I would like to suggest a new way to exploit distant binary systems.
As we know, hyperdrive didn't really work that well and was removed. Frankly, I do not want to see it back, it would probably still be problematic. That, and having to have a new, different engine for all ships required to make the trip between the distant companions would be problematic.
I think a much more elegant and "realistic" solution would be, after researching an appropriate technology, the possibility to build in-system gates between stars. You could justify it as a technology that "replicates the natural lagrange points", only that because of the imperfect results due to it being artificial, it requires the mass of a star.
Mechanically, it would be similar to the already present gate constructors. You would build a "lagrange constructor" ship, with the appropriate module. Send it to a star. Order a "build gate to <other star in system>" command, and then wait until it is complete. That would create a one-way gate, as for the other normal type of system-to-system gates. If you want a two-way artificial lagrange point, you would send the constructor to the other side and build the gate on that side as well.
I hope that this solution would be relatively simple to implement, and once it's done it can work with the already present code for routing ships. And it would allow to finally use systems with distant stars companions.
Defining which events break up the time progression cycle
Copy of posting from here:
hxxp: aurora2. pentarch. org/index. php?topic=9835
Would be nice if we could choose which actions stop a time progression cycle early and which don't. At least for some of them I cannot understand why they stop it early.
Orbital Habitats
This is a copy of a post in the VB6 7.2 Changes List. I didn't release the updated VB6 version so this is still a change from the released VB6 Aurora.
The population capacity of orbital habitat modules has been increased from 50k to 200k. In combination with the new 'No Armour' option this significantly reduces the cost of building orbital habitats. For example, the habitat shown here supports a population of one million for a cost of 1145 BP. To support one million colonists with infrastructure on a colony cost 2.0 world with acceptable gravity would cost 400 BP, so the colony cost would have to be approaching 6.0 before the Orbital Habitat became cheaper. For low-gravity worlds it is comparable with the cost of low-gravity infrastructure and it is the only option for high gravity worlds or small bodies with low population capacities.
Sidon class Orbital Habitat 1,252,970 tons 162 Crew 1144.7 BP TCS 25059 TH 0 EM 0
1 km/s No Armour Shields 0-0 HTK 132 Sensors 1/1/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 0 Max Repair 200 MSP
Habitation Capacity 1,000,000
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
Commercial Active Sensor (1) GPS 1920 Range 27.3m km Resolution 120
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as an Orbital Habitat for construction purposes
About Orbital Habitats:
wouldn't it make more sense to chance the "Commander" of a non-military habitat to a "Civil Admin slot" instead of a Naval Commander slot? The example habitat Steve posted today is a pure living station, so a civil commander would be better suited than a military officer.. a miltary station should still need a military commander
Just thought of this, could FACs get a minor tracking speed bonus? They are so similar to fighters, but lose the best part (from a direct fire perspective). If they could get a 2x bonus (vs the 4x for fighters).
For instance, it'd be great to have a cargo group setup to load materials from a colony once that colony hits a certain level.
This is almost more of an idle thought than a fully-weighed suggestion, but-
At present, the only hard distinctions between ship classes are as follows: Whether a ship has military or commercial drives for the purposes of using jump drives, whether a ship is military or civilian for maintenance and morale purposes, and whether a ship is a fighter or literally anything else.
That last one sticks out to me as the most 'arbitrary' of them. Whether you're a conventional empire, a fledgling TN race, or someone with mastery of the stars strong enough to challenge the [spoilers]- a fighter factory can only produce designs up to 500 tons, across the entire span of the game. Your industrial base and shipyard tech might reach the point where you have gargantuan warships as your standard combatants, but a fighter will only ever be 500 tons or less.
So, my suggestion is to add a new tech line that determines the capacity of your fighter factories. It can be an extremely expensive tech, but I feel like allowing even a bit of wiggle room in the flexibility of those factories would jive well with overall progression.
Could we have multiple tractor units per ship?
I'm trying to avoid that due to complexities of tractor chains.
Improving the way you set up and edit ship formations plus attendant FACS and fighters would be great. With the sensor changes I’m expecting more us of pickets etc but at present it is quite a lot of effort to set up and then edit. Some flex on deciding which elements will detach from the main TG at any particular point in time would be helpful.
I'm not sure how that'd interact with your rework on them, so it's all from VB, I'll admit.
Can you make it so a planet that isn't visited regularly by civilian colony ships slowly becomes more and more attractive to them?
Often when I have one homeworld and say 2 colonies at col cost 0, civilian colony ships will only fly between the homeworld and the closest colony, unless I set it to "stable" for some time. (I suspect even with your change, civilians colony ships would only fly the route that gives them the most wealth/time and forget the rest exists.) So could you make it so if the second, more distant colony hasn't seen civilian colony ships in a while, the reward for civilian colony ships would slowly ramps up until eventually they find it more interesting than the closest colony? It'd slowly go back down as colonists start being unloaded there.
I think it'd be better to make un-flown routes offer more money than make the over-used ones offer less, it'd keep their and your income about constant. You'll likely get a bit more since between the time they decide on their new target that'd bring them just one more wealth and by the time they get there, the reward would have kept going up. If you make their most-used routes less rewarding though they'll go use another, make it less rewarding and keep switching, making all the trade routes less and less rewarding, spiraling down until they're not making any money anymore at all. If there's a hard cap to ensure there's always a decent-ish minimum reward, some routes would still appear less interesting than another's minimum and never be used at all.
I'm not super sure it affects freighters because I only ever get very few of them, but it seems having more trade goods to pick from than just "colonists" helps them fly more randomly and that they might not need incentives to fly to other places.
Can we have more ways to sort and/or filter things? Mostly I'm thinking about the task group list in the task group orders window, and the class list on the class design window.
Right now, it's pretty annoying to constantly have to scroll and search through the list of task groups when I want to issue a new order. So I suggest making the TG list more of a tree, using the hierarchy set up in the Task Force Organization window. This way I could keep commercial TG's, survey TG's, and military TG's separate, without being forced to use goofy names to take advantage of the alphabetical order.
I also suggest something similar for any list of ship classes. Give us a better way to manage them than a single, linear list.
I'll repost a possible change I suggested in the C# discussion thread: that real star systems with known planets in real life generate with those planets. That is, something like Proxima Centauri will always have a 1. 25 Earth-mass planet orbiting 7. 2 MKm away from it. All the known planets would exist in a database, and the existing system generation code would be modified to generate other planets and asteroids around the real planets. So we have Prox Cen b, and then maybe some Jupiter-mass companion and asteroid belts out at 2 AU (or something).
Steve, I'm an exoplanet astronomer by day, and I'd be happy to help compile the planet information for you, suggest modifications to the system generation code, or even help modify it myself.
Please change the way you implement the wait command fro VB6. (...)More options to "wait on a specific action or state" would be nice. E.G.: wait until fleet has joined this fleet, wait until x amount of fuel is in cargo of target fleet (for transporting them from harvesters to a colony), wait until x amount of mineral(s) is at target colony, wait until x amount of installation is at target colony, etc.
I think it would be better to just have them as a regular command, three new ones... Wait in seconds, wait in hours, wait in days. You can then just inject these orders as any regular order and it is easily recognized and tracked.
Steve,
After seeing your screenshot of the named waypoints and specifically the "Fleet Exercise Area" waypoint, would it be possible to assign a waypoint (or other destination) to the Fleet Training action?
If assigned, the fleet would move to that waypoint/location and then stay within a certain distance while performing fleet training exercises?
If unassigned, the fleet would behave as currently designed.
As a secondary item, the UI might need to allow a distance to be added to the order to control how far the fleet ranges from the waypoint. I would require the distance to have a minimum (and default), perhaps the range of the longest ranged missile in the fleet or 25 million KM if no missiles are in the fleet.
Speaking of training missile warships and fighters it might make sense if they actually had to launch fighters/expend live missiles during training or at least could do so to speed up the progress.
I like to RP that each launcher need to fire at least once and Fighters fly one sortie during training to not have a SM fail chance when used in anger for real the first time.
This could also make spying on enemy training manouvers a thing if implemented well.. or maybe I'm going into unnessecary detail here
I guess in that case there should be the option to build cheaper training missilesYep, it will be great!
I guess in that case there should be the option to build cheaper training missiles
Can we get a proper fleet combat interface that allows to assign targets to fire controls on an entire fleet instead of having to cycle through each individual ship?
My idea involves fire controls getting set to a fleet fire control channel. These channels then manage all fire controls assigned to them, so you might have a "Beams" channel, a "Beam PD," a "Missile PD", or a "Missile" channel.
Assigning targets (Multiple selection allowed) to a channel means all fire controls will fire on those selected targets.
Channels could have various options, max salvos in flight, max salvos per target in flight, focus fire, spread fire, point defense availability
Target selection would be inherited if a lower formation doesn't override it. So if the channel "Missile" of 1st Fleet targets the enemy battleships, the channel "Missile" of 2nd Squadron of 1st fleet can target an escort, then the Squadron will fire at the escort until it is destroyed, then will switch to the battleships set by the Fleet wide level.
All this would make handling large battles much easier. I don't see anyone having fun assigning each fighter a target when a hundred fighters clash with another hundred.
I guess in that case there should be the option to build cheaper training missiles
Id kindof prefer a training missile item. Doesn't need to be specially designed by the player but it adds some depth if ships out on training are carrying less live ordnance due to their load of training missiles and get caught by the enemy. Making even more things just an MSP cost is a terrible cop out that isnt even worth adding imo.
All this talk about training missiles got me thinking, could we have crew experience gain make a bit more sense?
Having crew gain experience when their ships armour is hit, but not when the shields are hit always seemed a bit odd. It also seemed odd that causing damage didn't give the firing crew any experience gain.
A system where the crew can gain grade from firing training missiles (and maybe other crews could get grade from shooting them down) could be interesting and would add a bit more depth to Fleet Training. You could set up fleet exercises, have one portion of your fleet try to sink the other, that sort of thing.
It would give you something to do while you wait for your explorers to find aliens. :)
A system where the crew can gain grade from firing training missiles (and maybe other crews could get grade from shooting them down) could be interesting and would add a bit more depth to Fleet Training. You could set up fleet exercises, have one portion of your fleet try to sink the other, that sort of thing.
It would give you something to do while you wait for your explorers to find aliens. :)
That is a very interesting idea. The ability to designate part of your own forces as a 'red force' would not only permit training, but allow players to understand combat without losing ships. Perhaps ships could also be set to 'training mode'. If they take damage from friendly ships that are also in training mode, that damage vanishes when they exit training mode (using the assumption it was all simulated damage). Missiles fired in training mode would reappear in magazines (simulated fire). That could even allow allies to train against each other.
Training mode would end automatically if a hostile contact was detected.
Perhaps some stats could even be unknown or quite inaccurate before you have run weapons through actual tests ( like too hit chance vs certain speeds for example ).
Training mode would end automatically if a hostile contact was detected.
Do you mean something like the following by this?
1) The hit chance when a system is originally designed is a "nominal" value.
2) The actual value would be NominalValue*RandomMultiplier where random multiplier runs from e.g. 0.5x - 2x (uniformly on a log scale).
3) The player would originally see the nominal value in dialogs, but as the system gets exercised/tested/used in combat the value would gradually change to actual value.
4) The value would be tracked on a researched component level. So e.g. an engine might have the power and fuel consumption adjusted, and would use the same parameters in all classes in which it was used.
On the one hand, I think that's really cool and realistic from the point of view of actual systems no matching design specs (e.g. early WWII US torpedoes). OTOH it's more micromanagement. OTGH, it puts a lot more fog of war into component design - minmax players wouldn't be guaranteed that subtly tweaking a design for an extra 5% would actually give them that 5%. It would make component design more like rolling characters in D&D, with the tweak that you have to do real-life testing of the components to tell if you got a lemon and want to reroll the same design.
John
1) The hit chance when a system is originally designed is a "nominal" value.I really like this although I'd say the ranges have to be smaller.
2) The actual value would be NominalValue*RandomMultiplier where random multiplier runs from e.g. 0.5x - 2x (uniformly on a log scale).
3) The player would originally see the nominal value in dialogs, but as the system gets exercised/tested/used in combat the value would gradually change to actual value.
4) The value would be tracked on a researched component level. So e.g. an engine might have the power and fuel consumption adjusted, and would use the same parameters in all classes in which it was used.
In VB6 you can use the Combat Overview window to assign fleet wide targeting.
To simplify managing bigger empires having civilian trade also transport minerals would be an ideal addition. Maybe in terms of using the "mineral limit" values as a measurement of automating those orders. If on a colony the mineral amount is lower than the minimum this generates a demand for this mineral and the civilians take a look around which planets do have that mineral in abundance (maybe two or three times over the minimum value) and transport that to the target planet.
Traders tend to refuse to do long runs in vb6 unless there is no other option, I assume as a marginal cost thing. Could we offer premium prices to get them to do long hauls?
While the random generation routines could be worked over to make more sensible "choices" (and to include fleet graphic), my suggestion for C# Aurora would be for the color and fleet graphic choosen in the Race Details Window to only apply to how the empire is represented on its own galaxy map; and for fleet graphics and system color of other empires to "simply" be an editable setting in the Intelligence Window.
If we go down that route, I think it would be ideal to have a way to specify which planets/colonies civilian freighters are allowed to consider when they're looking for where to acquire minerals, and maybe even the ability to designate which minerals they're allowed to take from which planets/colonies.
Like a source, destination or stable preset for minerals?I'm thinking the colonies would have somewhere in the population/production window (probably in the civilian/ind tab) where you can choose what minerals can be exported from the planet by civilians (if any). This is only because the initial suggestion seemed to be that supplying the minerals for civilian transport shouldn't be done with the normal civilian contract system (to reduce micromanage, I'd assume).
Bit of an out-there suggestion this time:Further, what about it is meant to be futuristic? We could build dome or tunnel cities right now if we had the shipping to actually get to other planets. Why does it need the high-tech materials if we could do it in real life?
Remove the Duranium cost from building Infrastructure, have it purely consume time and money.
Since infrastructure can be created as a trade good, it's already possible to create it without spending resources besides time, technically. You could argue that the ability to prepare it on demand is worth the Duranium cost, but personally I always find myself wanting to take advantage of the 'free' trade good version because TNEs are a nonrenewable resource.
Further, what about it is meant to be futuristic? We could build dome or tunnel cities right now if we had the shipping to actually get to other planets. Why does it need the high-tech materials if we could do it in real life?That's a very slippery slope Barkhorn! Why should a financial center or a military academy need high-tech materials?
Maybe civilian mines could actually deliver the duranium they mine which you don't buy and use that to build infrastructure ( and some other trade goods ) with?
I disagree with the slippery slope thing, the idea of financial centers and military academies not needing them seems quasi reasonable to me, though less so. You might need high tech materials to build high tech computers in order to run adequately advanced simulations for both the purposes of the academies and the financial centers.
The suggestion that its 'backwards' seems exceedingly iffy an excuse, I mean is that really a reason to stop all colonization ever until some duranium can be obtained?
I had mostly assumed it was just a vague attempt at balance, which was somewhat undermined by the free infrastructure the civilian market produces.
Maybe civilian mines could actually deliver the duranium they mine which you don't buy and use that to build infrastructure ( and some other trade goods ) with?I mentioned something like this in the discussion thread when people were talking about economics, and I still like the idea. I think it might be nice to have civilian mines actually generate a Trans Newtonian Mineral trade good, and since this has been brought up it would certainly make sense for it to play a part in the production of Infrastructure at least.
You can already set them to do this.
No. I am taking about the minerals that you don't buy being used for trade goods -> infra generation which is built for free now.
That's a thing?
It's not "a thing" which is why I am suggesting it should be! ::)
( Because neither duranium vanishing into thin air when you don't buy it nor infrastructure being conjured out of thin air for free makes sense )
Considering that civilian mines mine all minerals, and preferentially select for high quality Duranium and Sorium deposits while not selecting low quality deposits of these minerals no matter how large nor deposits of any other materials this doesn't sound like a good idea to me. You'd have to link civilian ship production to mining of other materials as well and work out more of the civilian economical background activity.
I am a bit ambivalent about this. As someone who plays conventional start, it means I will have to devote a LOT of time building infra for new colonies...
Or avoid buying some minerals from CMC, but I'm used to just buying everything, since TN minerals are at a premium when it takes years to leave your home system. And so I generally buy every single scrap of metal they produce.
I have considered this in the past as well, plus fuelling civilian ships from civilian harvesters. It adds a lot of complexity around civilians though and it is probably not worth it. The proposal about Duranium for infrastructure does add a useful extra dimension though as it slows down civilian growth and adds meaningful decisions for players regarding the construction of infrastructure.
You'd have to link civilian ship production to mining of other materials as well and work out more of the civilian economical background activity.That would be nice though. A more robust economic model seams like it should mean the possibility for more differences in the economies of different empires, both in the same game and in different games.
Agreed. At present, I would argue that Aurora is already extremely unrealistic in terms of the level of detail and control that a single individual (the player) has over the empire. Even (especially?) autocrats have to cope with bureaucrats who don't do as they're told.It seems to me that in any game like this, where the workings of government aren't really explored, the assumption is that you're playing as either the government in general or the nation/empire in general, rather than the president/dictator/king (and in fact, in the case of the Civilization series I'm pretty sure that's explicitly stated).
I kind of like the struggling part of conventional starts. Wish that it was modeled in even more details with chemical rockets ( low fuel / inefficient ) more conventional techs, and so on
A small mod for civilian lines, I'd like a Step or Increment function added to transport of installations.For this exact case wouldn't it be easier to just build a cargo ship of your own? Civilian transport is useful but I'm not sure it's supposed to be a full replacement for building your own ships.
IE: Supply: 5xConstruction Factories Step 1
Would put 1 factory in the queue and then upon DELIVERY (not pickup) would put the next factory in the queue.
Supply: 5xConstruction Factories Step 2
Would put 2 factories in the queue and then upon DELIVERY (not pickup) would put the next 2 (or remainder) factories in the queue.
I'm tired of wrecking my civilian trade and infrastructure transport just to move some relatively low priority colony upgrades.
For this exact case wouldn't it be easier to just build a cargo ship of your own? Civilian transport is useful but I'm not sure it's supposed to be a full replacement for building your own ships.
What about allowing civilians to transport everything the player can, with the possible exception of missiles and ground troops?
In real life, the US military doesn't transport rare earth metals in from Africa, even if they are strategically important.
What about allowing civilians to transport everything the player can, with the possible exception of missiles and ground troops?
In real life, the US military doesn't transport rare earth metals in from Africa, even if they are strategically important.
Are there any plans to lift the transport restrictions on some of the buildings? There are few (like the financial centers), but they seem to be arbitrary and an annoyance ingame.
The new screenshots of the Ship view/Naval Organization are looking good. Would it be possible to have a way to identify with a glance at the Naval Org view what ships are damaged (different ship name text color or an '*')? It's currently sometimes a hassle to go back and forth between the damaged ships screen and the fleet/ship window.
Yes please, if it's not already a thing. I'd prefer different colours for the ship names. How I'm thinking it could work is have one colour for undamaged, a different colour (yellow?) if the ship only has armour damage, and then another colour (red?) if the ship has damaged internal components.
Has anyone ever heard about virtual components? No? Well, now you have. But what are they?That would be amazing. Especially for fighters and FACs where component size is so critical.
The idea came to me whilst designing new ships. What I sometimes do is SM a certain component (or maybe three to five variations) to see, if they fit my overall design and how much they affect other components which could lead to designing special components (like a new engine).
If I am happy I basically delete these virtial components and research them the proper way.
So how about a button in the tech designer which does exactly that? Insteat of giving a tech to research it creates a virtual component which can be used in ship design. However, that design can't be locked down as long as it has those components in it. Which leads to the next button in the tech designer. Transfer virtual component to research - which then after proper research converts it to a real component.
These virtual components must be clearly distinguishable, of course.
You can offer government contracts, which the civilians will fulfill, but the price you pay beyond the immediate contract cost is the disruption of the civilian economy. Decisions need both advantages and disadvantages or they aren't decisions.Doesn't this lend itself more to the approach of allowing players to take considerable control over the civilian sector at the cost of ever increasing economic inefficiencies? You can already pick economically totalitarian regimes, so that kind of approach would seem to lend itself to that.
Reposting my suggestion from 7.x as it seems more appropriate here:
Make us design ship hulls rather than ships.
That is, instead of designing a complete ship and tooling a shipyard for it we design a hull with various hull spaces, hard points and mounts where ship system appropriate for said spot can mounted. Have said hull be a racial research, then shipyards can tool for said hull. After that ship variants can be designed from said hull (and possibly researched), by adding different systems in the appropriate places and all variants can then be build in the shipyard tooled for said hull.
See for example Star Citizen and their hull variation for inspiration.
More elaborate explanation here (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9627.0)
That would be a complete conceptual rework of how ships fit together, which doesn't really sound that appealing.
Don't remember numbers but you can have one "hull" and a lot of variants of them, and every variant can be built in the same shipyard as basic model.
It would work mostly the same, except that there is a clearer and more logical approach to how ship variants work and more depht.You're talking about moving from a system entirely based around the quantity and quality of components in the ship to a system where we have to design hulls with hard-points and hull-spaces and possibly research both them and their variants. That's significantly different. The current system of "if they're similar enough the shipyard can build both" works fine.
You're talking about moving from a system entirely based around the quantity and quality of components in the ship to a system where we have to design hulls with hard-points and hull-spaces and possibly research both them and their variants. That's significantly different. The current system of "if they're similar enough the shipyard can build both" works fine.
Edit: Sorry for making this a debate in the suggestion thread, lets discus it further in the separate threat I have made for the suggestion, if anyone want to debate it further.
With conditional orders on C# - if there is a similar order to the current conditional order for Fuel Harvesters " unload 90% fuel at colony " , could the new order please include an option that the colony must be one with actual colonists or instead specify a colony by actual name and not just to a colony.
The reason being that on my current game the Fuel Harvesters at Jupiter seem to want to unload 90% of fuel at a passing comet with automated mines , rather than at Earth where my stockpile of fuel is kept.
DavidR
On the combat screen,weapons assigned to fire controls should be green while unassigned ones should be red. Same goes for missiles. Also, if a fire control is selected all of it's weapons should be highlighted.
