their short range beam weapons to fire at incoming missiles.
Hopefully there will be some change in these mechanics in the future.
Final fire protects all nearby ships, not just those in the same TG. Check your max range settings for the point defence. Ships will only use their PD to defend friendly or allied ships within that range.
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They do!!! I must have missed that... good to know. :)
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Having an order along the lines of pursue/attack enemy ships as a fleet order would be nice.
Also being able to set up default fire control assignments in class design would eliminate a lot of pointless copy/paste work. A restore default button on the ship controls would round it out nicely.
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My two cents.
I do like the detail of the combat. The biggest problems I have is that I seem to only be able to automate final defensive fire and that's all. Whenever I set the fire control to Area Defense it resets itself to final defensive fire. I find this incredibly annoying due to the design of my Gauss cannon defense system. My escort ships have 3 twin half size turrets with each gun firing 6 rounds each, 36 rounds per ship every 5 second interval. Now multiply that by the number of ships (the minimum being 5 ships) and you get an awe inspiring number of rounds. My larger ships have full sized twin turrets and my missile ships use two singles. One of my fleets right now fires a total of 408 shells every 5 seconds and that's not counting the rail-guns. So even at long range I am going to hit something and personally I would rather take every single opportunity to hit that I can. If I manually aim my guns not a single missile can even get close to my fleet, but I should not have to micro the aiming. Unfortunately my game does not accept area defense orders with anything.
Side note, I dont have a single AMM designed, I dont use them. I do have AFMs but never deployed them because I have yet to run into fighters.
As far as the game combat being focused around missiles, it entirely depends on your play style. I do have long range ASMs but my main combat is up close and personal with Gauss turrets and rail guns with BIG short range torpedoes (the weakest having a nuclear blast power of 49). I have yet to run into anything I cant close with unless I screw up and hit the wrong time increment button but then enough of my heavily armored fleet survives to destroy the enemy. Unsurprisingly I cant wait for shock damage in the next version. A nuclear blast power of 49 should disable most enemy ships in one shot.
One big problem is combat reports. I dont read the 400+ reports of hits or misses, its just to much. There really does need to be a summary system or something.
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@GenJeFT, What specificly have you done for setting Area Defense?
@any mod... perhaps this sub-discussion is best split to it's own topic in either Academy or Bugs.
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@GenJeFT, What specificly have you done for setting Area Defense?
I go into Ships, select the specific ship to set up the fire controls. Click on the pull tab menu for select fire mod for SFC and select area defense. Then I put in the range in Max PD range and put in 50 so it fires at the 50,000km range of my gauss turrets. But the settings dont stick. I would like my Rail guns (or MAC guns as I call them, yes I played HALO) to auto fire on enemy ships but that does not happen either. Most of my combats leaving me manually targeting everything on every ship.
Doing some testing with some really old ships.
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I go into Ships, select the specific ship to set up the fire controls. Click on the pull tab menu for select fire mod for SFC and select area defense. Then I put in the range in Max PD range and put in 50 so it fires at the 50,000km range of my gauss turrets. But the settings dont stick. I would like my Rail guns (or MAC guns as I call them, yes I played HALO) to auto fire on enemy ships but that does not happen either. Most of my combats leaving me manually targeting everything on every ship.
Doing some testing with some really old ships.
Try a value of 5 instead of 50.
Just curious, why are you trying to use area with such a short ranged system? Final would much more effective all things considered.
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Well, I have experienced my first combat. I think the thing that Steve must repaired or change is "The Combat Assignment Overview". The flow of combat is good. In my first combat, It was very confusing. Because I didn't understand about the combat mechanic at all. I faced many trouble there. From chasing the enemy because of my ship design flaw (my ship is a laser corvette that fire every 4 charged time), etc. But after I understand the mechanic, it's fun. Yet, Steve needs to repair, or if not to change a lot of things in "User Interface" here.
1st. Rather than changing from one form to another (just because we need to direct our involved ships in combat from "system Map" and other forms (like combat assignment overview, Fleet Order, Individual Ship forms, etc), why not making a special form that will focus to combat system. In this form, we will get a system map, individual involved ships, to buttons that involve ships and fleet maneuver in combat. It will simplify the game a bit, but not cut the feature and the mechanic.
This form will act as CIC / Bridge / Flag bridge of the commander of individual ship / fleet. There, you can see the map around the ship that involved in combat, buttons to "Fire", turn on/off Active sensor, etc. You can even arrange the ships that you can control in this form (rather than choose one among all the ships that you have - it won't add micro, but consume more unnecessary time that we can cut to enjoy this game. And there, you can read "Combat log" without opening "Event Update" form all the time. It will simplify unnecessary micro but still keep the fun of time calculating etc that the game has.
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Try a value of 5 instead of 50.
Just curious, why are you trying to use area with such a short ranged system? Final would much more effective all things considered.
Simple, most of the missiles I run into fly at 25,000m/s or less. So I fire at 50,000 meters, again at 25,000 meters, and again point blank in that last 5 seconds.
Why fire once when I can fire 3 times?
For extra point blank fire I still have CIWS.
I also detect the missiles at really long range so by the missiles enter PD range I usually have a really high tracking bonus. I will tell you more about it next combat I get into and get you more exact numbers.
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Simple, most of the missiles I run into fly at 25,000m/s or less. So I fire at 50,000 meters, again at 25,000 meters, and again point blank in that last 5 seconds.
Why fire once when I can fire 3 times?
If a missile fly at 25,000m/s it will move 125,000m in one five second pulse before you can fire again.
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Simple, most of the missiles I run into fly at 25,000m/s or less. So I fire at 50,000 meters, again at 25,000 meters, and again point blank in that last 5 seconds.
Why fire once when I can fire 3 times?
For extra point blank fire I still have CIWS.
I also detect the missiles at really long range so by the missiles enter PD range I usually have a really high tracking bonus. I will tell you more about it next combat I get into and get you more exact numbers.
This doesn't make sense.
First issue... game range scale is in kilometers not meters.
Second issue... the smallest time cycle for the game is 5 seconds which means that said missiles covers up to 125,000km. 2.5x the maximum range of your gauss cannons. Manual targeting should only be able actually resolve a shot about 1 time in 3 chances. You are probably not seeing this because the volume of systems within range are masking effect.
Third issue... manually targeted weapons will not be able to fire at missiles during the same 5 second impulse that said missiles intercept their target. It's an issue with the game sequence, all movement is resolved prior to normal weapons fire. The only exception is assigned final defensive fire which is resolve during movement.
@ any mod--- this really needs to be split to a separate topic in academy.
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This doesn't make sense.
First issue... game range scale is in kilometers not meters.
Second issue... the smallest time cycle for the game is 5 seconds which means that said missiles covers up to 125,000km. 2.5x the maximum range of your gauss cannons. Manual targeting should only be able actually resolve a shot about 1 time in 3 chances. You are probably not seeing this because the volume of systems within range are masking effect.
Third issue... manually targeted weapons will not be able to fire at missiles during the same 5 second impulse that said missiles intercept their target. It's an issue with the game sequence, all movement is resolved prior to normal weapons fire. The only exception is assigned final defensive fire which is resolve during movement.
@ any mod--- this really needs to be split to a separate topic in academy.
Made a big math error on my part. now I feel stupid.
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Don't sweat it. I get bit by the details quite often.
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Final intercept allows weapons to get one chance to fire. Mechanically, I'm sure I think it actually happens after the game recognizes that the missiles hit but before the game calculates miss chance. I've seen my lasers set on PD automatically switch in the combat screen when missile speeds were too fast, so if you have weapons set to point defense they never will be completely useless.