Scout ships are less likely to get eaten. First off, they are smaller, so they are more likely to detect enemy anti-ship sensors before they themselves can be targeted.  Second, depending on whether they are fully independent long ranged scouts (60+ billion km range), or parasite scouts with boosted engines, they may be able to outrun the enemy. 

One of my favorite scout classes is an 80 ton ship that is a 1 HS boosted engine, 10,000 liters of fuel, and a .1 HS active sensor.  Very fast, decent range for their speed.  And cheap enough to have several on a survey support carrier.

I RP it that the scout crews get rewarded for their huge risks by insider trading on knowledge of what systems and bodies are likely to become economically viable colonies.  They take huge risks, and their stories get huge coverage.  The jobs of grav and geo survey are much more methodical, less glamorous, and less risky.

Adventure is for the fleet scouts that have 50% of their mass in max boosted engines.  A scout flight could have an active sensor variant and an EM variant, which probe an enemy for months, finding out how they react.  The enemy gets used to chasing off the scouts, not knowing that THIS chase gets them way out of supporting range from their planet, and they get drawn into an ambush.  Adventure is the scout crew looking hungrily at the large flotilla chasing them, knowing they get a share in the salvage to come.  "Come along, little fishy who doesn't know they are a little fishy!"

It would be nice if this was implemented and we could set an 'empire wide' and a 'population wide' setting for this. Because of course you would harden your border worlds much more than you would harden your core worlds when you are faced with a threat on the border.

Would you, though?

Civil defense is much more about fostering a culture of institutional competence and government-in-depth than specific policy measures that can be applied locally. Of course things like zoning regulations and building codes can be enforced selectively, but the same policies that reduce collateral damage during disasters (natural or man-made) are also policies that make your cities nicer places in general. Why would the core populations accept that frontier provincials get nicer homes, better mass transit links, less risk of their neighborhood burning down, etc. than the core worlders? As a general rule, at least in human empires, the imperial core gets to have nice things before the provincials do.

I can't think of any actual examples of strong civil defense being implemented only to harden specific regions in a risk-based manner like that. Either you cultivate that ethos as a civic virtue throughout your society and civil service, or you don't.

On the other hand you can design a science vessel to be able to go by themselves and enough equipment to survive an encounter. That way you can survey gravitational points and new systems allot faster. These ships can also double as military scouts when needed in a war.

In most of my play-throughs I would not loose many survey cruisers that way unless they come up against something way more advanced than themselves, but in that case even a small military escort might get smoked as well. These ships are not that expensive either, around the cost of a regular frigate scout.

The initial survey cruisers would only survey some planets depending on the type of system. The point being for strategical reasons.

After this unarmed commercial GEO survey ships would take over and survey systems as I want to start exploiting them once they are secured and beacons dropped at all warp points.

There are little reason to completely survey every system all the time immediately. I tend to completely concentrating on GRAV survey to map the surrounding so I can plan my colonies and need for the infrastructure. Finding worlds to colonise, fuel sources to harvest or mineral rich planets with large reserves at decent accessibility is priority.

Keeping a dedicated GEO ship following along does not make allot of sense. I often end up putting a small GEO surveyor in a hangar on the exploration cruiser to survey some close by planets as the cruiser survey the system.

I also find that small ships tend to be rather slow so I rather build them with big fuel efficient engines and put a few GRAV sensors on them and perhaps then one GEO sensor or a shuttle with a GEO sensor. This means that the ship is fast and very fuel efficient, they also easily can fit a bit more sensory systems without compromising fuel economy that much. Some survey cruiser can be like 50-70% engines at times depending on technology level and what other system I want on there.

Early GRAV surveyors often are allot smaller (while a naval yard is growing) and I always survey like there are NO threats out there until I find a threat. The people making the decisions don't really expect dangerous aliens out there until they actually find any...  ...I hardly have a military until there is a real need for one either for the same reasons.

Using build points and cost is often a very bad way of reason as that does not say if a bigger cost with yield a bigger return down the line. The cost of increasing the size of a yard also mean little as a yard can be used for other things down the line. You are not going to continually churn out survey ships all the time.

In C# you will make them all military anyway and small engines will not be very fuel efficient any more, so you will want bigger surveyors going forward. It is also easier to exploit good commanders for survey bonuses on bigger more capable ships in C# as well. These ships will survey much faster than several small ships.