This would make it far easier to assigns and reassign weapons on ships, as it is fairly confusing right now.
An idea for a new technology: CapacitorThat's a nice idea. I wonder how attractive it would be in reality though? You'd presumably be using up your capacitor charge on long range/low accuracy shots and then be down to slow fire as the range drops and effectiveness increases.
Instead of having a bulky reactor onboard, why not having a smaller one, but loading some batteries which "save" energy that then can be "released" when needed. This would give two basic choices of ship designs:
The Default: Your beam weapons need 46 Energy to maintain a 10 sec firing rate. So you build a reactor of power 23.
The Capacitor: Same energy demand, but instead you load up a reactor of power 11.5 and a battery which can store 230 Energy. The gain would be to have a 5 sec firing rate for the first couple of shots, which then, after the battery is used up, slow down to 20 sec firing rate (because of the smaller power reactor). The gain would also be having a lighter ship which would be faster. Whilst the beam weapons are not charged, the energy would go back into the battery.
That's a nice idea. I wonder how attractive it would be in reality though? You'd presumably be using up your capacitor charge on long range/low accuracy shots and then be down to slow fire as the range drops and effectiveness increases.That's what the AI would do certainly.
It would be an obvious choice for jump defense/assault though where the early shots are what matter most.
But what impact would it have on a Laser? Reduced range? Reduced rate of fire? Reduced damage? All of the above?
What about a turret? What about a CIWS? What about a fuel tank?
Sure. But I don't see that as a problem so much as extra work. (Of course, I'm not suggesting I do the work, so I don't see it as a problem.) You yourself just gave some good examples, and I can do more. Frankly, in the ideal world where Steve took this suggestion and ran with it (while also not adding to his own workload at all, nor the time to release, because he let his magical basement gremlins do the coding), each relevant part would have multiple partial failure states. Some examples:I think the flaw with your plan I see is that many of these changes would be very annoying for players. Any changes to the weapon ranges/fire rates/fire controls is likely to lead to more micromanagement in battle, for instance. Varying speeds and fuel efficiencies will lead to more fuel management problems. etc etc
<snip>
You'd have to have a very strong gameplay benefit to counter-balance adding more micro-management, imho.
I think the flaw with your plan I see is that many of these changes would be very annoying for players. Any changes to the weapon ranges/fire rates/fire controls is likely to lead to more micromanagement in battle, for instance. Varying speeds and fuel efficiencies will lead to more fuel management problems. etc etc
You'd have to have a very strong gameplay benefit to counter-balance adding more micro-management, imho.
Yes, this is the key to any change involving extra detail. Does it add consequential decisions which add game play benefit greater than the additional micromanagement?
Suggestion: Inverse the effect of the "Show Surveyed Bodies" checkbox on the Minerals-tab.
Reason:
Whenever the checkbox is checked it adds a white ring to every body that has been surveyed, which makes the screen very noisy.
That's why I only check it whenever I want to know which bodies still need to be surveyed.
If the effect is inversed you could simply leave it ticked and have your survey ships remove the noise from your populated systems.
Pros:
+ one option less you have to fumble around with every now and then
+ as an added bonus you have less redundant information on the screen, since the checkbox "Show Mineral Concentrations" already implies what has been surveyed.
Cons:
- people will have to get used to the inversed effect
... feel free to add more to the pros and cons if something comes to mind.
Why not have borh? A button for checking surveyed and another dor unsurveyed. That way you get les noise at the begining by seing only the surveyed ones and at the end by seing the unsurveyed bodies.
What if you could have medals you create be auto-awarded to commanders when certain conditions have been met? I. e. If a Ground Commander has been in ten separate battles they get Medal A, if a ship commander's vessel destroys a designated number of enemy ships they get Medal B, if a leader's skill rating in a certain field reaches a certain percentage they get Medal C, etc.
EDIT: And maybe have it as an event as well? That way you know when someone has been awarded one of your medals.
Would it be possible to give ships and ground units an image, similar to that of the alien race image in the Race Details screen?
There was some talk about Jump Gates in the mechanics sections today, so I'll post an idea I've had for a while.
A blockade component that would allow a ship to stop traffic through a jump gate. This would not stop ships with jump drivers. Probably have to make it time limited somehow, perhaps it requires fuel to do it or something similar.
Yes, this is the key to any change involving extra detail. Does it add consequential decisions which add game play benefit greater than the additional micromanagement?
If it's not too late, can we get either "Missile Size Points" or "Maintenance Supply Points" renamed to something else? Or at least, have their abbreviations changed so we don't have two MSPs?
My preference would be to have everything that is currently referenced in M(issile) S(ize) P(oint)s to instead be given in tons, but I could live with MRPs (Maintenance & Repair Points) or Mt (Maintenance) or RSPs (Repair Supply Points) or Quatloos or RoDTs*.
.
*Rolls of Duct Tape
4. Just rename some weapons (and tech lines) as tech progresses. Or give players an option to do so:
Example: Microwave beams from tech level 5 (or some tech level where it makes sense, like a bigger jump in efficiency) to Ion Cannon.
Particle Beams later to Neutron, Antiproton, Multi-Particle. It would be just a new name. No new functionality. The best would if players could specify those names before starting play. This would help imagination a lot making research slightly less tedious.
There's nothing stopping you from doing this on a component basis now.
Working on AI at the moment
I'd like to suggest an "Ignore Colony" button for civilians. There are a lot of times where you need to have a "colony" on a colony cost 0 planet (espionage teams and ground invasions are the main ones) for gameplay purposes but you don't actually want any people sent there.
On a similar but probably more complicated note, I'd also like to suggest allowing multiple species to share the same colony. There are a lot of weird cases in-game right now where you can end up with multiple colonies on the same planet, trying to swap installations, minerals, or ground units between them, and if you try to consolidate them (assuming they are both the same species) into a single colony you risk accidentally deleting something important that you forgot to transfer. I think the biggest issues with this would be infrastructure requirements, but I don't think that would be an insurmountable problem.
Given the changes in species traits, will we be seeing more potential change factors in gene modding? Like traits that let you increase productivity or population density?
In C# Aurora, civilians will not send colonists to any colony with 0 population. This means you need to start your own populated colonies, but prevents the above situation.
If fuel efficiency scaled with % of speed as well, to offer some benefit to operating on reduced velocity, that'd cover the latter. As long as its balanced so that its not superior to an engine built to be run at that slower speed, then it shouldn't have a significant effect on game balance.
Given the changes in species traits, will we be seeing more potential change factors in gene modding? Like traits that let you increase productivity or population density?
Multiple species can't share the same population due to different environmental requirements, which affects not just infrastructure but other factors such as manufacturing efficiency. They can also have different characteristics in C# such as production and research bonuses.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but wouldn't it be fairly trivial in theory ( mathematically at least ) to average weighted for size of population?
A 2 million pop colony with a -20% modifier + a 4 million colony with a +10% modifier becomes a 2*0.8+4*1.1 = 6 million colony with a +0% modifier.
An easier way to manage teams would be nice. At the moment I only recognize if a team has lost one of its members by looking at the commanders screen and see that there are open posts. A warning message like "team incomplete" would be nice. And then if you click on the teams-tab you can only see teams, but not who are in them. Maybe I also want to exchange someone - but that is rather difficult to accomplish because I can only see if someone is in a team when I click on his name in the commanders screen.Teams will not be present in C# aurora right?
Teams will be replaced with ground units or ship components IIRC.
Yes, that is the plan. Geology teams are already gone. Others will be replaced as I code the relevant areas.
Being able to create a corridor through nebulae for ships to move at their usual speeds would be nice.
Maybe a new order to clear away space rubble with weaponry could take of this.
It would create a space in weapon range in which ships can use their normal speeds without obstacles.
As a drawback ships with this order would be easier to detect.
Though I'm not sure if this actually makes sense...
Do ships need armor in nebulae to protect against rubble or because of pressure?
Seems to me you could push it out of the way over time. I'm not saying that should be added, but it seems excessive to declare it impossible.It would take an awfully long time to clear an area, and even if you were to do so, the dust in the nebula isn't motionless, so the area will just get filled back in by more dust.
Age of RaceLike with commander gender, this should go both ways too. Maybe my race of hyper-active marsupials only lives 10 years!
Any chance we can have age changes with Races, that way officers live longer or have alien species living longer then 100 years. A new tech line as well to enhance living age? So instead of hard coding the maximum age you can have it as a fillable field in the Species Tab
Should age correlate with training rates, for balance? If your commanders only live 10 years, you probably need a constant supply of fresh manpower, while with 150 year old commanders you would eventually end up with a huge officer pool at current rates.Age of RaceLike with commander gender, this should go both ways too. Maybe my race of hyper-active marsupials only lives 10 years!
Any chance we can have age changes with Races, that way officers live longer or have alien species living longer then 100 years. A new tech line as well to enhance living age? So instead of hard coding the maximum age you can have it as a fillable field in the Species Tab
Age of Race
A new tech line as well to enhance living age?
However, if we had beam weapons with significantly more range, the race with the longest range weapons wins, regardless of what the other side does, because they would be torn to pieces trying to close that longer range.
Missiles have great range, but require ammo and can be shot down. Beam weapons can fire forever, with no ammo and no possible defence. Their limitation is range. The five second range is convenient technobabble, but the real reason is to avoid breaking the game by making beam weapons too powerful.
Edit: unrelated but I didn't want to make another reply and have it be three in a row.If I'm correct this is all going to under the new OOB screen, anyway
On the combat assignments overview screen, there should be a third tab beyond 'setup fire controls' and 'missiles in flight' named something like 'damage report' that shows current armour, damaged subsystems, and DAC. Basically just copy the one in the individual ship screen, so I don't have to go looking for it.
If you want a long range weapon that can deliver a useful energy load your options at space ranges are basically 'use a self guiding missile' and 'use a chunk mass on a carefully aimed trajectory.'
The reasons for this are mostly to do with energy weapons generally being made of, well, high energy particles. It'd be similar to grabbing a handful of marbles and throwing them, sure, you can get some good distance as glass is dense enough to maintain momentum, but most marbles will scatter across a wide area. If you can actually hit you're better off tossing a single stone of the same weight as all those marbles put together because so much more energy is delivered at the target than with the rather more scattershot impact of the particles.
Which is where the chunk of mass comes in; if you throw something that's not likely to be overly influenced at the relevant range due to gravitational influences, the solar wind and electromagnetic fields you are more likely to hit because fewer things are going to influence the shot. And a chunk of mass, especially something made of tungsten or another high density metal that is not ferromagnetic? It's not going to care much about anything so long as it's fired cold, because there's not going to be any evaporating material shifting the trajectory of the shot either.
Sure, if you're trying to shoot enemy ships with a giant spotlight, but the entire point of a laser is that the beam is coherent. And there are more photons in a laser beam than there are marbles in a handful. The problem with any unguided weapon "at space ranges" is that space is big. Realistically a kinetic weapon would be next to useless unless fired at a very very high fraction of c because the target can simply dodge out the way. When firing a laser beam, or a kinetic weapon close to c, anything beyond a few seconds is pointless because even with the best targeting, random movements by the target can throw it off even if they can't see it coming. Personally I think the way "beam" weapons are handled in aurora currently is generally fine and I don't think it needs some great overhaul to achieve a result that would, ultimately, be overly complicated with convoluted rules and either most likely unrealistic or useless and, as steve has pointed out, would be problemtic for gameplay.
I was reminded (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9343.msg101162#msg101162 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9343.msg101162#msg101162)) that rescuing life pods (your own, or somebody else's) usually results in wildly varying overages of life support capacity. I'd like to suggest some sort of "Equalize POWs/survivors across fleet" and "concentrate all POWs/survivors on a single ship" buttons.I believe Steve has already fixed this, so that lifeboat contents are evenly spread out in a TG. I've brought this issue up several times.
Probably based on available life support capacity, so that one's cryo-equipped rescue ship / prisoner transport properly hoards the 150 extra bodies it was designed for.
Funny you mention spotlights.
At space ranges? Even a powerful laser will have diverged considerably even in a vacuum. It might as well be a spotlight.
He's in charge of it, and can tell it where to go, but the captain is responsible for it, and unless the senior staff has issues the captain is really the last authority on the matter.
Sure, if you' Realistically a kinetic weapon would be next to useless unless fired at a very very high fraction of c because the target can simply dodge out the way.
I am not sure at the moment if I am wrong about a concept in VB6 Aurora. If so, just ignore this posting. If I am right, then at the moment a rocket that is led to a target via an active sensor, the moment the active sensor gets lost, the rocket gets lost, right? If not, again, just ignore this.
But if so, it would be nice if in C# Aurora the game would automatically create a waypoint for the rockets where the last known position of the target was, the moment the active sensor got lost. So in case the rocket itself has an active sensor it then can engage that at that waypoint and see, if there is an enemy ship nearby.
That is correct, except I think missiles with sensors will stop at the last location of their target.I am not sure at the moment if I am wrong about a concept in VB6 Aurora. If so, just ignore this posting. If I am right, then at the moment a rocket that is led to a target via an active sensor, the moment the active sensor gets lost, the rocket gets lost, right? If not, again, just ignore this.
But if so, it would be nice if in C# Aurora the game would automatically create a waypoint for the rockets where the last known position of the target was, the moment the active sensor got lost. So in case the rocket itself has an active sensor it then can engage that at that waypoint and see, if there is an enemy ship nearby.
Last time I checked, a missile WITHOUT on-board sensors would self-destruct if it lost target lock. A missile WITH on-board sensors would continue on -- no change in direction or speed -- while constantly looking for a new target.
This second action is the main benefit for missiles-with-sensors, and thus will not be extended to non-sensor-equipped missiles.
Can you make the VB6 saves work with C#?
Can you make the VB6 saves work with C#?
The answer will be "no". Steve only supports previous saves for minor version updates. C# will have completely different information in the database (and possibly a different database system as well - I don't remember); it would take WAY too much time for him to write a front-porting tool.
John
Maybe. Maybe he will write a conversion program. Or someone else with knowledge of the databases will.
Even aside from the structural changes in the code, the changes to the mechanics alone would render saves incompatible and in need of some conversion. You couldn't simply slap an old save into the new game and go, what would happen to ground units for instance?Depends on how many changes there are "under the hood". Aurora has quite a large amount of background database stuff, which might make it quite impossible to "translate" a game from VB6 to C#. Nevertheless, when C# comes out, I plan to take a look into this (and then eventually refrain from it totally because of "too complex to do"). We'll see...
Some current event log notifications are all or nothing, i. e. You hear about officers, administrators, and scientists dying/worsening in health, but most of the time they're just some random person you don't care about. What if you could set certain positions as having high priority notifications so that you can know about the positions you actually care about, i. e. "Your administrator for the position of Sector Commander of Earth Sector has just died. "Seconded. I can't even count the number times I've been confused by my ships not raising their Task Force Training until I find out my TF Commander died a year ago and I've been wasting fuel the whole time.
Thanks. That way it works.
Does that "fire missile once you're at that location" make any sense? In what circumstance can that be senseful?
It is useful for dropping sensor buoys or mines.
I should think this could stand re-naming to avoid confusion. <snip>
In fact, I'd suggest having both - 'Launch missiles' would just act as it does now, while 'launch missiles from' would pull up a sub-menu that allows you to choose whch launcher and missile you want to use.
<snip>I agree that morale limits the long term usefulness of smaller military stations. I like your abstract option 2, but maybe both stations and ships should have a "rotate crew" option that freezes morale in appropriate systems. It could consume MSP and also reduce crew effectiveness (to represent the fact that your key personnel might be off the ship). So you'd have to make a hard decision about whether you cancel shore-leave as a conflict looms.
1) a station equipped with a shuttle bay, in a system with an appropriate colony world or recreation module-equipped station, would not be subject to morale degradation, denoting the ability of said station to send its crew out on regular leave rotations; or:
2) abstract this by a little by allowing a player to opt for such stations to have a higher annual mineral upkeep in order to represent the associated cost in money and material of using (invisible) commercial shuttles to rotate out crews.
Either case should probably also require that such stations have a higher than normal crew requirement, as both the on-station personnel and those currently on shore leave would be unavailable for assignment on new construction.
Not sure how much other players would want a system like this, or how hard it would be to code; I just know it's something that has always frustrated me a little that I couldn't do, so I figured I'd post it here!
-snip-Isn't this what recreational modules are for?
However, what I haven't seen is how the morale of MILITARY stations might be addressed?
There's never been a way to actually 'rotate crews' in Aurora, and that's pretty much torpedoed the real possibility of building stationary defense bases to look after jump points (at least, not ones that weren't prohibitively huge and expensive anyway).
-snip-
Sort of, but they are very big. I think it should be possible to maintain a, say, 60kt defense station indefinitely. That's not very viable if you need to add a 100kt recreational module.-snip-Isn't this what recreational modules are for?
However, what I haven't seen is how the morale of MILITARY stations might be addressed?
There's never been a way to actually 'rotate crews' in Aurora, and that's pretty much torpedoed the real possibility of building stationary defense bases to look after jump points (at least, not ones that weren't prohibitively huge and expensive anyway).
-snip-
You could build ships with recreational modules, and have them tour your stations.Isn't this what recreational modules are for?Sort of, but they are very big. I think it should be possible to maintain a, say, 60kt defense station indefinitely. That's not very viable if you need to add a 100kt recreational module.
Which basically means you've got a 100kT+ ship moving around your defense perimeter being a target. There's a reason you don't do that in real life and instead shuffle personnel around.Could you explain your analogy to real life here? I can't really think of any strictly analogous situation. Military bases around the world are supplied by a variety of means and I would imagine that at least part of the supply chain includes 100kt ships.
Which basically means you've got a 100kT+ ship moving around your defense perimeter being a target. There's a reason you don't do that in real life and instead shuffle personnel around.Could you explain your analogy to real life here? I can't really think of any strictly analogous situation. Military bases around the world are supplied by a variety of means and I would imagine that at least part of the supply chain includes 100kt ships.
Ok, but then I don't understand how this demonstrates that you "don't do" having a 100kt ship moving around. Obviously ingame it's a bit of an abstraction and there's absolutely nothing stopping you from imagining that that's what is happening anyway.Which basically means you've got a 100kT+ ship moving around your defense perimeter being a target. There's a reason you don't do that in real life and instead shuffle personnel around.Could you explain your analogy to real life here? I can't really think of any strictly analogous situation. Military bases around the world are supplied by a variety of means and I would imagine that at least part of the supply chain includes 100kt ships.
Yes, but if you have a military base in the middle of the ocean, you don't charter a cruise ship to dock up and just let people mess around in the ship facilities for a few weeks. You sail them out to the nearest piece of civilization. If anything, you could probably just rotate leave crew onto those replenishment ships, and they'll drop them off when they return.
Which basically means you've got a 100kT+ ship moving around your defense perimeter being a target. There's a reason you don't do that in real life and instead shuffle personnel around.USO tours are basically that. And during WW2 and before it, mobile bordellos were a thing in most armies. A space station is not in combat 24/7 nor is it necessarily sitting in the "frontlines" all the time. Having a recreational ship visit it once a year or two is perfectly reasonable.
USO tours are basically that. And during WW2 and before it, mobile bordellos were a thing in most armies. A space station is not in combat 24/7 nor is it necessarily sitting in the "frontlines" all the time. Having a recreational ship visit it once a year or two is perfectly reasonable.
I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. It seems to me that Ships in Aurora tend to be quite a bit larger than real world ships. Not only that, but the largest cruise ships today are over 200k tons.Quote from: Garfunkel link=topic=9841. msg108423#msg108423 date=1527130335USO tours are basically that. And during WW2 and before it, mobile bordellos were a thing in most armies. A space station is not in combat 24/7 nor is it necessarily sitting in the "frontlines" all the time. Having a recreational ship visit it once a year or two is perfectly reasonable.No USO tour I've ever seen has consisted of the equivalent of the Queen Elizabeth 2 pulling into port for a month.
@Steve Walmsley have you tried or even played MANO (Modern Air Naval Operations) to see how they deal with the display of unit names and vectors? It can be very rapidly a mess, display wise and I think they did a few things right to de-obfuscate/unscramble display. I'm basing my observations on some screenshots, I did not play the game. But for example at a certain zoom level, individuals ships are replaced by a TF icon, and you can tooltip it. Will Aurora C# supports tooltip on the main map?
I'd love a TN Economy Info windowI don't know how flexible such a thing could be programmed; but I imagine some kind of "universal query system" with which we can create our own "analytical statistics". Especially if you play a multi fraction game, VB6 Aurora lacked quite a bit in giving you the tools to keep everything in overview.
The total empire wide production of every mineral, maybe collapsible to see the biggest production location.
The same for mineral expenditure, and maybe stockpiles.
I don't know how flexible such a thing could be programmed; but I imagine some kind of "universal query system" with which we can create our own "analytical statistics". Especially if you play a multi fraction game, VB6 Aurora lacked quite a bit in giving you the tools to keep everything in overview.
He'd also have to be careful to prevent queries from breaking the DB. Don't want to let anyone run any table drop queries.
Well there is a database for the game, so we could have a screen that display the results of SQL queries on the database, maybe let you save a few different queries so you could easily access multiple reports. That'd be about as much flexibility as you could get.That would be something... . Being able to create some queries, which will be updated after time progressions... .
I was wondering if some of the calculations needed could be pre-done in the background whilst the user is working on his move.
The problem with "follow" is that when you kill the contact you were following, the order stops and your ships stop dead in their tracks. This can be deadly if you're kiting beam ships.
From what I see STO weapons are currently limited to beam weapons only.
Could we also get STO missile launchers? Without long range missiles an enemy can always park themselves outside of beam range and bombard the planet, without being able to strike back.
Further, having a beam fire control for each STO weapon sounds quite expensive. Would it not make more sense to have the fire control as a separate vehicle, where then one can combine however many guns and fire controls into a battery as you think useful?
"Would it not make more sense to have the fire control as a separate vehicle"Used to be, but a lot of modern ground units incorporate their own tracking systems, especially SPAAGs (which beam weapons would be relatively analogous to).
That's what they do in real life usually, at least for land-based AA. Ships tend to all have their own fire control.
No missiles, because I want to avoid the complexities of ground units with ordnance, which also require long-range sensors and long-range fire controls. Beams are nice and straightforward. The fire controls are cheaper for ground units. I wanted every ground unit to be self-contained - otherwise it gets complex to track (for the player as well), so this is the same overall cost for separating fire controls without the micromanagement.My PDCs just all used to be massive missile bases, with beam armament for PD only. STO units could draw ordnance from the planetary stockpile directly, and if the sensors are the problem, one could add them to the deep space tracking installations.
My PDCs just all used to be massive missile bases, with beam armament for PD only. STO units could draw ordnance from the planetary stockpile directly, and if the sensors are the problem, one could add them to the deep space tracking installations.
I really don't want to be out ranged, and if you are behind in beam tech, you cannot compensate with your missiles
By the way, you're mistaking the purpose of STO ground units here. As Persona012345 said, their purpose is: The enemy can either glass the planet at long range (if they can get past your PD), at the cost of most of its infrastructure and population.I feel like it's worth pointing out that since in C# you'll be able to target planets with beam weapons, being outranged in beam tech is actually something to worry about. Unless I'm misremembering how things will work, an enemy with longer range beams could park a beam ship just out of your range, and destroy your STO with its weaponry, with minimal damage to population and infrastructure.
Or try to conquer it with its infrastructure still present, a fact that is hard to accomplish because planetary assault is harsh.
And if you're behind in tech, tough luck. Build more orbital missile bases.
Yes, but I think its a bit more complicated than that because of the new terrain modifier rules. On a flat grassland planet then being outranged is a major worry, but on a mountain or jungle world it will be very difficult for a ship to successfully hit your SFO.By the way, you're mistaking the purpose of STO ground units here. As Persona012345 said, their purpose is: The enemy can either glass the planet at long range (if they can get past your PD), at the cost of most of its infrastructure and population.I feel like it's worth pointing out that since in C# you'll be able to target planets with beam weapons, being outranged in beam tech is actually something to worry about. Unless I'm misremembering how things will work, an enemy with longer range beams could park a beam ship just out of your range, and destroy your STO with its weaponry, with minimal damage to population and infrastructure.
Or try to conquer it with its infrastructure still present, a fact that is hard to accomplish because planetary assault is harsh.
And if you're behind in tech, tough luck. Build more orbital missile bases.
I feel like it's worth pointing out that since in C# you'll be able to target planets with beam weapons, being outranged in beam tech is actually something to worry about. Unless I'm misremembering how things will work, an enemy with longer range beams could park a beam ship just out of your range, and destroy your STO with its weaponry, with minimal damage to population and infrastructure.
It is possible, but as stated:The fact that they aren't STO's. This matters both because of how significant roleplay is to Aurora and because STO's are mechanically different from orbital bases, such as benefiting from fortification and using ground unit officers.
1) If you want to prevent sieges, build more orbital defense stations. Especially if you are out-teched. Do not let the enemy close if at all possible. I don't get this complaint about being outranged. Before, you had PDCs. Now, you're going to have orbital bases. It is the very SAME thing. You can put on your orbital defense bases the same things you had in your PDCs. They are functionally identical. So... what exactly is the problem with orbital defense bases?
... And also, I will be blunt. If you are out-teched and out-produced by an enemy who has a lot more ships than you, things ARE supposed to be hard. The state of the rules, as they should be, seem balanced enough for me.It's not about things being hard, it's about having no response. If the enemy out-ranges me with beam weapons, and I have no missiles, there is nothing I can do. This is not the same as being out-ranged with missiles, where I at least have the ability to shoot at incoming missiles. I understand that, too an extent, weapon failure is intended to deal with this, I feel that a mechanic which involves no player interaction is not a satisfying form of defense.
Before, you had PDCs. Now, you're going to have orbital bases. It is the very SAME thing. You can put on your orbital defense bases the same things you had in your PDCs. They are functionally identical. So... what exactly is the problem with orbital defense bases?
I'm actually kind of curious about how practical orbital stations would be with shield generators instead of armor, since that would mean (I think) you could build them with industry. But building them with shipyards would be workable too; they still get hefty bonuses compared to ships.I think shield generators qualify as military, which disqualifies them from use on stations.
I know in the current version of Aurora PDC beam fire controls get a 50% range bonus, I don't remember if it was mentioned if that gets applied to the new ground based STO beam weapons? But it might help with the worries over being bombarded from out of range.
I'm actually kind of curious about how practical orbital stations would be with shield generators instead of armor, since that would mean (I think) you could build them with industry. But building them with shipyards would be workable too; they still get hefty bonuses compared to ships.I think shield generators qualify as military, which disqualifies them from use on stations.
I know in the current version of Aurora PDC beam fire controls get a 50% range bonus, I don't remember if it was mentioned if that gets applied to the new ground based STO beam weapons? But it might help with the worries over being bombarded from out of range.
Space stations can use military components, though. The discussion was whether you could use industry instead of shipyards to build defense stations, which means they'd also have a bunch of guns and missile launchers that would also be military components.http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106758#msg106758
As far as I can tell the only limitation on stations to be built by industry is "no armor"; I don't know if shields instead of armor would be practical, but it seems perfectly rules legal.
Space stations can use military components, though. The discussion was whether you could use industry instead of shipyards to build defense stations, which means they'd also have a bunch of guns and missile launchers that would also be military components.http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106758#msg106758
As far as I can tell the only limitation on stations to be built by industry is "no armor"; I don't know if shields instead of armor would be practical, but it seems perfectly rules legal.
There are two more limitations: No engines, and no military systems to qualify for being a station.
Also, in real life larger does not necessarily mean more difficult to develop, as certain things get easier if you have the necessary space available compared to cramming everything into the smallest possible compartment.But that is already in the game: A larger engine with the same total power is cheaper to develop. And cramming the same engine into a smaller housing (by increasing the power multiplier) increases cost by a lot.
But that is already in the game: A larger engine with the same total power is cheaper to develop. And cramming the same engine into a smaller housing (by increasing the power multiplier) increases cost by a lot.What I mean is that larger engines with the same power density are more expensive to develop, for example using either 8 size 10 engines or 2 size 40 engines with the same total power (same power multiplier) in the same space. Here you are trading off HTK for fuel efficiency.
I'd say the larger components are attractive enough the way they currently are, especially low power commercial engines.
Mass drivers should have the option of sending a specific number of minerals, instead of just turning them on and remembering a couple years later to stop sending all your stuff to Mars. Also, the ability to pick and choose which minerals are used.
When starting a new game allow the user to 'outlaw' or make unavailable certain technology/technological paths (such as the various weapon paths) so that if the user would like, for example, a more 'Star Wars' experience they can just get rid of missiles and the rest leaving only lasers and mesons. I imagine this could also apply to shielding / stealth tech depending on peoples tastes (since I don't think anyone will be wanting to get rid of the production paths etc) but being able to determine the weapon types, and thus the 'meta' of the military in a game could be nice.Definitely this. As long as you also had the option to remove say missiles and mesons. Because Mesons always seem cheaty and annoying.
When starting a new game allow the user to 'outlaw' or make unavailable certain technology/technological paths (such as the various weapon paths) so that if the user would like, for example, a more 'Star Wars' experience they can just get rid of missiles and the rest leaving only lasers and mesons. I imagine this could also apply to shielding / stealth tech depending on peoples tastes (since I don't think anyone will be wanting to get rid of the production paths etc) but being able to determine the weapon types, and thus the 'meta' of the military in a game could be nice.
This is possible but tricky. The simple implementation would be to flag certain techs as not available. However, those techs affect other parts of the game. For example, removing missiles would require removing techs such as warhead strength or missile agility, but that would leave ordnance factories, ordnance-related logistics installations, the missile design window, ordnance factory options in production, etc. You would also need to remove magazine techs, but they would still be an option in the Create Project window. It isn't as straightforward as ticking techs to exclude. Also, by excluding missiles, you also exclude recon probes, geo-survey probes or sensor buoys, unless you only exclude warheadsIs the simple fix just to have a No-missile checkbox that disables warhead techs and tells the NPRs to only use the beam AI schemas?
In addition, NPRs would have to be able to handle any missing parts of their normal tech, which would not be straightforward at all.
It might be possible at some point to have (for example) a non-missile version as an option for a game, with all the various missile-related elements removed. However, they are an integral part of the game so it would take a while to identify everything that would change. Maybe for a post-launch version.
When starting a new game allow the user to 'outlaw' or make unavailable certain technology/technological paths (such as the various weapon paths) so that if the user would like, for example, a more 'Star Wars' experience they can just get rid of missiles and the rest leaving only lasers and mesons. I imagine this could also apply to shielding / stealth tech depending on peoples tastes (since I don't think anyone will be wanting to get rid of the production paths etc) but being able to determine the weapon types, and thus the 'meta' of the military in a game could be nice.Well, there is torpedo tech in the SW universe; they are simply very low range, equal to the beam wepaons (one might argue, that in relation to range, the SW universe is the opposite of the Aurora universe - beams (as we have learned in TFA) can be quite long range ... . However (as we have learned in TLJ), shielding is quite strong over distance - which is the technobabble reasoning for their short range fights ... .
However (as we have learned in TLJ), shielding is quite strong over distance - which is the technobabble reasoning for their short range fights ... .Is it? Man I prefer the old EU explanation that EW got so good they're down to having to rely on their own eyes.
Quote from: TMaekler link=topic=9841. msg108837#msg108837 date=1530869769However (as we have learned in TLJ), shielding is quite strong over distance - which is the technobabble reasoning for their short range fights . . . .Is it? Man I prefer the old EU explanation that EW got so good they're down to having to rely on their own eyes.
Is the simple fix just to have a No-missile checkbox that disables warhead techs and tells the NPRs to only use the beam AI schemas?I imagine the new way NPRs will be planning out their ships and fleets prevents it from being that simple.
I would very much appreciate an option to turn off Jump Gate Constructors (whatever they will be called in the new version)
There is an option to remove all jump technology and have gates everywhere, but I would very much like to play with jump drives only.
Since jump gates are needed for the civilian traffic, wouldn't it be better to restrict it to commercial only?I thought I read somewhere that civilians now knew how to deal with jump tenders. I can't find the source though, I am afraid
When I am building ships quickly I try to use planetary industry to build some of the big ticket items so that the ship construction time is reduced. This ends up being a bit of a pain a lot of times as I am building x engines, y turrets, etc. If we could have some means of putting together several items in a package and selecting the package to be built instead of the individual items it would help. For example a recent cruiser I built had 4 engines, 3 heavy laser turrets, 4 point defense turrets and 4 different fire controls. If all of this could be combined into CA1 package it would make using the planetary industry to speed up ship construction much easier.
As a note by prefabricating much of a ships components I was able to take a 30,000 ton ship with a nominal 23 month build time and instead have it finished in 5 months. Better than 4 times as fast, which can be a big advantage in an emergency.
Brian
Would it not make more sense to have industry being able to directly support shipyards to some extend, reducing build times, instead of fiddling with component stockpiles. Change it so you are able to assign industry to ship construction, and flag shipyards to use industry support, accelerating the project as if it was building the components, without any of the micromanagement.
Problem is the component mechanic supports and enables ALOT of other game mechanics.I agree that these are valid uses of components, building them in factories to accelerate construction however is not one of them in my opinion, because it requires tedious micromanagement.
Salvaging of ship components.
Scrapping ship components ( for science and resources ).
Trading of ship components ( rp multi faction games )
Moving of ship components from an industrial planet to a separate dockyard planet.
Repairs and upgrades using ship components.
I agree that these are valid uses of components, building them in factories to accelerate construction however is not one of them in my opinion, because it requires tedious micromanagement.
My suggestion would be to allow industry to support shipyards as if you were microing them, to get the same advantage out without having to place all these orders.
I agree that these are valid uses of components, building them in factories to accelerate construction however is not one of them in my opinion, because it requires tedious micromanagement.
My suggestion would be to allow industry to support shipyards as if you were microing them, to get the same advantage out without having to place all these orders.
3 of my 5 points are impossible or pointless to do without allowing factories to produce components... So your agreement also becomes a direct contradiction to your own statement/suggestion that follows it.
Whitecold: Are you suggesting that Steve rip out the current mechanism of having factories build components that are then used by SY, or are you proposing an additional mechanism that leaves the current one in place?Well, ripping it out would solve the discrepancy as well, but my idea would be to leave it in place, and calculating the BP needed for the components which are still missing from a design, and allowing industry to support the shipyards up to that amount of BP.
Thanks,
John
Disabling increment adjustment, its really annoying.
Well, ripping it out would solve the discrepancy as well, but my idea would be to leave it in place, and calculating the BP needed for the components which are still missing from a design, and allowing industry to support the shipyards up to that amount of BP.
Quality of Life suggestion: When one does not select a name pattern for new ships, Aurora automatically counts upward. But that numbering might be off for whatever reasons. Being able to set the next free number would be great.
Or even better: give us the option to create a naming scheme for every ship class, so it not automatically is the class name + increment, but rather something which can be chosen by the user.
Options: <class name>, <number increment>, <letter increment>, <manual text>, etc.
That doesn't address the desire to build components in advance of when you intend to build the ships. Allowing industry to support shipyards actively is great, but sometimes I'm still researching and developing the tech for a new generation of ships, and won't be done for a couple years, but I got the technology to start making the new engines right now. I don't want to lose two years of production time, so I start manufacturing the engines ASAP.You should still be able to all do this! The original suggestion was to be able to build packages of components to accelerate ship construction, instead of ordering every single component individually. My suggestion is to automatically calculate BP, not requiring any packages to be ordered but directly construct components in factories as they are needed.
Other random quality of life suggestion: Instead of suggesting random new companies for naming components, have a separate panel where you can save the names of the companies you have in your game (and generate suggestions)
Then you can select the company name in a dropdown menu, as you will be likely be reusing company names.
Other random quality of life suggestion: Instead of suggesting random new companies for naming components, have a separate panel where you can save the names of the companies you have in your game (and generate suggestions)
Then you can select the company name in a dropdown menu, as you will be likely be reusing company names.
Strongly in favor of this, would hugely help me keep things straight (I might actually start using company names again).
Absolutely in favor, I would *love* to actually keep consistent companies for equipment and ordinance and so forth.
Another suggestion of mine: Remove the missile engine component, and revert to designing missile engines along with the missile itself, adding options for boost modifier/engine generation/fuel consumption there.Maybe add the ability to create missile engines in missile creation without removing missile engines as a component?
The missile engine component adds an annoying step to missile design. Unlike regular engines they are very rarely reused, every new missile usually requires a new engine. Furthermore there is no incentive to use multiple engines on a missile if you can use a single one instead, and I don't think there should be one.
Also, I'd suggest to remove the cap on missile engines to 5 MSP, especially with the new incentives to large missiles.
The missile engine only adds unnecessary complications, you should not have to use an external performance calculator to find out which engine size you need in the first place.
Other random quality of life suggestion: Instead of suggesting random new companies for naming components, have a separate panel where you can save the names of the companies you have in your game (and generate suggestions)I think that's been discussed before, could be wrong.
Then you can select the company name in a dropdown menu, as you will be likely be reusing company names.
Absolutely in favor, I would *love* to actually keep consistent companies for equipment and ordinance and so forth.
Would be interesting to have civilian companies also as additional production capacity - not only handing transport orders to them, but also building equipment... .
Absolutely in favor, I would *love* to actually keep consistent companies for equipment and ordinance and so forth.
Would be interesting to have civilian companies also as additional production capacity - not only handing transport orders to them, but also building equipment... .
I was thinking about something like this. Assuming a capitalistic society, what if you had something along the following:
Multiple companies, each with fields of interest (maybe some are like Rolls Royce and focus on engines, other are Intel like and do computers, etc).
Instead of designing a new technology, you instead put out a request to these companies. "I want a 15cm UV laser with 10sec recharge". Then after some time, these companies come back with their prototypes that each have small tweaks to your request.. Maybe the Foobar Corporation's laser does an extra point of damage but takes a little extra material to make. But Barfoo Inc has a model that can fire a little farther. Then you pick the one you want and it becomes a thing to build.
For instance, it'd be great to have a cargo group setup to load materials from a colony once that colony hits a certain level.
You can already do this one in VB6. The move order is "Load Mineral when X available"
I have considered something on these lines before (as well as civilian companies building warships for the government). Probably won't in the first version, but will consider for the future.
Civilians don´t spend fuel right now. Expanding civilian activities to much would decrease the fuel scarcity push towards colonizing new worlds or conquering them. If civilians used fuel, they would frequently end reserves without the player being able to do much about it. Maybe they should use fuel with players being able to limit their consumption?, this with a rebalancing of the typical ammounts of fuel found on default empire planets.
A Cockpit module as a smaller alternative to a Bridge. It seats a Pilot and may seat a Navigator/Sigint or a Gunner/Bombardier. This new type is not intended to replace current mid to long range 'Ship' type fighters, but gives options for smaller short to medium ranged craft.
Civilians don´t spend fuel right now. Expanding civilian activities to much would decrease the fuel scarcity push towards colonizing new worlds or conquering them. If civilians used fuel, they would frequently end reserves without the player being able to do much about it. Maybe they should use fuel with players being able to limit their consumption?, this with a rebalancing of the typical ammounts of fuel found on default empire planets.
Engaging the new rules is exactly what I was hoping for. What I was suggesting is a small ship that only has a bridge crew, limited to a pilot and possibly one other officer, like a modern two-seat fighter. It also has the natural vulnerability that a single hit to the cockpit is an instant kill, since that is the only crew on board. I fully understand if Steve doesn't go for it, but I'd love to be able to build X-wing fighters.A Cockpit module as a smaller alternative to a Bridge. It seats a Pilot and may seat a Navigator/Sigint or a Gunner/Bombardier. This new type is not intended to replace current mid to long range 'Ship' type fighters, but gives options for smaller short to medium ranged craft.
Any ship of 1000 tons or less can leave the Bridge off altogether. (Unless that's been changed and I've forgotten?) Did you mean to engage the new Command & Control (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg101818#msg101818) rules? Because at first glance this suggestion looks seriously imbalanced in that context, to the extent of undercutting stated design goals.
Civilians don´t spend fuel right now. Expanding civilian activities to much would decrease the fuel scarcity push towards colonizing new worlds or conquering them. If civilians used fuel, they would frequently end reserves without the player being able to do much about it. Maybe they should use fuel with players being able to limit their consumption?, this with a rebalancing of the typical ammounts of fuel found on default empire planets.Expanding the player hauling orders so set-and-forget automatic hauling routes can be set up would eliminate the need for civilian inter-system mineral and fuel hauling, rendering the entire question moot. It would also allow regular supply lines to the new deep-space orbitals to be created. The new fuel orders are a good start, but don't quite go far enough. This is the single biggest item on my wish list, since there is currently no actual way to do it, and it gets very micro-managy very quickly.
I also would suggest to rework transport commands; especially in the area of transferring a certain amount of industrial complexes to other planets.This is what civilian shipping orders are designed for. Hopefully the rework that is going into C# will make it more stable than VB.
What happens most of the time is, that I transfer AutoMines to new locations when a planet has gone exhaust. Which means setting up one cycle of transport and then repeating or set it to cycle move. But lets say I want to transfer 120 AMs to Planet X and 90 to Planet Y. Then I have to set up two task forces and be exact with the repetitions. But later down the line another transport task group finishes and I simply want to add those ships to transfer to Planet X also. I then have to either recreate everything after merging or set up another task group but reduce the original group. If the task group simply would have an order stack of
a) load AMs on Planet A
b) unload AMs on Planet B
c) refuel on Planet E
d) Cycle until 120 AMs have been transferred (auto reduce after every load command)
then I just could join the new ships to that task group and have an easier micromanagement.
Additionally, if the route to the target would be recalculated each time (and if Lagrande Points could be included), it would use those points when usefull, otherwise not. In VB6 if you have set up such a cycle with LGPs and they move around, the trip might become longer than necessary.
This is what civilian shipping orders are designed for. Hopefully the rework that is going into C# will make it more stable than VB.Yes. I think it would be a nice feature, if you could do what the civilians are doing, with your own ships.
I'd like to suggest automated terraforming: as soon as you install terraforming bases or move them into orbit, they should automatically add or remove gases until the planet is suitable for life. The algorithm would be simple in most cases: if the temperature cost is greater than 2.0, add greenhouse or anti-greenhouse gas until it's <= 2.0, then add or remove oxygen until that's at an acceptable level, then finish adjusting the temperature if necessary.I'm not against this as an option, but the ability to manually set gas levels has both strategic and RP value, in making a planet suitable for more than one species (who aren't necessarily all present), deciding how much work I want put in to making the planet inhabitable, and making a blockaded planet unsuitable for the enemy.
It would be one less thing to have to micromanage, and less calculation/guesswork to have to do.
Good point, I'm just not sure how that could be implemented with the current order style.This is what civilian shipping orders are designed for. Hopefully the rework that is going into C# will make it more stable than VB.Yes. I think it would be a nice feature, if you could do what the civilians are doing, with your own ships.
Terraforming would be easier (meaning less micro) if you could set a target composition of the desired atmosphere (that screen will tell you the final temperatures etc.); and once you have set the target, the TFs work towards that goal. So basically not having to do it by your own step by step, meaning gas by gas... .
Variable size for stuff like:
- Crew Quarters
- Hangar Space
- Maintenance Space
- Maintenance Storage
- Fuel Storage
etc.
Instead of having to research or having available 6 different fixes sizes, I think it would make more sense to be able to tell the program how much it should add to the ship and the overall size and material use of that module is calculated based on that size.
Why not instead have both a number for how many tanks its held in? I. E set the fuel to 1. 5 million tons in 6 tanks, with each tank taking up equal space and holding equal amounts of fuel. Perhaps even have a field for smaller tanks, if you really want too.Quote from: TMaekler link=topic=9841. msg109140#msg109140 date=1532957911Variable size for stuff like:
- Crew Quarters
- Hangar Space
- Maintenance Space
- Maintenance Storage
- Fuel Storage
etc.
Instead of having to research or having available 6 different fixes sizes, I think it would make more sense to be able to tell the program how much it should add to the ship and the overall size and material use of that module is calculated based on that size.
Larger fuel modules (for example) are more efficient in terms of cost while you may want multiple smaller modules to allow for redundancy. Otherwise life support or fuel could be lost all at once. The variation is to allow player choice. BTW I think for C# the smaller life support systems are all available without research (not at home at the moment so can't check).
That way leads to unrepresentable fractional numbers, which are best avoided. On the other hand, specifying the number of tanks and the number of liters per tank would work nicely. An HTK option like we have for magazines, representing compartmentalized or self-sealing tanks would work, too.Quote from: Steve Walmsley link=topic=9841. msg109141#msg109141 date=1532959461Why not instead have both a number for how many tanks its held in? I. E set the fuel to 1. 5 million tons in 6 tanks, with each tank taking up equal space and holding equal amounts of fuel. Perhaps even have a field for smaller tanks, if you really want too.Quote from: TMaekler link=topic=9841. msg109140#msg109140 date=1532957911Variable size for stuff like:
- Crew Quarters
- Hangar Space
- Maintenance Space
- Maintenance Storage
- Fuel Storage
etc.
Instead of having to research or having available 6 different fixes sizes, I think it would make more sense to be able to tell the program how much it should add to the ship and the overall size and material use of that module is calculated based on that size.
Larger fuel modules (for example) are more efficient in terms of cost while you may want multiple smaller modules to allow for redundancy. Otherwise life support or fuel could be lost all at once. The variation is to allow player choice. BTW I think for C# the smaller life support systems are all available without research (not at home at the moment so can't check).
Armor and crew quarters for now just nicely round any fractional numbers. I would go on and propose to overhaul the interface for designing ships, instead of clicking items many times, add to each row a number field where you can type in a number. For launchers, beams, fire controls this would simply be the amount requested, while for fuel it could be capacity, or for engineering spaces the desired maintenance time.That way leads to unrepresentable fractional numbers, which are best avoided. On the other hand, specifying the number of tanks and the number of liters per tank would work nicely. An HTK option like we have for magazines, representing compartmentalized or self-sealing tanks would work, too.Quote from: Steve Walmsley link=topic=9841. msg109141#msg109141 date=1532959461Why not instead have both a number for how many tanks its held in? I. E set the fuel to 1. 5 million tons in 6 tanks, with each tank taking up equal space and holding equal amounts of fuel. Perhaps even have a field for smaller tanks, if you really want too.Quote from: TMaekler link=topic=9841. msg109140#msg109140 date=1532957911Variable size for stuff like:
- Crew Quarters
- Hangar Space
- Maintenance Space
- Maintenance Storage
- Fuel Storage
etc.
Instead of having to research or having available 6 different fixes sizes, I think it would make more sense to be able to tell the program how much it should add to the ship and the overall size and material use of that module is calculated based on that size.
Larger fuel modules (for example) are more efficient in terms of cost while you may want multiple smaller modules to allow for redundancy. Otherwise life support or fuel could be lost all at once. The variation is to allow player choice. BTW I think for C# the smaller life support systems are all available without research (not at home at the moment so can't check).
Larger fuel modules (for example) are more efficient in terms of cost while you may want multiple smaller modules to allow for redundancy. Otherwise life support or fuel could be lost all at once. The variation is to allow player choice. BTW I think for C# the smaller life support systems are all available without research (not at home at the moment so can't check).
Desired maintenance time isn't the only consideration. For example, some of my survey/recon ships have short rated maintenance times because they don't have enough MSP to repair their sensors, but the AFR is low enough they usually get back for overhaul before they actually experience a failure.Armor and crew quarters for now just nicely round any fractional numbers. I would go on and propose to overhaul the interface for designing ships, instead of clicking items many times, add to each row a number field where you can type in a number. For launchers, beams, fire controls this would simply be the amount requested, while for fuel it could be capacity, or for engineering spaces the desired maintenance time.That way leads to unrepresentable fractional numbers, which are best avoided. On the other hand, specifying the number of tanks and the number of liters per tank would work nicely. An HTK option like we have for magazines, representing compartmentalized or self-sealing tanks would work, too.Quote from: Steve Walmsley link=topic=9841. msg109141#msg109141 date=1532959461Why not instead have both a number for how many tanks its held in? I. E set the fuel to 1. 5 million tons in 6 tanks, with each tank taking up equal space and holding equal amounts of fuel. Perhaps even have a field for smaller tanks, if you really want too.Quote from: TMaekler link=topic=9841. msg109140#msg109140 date=1532957911Variable size for stuff like:
- Crew Quarters
- Hangar Space
- Maintenance Space
- Maintenance Storage
- Fuel Storage
etc.
Instead of having to research or having available 6 different fixes sizes, I think it would make more sense to be able to tell the program how much it should add to the ship and the overall size and material use of that module is calculated based on that size.
Larger fuel modules (for example) are more efficient in terms of cost while you may want multiple smaller modules to allow for redundancy. Otherwise life support or fuel could be lost all at once. The variation is to allow player choice. BTW I think for C# the smaller life support systems are all available without research (not at home at the moment so can't check).
Desired maintenance time isn't the only consideration. For example, some of my survey/recon ships have short rated maintenance times because they don't have enough MSP to repair their sensors, but the AFR is low enough they usually get back for overhaul before they actually experience a failure.It is not about if maintenance times catches all aspects, it is about what parameter is the most convenient to control. 12 months maintenance time tells you something, 5 engineering spaces may be anything or nothing. Similar to how you want to control the number of armor layers rather than the total amount of armor.
Just a minor suggestion, "Conventional Steel" should probably be called Rolled Homogeneous Armour (RHA) as that is more specific and technical and perhaps the middle conventional armour tech can be Explosive Reactive Armour (ERA) with the top tech being Composite Armour before we get to duranium (though those two are more debatable and there's probably not too much of a problem with "composite" and "advanced composite").
As for crew requirements.
Further down the line could we have computer effeciency ylyechs which reduce the amount of crew needed, while making the ship exorbitantly expensive.
We could then make things like the Honorverses Recon Drones and Missile Pods, which don't have any crew at all but can be retargeted and flown like an Aurora ship.
I actually use Drones and missile pods, remove everything from a fighter hull and stick a big passive sensor on it , then set it deployment time to 200 months and you have an early warning drone you can deploy anywhere without getting spotted easily ( just put it some distance away from anything so nothing fly's to close. same with missile pods remove the engines from a fighter, put the deployment time to 200 again and if you deploy tractors to your ships you have a missile pod, could also make variants like Missile defense pods etc. and keeping them small you can take advantage of your fighter production resources. . :)Quote from: Frank Jager link=topic=9841. msg109255#msg109255 date=1533579807As for crew requirements.
Further down the line could we have computer effeciency ylyechs which reduce the amount of crew needed, while making the ship exorbitantly expensive.
We could then make things like the Honorverses Recon Drones and Missile Pods, which don't have any crew at all but can be retargeted and flown like an Aurora ship.
For now you can only create a missile drone. It will be fine to create a system of no crew ship that can be hacked by enemy if discovered. Then stealth technology will be even more important, because that drone can be very small, and with new sensor system that have much more sense. And also more electronic warfare :)
P. S For roleplay AGI civilisation it could be technology that make ship less depends on robots/cyborgs.
I actually use Drones and missile pods, remove everything from a fighter hull and stick a big passive sensor on it , then set it deployment time to 200 months and you have an early warning drone you can deploy anywhere without getting spotted easily ( just put it some distance away from anything so nothing fly's to close. same with missile pods remove the engines from a fighter, put the deployment time to 200 again and if you deploy tractors to your ships you have a missile pod, could also make variants like Missile defense pods etc. and keeping them small you can take advantage of your fighter production resources. . :)
I think that DSTS should require one million population per installation. As it stands you can, for very little cost, get almost complete ckverage of everythkng important. Making it so you can't just plop them on an asteroid makes sense for pickets actually useful while maintaining the home turf advantage you get from full DSTS coverage in established systems. You can still make the outposts but it would no longer be invisible or almost free to do, but intelligence becomes harder to come by and more involved without adding much micro at all.
I think that DSTS should require one million population per installation. As it stands you can, for very little cost, get almost complete ckverage of everythkng important. Making it so you can't just plop them on an asteroid makes sense for pickets actually useful while maintaining the home turf advantage you get from full DSTS coverage in established systems. You can still make the outposts but it would no longer be invisible or almost free to do, but intelligence becomes harder to come by and more involved without adding much micro at all.
I don't think this makes sense. Why not just make DSTS less effective?
I'd actually think it'd be interesting to make sensors in general less effective across the board. Mid-tier sensors can sweep half a system
Can you have higher racial training levels cause less recruits, because I don't know why you'd ever want it on anything other than 5 if it gives you the best stuff for the same amount of recruits. It wouldn't make sense for the same amount of soldiers to pass into the navy/army either if the training is more difficult. Thats why there are fewer Special Ops than regular soldiers.
Perhaps not a bad idea for the functionality of the damage reduction, actually. Instead of using max SP, use remaining SP as a function of ship size to determine damage stopped. Of course that changes shields from being a Big Ships tool to being something usable on all ships.That makes shields way too similar to armor. They would need a massive buff in efficiency to make up for the loss of protective ability at low strength, putting them in conflict with armor.
I guess I just generally like the idea of shields not competing with armor for defensive ability, but that there is some synergy between the two that makes it advantageous to put both on your ship.
What if you combine the leaking shield concept with the way it works now? Shields would deteriorate as they get hit, and as they deteriorate they absorb less and less damage per hit.I am afraid that makes them too similar to armor. Also, with leakage determined by FULL shield strength, HTK of shield generators become important. Getting a hit through that causes shock damage blowing up a shield generator would be the reason to mount redundant generators. Also, I'd rather have consistent leakers instead of a cliff edge where you either beat shield regen, and break the shield to nothing or do only superficial damage because the shield stays at close to full strength.
What if you combine the leaking shield concept with the way it works now? Shields would deteriorate as they get hit, and as they deteriorate they absorb less and less damage per hit.I am afraid that makes them too similar to armor. Also, with leakage determined by FULL shield strength, HTK of shield generators become important. Getting a hit through that causes shock damage blowing up a shield generator would be the reason to mount redundant generators. Also, I'd rather have consistent leakers instead of a cliff edge where you either beat shield regen, and break the shield to nothing or do only superficial damage because the shield stays at close to full strength.
Having a higher rate of leakers but independent of current shield strength ensures the stronger party takes some damage as well, which is what the leakers should mostly accomplish.
Why not just have two types of shield generators? The current ones and ones that have a higher strength but let some damage leak through?The buffering effect of reducing strikes means the leaky shields will be more survivable. 10 half strength hits do much less damage to armor than 5 full strength ones in armor penetration.
What do you think about the ability to equip fighters with different payload? Like you can do in real life. So one would be able to us a plane depending on the situation it would be needed for..
I think reactors probably shouldn't be possible to put into a pod, but it might be fun to put lasers, missiles, sensor, EW, or fire control pods onto fighters interchangeably. It would also be more or less consistent with modern multiroles to some extent, which also tend to do that sort of thing.That does not make much sense, a single laser is already 3HS, which is a massive investment in tonnage. A laser mount on a fighter is more a spinal mount than an underwing gunpod. Also, how would you penalize flexible mounts compared to permanent ones, and what is there left to design on a fighter but the engine?
I'd point out the lower laser size limit is totally arbitrary at the moment. I do however agree that something like that in particular souldn't be swappable for a fighter sized thing.
Also, the equalizer was a perfectly effective weapon (it let the thing destroy tanks for heck sakes), and the harrier was quite useful for the fact that it was very flexible, despite its overall low speed. It performed fine in the Falklands war for instance.
I could see lasers as they are now not being particularly swappable for fighter sized things, but that doesn't mean hardpoints shouldn't be possible period. It would be terrible if it was a system that only applied to fighter sized vessels arbitrarily, so lasers could easily just only be swappable for much larger vehicles. And then fighters have reduced multi mission capability purely off of the fact they are so small.
I'd point out the lower laser size limit is totally arbitrary at the moment. I do however agree that something like that in particular souldn't be swappable for a fighter sized thing.
Also, the equalizer was a perfectly effective weapon (it let the thing destroy tanks for heck sakes), and the harrier was quite useful for the fact that it was very flexible, despite its overall low speed. It performed fine in the Falklands war for instance.
I could see lasers as they are now not being particularly swappable for fighter sized things, but that doesn't mean hardpoints shouldn't be possible period. It would be terrible if it was a system that only applied to fighter sized vessels arbitrarily, so lasers could easily just only be swappable for much larger vehicles. And then fighters have reduced multi mission capability purely off of the fact they are so small.
I'd like to point out that any change in minimum beam weapon size will be immediately picked up as PD weapon. There it likely has a larger impact than for beam fighters.
The entire hard point system seems overly complicated, all these things need to be separately produced, stored in magazines... We already have refits to make small modifications. We could add a refit module that allows very limited refits away from a population, assuming all required components are available, the refit is cheap enough.
That way you avoid all the additional overhead of hard points, and dealing with items outside armor, and what exactly can be placed there.
As far as I am aware,this is the current thinking on fighters in relation to ground combat (where different roles are relevant): http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9792.msg106084#msg106084This cover most of what I was thinking about. Happy...
Unless I've missed something this is still the idea for ground support roles. If you mean being able to swap out the missile launchers on a fighter for lasers or whatever on a whim then that is something else (not something I'd be in favour of personally).
I'd point out the lower laser size limit is totally arbitrary at the moment. I do however agree that something like that in particular souldn't be swappable for a fighter sized thing.Oh I completely agree that all the weapon sizes in Aurora are arbitrary, but the system as-it-is seems fairly balanced to me in ship-to-ship combat. Any change to weapon sizes would have far more impact on the far more important aspect of the game (ship-to-ship combat) rather than in fighter combat, and would thus be a major change.
Also, the equalizer was a perfectly effective weapon (it let the thing destroy tanks for heck sakes), and the harrier was quite useful for the fact that it was very flexible, despite its overall low speed. It performed fine in the Falklands war for instance.
The discussion on training and order delays has had me thinking again about general crew readiness for combat. It's always bugged me that you can have a ship sit on a warp point for three years doing nothing and then suddenly be all guns blazing within the space of a five second increment. That level of readiness just seems odd to me.Wow. This is such an great idea and seems fairly easy to implement. Maybe on TG/Fleet basis and not ship basis? Two thumbs up.
I know its something as a player you can just RP by not firing straight away but I'd be interested in seeing some mechanic in the game to address this although accept that for the small number of times it would have an impact it may be a bit much. As to how that could work I was thinking about 2-3 states for the crew to be at that impact delays to initial but not subsequent orders such as:
- Normal Watch: CIWS no delays, beams short delays, missile batteries longer delay, fighter launch etc longest delay - no impact
- High Alert: As above but with no delays on wider range of actions and reduced delays on fighter launch etc - 2 times rate on deployment time
- Red Alert: Basically then just use normal command delays where applicable based on crew training etc - 5 times rate on deployment
So basically if you want to travel you are on normal alert, if you are worried you go to Amber and then its a decision as to when you go to Red Alert. It clearly makes jump point defence more of a logistical challenge and might make the investment in stealth ships more interesting if it means you have a better chance of catching an enemy out. Probably one for the AI to ignore though.
The discussion on training and order delays has had me thinking again about general crew readiness for combat. It's always bugged me that you can have a ship sit on a warp point for three years doing nothing and then suddenly be all guns blazing within the space of a five second increment. That level of readiness just seems odd to me.
I know its something as a player you can just RP by not firing straight away but I'd be interested in seeing some mechanic in the game to address this although accept that for the small number of times it would have an impact it may be a bit much. As to how that could work I was thinking about 2-3 states for the crew to be at that impact delays to initial but not subsequent orders such as:
- Normal Watch: CIWS no delays, beams short delays, missile batteries longer delay, fighter launch etc longest delay - no impact
- High Alert: As above but with no delays on wider range of actions and reduced delays on fighter launch etc - 2 times rate on deployment time
- Red Alert: Basically then just use normal command delays where applicable based on crew training etc - 5 times rate on deployment
So basically if you want to travel you are on normal alert, if you are worried you go to Amber and then its a decision as to when you go to Red Alert. It clearly makes jump point defence more of a logistical challenge and might make the investment in stealth ships more interesting if it means you have a better chance of catching an enemy out. Probably one for the AI to ignore though.
You can already do that with MIRVed missiles. You pay an overhead for the missile bus and are limited to having to fire the entire hardpoint at once and at the same target, but those seem like very reasonable kinds of costs. In your example, you'd mount four size 13 boxes and each of them would load either a size 13 bombardment weapon or a size 1 bus wrapped around two size 6 shipkillers. You only get 8 shipkillers instead of the 9 you would get on a dedicated platform, and you have to fire them in pairs rather than singletons. That trades a 12 % reduction in loadout and barely perceptible reduction in targeting flexibility for the strategic flexibility of multiple loadout configurations, which does not seem like an onerous level of trade-off.As far as I am aware,this is the current thinking on fighters in relation to ground combat (where different roles are relevant): http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9792.msg106084#msg106084This cover most of what I was thinking about. Happy...
Unless I've missed something this is still the idea for ground support roles. If you mean being able to swap out the missile launchers on a fighter for lasers or whatever on a whim then that is something else (not something I'd be in favour of personally).
One point which was included also in my thoughts was the ability to have fighters which can change ordonance Koadjutors for ‚normal‘ battle usage ase in VB6 aurora. At the moment everything is limited to the size of the missile launchers. So if I would want a multi combat role fighter I would have to design every missile fitting to one launcher size. What I would like to have added would be an option to load for example
a) either 9 S6 missile for space to space combat (total of 54)
b) or 4 S13 missiles for space to ground bombardment (total of 52)
when using box launchers.
So with a S6 box launcher (because they are mounted on the outside of the ship), it would also be possible to mount a lesser number of missiles which could be bigger in size, up to the sum of all box launchers x number of them (54 in the example above, 9 x 6).
MIRVS don't really provide that kind of flexibility unless you want to SM in every combo you want as needed.That's because you shouldn't be able to strap five missiles onto four hardpoints just because the total mass comes to the same number, unless you go to the trouble of building a custom system like a MIRVed warhead. You can't just wake up in the morning and decide that you want to load fifty Stingers on your missile destroyer instead of the five cruise missiles it's designed for (or eight Sidewinders on your fighter-bomber in place of the two 2000 pound bombs it's designed to carry), just because the total displacement would be the same. What you might be able to do is attach a purpose-built missile pod, but you'd still need to manufacture that pod and get it to your staging area. Effectively a fire-and-forget launch platform wrapped around a number of missiles, which in Aurora would be represented by a two-stage system with multiple warheads.
Why? There is no engineering problem with this. There are even an example of modern nuclear submarines that can carry multiple surface to air missiles packed into a single VLS designed for a ballistic missile. They even have small diametre quad packs of bombs that can go on a single hardpoint for aircraft. Sure a dedicated platform designed to fire those missiles would be much more effective, but a little penalty in mass or loadout is well worth the versatility allowed.MIRVS don't really provide that kind of flexibility unless you want to SM in every combo you want as needed.That's because you shouldn't be able to strap five missiles onto four hardpoints just because the total mass comes to the same number, unless you go to the trouble of building a custom system like a MIRVed warhead. You can't just wake up in the morning and decide that you want to load fifty Stingers on your missile destroyer instead of the five cruise missiles it's designed for (or eight Sidewinders on your fighter-bomber in place of the two 2000 pound bombs it's designed to carry), just because the total displacement would be the same. What you might be able to do is attach a purpose-built missile pod, but you'd still need to manufacture that pod and get it to your staging area. Effectively a fire-and-forget launch platform wrapped around a number of missiles, which in Aurora would be represented by a two-stage system with multiple warheads.
What you should reasonably be able to do with full flexibility is attach a smaller missile to a hardpoint designed for a larger one, and the box launcher already lets you do that out of the box (you should pardon the, pun) with no need for workarounds.
But Harrier is a terrible fighter plane and was mainly used due to its VTOL capability, that allowed "mini-carriers" to ferry them to combat zones. The plane lacks an integral gun and thus the need to carry a gun-pod like the Equalizer. So it kinda proves the point Scandinavian was making.The harrier was used for two purposes:
Even the smallest lasers (10cm Focal Size) are 150 tons. With Reduced-size you can bring it down to 100 tons but then you have to accept quadrupled recharge times. That's still 20% of your 500 ton fighter, or even a higher percentage if you're making a faster interceptor-type fighter.Which is equivalent to a large missile box launcher. Also, pretty sure there are much more extreme reduced-size options available.
To me, swapping something that is twenty percent of the mass of a fighter does not sound doable. Even the B-52, that could carry 31 tons of bombs, couldn't just swap those bombs with some other weapon, because it was purpose-built to carry bombs in its cavernous bomb bays and nothing else.Again, why not? A B-52 can carry 31 bombs, or it could carry 60 smaller bombs, or 1 giant bomb, or guided bombs, or standoff bombs with 200 mile range, or cruise missiles with nuclear tips. Hell, pretty sure they have ballistic missiles that can be fired from bombers. Nothing is stopping someone from putting 100 sidewinders in a B-52, there just isn't a reason why you would.
Hi Steve, if it's possible could NPR missile firings not reduce the game to 5 second increments? I'm sure there's a reason behind it but I don't like that it gives away what the enemy is doing.That is because the computer still has to calculate damage and weapon use, even when the player cannot see. If it didn't pause, you could have hour long turns with no feedback into what is happening. Don't worry, I'm sure C# Aurora will be quicker.
There are even an example of modern nuclear submarines that can carry multiple surface to air missiles packed into a single VLS designed for a ballistic missile. They even have small diametre quad packs of bombs that can go on a single hardpoint for aircraft. Sure a dedicated platform designed to fire those missiles would be much more effective, but a little penalty in mass or loadout is well worth the versatility allowed.Yes, there are examples of building a custom weapons package that lets multiple missiles be packed into a single larger tube. This still has to be purpose-built, it's not a minor hot works you can decide to make on the fly as you load the ordnance for deployment.
Nothing is stopping someone from putting 100 sidewinders in a B-52,For transportation, sure. But you can also do that with box launchers (they provide full magazine capacity equal to their max missile size).
I would like to suggest bomb bays, although I'm sure that has been suggested before.A system that could launch ordnance that doesn't require active targeting, such as buoys or bombs, would make excellent sense. If done right it could also be used to greatly simplify the micro around minelaying. Which is badly needed at the moment.
The SSBN's were never intended to be hot-swapped for differing munitions, the subs were pretty much built around a given missile, and would keep it pretty much until the end, not exactly modular. So naturally, there wasn't a lot of wiggle room in making them functional with another weapon system, so their tubes received a more rigorous re-design to accommodate the tomahawks and wiring to control each. Enough that they got redesignated as SSGN's, and can't easily return to SSBN duties without similar reworking.
Mk-41 VLS for US and allied warships however was built with modularity in mind. Every visit to port could see a different weapon placed in the same cell if there were reason to change it out/reload. Effectively box launchers coming in sets of 5 or 8 per module, each receiving an encased munition allowing a common interface for multiple weapon types, the wiring and adaptation of the interface to any given munition occurs inside the weapon canister—the ship only ever talks to canisters, the canisters translate/relay to the weapon/ship—, which slots neatly into the cells/"box launchers" and serves as launch tube for the weapon within.
That brings me to RIM-162 ESSM, those fit four to a canister, and required zero alteration of the Mk-41 vls hardware to accommodate. They fit into a standard canister, the canister fits the VLS. On any given voyage they will decide if they will sail with the standard set of munitions, or if they need to change it up a bit. Often the ships are not completely stocked these days, no need, but there is literally nothing stopping an arleigh burke destroyer from going to sea with 96 tomahawks or 384 ESSM, other than a desire to have a mix of munitions available at all times. The change between is literally a crane lifts one canister out, and lowers the other into place.
As far as I'm concerned, so long as there is no sharing of capacity between cells/boxes —2 size 15 box launchers cannot fit 5 size 6 missiles, only 4— , and commonality of munition within each box launcher, I don't see an issue with it. But only for box launchers. Standard launchers are an entirely different beast.
Its no great leap to assume standardised canisters are utilised to simplify training of ordnance personnel, transportation, and warehousing of munitions. So long as you obey the canister's dimensions, anything goes.
I would expect there to be some minor loss of capacity in building the separators between cells for multiple munitions, but not significant, just enough to say you can't fit 5 size 3 rounds into a size 15 launcher, but could probably get 2 size 7's into it. I would expect that the more munitions loaded, the more is lost to dividers, such that if you could just get 2 size 7's into a size 15 launcher, you'd never fit 14 size 1's as well, but maybe 10-12.
see here: https://www. alternatewars. com/BBOW/Weapons/VLS_Baselines. pdf
and here: https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Mark_41_Vertical_Launching_System
Maybe have a range of possible missile sizes a certain sized box launcher can accept rather than giving a player carte blanche with what can be stuffed in there.
maximumMunitions=INT(launcherSize^0.6)*2
maximumMunitionSize=INT(launcherSize*(1-0.015*(munitions-1))/munitions)INT(15*(1-0.015*(4-1))/4)
INT(15*(1-0.015*3)/4)
INT(15*(1-0.045)/4)
INT(15*0.955/4)
INT(14.325/4)
INT(3.58125)
3roundup(size*packing/(1-0.015*(packing-1)),0)
roundup(4*4/(1-0.015*(4-1)),0)
roundup(16/(1-0.015*(4-1)),0)
roundup(16/(1-0.045),0)
roundup(16/0.955,0)
roundup(16.754,0)
17Size 17, so you're wasting 1 MSP to quad pack with size 4. There is no engineering problem with this...All the examples you gave and really, all the examples there exist, are just that - purpose-built engineering solutions. They already exist by the fact that any launcher will accept any missile as long as it fits. What QuakeIV and TMaekler were suggesting isn't that, it's much more because it would mean free swapping of all weapon systems with any other weapon system "on the fly". And that is not possible today, nor is it something that seems to be possible in the near future. And it shouldn't be brought into Aurora because it opens a massive can of worms with the combat model.
...for a first generation VTOL jet with no computer assisted flying, the Harrier did everything needed. It was never going to compete with land based air superiority fighters, not even catapult launched aircraft can compete with a contemporary land based aircraft. Honestly, the Harrier wasn't THAT bad...That wasn't the argument. The Harrier was used as an example by QuakeIV to justify his suggestion that multirole fighters work and are great. You merely reinforced my earlier counter-point: that the Harrier, as capable as it was to perform a wide variety of tasks from a wide variety of bases, was NOT a great plane. It would always lose out to a dedicated specialist plane. I'd rather take an A-10 or SU-25 for ground support, and an F-15 or MiG-29 for air combat, or an AH-64 or a Mi-24 to operate from an improvised landing strip. Harrier's strength was that instead of 3 different platforms, you only needed to buy one.
Which is equivalent to a large missile box launcher. Also, pretty sure there are much more extreme reduced-size options available.Box launchers, however, can get down to 50 tons. Lasers, even with the half-size reduction, which is the best there is, are still at least 100 tons. You're probably mixing it with GC that can be reduced down to 25 tons. That's still a lot more than 2% of platform mass.
Again, why not? A B-52 can carry 31 bombs, or it could carry 60 smaller bombs, or 1 giant bomb, or guided bombs, or standoff bombs with 200 mile range, or cruise missiles with nuclear tips. Hell, pretty sure they have ballistic missiles that can be fired from bombers. Nothing is stopping someone from putting 100 sidewinders in a B-52, there just isn't a reason why you would.Because a weapon system does not exist in a vacuum. B-52 bomb bays were built to accommodate very few, very specific bombs. The specs of those bombs were then built into the bombsight. Every time the USAF wanted to get the B-52 to utilize a new weapon system, it had to modify or rebuild the bomb bays as well as the bombsight, and later the targeting computer(s). That's one reason why "smart kits" were invented, allowing mechanics to just slap them on "dumb" iron bombs, which in turn enabled bombers to drop semi-smart bombs without the need to modify the plane itself. The program to get the B-52 to fire cruise missiles was a big and costly one, requiring the design of purpose-built cruise missile for them, as well as a new version of the bomber itself to support it. So only the B-52G and H models can fire the AGM-86 ALCM, not any other model of B-52.
We already have the ability to use missile launchers to shoot any type of missile as long as it fits. The ability to just swap-on-the-fly missile launchers with lasers or of violating launcher sizes as long as some arbitrary "total" isn't surpassed, goes against my sense of realism and immersion, nor does it seem like something that is really needed.
Agreed on modularity being a feature of the future. Logistics wins wars, and simplifying your logistics with a singular model versus several dedicated, if capable enough, can yield enormous gains.This is peacetime logic.
No, logistics is an immensely important part of warfare and is often the make-or-break factor in real life war. Having equipment that can do the job, albeit less well, is always preferable to not having the equipment to do the job at all. Having for example one type of multirole plane doesn't just mean that you have the equipment though, even if more can't be delivered. It also means that you only need to produce replacement components, fuel, mechanics and everything else that goes along with operating a plane, for that single type of plane and that they are compatible with every plane there. This immensely simplifies the production chain and allows you to ramp up production faster, and simplifies the logistics of delivering these things where they need to go.Agreed on modularity being a feature of the future. Logistics wins wars, and simplifying your logistics with a singular model versus several dedicated, if capable enough, can yield enormous gains.This is peacetime logic.
Quote from: Scandinavian link=topic=9841. msg109532#msg109532 date=1535266176No, logistics is an immensely important part of warfare and is often the make-or-break factor in real life war.Quote from: amram link=topic=9841. msg109531#msg109531 date=1535259978Agreed on modularity being a feature of the future. Logistics wins wars, and simplifying your logistics with a singular model versus several dedicated, if capable enough, can yield enormous gains.This is peacetime logic.
. . . snip. . .
Better equipment wins battles, better logistics wins wars. . . .
If you field more models of equipment, with a force structure that is equivalent in performance to an adversary which meets you in quantity and quality through a single model, they hold a significant advantage.If you use two models and his single model is three times as expensive in manufacturing time and supply chain complexity, he will have to outspend you by fifty per cent just to have parity in quantity and quality.
Take air combat. two forces. One has 30 fighters and 30 attack planes. The other has 60 multirole.That will never be the force structure of the two opposing sides in your hypothetical. The side that uses dedicated planes will always field a force more heavily weighed toward air superiority on day one, because once one side has established air superiority it is very hard to take it back, while flying CAS can clearly wait a few days for reinforcements to be brought up from rear echelons (if it could not, you would not be able to fly all of your fleet in the air superiority configuration during your alpha strike). At a 3:2 kill rate, they only need a 45:15 split to wipe out your whole force on the first day, at which point you will never recover the attrition game (assuming equivalent total production capabilities, and that they produce air superiority planes at a 3:1 rate to ground attack), and they are free to fly CAS with impunity.
Production benefits as well, less competition for limited resources means the quantity of the stock will be increased. Distribution, warehousing, acquisition, everything benefits.Yes, I've also read Lockheed's advertising copy.
Not sure how this forum works with regards to the difficulty of thread splitting, would you be willing to split off the debate of that particular suggestion into its own thread?
starts here: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9841.msg109413#msg109413
Fuel Report window: being able to exclude selected ships in this view would help getting rid of unnecessary clutters (I do have lots of sorium harvesters which I really don't need to see in this window). So an option box for every entry which when enabled would exclude that ship from showing in this list (with an option button at the top of course to enable showing them) would be nice.
Alternatively having a general option button in the class design window which sets this flag for the whole class might be a less micromanage alternative.
Improvement on TG/Fleet loading logic.
Currently, in VB6 Aurora, a TG ships load one by one. Once the topmost transport is full, then it starts loading the next transport and so on down the list. This isn't much of a concern with cargo freighters until very late in the game when you might have a TG of 20+ super-freighters, at which point the loading and unloading times get really noticeable. Or you don't use Cargo Handling Systems for some reason.
Snip
Improvement on TG/Fleet loading logic.
Currently, in VB6 Aurora, a TG ships load one by one. Once the topmost transport is full, then it starts loading the next transport and so on down the list. This isn't much of a concern with cargo freighters until very late in the game when you might have a TG of 20+ super-freighters, at which point the loading and unloading times get really noticeable. Or you don't use Cargo Handling Systems for some reason.
But with troop transports, this becomes noticeable way earlier. As an example, I have a TG of 8 ships, each capable of carrying a full division. I ordered the TG to load 2 divisions, a bunch of REP and GAR units and a whole load of CBs. The TG has been loading units forever and is still going strong. Because it takes about 27 days to load one CB. I forgot to check how long the individual battalions or the divisions took. Next time, I'll just create individual TGs for each troop transport, it's not a problem.
But for C#, ensuring that each ship in the Fleet/Sub-fleet loads concurrently instead of consecutively, would be an awesome improvement.
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.I feel like this could be solved by better AI and I believe I have proposed logic that would help with this somewhere, though it's possible I just meant to post it then forgot to. In any case, with the multi-leveled AI coming in C# aurora I feel like there are plenty of possibilities to make the AI smarter when it comes to choosing what ships to build. I wouldn't even mind if it was deliberately imperfect, for example basing it's purchasing decisions heavily on prior income - IRL, markets usually take time to adapt to sudden changes after all - rather than having it be predictive, but I do think there needs to be some mechanism to push companies towards the demand rather than it being fairly arbitrary. It also might result in companies tending to specialise which might be cool to see.
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.I feel like this could be solved by better AI and I believe I have proposed logic that would help with this somewhere, though it's possible I just meant to post it then forgot to. In any case, with the multi-leveled AI coming in C# aurora I feel like there are plenty of possibilities to make the AI smarter when it comes to choosing what ships to build. I wouldn't even mind if it was deliberately imperfect, for example basing it's purchasing decisions heavily on prior income - IRL, markets usually take time to adapt to sudden changes after all - rather than having it be predictive, but I do think there needs to be some mechanism to push companies towards the demand rather than it being fairly arbitrary. It also might result in companies tending to specialise which might be cool to see.
1. Please allow us to modify characteristics of various stellar bodies or, even better, add custom ones.A dialog where one can select several parameters as to a rough category of system that should be created would help much.
2. System generation algorithm should be modified in my opinion.
5. While I appreciate better automation of weapon to fire control assignment, there is one small addition I'd like to request. I'd like to be able to select a type of weapon, type of fire control and then tell the game how many of armed weapons I'd like to assign per fire control. This would help enormously with box launchers when I don't want to use their full power.Would make sense.
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.I think the civilians will be better in building new ships, depending on the needs of the empire. Steve wrote about that not so long ago. Although, being able to "select" which areas are made accessable for civilians would be a) nice, and b) make it easier to simulate different kinds of societies.
3. Missile agility has to be modified. Late fusion/early anti-matter era anti-missiles have 50%-80% interception chances all due to agility which cannot be countered with intelligent missile design. One option would be to discard it completely (although the starting interception chances would have to be increased as otherwise anti-missiles would have like 20% interception chance) while another would be to allow missiles to use agility to avoid interception. The second option would be more interesting in my opinion but would require more balancing work as it should also impact point defences.For 3. I think ECM will at least alleviate the problem somewhat, as loosing 30 or 40% interception chance is quite painful, and ECCM uses up 25% of a 1 MSP countermissile.
And yes, I know there are changes coming to missiles, but agility is pure interception chance with no counter, so I don't think it will solve the issue. Flattening out the Agi tech curve would help as well, especially since shipkillers are usually not using much agi.
4. At the moment repeatable missile launchers are flat out useless, as demonstrated in Steve's own colonial campaign. A way to possibly solve the issue would be to create a new technology that would reduce the impact of miniaturised launchers, which currently receive large penalty to fire rate. Obviously such technology should not, by itself, make miniaturised launchers as fast as full sized ones, but after playing dozens of campaigns I simply cannot find use for repeatable launchers as they are very, very easily countered by turreted gauss cannons.
Admittedly simply removing gauss cannons would also solve the issue, at least in mid to late game, after railguns are no longer effective.
I feel like this could be solved by better AI
I think the problem could be far better solved by limiting all Civilian Shipping Lines to a single category of ships (so cargo only, or colony only, or luxury passengers only ((Also, please bring back Luxury Passenger Ships.)) or fuel harvester only, etc.) That way, only the types of civilians actually being used would make money and thus build more ships.
1. Please allow us to modify characteristics of various stellar bodies or, even better, add custom ones.A dialog where one can select several parameters as to a rough category of system that should be created would help much.
2. System generation algorithm should be modified in my opinion.
I think the civilians will be better in building new ships, depending on the needs of the empire. Steve wrote about that not so long ago. Although, being able to "select" which areas are made accessable for civilians would be a) nice, and b) make it easier to simulate different kinds of societies.
For 3. I think ECM will at least alleviate the problem somewhat, as loosing 30 or 40% interception chance is quite painful, and ECCM uses up 25% of a 1 MSP countermissile.
4. I think it is a serious problem. It could however be fixed with making box launchers larger.
Per msp missile size if you have 3 HS giving you 2 launchers + 1 HS magazine you can fit in 16+2 missiles at 80% efficiency. The same size in box launchers fits you 20! missiles, more than the re-loadable solution.
As for gauss cannons, one possibility to make smaller missile sizes viable would be to limit the amount of shots that can be fired on the same missile.
I'm afraid you forgot that capacity has to be divided by missiles size. 1HS magazine will give you 16 capacity allowing you to carry five missiles, for a total of seven. However I would argue that your example isn't really that good, for in that situation you could five only three times per launcher. If you build them to fire 7+ salvoes magazines are much more efficient way to store missiles than box launchers. So box launchers are already a tredeoff - lower total ammunition capacity in exchange for firing all of it at once.No, I did not. Assuming size n missiles and you invest 3*n HS into 2 launchers and n HS magazine space, you end up with the 16+2 missiles for launchers vs 20 for box launchers. I am arguing that the trade off is just way off, assuming 9 salvos vs firing the same all at once it is always better to have the box launchers.
I"m afraid you're forgetting "bonus tracking vs missiles" tech. Gauss cannons are very, very accurate and it's very rare for them to need to fire more than two shots to take down incoming shipkillers of equivalent technology level. At least I think so, can't be bothered to do the math right now.Yeah, that would also need to be nerfed to make low salvo sizes of missiles more useful. Maybe also increase the range at which missiles are engaged by final PD as their speed increases.
Was just looking back over the rules changes and the new ground units. What has struck me as odd is the need to attach large lumbering tanks to all larger units in order to fit in the HQ component. This is going to look particularly odd if you have a bunch of for example jungle trained troops who then end up with something that would not exactly be fit for such terrain. I was therefore wondering if a split version of these units could be created as an alternative such that a series of light vehicles could do the job of one large mounted unit. I expect along with this you would have to deal with partial damage to the units / loss of some but not all but would think you could have some simple rules that noted if you lost more than 25% or so of units the HQ bonus would cease to function. Hopefully that would be a lot of overhead to maintain some more balanced unit templates.
Was just looking back over the rules changes and the new ground units. What has struck me as odd is the need to attach large lumbering tanks to all larger units in order to fit in the HQ component. This is going to look particularly odd if you have a bunch of for example jungle trained troops who then end up with something that would not exactly be fit for such terrain. I was therefore wondering if a split version of these units could be created as an alternative such that a series of light vehicles could do the job of one large mounted unit. I expect along with this you would have to deal with partial damage to the units / loss of some but not all but would think you could have some simple rules that noted if you lost more than 25% or so of units the HQ bonus would cease to function. Hopefully that would be a lot of overhead to maintain some more balanced unit templates.Are you sure vehicles are required at all? In the rules post example (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg105832#msg105832) I can see infantry HQ units only one level below the highest tank-based HQ.
In VB6, civilians tend to build mining colonies on their own. While nice, I would like to have more control over, where they are allowed to do that. The game I guess has several parameters as to what would be ideal for the civis to build such a base. Maybe making these available and editable might be enough control. If not, the ideal is always body-individual rights-setting ;)If the issue is that the mines are popping up in poor places, economically soaking, I think reworking the system for determining where they open is a better solution, though I'd like to see an economic overhaul in general.
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.With the economy as simplistic as it is, I don't think you'll manage to do much even with such a change.
Was just looking back over the rules changes and the new ground units. What has struck me as odd is the need to attach large lumbering tanks to all larger units in order to fit in the HQ component. This is going to look particularly odd if you have a bunch of for example jungle trained troops who then end up with something that would not exactly be fit for such terrain. I was therefore wondering if a split version of these units could be created as an alternative such that a series of light vehicles could do the job of one large mounted unit. I expect along with this you would have to deal with partial damage to the units / loss of some but not all but would think you could have some simple rules that noted if you lost more than 25% or so of units the HQ bonus would cease to function. Hopefully that would be a lot of overhead to maintain some more balanced unit templates.Are you sure vehicles are required at all? In the rules post example (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg105832#msg105832) I can see infantry HQ units only one level below the highest tank-based HQ.
Was just looking back over the rules changes and the new ground units. What has struck me as odd is the need to attach large lumbering tanks to all larger units in order to fit in the HQ component. This is going to look particularly odd if you have a bunch of for example jungle trained troops who then end up with something that would not exactly be fit for such terrain. I was therefore wondering if a split version of these units could be created as an alternative such that a series of light vehicles could do the job of one large mounted unit. I expect along with this you would have to deal with partial damage to the units / loss of some but not all but would think you could have some simple rules that noted if you lost more than 25% or so of units the HQ bonus would cease to function. Hopefully that would be a lot of overhead to maintain some more balanced unit templates.Are you sure vehicles are required at all? In the rules post example (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg105832#msg105832) I can see infantry HQ units only one level below the highest tank-based HQ.
They aren't needed. You can create infantry HQs.
Ah ok so if I have a large infantry formation that needs say 10000 tons of control I can meet this with infantry based hq units? Sorry was not clear to me from the original post.
I think the game would benefit significantly from a more robust economic model, including things such as tracking the wealth/prosperities of individual colonies, tracking TN minerals sent to the civilian economy as a trade good, requiring shipping lines to purchase TN minerals fur ships, requiring the civilian economy to expend TN minerals to create civilian mining complexes, more robust AI to handle this kind of thing. Any kind of economy overhaul would require a serious amount of work, however, and at this point I wouldn't want to see it delay the initial release of C#.The focus of Aurora is the unit design - and we will get a lot of that in C#. And I fully agree that Aurora does not need a delay because of economics rework. If Steve would be interested in an later economics rework, there could be a separate thread created for discussions about it.
I was wondering if the collected intelligence points of alien populations should decrease over time if no active intelligence is done? It sounded to me that the points stay at the level they once gained forever, but that sounds a bit off to me... . Although a very nice solution in general for espionage.
I see. Maybe you can save the ‚time gone‘ since last active intelligence and every new beginning has to first overcome ‚re-contact-phase‘ and then have full access to previous data. The length of that ‚re-contact-phase‘ could be like 1/10th of ‚time gone‘, capped by a maximum of 6 month.I was wondering if the collected intelligence points of alien populations should decrease over time if no active intelligence is done? It sounded to me that the points stay at the level they once gained forever, but that sounds a bit off to me... . Although a very nice solution in general for espionage.
There are pros and cons both ways. For example, it might be odd from a player perspective if you knew there were 100 factories on a planet last time you checked but now you have no idea because you dropped below the level where that information is available. Either way, it is a compromise.
I see. Maybe you can save the ‚time gone‘ since last active intelligence and every new beginning has to first overcome ‚re-contact-phase‘ and then have full access to previous data. The length of that ‚re-contact-phase‘ could be like 1/10th of ‚time gone‘, capped by a maximum of 6 month.I was wondering if the collected intelligence points of alien populations should decrease over time if no active intelligence is done? It sounded to me that the points stay at the level they once gained forever, but that sounds a bit off to me... . Although a very nice solution in general for espionage.
There are pros and cons both ways. For example, it might be odd from a player perspective if you knew there were 100 factories on a planet last time you checked but now you have no idea because you dropped below the level where that information is available. Either way, it is a compromise.
So gone for 2 years would mean 2.4 month re-contact-Phase, etc.
There are pros and cons both ways. For example, it might be odd from a player perspective if you knew there were 100 factories on a planet last time you checked but now you have no idea because you dropped below the level where that information is available. Either way, it is a compromise.
I'm not sure I like the idea of having the modules act as EM sensors. I'd rather they used the vessel's EM sensor rating instead as that avoids having to choose between having a large EM sensor to pick up foreign vessels and populations or a large number of ELINT modules to gather intelligence from great range.
There are pros and cons both ways. For example, it might be odd from a player perspective if you knew there were 100 factories on a planet last time you checked but now you have no idea because you dropped below the level where that information is available. Either way, it is a compromise.
Could it be handled the same way you do with legacy data?
"The information regarding a specific population will remain static if ELINT monitoring ends but will be updated once an ELINT ship is back in range."
Ideally if you drop below the level where it's displayed what could happens is you still see the latest known amount but with some note after it saying something like "( old data from year X month Y )"
It is to avoid the situation of detecting ELINT emissions from something that hasn't been detected any other way. By making them EM sensors too, that can't happen. Also provides a useful backup if the primary sensors go down.
I don't want ELINT to use the ship's primary sensors as that would make ELINT too powerful. Currently it is 1/10th of normal EM capability.
I don't want ELINT to use the ship's primary sensors as that would make ELINT too powerful. Currently it is 1/10th of normal EM capability.
There are pros and cons both ways. For example, it might be odd from a player perspective if you knew there were 100 factories on a planet last time you checked but now you have no idea because you dropped below the level where that information is available. Either way, it is a compromise.
Could it be handled the same way you do with legacy data?
"The information regarding a specific population will remain static if ELINT monitoring ends but will be updated once an ELINT ship is back in range."
Ideally if you drop below the level where it's displayed what could happens is you still see the latest known amount but with some note after it saying something like "( old data from year X month Y )"
Really like the ELINT plans although must admit I will miss the old teams on the ground; have had some good RP fun with them in the past. A couple more thoughts on the current rules:
- Not done any looking at the maths of relative EM emissions of a decent planet versus their typical thermal detection range but with revisions to passive sensor range I'm wondering how practical it will really be to get a ship able to collect points without being readily detected by the hostile planet. Look forward to seeing how that works on playtesting.
- Are you considering a ground installation version of this or to have it as a ground unit type? I could happily see people wanting to drop of units or an installation on an out of the way asteroid somewhere to be able to snoop on other races and would hope that also changes the interplay on thermal detection range and sensor range per the above point.
- Whilst probably not wanting to get into the world of encryption I wonder if a very high tier of points could be classed as you having cracked their communications and hence be able to obtain a chance of seeing orders issued to ships or units.
Is not Electronic a misnomer both for ELINT and EM sensors? Active sensors are FTL, and so seems to be interstellar communication.Really like the ELINT plans although must admit I will miss the old teams on the ground; have had some good RP fun with them in the past. A couple more thoughts on the current rules:
- Not done any looking at the maths of relative EM emissions of a decent planet versus their typical thermal detection range but with revisions to passive sensor range I'm wondering how practical it will really be to get a ship able to collect points without being readily detected by the hostile planet. Look forward to seeing how that works on playtesting.
- Are you considering a ground installation version of this or to have it as a ground unit type? I could happily see people wanting to drop of units or an installation on an out of the way asteroid somewhere to be able to snoop on other races and would hope that also changes the interplay on thermal detection range and sensor range per the above point.
- Whilst probably not wanting to get into the world of encryption I wonder if a very high tier of points could be classed as you having cracked their communications and hence be able to obtain a chance of seeing orders issued to ships or units.
I am considering ground and installation versions of ELINT.
I also considered having encryption and decryption research projects, but for the moment decided that was too much micromanagement. The modification based on Xenophobia is intended to simulate that races concerned about aliens would invest into more secure communications and restrict public information. If I get back into government types, I might use that instead.
Is not Electronic a misnomer both for ELINT and EM sensors? Active sensors are FTL, and so seems to be interstellar communication.That's one technobabble interpretation, but there are many others. If TN comms tech has the advantage of FTL communication speeds then advanced civilizations might ditch fibre optic entirely and move everything into TN space for the speed advantage, opening themselves up to interception. Heck, maybe the entire internet goes TN wireless, and ELINT systems are mostly listening to facebook messages, and trying to deduce useful intelligence from that.
I doubt much electronic information can be gathered from a single planet, as any advanced civilization will likely put as much as possible of their internal communications into optical fibers, or short range radios that are highly focused on satellites for uplink, and pointed at the planet from satellites to ground.
This only really leaves communications between systems to be intercepted, but at these ranges, you likely aim at the entire system, and not anything in particular in it. Also, since every unit has comm gear that can pick up interstellar communication, it does not seem like you need special antennas for picking up that kind of transmission.
I'd like to suggest some way of one sided language translation, by ELINT or otherwise. Monitoring alien communications with stealthed ships to translate their language to enhance interrogations sounds very fun.My problem is always how do you get the stealthed ships into the system? I don't think I've read anything to suggest that stealthed ships will be any better at getting past a jump picket in C#.
Is not Electronic a misnomer both for ELINT and EM sensors? Active sensors are FTL, and so seems to be interstellar communication.EM sensors pick up electromagnetic radiation produced by electrial systems. ELINT might be a misnomer (though ELINT doesn't so much refer to picking up communication signals, in this case it could be the analysis of electro-magnetic signatures to figure things out) dpending on your particular scenario, but who cares, it's not exactly uncommon to keep using a term for the same practice even if the term gets technically outdated. And this is heavily dependent ont he scenario you are RPing.
I doubt much electronic information can be gathered from a single planet, as any advanced civilization will likely put as much as possible of their internal communications into optical fibers, or short range radios that are highly focused on satellites for uplink, and pointed at the planet from satellites to ground.
This only really leaves communications between systems to be intercepted, but at these ranges, you likely aim at the entire system, and not anything in particular in it. Also, since every unit has comm gear that can pick up interstellar communication, it does not seem like you need special antennas for picking up that kind of transmission.
Even improved stealth efficiency can't get past a picket. I think it would be interesting to be able to design special jump engines that have a huge jump radius (maybe starting at around 10m km and getting higher with tech?) that can only jump one ship (no assisted transits or squadron jumps). Other downsides could be increased size, as is done with commercial drives, and a smaller maximum size. This would allow a stealth ship to jump in outside point-blank sensor range, or allow a fast, PD-equipped ship to escape more quickly. Obviously, these would be trapped in enemy territory, but that is a danger with any stealth ship design.
Currently a jump drive and a cloak are pretty much taking up an entire ship already. I think regular jump drives need a buff in HS requirement first to make room a long range, larger jump drive. Also such a drive should work both ways (jumping into a point from afar, jumping out a good distance away), to not make any jump into enemy territory a suicide mission.
This sort of Jump Drive design could also be relevant if you want piracy or raiding ( AKA Space Submarines ) to be relevant weapons. ( If they can't get around jump point pickets they are not going to reach the rear lines ).
These Jump drives would need to take up big enough space to be prohibitive for use on your main warships, but small enough to still allow you to run stealth modules and some cheap reduced sized launcher weapon systems that can quickly and efficiently destroy freighters or civilian ships.
Currently a jump drive and a cloak are pretty much taking up an entire ship already.
For "submarines" improved handling of passive detectors would also help. A missile fire control should be able to guide a homing missile close enough to a target to have a 0.25 msp sensor on top of the missile pick up the target for final acquisition.
It would save on a lot of clicking if we could issue the same orders to multiple task forces (or whatever they are now called) at the same time. Specifically I'm thinking of cases where you have multiple fighter squadrons or fac squadrons and you want them all to be heading to a new waypoint or all returning and refueling etc. I know you can save a set of orders and copy over currently but that is still quite fiddly if you want to do for a group of say 10 squadrons and you are regularly updating their orders. Was wondering is some sort of shift click to highlight multiple task forces would be possible.I guess, with the new system, you put them as subfleets in one fleet, send that to the waypoint and there split them up in subfleets again.
Only at the very first levels. ( First level is Efficiency 3 for both meaning you have 33% left for all other systems if you equip both )I still think the Jump drive needs a buff (Move it up a tech level or two) to make room for the second drive early enough if you want it available somewhere in the midgame where cloaks become available. The cloak progression line could also be flattened out, with a size reduction for less efficient cloaks. So you can build small, reduced efficiency cloaks.
At for example 5:th tech level you will have Efficiency 8 on both meaning you can make a ship with 75% left for all other systems if both are equipped. Basically you could even equip all your warships with it ( even if it would be costly it is within reach ).
At max tech levels ( Efficiency 15 ) You would need to allocate just 13% of your ship to both these systems leaving the remaining 87% free.
For balance any "Raiding" or "Scouting" Jump drive or what you want to call it would need to have a much flatter progression curve in tech, or be made so much significantly more expensive in resources that it's not feasible to equip large parts of your fleet with it.
That's a good idea, and one that I have suggested before. The tricky question is how you don't make it unbalanced ( Basically what prevents everyone from always using just passive targeting? ). It needs to have some serious downsides too besides requiring a 0.25 msp sensor in each missile.For one active sensors should outrange thermal sensors, and if you fire at an EM target, your enemy always may turn off their emissions. A further downside could be that your homing missiles pick their targets themselves, any they can detect, which may not be the one you intended. So in a fleet battle this will lead to very poor focus firing.
If you wanted to give a serious downside to self targeting missiles, gives CIWS a significant bonus to hit against sensor equipped missiles. Something about how they're lighting themselves up with the sensor package pinging off. Then you could justify buffing the effective range of missile sensors. So for your big warships, if you want to get your warheads through a heavy missile defense in a proper fleet, you guide them in from a directed fire control. But if your picking off a lone merchant ship, or a handful of troop ships in a surprise attack, the trade off of using more missiles to achieve the same effective damage may be worth it.Passive sensors don't light up, by definition of passive sensors. I also really dislike the idea of giving CIWS a bonus compared to other missile defenses. I for one only install CIWS on civilians, supply ships, my warships have dedicated firecontrol+sensor+guns arrangements for defense.
A ground forces summary screen which shows the location of all ground forces and condition in one place, sortable both by the unit groupings but also location (when you get larger forces working out which planet they are on or what's in transit and to where can be a bit of a headache).
I guess, space stations will be completly stationary, as they were in VB6 Aurora. Although it might be nice to have a station rotate around another object at a given speed... . At a cost of certain amount of fuel... .Man, I hope the Moon never runs out of fuel. Would be annoying if it fell back on Earth.
The idea with the fuel came from the base, that propulsion through TN engines happens outside of normal spacetime, and once you stop that engine, the ship stops... :-)I guess, space stations will be completly stationary, as they were in VB6 Aurora. Although it might be nice to have a station rotate around another object at a given speed... . At a cost of certain amount of fuel... .Man, I hope the Moon never runs out of fuel. Would be annoying if it fell back on Earth.
Quality of Life: Older Modules like "Geological Survey Sensors" should be excludable in the class design window, once the improved versions are available.
Actually, you can already make 'stealth' engines in Aurora. You just need to research and implement the lower thermal signature tech line on that drive.
It drives up the cost of the engine though.
To throw an extra cog in the wheels of jump drives, how about a third type approach? So have a stealth jump drive that has the huge range and single ship capacity, but allow it to only work on "stealth" drives. I am guessing it wouldn't take much to add in a new drive engine type, just make them have a low power thrust output, with larger sizes than standard military and smaller than current commercial drives.
To avoid them being put onto a commercial vessel, just make them give error flags if they are used with components such as cargo bays etc.
Actually, you can already make 'stealth' engines in Aurora. You just need to research and implement the lower thermal signature tech line on that drive.
It drives up the cost of the engine though.
He is talking about a special jump drive like the one I suggested a couple pages back, not a regular engine.
Seems more like he's mixing up engines with jump drives.
I can't find that in VB6. Any tips where I can do that?Quality of Life: Older Modules like "Geological Survey Sensors" should be excludable in the class design window, once the improved versions are available.
You can make them obsolete and they won't appear (in VB6 and C#).
I can't find that in VB6. Any tips where I can do that?Quality of Life: Older Modules like "Geological Survey Sensors" should be excludable in the class design window, once the improved versions are available.
You can make them obsolete and they won't appear (in VB6 and C#).
I had an additional idea for ground combat. Preferential targeting during combat leads to favoring monolithic unit compositions and army compositions to minimize damage, but I was thinking what about preferential targeting against optimal weapon matches during the formation targeting phase, but unweighted targeting during the actual combat phase?
This would represent commanders picking good matches for engaging formations, and it would lead to favor mixing up units, as otherwise your tanks will face mostly heavy guns, while your infantry runs into heavy machineguns. For mixed formations, there is no obvious optimal match.
The bonus could scale with commander skill, making well led armies taking better engagements.
I don't see how random encourages combined armies, I don't see any synergy effect that makes combined arms. I am looking for some way to punish all tank formations, or any other single unit type formation, and I don't see how to do it without there being some difference if some units are in the same formation or somewhere else.
This ends up having its own problems as well, either insuring that you want completely homogenous units (IE every formation having the same ratio of tanks to infantry) or else never wanting to mix different types of units on the same front line (if all of your front line forces are light vehicles, preferential targeting doesn't matter).
People keep suggesting preferential targeting and I think it's a bad idea. Random targeting is both keeping things simple and the best way to encouraged combined arms units.
I don't see how random encourages combined armies, I don't see any synergy effect that makes combined arms. I am looking for some way to punish all tank formations, or any other single unit type formation, and I don't see how to do it without there being some difference if some units are in the same formation or somewhere else.
This ends up having its own problems as well, either insuring that you want completely homogenous units (IE every formation having the same ratio of tanks to infantry) or else never wanting to mix different types of units on the same front line (if all of your front line forces are light vehicles, preferential targeting doesn't matter).
People keep suggesting preferential targeting and I think it's a bad idea. Random targeting is both keeping things simple and the best way to encouraged combined arms units.
You punish single unit formations with your own single unit formations. If someone has all tank formations, you bring nothing but anti-tank guns.No. You cannot adjust your unit composition on the fly. That leaves all the advantage to the attacker. The defender cannot know what kind of units an invader will bring, so he cannot make single unit formations, else they can be hard countered. The defender thus needs mixed units, which should be able to defeat any single unit formation that possibly attacks them to make it even worthwhile to attempt a defense.
You punish single unit formations with your own single unit formations. If someone has all tank formations, you bring nothing but anti-tank guns.No. You cannot adjust your unit composition on the fly. That leaves all the advantage to the attacker. The defender cannot know what kind of units an invader will bring, so he cannot make single unit formations, else they can be hard countered. The defender thus needs mixed units, which should be able to defeat any single unit formation that possibly attacks them to make it even worthwhile to attempt a defense.
At the moment all of our ground forces and our enemies fight to the bitter end no matter what the odds. It would be great to see a bit of a morale overlay to this that means this is not always the case. At a very simple level I was thinking that when morale drops below a certain grade then there is a check each cycle as to whether the unit will seek to do one of several things:
- Cease to attack
- Look to move from a front line position to a rear position
- In very low morale surrender to the enemy creating PoWs and the potential to capture combat units such as tanks and artillery.
This is obviously pretty simplistic and I'm sure the rules could be expanded to cover items such as:
- Units with moral failures impacting the morale of other units - potentially leading to a route
- Different modifiers on morale checks for elite units or the ability to create fanatical units that will fight to the death / robotic units that have no morale checks
- Higher morale losses when faced with overwhelming forces against you - could be a good reason not to reduce your unit size down too far to play with the mechanics.
- A system for dealing with PoWs including a similar interrogation system as with the Navy with chance to identify OOB of troops in theatre, details of weapon systems etc.
- Ability to surrender a very badly damaged unit in the hopes you might recover the PoWs at a later stage.
Hopefully this would mean no fighting to the bitter end in most circumstances.
I would love a 'Bug Button' -- something we can click to 'Add Hive Mind NPR' to our game. Whether it be Heinlein's original literary Bugs, or Starship Trooper's more B-movie sci-fi version, or Weber & White's deadly serious technologically adept Arachnid Omnivoractiy. Ideally they would exist on a continuum of such, and vary from game to game (or even within games, if one were adventurous enough to add multiple such races).
I suppose what I'm asking for is half-spoiler race, half starting NPR. To me the important part is the flavour -- massive overpopulation, massive industrial production, suicidal tactics, stunted technological growth, ground forces that are basically ten billion armoured infantry, the ability to consume other races' biomass for food, fuel, or whatever. . .
Now we have some serious logistics considerations in place I was thinking it would be good to also have some control on how this gets burned. Perhaps have three rates on use of supplies based on how intense you want to fight, ie low intensity, normal, high intensity. Low intensity would give penalties to hit but reduce the rate of supplies used, normal would be as is and high would increase chance to hit but drastically increase supplies usage as well.
I'd also suggest that the attacker would drive the rate of supplies used so if they were low intensity then the defending side would also be low intensity and if both attacked then the highest intensity selected by wither side would be the intensity of the battle.
You might use different rates if holding on for reinforcements or on the opposite side may look to up the ante to win before reinforcements arrived or if there was time pressure on the objective.
Not sure if added/suggested yet (probably was)
Preset orders for ships so you don't have to manually put the same orders for every ship, its a pain to do so.
Not sure if added/suggested yet (probably was)
Preset orders for ships so you don't have to manually put the same orders for every ship, its a pain to do so.
Do you mean weapon assignments? Orders are at the fleet level.
Do you mean weapon assignments? Orders are at the fleet level.
No I meant conditional orders such as refueling/surveying.
"Geo-Survey Preset"
Default Orders:
>Survey nearest body
Conditional Order A:
>If fuel is under 30%, refuelA fleet consisting of 25 14.000t Asteroid Miners is detected at the same distance as a single 14.000t Asteroid Miner. I think there should be some ‚penalty‘ for large assemblies of ships in terms of detectability. EM value accumulates for a civilization. Likewise it should for larger fleets. Not in a 1 to 1 scale, but something like: 10 ships a 14.000t should be detectable like 1 ship a 28.000t.This has a big problem when going by fleet: you can simply put all of the ships in different fleets, which would then be at the same location without increasing the detectable range. If you go by ships on one exact spot, that can be easily solved by letting all of the ships get near each other instead of on the sames spot. If you go by distance on the other hand, it would be very complicated calculation when which ship would be detected. In any case, i dont see how this could realisticly be implemented.
This has a big problem when going by fleet: you can simply put all of the ships in different fleets, which would then be at the same location without increasing the detectable range. If you go by ships on one exact spot, that can be easily solved by letting all of the ships get near each other instead of on the sames spot. If you go by distance on the other hand, it would be very complicated calculation when which ship would be detected. In any case, i dint see how this could realistically be implemented.
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.This is a very good suggestion and something that has happened in actual military history. Morale could represent both the mental willingness to fight, as well as the general organization and cohesion of the unit, as well as their fatigue level. So repeated combat brings it down, being on defensive keeps it static, staying in the rear increases it slowly and being out of combat zone altogether makes it go up fast.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.
The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.
The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.
The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
Ground combat morale as it is currently implemented is just an amplifier, as the stronger side gains morale for successful kills, and the weaker side loses morale for taking more damage.This is a very good suggestion and something that has happened in actual military history. Morale could represent both the mental willingness to fight, as well as the general organization and cohesion of the unit, as well as their fatigue level. So repeated combat brings it down, being on defensive keeps it static, staying in the rear increases it slowly and being out of combat zone altogether makes it go up fast.
That in itself is not very interesting, as it is essentially HP all over again. It would be way more interesting if only morale losses were amplified on front line attack, or units would even take morale damage for being on front line attack regardless of opposition, to simulate the strain of assault, and troops getting successively more disorganized, and not having time to rest and get their gear sorted out and repaired.
The interesting situations this could lead to is a stronger attacker wearing itself out to the point the defender can counterattack and defeat a stronger, low morale opponent. So for a successful attack you need to be quick enough, rotate your offensive formations, or let them recover, as currently there does not seem to be much incentive where you would ever want to stall a fight as the stronger force.
Both versions of 'morale' have an impact on fighting ability, although the quality aspect is long-term while combat fatigue is short-term and could recover within a few days. Perhaps we should have both with different designations.Hearts of Iron 3 solved this with using Strength and Organization values for each units. Strength was literally the Hit Points of an unit - the game did not model individual soldiers or equipment - where as Organization was a catch-all for all non-physical elements of a unit. So a high-quality, well-trained unit would have a higher Organization than a low-quality, poorly-trained one. What made the system really work was the "hidden" attribute of Morale, that determined how fast Organization could be recovered after a battle. So while the military doctrines of a country might allow the training of units with high Organization values, without the investment in propaganda etc that improved Morale, the units would only fight a single battle, and then require days if not weeks to recover. Units, no matter how much Strength they had left, would be immediately routed when their Organization hit zero and if they could not path to safety, would surrender.
Anyway, some food for thought there. Personally I think that renaming Morale to Quality and adding a Cohesion value would probably be the best system for Aurora C#. The Quality will only slowly increase due to Commander Training and combat, replenishing losses would bring it down, but otherwise it would be static. Cohesion value would be static in peace time, go automatically down in combat, recover slowly when unit is part of a campaign but not at front lines, and recover fast when unit is completely out of the war zone. The benefits of this system would be that it encourages players to rotate their combat units instead of just dropping a massive DOOM STACK on a planet, which makes ground campaigns more immersive. There would be a solid mechanical reason to create a R&R ship(s) or stations, where mauled ground units could be replenished and recover their Cohesion before being sent back to the meat grinder. And Cohesion could be something that would allow flavour between races - a Psychic Hive Mind could have insanely high Cohesion values when compared to Humans.
Well, if you are going to redo the Morale system, I've a few suggestions.
I'd say that ground forces have 3 non-physical stats. These stats are Morale, Cohesion and Training.
Morale would have a linear connection with casualties; although more severe losses will cause more severe morale loss, the real threat to morale is slow attrition. Likewise, although inflicting losses on enemy forces raises morale, it does not raise it as much as taking the same losses does in damage. Units in Support and Rear Echelon positions take worse morale hits when engaged and recover less when inflicting losses. Units that have been engaged in combat during a construction increment do not recover morale. This would encourage players to cycle forces, but the time spent should be something reasonable. Morale normally doesn't exceed the Formation's maximum value, but a properly skilled CO can increase the cap and/or recovery as currently in the rules.
It should be noted that, during WW2, the Americans reckoned a soldier could remain on station for nearly 3 months at a time, while the British cycled their troops every 12 to 14 days, giving them 4 days of leave.
Cohesion would have an exponential connection with casualties; constantly bleeding a few troops every combat round will slowly decrease Cohesion, taking a large number of casualties for the formation all at once drastically impacts its Cohesion and ability to provide a united front. Likewise is the loss of an HQ unit in the formation or the CO due to a combat injury something that can cause potentially heavy hits to Cohesion, but if they've got non-generic COs under them the hit is less (on the presumption that the chain of command keeps going), while the loss of an HQ has limited effect as long as it's not the last HQ. Having more than 1 HQ in the formation is a boost for Cohesion, if one with strongly diminishing returns, as is a commander with the right skills.
Generally speaking a military unit can cope quite well with the slow loss of troops; it's something they train and prepare for because losses are inevitable in war. Losing command and coordination, as would happen if the HQ of the unit is lost or a large chunk of its personnel is killed in a short amount of time is far more devastating.Putting down Cohesion as an explicit value does mean that you can get an idea how likely it is a given unit is going to falter and enable an enemy Breakthrough. High Cohesion also translates into having a high chance of performing a Breakthrough though.
Training would take the place of the current Morale value. I would say it's much more stratified than the current system, with the levels of Conscript, Green, Trained, Regular, Veteran and Elite. GFTF's on a planet can be instructed to train formations to a certain standard, which impacts the time and wealth it takes to train. Minerals is independent and only cares for the end equipment. Conscript troops train quickly and cheaply but take severe maluses to Morale and Cohesion, Trained troops have standard Morale and Cohesion, and Elites have high Morale and Cohesion but take a long time and are expensive to train and maintain. A CO with the proper skills can get even the worst Conscript unit up to Elite eventually, but that will take a lot of time of money in comparison to just selecting Elite training in the GFTF.
Training is something that's accumulated not unlike the way crew skill levels are. And like with crew skill levels, it's something that's averaged between all members of the unit. You can absolutely shove Green troops into an Elite formation, it just means the unit becomes on the average less skilled and may lose a level of Training depending on how much the unit is expanded from current size, but likewise can you shove some Elite or Veteran troops into a much less skilled unit as a cadre to stiffen them up a bit.
I deliberately picked some tresholds so as to let you pick a few values for each level instead of having to insert a calculation system that can get... odd as skill point values become more extreme.
I've got more ideas for the ground combat system, although I'll admit I'd basically shamelessly plunder Paradox grand strategy games for ideas.
Well, if you are going to redo the Morale system, I've a few suggestions.
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Training would take the place of the current Morale value. I would say it's much more stratified than the current system, with the levels of Conscript, Green, Trained, Regular, Veteran and Elite.
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I deliberately picked some thresholds so as to let you pick a few values for each level instead of having to insert a calculation system that can get... odd as skill point values become more extreme.
Combat would only increase Quality (for the survivors) while Cohesion would fall based on a base rate for being in combat, modified by losses. Quality would decrease as a result of replacements being added (as morale does now), but would still move up to 100 relatively quickly (about 100 per year) and above 100 more slowly, again per the current morale rules. Rather than cohesion being higher for a 'hive mind', maybe it would just fall much more slowly.
I really HATE a stratified level system. I hate that a force that is 1 XP short of Veteran counts the same as a force 1 XP above Green. I would much rather have a scale of 50 to 150 -- probably with a significant bell curve -- than fixed 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%, 150% categories.
My computer can handle nine decimal places easily. Please give us a morale system that (theoretically) accounts for when my troops get double dessert rations versus when they don't.
Do we really need both hp and cohesion? I know they're different things, but it seems like the actual strategic impact would be minimal outside increasing micromanagement.
In the end, this is ground combat in Aurora, not a new game entirely, so I'm kind of wary of over-complicating an addition that will already be much more complicated then what it's replacing.
Well, currently ground combat is fire & forget, unlike space combat which is very micro heavy.It's more that simply moving formation in and out of the front line when they get low cohesion is tedious and pointless, without much in the way of actual decision-making in the vast majority of cases, rather than people not wanting deeper ground play. Just busy work. Unlike most aspects of space combat where actual decisions need to be made. And whilst it could be automated, that begs the question of why even implement the mechanic in the first place if you're just going to automate it.
Even in C#, it is largely fire & forget, because while you will spend more time designing your units and formations, the only real concern you have to worry about is ensuring supplies & replacement are delivered to the planet. You select front and rear formations, ground-support fighters (if any) and then let the game proceed. With the proposed change, a player would have to monitor ground combat, making it more like space combat in the amount of player attention it requires.
Having said that, I can totally understand that for some players, the ground combat is a tasteless side salad whereas the space combat is the fat t-bone slathered in gravy and spraying thousand islands sauce over the salad will not improve the dining experience for them. :D
Do we really need both hp and cohesion? I know they're different things, but it seems like the actual strategic impact would be minimal outside increasing micromanagement.
In the end, this is ground combat in Aurora, not a new game entirely, so I'm kind of wary of over-complicating an addition that will already be much more complicated then what it's replacing.
This is a valid view too. If I change Morale to Quality and add Cohesion, the actual game-play change would be moving formations in and out of the front-line to manage cohesion. While more realistic, that might get tedious fast. It could be better to have less 'realism', but smoother game play. Although Aurora should have a lot of variety and choice, it should not have micromanagement where that detracts from game play.
Well, currently ground combat is fire & forget, unlike space combat which is very micro heavy.
Even in C#, it is largely fire & forget, because while you will spend more time designing your units and formations, the only real concern you have to worry about is ensuring supplies & replacement are delivered to the planet. You select front and rear formations, ground-support fighters (if any) and then let the game proceed. With the proposed change, a player would have to monitor ground combat, making it more like space combat in the amount of player attention it requires.
Having said that, I can totally understand that for some players, the ground combat is a tasteless side salad whereas the space combat is the fat t-bone slathered in gravy and spraying thousand islands sauce over the salad will not improve the dining experience for them. :D
It could be better to have less 'realism', but smoother game play. Although Aurora should have a lot of variety and choice, it should not have micromanagement where that detracts from game play.
With all the time, work and thinking which went into the new ground combat it is much more "fleshed out" as in VB6 - which results in the point that it also deserves much more "love" from the player... it shouldn't be too micro right but should be more micro than atm...
also as I said, ground combat is something the player can avoid nearly completely if he wishes... space combat he can not...
I would point out that not all player interaction is micromanagement. It becomes micro heavy if you have to do tasks that are not meaningful decisions. Do you attack, do you retreat are important questions, which should matter.
Firing 100 missiles from box launchers in 20 5 missile salvos at 20 swarmers is currently a micro heavy task. If you need to select each ground unit individually and change it to attack, that is micro heavy, but changing a stance every few hours, that is just paying attention to what you are actually doing.
I had a few thoughts about spoilers today.
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A suggestion on the ground combat:I would tend to agree that some of the citizenry would volunteer if it seemed to them there was a need to.
Population could contribute some troops/strength as well. . . snip. . .
A suggestion on the ground combat:
Population could contribute some troops/strength as well, depending on the loyalty and happiness of the planet. A planet that loves its empire will have many patriotic citizens taking up arms themselves to help fend off the invaders, while a planet that already hates the ruling empire might even aid the invaders in getting captured.
The 19th century was the time when conscription ruled, and it was all about who could get the most men into the field, but since then, total manpower became less and less important compared to the amount of weapons you can afford, which is why we have many more professional armies again.
A suggestion on the ground combat:
Population could contribute some troops/strength as well, depending on the loyalty and happiness of the planet. A planet that loves its empire will have many patriotic citizens taking up arms themselves to help fend off the invaders, while a planet that already hates the ruling empire might even aid the invaders in getting captured.
The 19th century was the time when conscription ruled, and it was all about who could get the most men into the field, but since then, total manpower became less and less important compared to the amount of weapons you can afford, which is why we have many more professional armies again.
In Aurora the cost of equipment and weapons is likely only to rise, and the value of people without the proper equipment and the proper training to use it will fall.
Loyalty might matter in how easy it is to pacify a planet, but generally I'd consider the value of untrained volunteers nil, and if you do want to train a militia, you can spam large quantities of PWL equipped light infantry to fit the bill.
No matter how advanced the weapons get, conscripts will always be useful. Maybe not on the front line, but there's always room for more workers behind the lines. This is likely to only get MORE true as combat units require more and more supplies. These conscripts can be building and operating logistics infrastructure; driving trucks, paving roads, laying rail lines. They can also be building emplacements; you don't need Navy SEALS and laser guns to pour concrete.Quote from: Ranged66A suggestion on the ground combat:I would tend to agree that some of the citizenry would volunteer if it seemed to them there was a need to.
Population could contribute some troops/strength as well. . . snip. . .
A few questions come to mind if we consider the citizenry rising up to join the fight:
- Can they leave the infrastructure that supports them in hostile environments to go fight?
- Are they self armed in entirety, or to some percentage?
- If not self armed, can the soldiers arm them and if so, how many guns can they distribute? Presumably 100k soldiers do not have enough guns to arm 4 million volunteers. You have probably already lost the orbitals so good luck shipping in more guns before the fight is over.
- If they are self armed, do all civilians possess a gun or only some fraction. Does the fraction that volunteer apply only to the armed percentage, or the total population yielding both armed and unarmed volunteers
- What value, if any, might unarmed volunteers hold? Some bonus to recovery/replacement rates for lost personnel?
- Should player government and/or commander traits and/or administrator traits be used to influence the expectation/willingness to accept/seek out volunteers?
- Is there a limit to how many will be useful at any given task? Absurd example, 1 million civvies trying to do the work that was done by 100 personnel will probably get nothing done, just get in each other's way.
- Is there a tipping point? Seems reasonable that while too many would be detrimental, too few would benefit from adding some more.
- Are there any roles they might be a viable substitute? Seems plausible that for any such role, while too few and too many both don't get enough done, the optimal quantity might also not get enough done.
- Should they be affected by research as if they were a ground force unit? I would think yes, today we can buy guns far better than we could have in the 1800's, research tends to advance what we can obtain.
- Can they leave the infrastructure to venture out into the hostile atmosphere to be resistance fighters?
- If not, you won't be doing much resisting staying bottled up in the domes
- If you can leave the dome to resist, how likely are people to resist knowing the hostiles can simply vent every dome they encounter and let your supplies run out to end you.
- If its a breathable atmosphere, then resistance in any taken populated areas seems plausible. Outright combat or just a modifier to efficiencies?
- Is there really a point where the civvies would be so disloyal as to turn on you?
- The grass would have to be known, not thought, but known to be greener on the other side of the fence before they turn on you. Wealthier, benevolent, and have treated conquered planets well already? The civvies might just try to trade you in for a better life.
- xenophobia, biological/environmental compatibility, and ability to even communicate is likely to be a factor. Even if the grass is greener, do they leave the planet suitable for you, or terraform it to them and leave you restricted to infrastructure in perpetuity?
- if you know the grass is definitely greener right here, then its a choice between helping and apathy, not rebellion. If the invaders are known to mistreat the conquered, apathy is less likely, if they are known to exterminate it seems absurd, and in both cases, rebellion/assisting the invaders seems incredibly unlikely.
Perhaps none of that matters at all and it all simply hides behind abstractions, and you get 'given' a number of civilian combat units presumed to have equal traits but lesser abilities than standard soldiers, at the cost of some population loss, and what you do with them is up to you. Presumably once the battle is over any surviving volunteers auto disband and rejoin the population.
Suggestion 2: civilian mineral harvesters that go after comets/roids/moons. We already have fuel harvesters so why not!How would that differ from CMCs aside from the fact that instead of automines on a colony, there are asteroid miners on a colony?
I hope the research system is redesigned at some point. It is way to linear and not that interesting as a mechanic at the present.
Technologies which boost industry, research and economy should work very different from engineering and theoretical development. I think labs should be dedicated to a certain field but you should be able to convert them at a lower cost.
Scientist bonuses should not be immediately applicable to research projects but accumulated over time so there is a real choice between long term and short term planning. Instead of administration being a restriction on number of labs it could be a faster growth of science bonuses or some such.
I certainly don't want this to happen before C# Aurora is launched but at least that it perhaps is considered in some way down the line. The current system are a bit "gamey", you can role-play some restrictions of course, the same with industry.
I would love for industry construction to behave in a similar way where you can make long term plans or short term investment. Sort of like production lines in HoI 4 with a gearing bonus towards different projects. If you produce lots of things of a specific item you will produce that thing more and more efficiently over time... up to a certain limit based on technology or engineering skills.
To be fair, Hoi 4 is using Grit-and-grease man-powered assembly lines instead of super-hightech space-age omnifactories that use physics-defying elements
I hope the research system is redesigned at some point. It is way to linear and not that interesting as a mechanic at the present.
Technologies which boost industry, research and economy should work very different from engineering and theoretical development. I think labs should be dedicated to a certain field but you should be able to convert them at a lower cost.
Scientist bonuses should not be immediately applicable to research projects but accumulated over time so there is a real choice between long term and short term planning. Instead of administration being a restriction on number of labs it could be a faster growth of science bonuses or some such.
I certainly don't want this to happen before C# Aurora is launched but at least that it perhaps is considered in some way down the line. The current system are a bit "gamey", you can role-play some restrictions of course, the same with industry.
I would love for industry construction to behave in a similar way where you can make long term plans or short term investment. Sort of like production lines in HoI 4 with a gearing bonus towards different projects. If you produce lots of things of a specific item you will produce that thing more and more efficiently over time... up to a certain limit based on technology or engineering skills.
Yes this is something I would love as well in the far future.
I think Research and Industry construction could use similar mechanics. Basically start any new factory/lab at low efficiency (5-20%) and have them gradually, over some years build up proficiency in the area or category they work until a maximum of 100%
This means you want to make a long term plan that feels more realistic and resemble real limits rather than put 30/30 labs or 600/600 of your factories on a single project that you rush. It also means that you want to try to have some stuff building/researching in most categories in case you need something urgent from that category.
In fact I would much rather prefer if some of the leader bonuses ( which for Scientists can be massive ) is built into such a system rewarding long term planning and commitment into a tech field without getting lost because a random event decided it was time for that scientist to go.
HoI4 also have a diminishing returns built in here so that the first 10% of efficiency is gained much faster than the last 10% and that works really well to balance it out and reward very long term commitments.
Actually, if historical production schedules are anything to go by?
You are likely to see the 'mass produced' ships, the small ships, to get regular design updates and irregular complete redesigns of the types of ships. Because these ships are produced in large enough numbers that such a standardized design is desirable and it's practical to update regularly. The medium size ships? That's the point where an entire class is designed and allocated all at once. Sure the entire class is standardized, and given the time it takes to go from design to ship if the entire class doesn't get constructed at once (it won't be) you're likely to see new builds using refined designs and newer equipment while their older siblings languish with older stuff until a fleet wide update program.
But the big ships?
Big ships are bespoke. All of them. The US build ten of its Nimitz class carriers, but it took from 1968 to 2006 to build all of them. Which means that basically every time a carrier was getting build the US had the time to look at what was working, what was not and redesigning and refining the Nimitz class with every new ship. You could make a decent argument that calling it the Nimitz class is mistaken as each ship could be considered a subclass of the design by the time the keels got laid down.
There's a point in production, especially when the R&D cycle is running fast, where creating a factory for serial production optimization is not profitable, because it takes too long to build even a single item to even consider producing a second with the same setup when it's already obsolete.
With modern day computers the cost of designing a new ship is pretty much entirely just money and time. This is admittedly in no small part because there are massive databases with known materials and their behaviours that can be referred to when designing and simulating a new ship, obviating much of the need for prototypes and small scale tests that are later scrapped.You've already got the Shipyard Operations tech which makes re-tooling cheaper and faster, that does a decent job of covering the idea of learning about how to make ships out of TN material and building up such databases of parts and properties.
TN materials don't have this advantage, not early on, but as the knowledge of TN materials and their physics grows and develops this will become true of them as well. Because of this it might be more accurate to render the cost of retooling to nearly nothing except for some time and money but make research eat TN minerals. Of course, that would be a major shift in the game mechanics...
With modern day computers the cost of designing a new ship is pretty much entirely just money and time. This is admittedly in no small part because there are massive databases with known materials and their behaviours that can be referred to when designing and simulating a new ship, obviating much of the need for prototypes and small scale tests that are later scrapped.
This is more of just an RP thing, but i'd like a codex of all the individual ships that were build/destroyed with their history as well. Just to give a sort of "funeral" to ships that pioneered space travel.
This is more of just an RP thing, but i'd like a codex of all the individual ships that were build/destroyed with their history as well. Just to give a sort of "funeral" to ships that pioneered space travel.
This would be pretty good. Maybe some kind of historical records too, listing how many kills it got, how many missiles it shot down. Systems explored, bodies surveyed, jump points found... Stats for ships would be pretty neat.
This is more of just an RP thing, but i'd like a codex of all the individual ships that were build/destroyed with their history as well. Just to give a sort of "funeral" to ships that pioneered space travel.
This would be pretty good. Maybe some kind of historical records too, listing how many kills it got, how many missiles it shot down. Systems explored, bodies surveyed, jump points found... Stats for ships would be pretty neat.
Just write it down as it happens.
Have riots occur at high unrest where you lose wealth and buildings are damaged.
Have riots occur at high unrest where you lose wealth and buildings are damaged.
I'm actually considering having insurgents / rebels / partisans / freedom fighters (choose as need) appear at higher unrest levels. The fighting will cause collateral damage and they might even win and take over the population.
If they win and take over a population, could you give them all the same abilities as any other NPR, like building ships, training ground troops, and building colonies?
I would like to see the range of ship commands extended. For example the survey nearest object order, it has a range of 10 billion km which in most circumstances is ok, then you come across a system where theres planets/asteroids, sometimes hundreds of them, that are 50 billion km away, sometimes more. Maybe have this as something that is extended as you research better technology, and/or add more survey parts to a ship.
I would like to see the range of ship commands extended. For example the survey nearest object order, it has a range of 10 billion km which in most circumstances is ok, then you come across a system where theres planets/asteroids, sometimes hundreds of them, that are 50 billion km away, sometimes more. Maybe have this as something that is extended as you research better technology, and/or add more survey parts to a ship.
I'm pretty sure the 10 Terameter limit is a relic of VB6's performance issues. C# Aurora's search algorithm can likely handle much longer distances, and may even have already been modified to do so.
Since we're on surveys, would it possible to add a "survey next five planets/moons" order? Sometimes there's just too many asteroids and I want to survey planets first, so I can't give the "5 bodies" order, but "survey nearest planet or moon" is noticeably slower if you go by 5-days turns. I guess once a ship finishes its survey order, it waits for the end of the 5 days increment to generate its new survey order, while the ships with "survey next five system bodies" have a list to go through and don't waste as much time.
Since we're on surveys, would it possible to add a "survey next five planets/moons" order? Sometimes there's just too many asteroids and I want to survey planets first, so I can't give the "5 bodies" order, but "survey nearest planet or moon" is noticeably slower if you go by 5-days turns. I guess once a ship finishes its survey order, it waits for the end of the 5 days increment to generate its new survey order, while the ships with "survey next five system bodies" have a list to go through and don't waste as much time.You can circumvent this easily by using 1-day turns and Auto-Turns ON options.
Steve.... did you give any more thoughts into changing the Jump Drive requirement and size of the jump ship?
I think there are many changes in favour of smaller ships and I think this could be one good change in favour of bigger ships. It sometimes feel a bit restrictive to build bigger ships at low to mid tech levels because you also need to match them with an equal ship to jump them through jump point. It would open up some more strategic possibilities if we could use smaller jump ships to ferry larger military ships to their destinations.
I mostly end up adding the cheapest things possible to these ships so they require as little build material possible unless I can make a proper command ship out of it. But with increasing size I run out of good command equipment to put in that ship and are left with hangar space to fill them out which is cheap and versatile.
But in general I would like the option to build dedicated jump ships without having to add stuff to it just to make it bigger.
I don't know about others, but auto-turns are kinda painful for me to stop. Takes several tries everytime, and occasionally the system map window slips back behind every other window, it's not too bad if I set it to 2 minutes while NPRs are fighting and it ends up taking me 30 in-game minutes to finally manage to stop the autoturns, but with 1-day, I'd lose a lot of time.Since we're on surveys, would it possible to add a "survey next five planets/moons" order? Sometimes there's just too many asteroids and I want to survey planets first, so I can't give the "5 bodies" order, but "survey nearest planet or moon" is noticeably slower if you go by 5-days turns. I guess once a ship finishes its survey order, it waits for the end of the 5 days increment to generate its new survey order, while the ships with "survey next five system bodies" have a list to go through and don't waste as much time.You can circumvent this easily by using 1-day turns and Auto-Turns ON options.
Performance isn't the main concern. With a much higher limit, geo survey ships potentially will go sailing off into the middle of nowhere and then run out of fuel. A better option might be for me to introduce a distance option for standing orders at the fleet level or perhaps have 'survey within 10m', 'survey within 25m', etc.
If they win and take over a population, could you give them all the same abilities as any other NPR, like building ships, training ground troops, and building colonies?For roleplaying options, it might be most interesting of the SM can choose what kind of player it will become, when it happens. In a multiplayer game he can offer the new position to a potential new player who then plays them as a player - or if no interest, he can set them to NPR.
Steve, in your posting "Tactical map in background" you wrote: "C# does not have a starting menu bar in the same way as C#." I think the latter C# was meant to be VB6... .
Unrest should increase when unemployment rate is too high. People do want jobs! - Or if unemployment rises over a certain percentage, the civilian sector will begin employing those people into service industries. Takes them away from you if you later need them for production. However, if it switches around and you begin to have need of workers, and service industries do have more people empoloyed than they per game rules should have, they will (slowly) release those people which then will fill up your empty industries.This isn't a good thing because Aurora does not model commercial sector and non-TN industrial sector requiring work force. Logically, either there is a massive invisible population that produces trade goods, or those goods are actually produced by the unemployed population. This also doesn't mesh well with RP-scenarios where a nation only uses a portion of its real population for TN - for example I usually cut down 3rd world populations to simulate the general low education level as well as a balance measure.
This would mostly be for cosmetics - maybe there should be a reasonable punishment for your "service overemployments" applied. But I have no idea at the moment what could be reasonable. Maybe people get lazy and the overall productivity reduces.
I don't know about others, but auto-turns are kinda painful for me to stop. Takes several tries everytime, and occasionally the system map window slips back behind every other window, it's not too bad if I set it to 2 minutes while NPRs are fighting and it ends up taking me 30 in-game minutes to finally manage to stop the autoturns, but with 1-day, I'd lose a lot of time.Five 1-day turns might take a little longer than a single 5-day turn, but the auto-turns stop automatically when construction cycle runs, or something else that interrupts it, like a hostile contact, happens. So you won't lose out on production or research.
Plus, IIRC, it's still slower for 5 1-day autoturns than a single 5 days turn.
Any plans of adding resource silos for TN materials, which then can be attacked by the new ground forces... ? Rather then invading a planet for takeover one could then raid the planet to destroy its depots and cripple the enemy this way... .
Also would open a way for small infiltration units for sabotage or piracy...
This isn't a good thing because Aurora does not model commercial sector and non-TN industrial sector requiring work force. Logically, either there is a massive invisible population that produces trade goods, or those goods are actually produced by the unemployed population. This also doesn't mesh well with RP-scenarios where a nation only uses a portion of its real population for TN - for example I usually cut down 3rd world populations to simulate the general low education level as well as a balance measure.
Thus Steve would need to add a fourth sector to each colony - environment, service, commercial and TN-industry, and the relevant mechanism for populations to switch jobs. After all, not many nations can just command people to quit their day job at the mobile phone assembly line and instead start making missiles.
I think this is something that should be part of a larger population and economy overhaul, far down the line.
Any plans of adding resource silos for TN materials, which then can be attacked by the new ground forces... ? Rather then invading a planet for takeover one could then raid the planet to destroy its depots and cripple the enemy this way... .
Also would open a way for small infiltration units for sabotage or piracy...
I have considered this for both minerals and fuel, although it would have to be extended to missiles, ship components, etc. It would be a lot of extra work/management/UI. The question is whether that game play benefit would be worth it.
Another enhancement I have long considered is whether power to run everything should be required, from ground-based solar (distance from sun), geothermal (on high tectonic), TN reactors like those on ships, orbital solar collectors or even stations near the sun, etc. and whether power can be beamed and at what efficiency. That adds an extra layer of complexity and new infrastructure to be defended, but again it is a case of management vs game play benefit.
Any plans of adding resource silos for TN materials, which then can be attacked by the new ground forces... ? Rather then invading a planet for takeover one could then raid the planet to destroy its depots and cripple the enemy this way... .
Also would open a way for small infiltration units for sabotage or piracy...
I have considered this for both minerals and fuel, although it would have to be extended to missiles, ship components, etc. It would be a lot of extra work/management/UI. The question is whether that game play benefit would be worth it.
Another enhancement I have long considered is whether power to run everything should be required, from ground-based solar (distance from sun), geothermal (on high tectonic), TN reactors like those on ships, orbital solar collectors or even stations near the sun, etc. and whether power can be beamed and at what efficiency. That adds an extra layer of complexity and new infrastructure to be defended, but again it is a case of management vs game play benefit.
I would be happy if reactor power was required to run ship components, weapons, etc. Though it can always be surmised that the weight of reactor is already calculated when you add components, just like life support is, and the actual location of that reactor and its potential to be damaged is just abstracted away since its minor compared to the energy requirements of energy weapons. Though shields should need reactor power :pAny plans of adding resource silos for TN materials, which then can be attacked by the new ground forces... ? Rather then invading a planet for takeover one could then raid the planet to destroy its depots and cripple the enemy this way... .
Also would open a way for small infiltration units for sabotage or piracy...
I have considered this for both minerals and fuel, although it would have to be extended to missiles, ship components, etc. It would be a lot of extra work/management/UI. The question is whether that game play benefit would be worth it.
Another enhancement I have long considered is whether power to run everything should be required, from ground-based solar (distance from sun), geothermal (on high tectonic), TN reactors like those on ships, orbital solar collectors or even stations near the sun, etc. and whether power can be beamed and at what efficiency. That adds an extra layer of complexity and new infrastructure to be defended, but again it is a case of management vs game play benefit.
Suggestion: Organisational Number - Ground Combat
Not sure is there have been a suggestion on this, one thing I never liked about Ground Forces was the ability to continue to fight day after day, as long as they have supplies without rest. This mean combat instead of lasting months really on every last about a month total, no matter the size of the fights.
What I would love to see is something like an organisational number (very similar to HOI), which reduced each time the element is is combat. These numbers replenish over time, this stop the continual attack and allows combat to be a longer process then the current system. Or the very least swap out formations on the attack
The organisational number is an arbitrary number which describes a unit capabability over the length of time it fights, it is suppose to take into account combat fatigue, maintainence, continual combat degrades communications and organisational structure making commands slower.
Suggestion: Organisational Number - Ground Combat
Not sure is there have been a suggestion on this, one thing I never liked about Ground Forces was the ability to continue to fight day after day, as long as they have supplies without rest. This mean combat instead of lasting months really on every last about a month total, no matter the size of the fights.
What I would love to see is something like an organisational number (very similar to HOI), which reduced each time the element is is combat. These numbers replenish over time, this stop the continual attack and allows combat to be a longer process then the current system. Or the very least swap out formations on the attack
The organisational number is an arbitrary number which describes a unit capabability over the length of time it fights, it is suppose to take into account combat fatigue, maintainence, continual combat degrades communications and organisational structure making commands slower.
I *think* Steve mentioned that at some point because it was asked for earlier. It would be a very useful Quality of Life improvement. "Continual Capacity Expansion" opens a new sub-menu where you can write in the size.
Shipyards should be able to be detooled for either no or minimal cost, to stop you from having functionally useless shipyards that will never have a new class assigned to them due to retooling costs.
Unrest should increase when unemployment rate is too high. People do want jobs! - Or if unemployment rises over a certain percentage, the civilian sector will begin employing those people into service industries. Takes them away from you if you later need them for production. However, if it switches around and you begin to have need of workers, and service industries do have more people empoloyed than they per game rules should have, they will (slowly) release those people which then will fill up your empty industries.This isn't a good thing because Aurora does not model commercial sector and non-TN industrial sector requiring work force. Logically, either there is a massive invisible population that produces trade goods, or those goods are actually produced by the unemployed population. This also doesn't mesh well with RP-scenarios where a nation only uses a portion of its real population for TN - for example I usually cut down 3rd world populations to simulate the general low education level as well as a balance measure.
This would mostly be for cosmetics - maybe there should be a reasonable punishment for your "service overemployments" applied. But I have no idea at the moment what could be reasonable. Maybe people get lazy and the overall productivity reduces.
Thus Steve would need to add a fourth sector to each colony - environment, service, commercial and TN-industry, and the relevant mechanism for populations to switch jobs. After all, not many nations can just command people to quit their day job at the mobile phone assembly line and instead start making missiles.
I think this is something that should be part of a larger population and economy overhaul, far down the line.
Would it be possible to set a limit on the shipyards continuous capacity expansion. For example I want to build the shipyard up to 80,000 ton capacity I can either set it to continuous expansion and monitor when this is reached, or I can use several commands over time to build up to the eventual size required. If instead when I start the continuous expansion I set a limit of 80,000 and then have the shipyard stop expanding, It would be simpler and cause less micromanagement as well.Such an option would be great - and would make obsolete all prefixed value. Just imput target size and no of slipways - voila.
Brian
Even in VB6 Retooling cost is never higher than it would be for an empty shipyard. The cost is checked for empty or converting from the current tooled class. If converting is cheaper than empty, then that number is used. Otherwise empty is used.
That was more to model the the shipyard being "built for spec" the first time. In effect, the cost of retooling for your first ship is included in the cost of the shipyard itself.
In other words, working as intended :P
Has the military recruitment been talked about yet? Being able to choose if your armed forces are conscripts or volunteer-based professional military force, that sort of thing.
On the ordnance factory page, i'd love to have a button to mash that would compute a "missile census", counting the existing missiles by type as well as aggregating the loadout specs of my ships (including those building) by missile type. if displaying all that data is a pita, just getting supply and demand numbers for one type (via dropdown?) would still be pretty godlike.
It might be a good idea to make info the AI uses as inputs visible to players in general (when the info would be useful to the player), that way there is a way higher chance of noticing if its getting miscalculated (or noticing if the calculations ever break), which would hopefully lead to more reliable AI over the long term.
Hmmm, thinking about a reverse command. In the Fleet command window you can give a fleet the order to replenish missing missiles from planetary (or whatever) stockpile. Calculating, that the stockpiles wouldn't be enough, is easy for the computer. Auto-generating a production task which builds the missing missiles - would be a nice addon ;-)On the ordnance factory page, i'd love to have a button to mash that would compute a "missile census", counting the existing missiles by type as well as aggregating the loadout specs of my ships (including those building) by missile type. if displaying all that data is a pita, just getting supply and demand numbers for one type (via dropdown?) would still be pretty godlike.
The NPRs are doing all of the above in C# Aurora, so they know what missile types to build. Would be relatively easy to show to players too.
Suggestion:I would not bother too much about that. If anything terraforming should become more detailed in terms of opportunities. You should need some way to bind/extract harmful gasses, and you need something to release useful gasses to build up an atmosphere, instead of producing gas out of nothing.
Make terraforming less braindead. Right now, the terraforming system is really detailed, but it always boils down to the same actions as far as the player is concerned. Add 0.1atm oxygen, remove poisons, add greenhouse/anti-greenhouse gas, remove excess pressure. It's cool that the atmospheres are actually tracked and all, but there's no choices being made here.
I propose making terraforming actually involve some choices or trade-offs. Maybe Mercury would be better not terraformed; solar panels work better with no atmosphere in the way. Titan is better with it's cold and dense atmosphere; computation is more efficient the colder it is, thanks to Landauer's Limit, so a thick, cold atmosphere makes a great heatsink. Make us have to choose between a habitable planet or a planet that's good for supercomputers or solar panels.
There are a number of changes in C# that affect terraforming, including hydrosphere requirements, planetary capacities, speed dependent on planet size, tide-locked planets have different temperature effects, etc.. While the mechanics are similar except for evaporation/condensation, there are a lot more factors in the decision of where to terraform.That just changes what planets are worth it though, there's still basically no decisions being made during the terraforming process. Once a player has decided to terraform a world, the process is the same as it was on VB6. Some worlds might take longer, some might be quicker, but the point is that there is still going to be an optimum way to terraform. I am suggesting that there be trade-offs. For example thinning Titan's atmosphere and warming it up will make it better for human habitation, but worse for running super-computers or any industry that generates a lot of waste heat. There is a trade-off going on here that doesn't happen in either the old system or the new system. It wouldn't just be "Do I terraform this world?" but rather "Do I terraform this world, and if so, in what way?"
For example thinning Titan's atmosphere and warming it up will make it better for human habitation, but worse for running super-computers or any industry that generates a lot of waste heat. There is a trade-off going on here that doesn't happen in either the old system or the new system. It wouldn't just be "Do I terraform this world?" but rather "Do I terraform this world, and if so, in what way?"But that makes absolutely no sense. It does not matter how much more solar energy you get on Mercury without atmosphere or how much easier it is to run supercomputer on Titan if humans would still need specialized infrastructure to live there. Any savings you get on energy or cooling would be offset by the cost of having to import infra to accommodate colonists. The value of a colony cost 0 world is priceless. I do understand what you're proposing, making the details of terraforming a decision, but there already is a decision on whether to terraform a body in the first place and with the additional new rules, that decision is a bit more complicated than before.
I don't think wht you're asking for makes that much sense. I wouldn't mind a little more detail to the process, but realistically I've only ever really seen terraforming proposed as making a planet more habitable. Indeed, there's a hint in the very word,"terraforming". I haven't seen it seriously argued that it might be a good idea to turn planet earth into a giant snowball or getting rid of all the atmosphere and I don't think this would really add much to gameplay to make this decision. You'd end up just having a bunch of template planets for specific purposes and the process would be identical.There are a number of changes in C# that affect terraforming, including hydrosphere requirements, planetary capacities, speed dependent on planet size, tide-locked planets have different temperature effects, etc.. While the mechanics are similar except for evaporation/condensation, there are a lot more factors in the decision of where to terraform.That just changes what planets are worth it though, there's still basically no decisions being made during the terraforming process. Once a player has decided to terraform a world, the process is the same as it was on VB6. Some worlds might take longer, some might be quicker, but the point is that there is still going to be an optimum way to terraform. I am suggesting that there be trade-offs. For example thinning Titan's atmosphere and warming it up will make it better for human habitation, but worse for running super-computers or any industry that generates a lot of waste heat. There is a trade-off going on here that doesn't happen in either the old system or the new system. It wouldn't just be "Do I terraform this world?" but rather "Do I terraform this world, and if so, in what way?"
And since now financial centers are going to be more useless than ever. . .
EDIT: Also, why is this post getting extra spaces in places I definitely am not putting them?
Do you heavily subsidize civilian shipping lines? Do you exploit the heck out of the Earth-Luna infrastructure run? Do your games last long enough to exhaust your home system minerals, and do you then move your heavy industry to colony worlds? Do you even build imperial freighters?
I've never found Financial Centres to be useless. In fact, I have always considered them essential. They are literally the first thing I build, every game (since they don't require TN tech). Turning resource-poor, population-rich worlds into banking havens is an essential step towards galactic conquest, and a fine retirement plan for Earth / Homeworld / forge worlds.
Population growth on its own does it all for free, cheaper and eventually faster than you can build financial centers. I'd rather use my resources, workforce and factory time on something else. Oh, and of course, wealth, too. I had completely forgotten financial centers also cost wealth when typing this.
If you can't grow your research & industry faster than your population can grow I think your either not expanding industry/research as aggressively as many of us do when we play, not play the game for as long or your much more active in colonizing, or a combination of them.I always run a deficit in the first few years, being in negative wealth is the norm. I solve it with a lot of colonies and conquests. Financial centers have never helped me one bit.
If you try and play an Empire where most population is on large worlds with low pop growth ( or keep them on the core homeworld ) you can grow your industry and research many times as fast as your population grows... which does inevitably lead to wealth shortage when you rely on only population taxes.
If anything, ship production bonuses should be based on how long it takes to build a ship and how long ago the previous ship was launched in such a case. Ships with long production times tend to get far less benefit from the builder's familiarity with the design than a ship that's build in a couple of weeks on a single slip.
If anything, ship production bonuses should be based on how long it takes to build a ship and how long ago the previous ship was launched in such a case. Ships with long production times tend to get far less benefit from the builder's familiarity with the design than a ship that's build in a couple of weeks on a single slip.
I don't think this is really necessary. Ships themselves are not mass produced in assembly lines, and overall it will be just a buff to small units. They already have a massive buff that it is far easier to create small shipyards than to create massive ones. The cost of retooling already incentivises to keep building the same ships, simply increasing that cost would be the easiest way to achieve the same result instead of a complicated system to calculate when what was built.
Suggestions/questions about Boarding Combat:
Will boarding parties be able to call in fire support from friendly ships?
I also suggest that ships being boarded gain/lose functionality as different compartments change hands.
Suggestions/questions about Boarding Combat:
Will boarding parties be able to call in fire support from friendly ships?
I also suggest that ships being boarded gain/lose functionality as different compartments change hands.
I've not written boarding party combat yet but I probably won't add direct fire support. If ships could fire that accurately to help boarding parties, it would create the question of why they don't fire to knock out specific systems in normal combat.
While I won't track which system is in the hands of each combatant, I think it would be safe to say that boarding could cause collateral damage and that it would affect the performance of the ship being boarded.
While it should perhaps not be possible to hit most things specifically in combat I think that engines should be one exception since they are very big and produce the majority of the heat. Especially heat guided missiles should have a greater chance of hitting the engines and you should also have a decently good chance of targeting engines with normal weapons as well. Of course the overall chance of hitting the target should go down of you try to hit something specific... but still could be fun.Heat guided missiles being more likely than normal to hit engines and EM guided missiles being more likely than normal to hit active sensors that have been turned on, could be neat, but I don't think the game needs a system for generally being able to target various components.
While it should perhaps not be possible to hit most things specifically in combat I think that engines should be one exception since they are very big and produce the majority of the heat. Especially heat guided missiles should have a greater chance of hitting the engines and you should also have a decently good chance of targeting engines with normal weapons as well. Of course the overall chance of hitting the target should go down of you try to hit something specific... but still could be fun.Heat guided missiles being more likely than normal to hit engines and EM guided missiles being more likely than normal to hit active sensors that have been turned on, could be neat, but I don't think the game needs a system for generally being able to target various components.
For example, a formation element of 10 tanks engaged in combat is part of an armoured formation with a brigade HQ formation above it and a division HQ formation above that. The tanks will check for a vehicle-based logistics element within the division formation first, then a vehicle-based logistics element within the brigade formation and finally either type of logistic element within their own parent formation. If no logistic elements are available, the tanks will use their inherent supply, although they can only use that inherent supply for ten combat rounds, unless resupplied. If a unit does not require a full resupply (for example, it still has sufficient inherent supply for eight combat rounds), it will only draw an appropriate fraction of its normal GSP requirement (in this case 20%).
really great :) was 100% what I was asking for :)
but quick question about this Steve...
will such a logistic formation be flagged as such for the whole battle running? I mean if I have a formation with 75% logistic size - after a few battle turns the logistic units are "used up", some destroyed by combat and there is only a ratio of 55% left (so under 2/3) but the fighting is going on...
will it still be a "logistic formation" for this rule or just a weak combat formation as it was with a lot of logistic units into? (which would mean it would be better to go 90% or even 95% in the beginning to be sure)
You may also have the reverse situation in some cases, in which a combat formation loses more combat elements than logistics elements and suddenly becomes a logistics formation.really great :) was 100% what I was asking for :)
but quick question about this Steve...
will such a logistic formation be flagged as such for the whole battle running? I mean if I have a formation with 75% logistic size - after a few battle turns the logistic units are "used up", some destroyed by combat and there is only a ratio of 55% left (so under 2/3) but the fighting is going on...
will it still be a "logistic formation" for this rule or just a weak combat formation as it was with a lot of logistic units into? (which would mean it would be better to go 90% or even 95% in the beginning to be sure)
Yes, that is a problem that would have to be addressed. In practical terms though, you would probably create a very logistic heavy formation and then merge with an HQ once it was very small. I need some form of check on logistic size though or the code would start using logistic units from 'normal' formations on the assumption they were logistic formations. Another option is I simply allow the player to flag logistics formations in the same way as supporting formations.
Or make it a special modifier similar to the various training changes. It just only works for formations made up of HQs and Logistics units and nothing else. Could even make for relatively cheap units; large scale logistics dumps have historically been run by second line units IIRC.
New Game Settings
This is a placeholder for Game-level modifiers
1) Percentage modifier for Research Speed (for all races)
2) Percentage modifier for Terraforming Speed (for all races)
3) Percentage modifier for starting minerals on Sol.
4) Flag for Active Civilian Shipping Lines. When this is disabled, shipping lines will not produce ships.
5) Flag for recovering tech due to conquest. You can disable this so no new tech is gained via conquest.
6) LY entry to limit Starting NPR Locations to within a specific range of Sol: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg108824#msg108824
7) Option for Planet X in the Sol System: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg109206#msg109206
You can specify a number of Earth-based player races on the Game Setup window. You will cycle through a number of Race Creation windows equal to the number of races selected. You will still need to create any non-Earth-based races after the main game creation process.
just looking at your test-game screenshots Steve - great :)
but with the last one (ground unit) - would it be possible to add a colom to show for how many batleturns/hours/days (something like this) the selected formation (including its sub-formations when it is a division etc) has supply for?
In your screenshot, there are 4 resupply infanterie units (LG2) - but it would be great to see for how long the "1.PDR" could be fight with this...
this would help the player for his own units a lot if this screen would show how long the supply (units) would last
Having seen the lates AI reports, an idea came into my mind.
One limitation to tell large scale stories is the amount of detail work you have to do with multiple nations. So how about different levels of control?
One: Full AI Empire - the AI controls all levels of this empire
Two: High Level Human - The human player can issue general decisions (negotiate peace, go to war, explore jump point XY, settle in system / on planet ABC); but everything below that is controlled by the AI
Three: Medium Level Human - The human player can issue additional commands like construct new ships or facilities, move fleets to XYZ, etc.
Four: Human Empire - The human player controls everything
What also would be interesting: to be able to switch between modes. For example control an empire on L2 until it goes to war, then switch to L4 and control all aspects of the war, when it is done switch back to L2... .
What I hope with C# Aurora, is that I can play a reasonable multiple start with one player and multiple AIs, that will not inevitably turn into a free-for-all Armageddon :)
What I hope with C# Aurora, is that I can play a reasonable multiple start with one player and multiple AIs, that will not inevitably turn into a free-for-all Armageddon :)
Then don't include a Chinese faction...
This only works if the human is prepared to follow the same constraints as the AI in setting up his colonies and forces (creating the correct types of ground forces, forming the right operational groups, designing and building the required ship classes with the required capabilities).My main idea is to have some minor nations in a multi-nation start being AI, but also being given general alliance orders but not having to micromanage every one of them. So, yes, if that would be possible with the restrictions you mentioned, why not... . Let's see how your AI performs and reserve this idea maybe for a later release.
This only works if the human is prepared to follow the same constraints as the AI in setting up his colonies and forces (creating the correct types of ground forces, forming the right operational groups, designing and building the required ship classes with the required capabilities).My main idea is to have some minor nations in a multi-nation start being AI, but also being given general alliance orders but not having to micromanage every one of them. So, yes, if that would be possible with the restrictions you mentioned, why not... . Let's see how your AI performs and reserve this idea maybe for a later release.
Paradox and Firaxis have, in their later games, shown how extremely difficult it is to get a helper-AI to work competently. In both games, it is far more useful to have player to control everything manually and if the AI is ever given permission to handle something even temporarily, the time-savings are lost when the player takes control back and has to fix the mess that the AI has done.Distant Worlds let's you more or less set whatever part of the game you don't want to be involved in to AI control, and as far as I'm aware it works quite well.
Perhaps better would be to allow SM to force a permanent alliance between a player faction and an NPR-faction IF that faction was created by a human player and not the game itself.
Paradox and Firaxis also couldn't AI their way out of a wet paper bag. I mean, they show its not easy at the very least, but they don't necessarily show much about whats hard.