Quote from: Scandinavian on November 11, 2019, 02:55:29 PM

The practical issue with "smart" munitions is that their smartness is limited by the level at which you can identify and resolve the targets you want to blast. With typical actual battlefield target intelligence, as long as you have rifling in your artillery barrels, your fire support is probably about as smart as it's gonna get.

Of course but C# is bringing us forward observers as part of ground units so we have the in-game justification for battlefield intelligence alongside intelligence modules for ships as in-game justification for long-distance surveillance and reconnaissance. But my point is that while it instinctively feels "right" to weaken the destructive power of smart munitions to explain why they are not causing as much collateral damage as dumb munitions, it's blatantly false move to make. Well, it's correct for nukes but that's another argument. For conventional munitions, a Paveway IV missile is just as destructive as Mk 84 bomb, the difference is that you only need a single Paveway IV to wreck that command centre, whereas you need 50-100 Mk 84 bombs to make sure you hit it and in that process you flatten the whole neighbourhood.

So if Steve implements smart munitions that progressively get smarter (and even include ECCM to counter defender ECM), then I would very much prefer that the munitions are vastly more expensive rather than weaker. Plus, that means that a cheapskate power would just continue using cheap dumb munitions because while they might not want to glass a planet completely, they don't care about collateral damage as long as there is something to salvage.

A Paveway bomb will also occupy about the same amount of space as as a Mk 84 bomb in inventory, which makes it odd when either supply consumption skyrockets (to account for the greater cost) or remains the same for the same amount of damage in a round.

Actually, smart munitions would probably be best handled as a to-hit modifier and otherwise let it remain the same, potentially with a sufficiently large ECCM advantage over a smart munition modified weapons platform actually degrading the effectiveness of the smart munition beyond that of a dumb munition. You can tell me a lot of things, but a dumb bomb is a lot harder to fool than a smart bomb into landing anywhere but where it should hit.

That's a good point because while it feels like OH would protect portion of the population from collateral damage, it actually doesn't because of how Steve coded them to work. Mechanically, the population doesn't live in the OH, but on the body the OH orbits. It's just that the OH magically allows this to happen regardless of colony cost. So if you glass the planet, the population will be completely wiped out regardless of the number of OH's in orbit.

It gets even worse; populations in orbital habitats can be forced out of the habitats by boarding them, forcing them into highly hostile environments without any protection. Habitats have a number of logic inconsistencies that are very understandable given the fact we're dealing with a game, but still.

I mean, an orbital habitat would include things like manufacturing complexes and everything else other than the raw materials acquisition and immediate processing because, well, why would you force your population to work the construction facilities and fuel refineries down on the planet of imminent death when you can just station them in a close orbit that is much more easily reached from a habitat, especially when it's so much easier to keep them safe in such circumstances?

That's a good idea and would be another wealth sink. We don't know if the other new wealth sinks in C# are sufficient, but such a feature - that would then provide protection against collateral damage - could be a cool feature. Although, it might face the problem of electronic hardening, in that it would be useful in only such niche cases that nobody would ever actually use it.

It would be nice if this was implemented and we could set an 'empire wide' and a 'population wide' setting for this. Because of course you would harden your border worlds much more than you would harden your core worlds when you are faced with a threat on the border.

Doesn't Infrastructure currently fulfill this purpose?  If I build a thousand extra LGI (or just 'I') on a colony, other installations are that much less likely to be hit, and the increase in ColCost due to bombardment is mitigated if not entirely compensated for.  And some (perhaps significant) portion of the collateral damage causes zero reduction of my industry.

Sure, it has the believability drawback of being able to ship your 'armour' to any colony you like -- and the civilians will do so if you're not careful -- but it's already in the game, costs money & minerals & time to build, and while it scales infinitely it can never be 100% effective.

No, because collateral damage tracks population damage and infrastructure damage differently IIRC. Or rather, they track them the same, but points of collateral damage always do population damage, while they may end up sinking into already ruined facilities and thus do no further damage to the planetary facilities.

Also, infrastructure shipping is only done by civilians to places that need infrastructure from places that have infrastructure in the market.

Quote from: Scandinavian on Yesterday at 01:03:01 AM

One could model this with a Civil Defense slider, which imposes a Wealth maintenance cost on all buildings and population subject to collateral damage, but providing a defense against collateral damage. Changing the slider should only change the costs and modifiers slowly, though, because a lot of the effort and impact of civil defense is on a time scale of decades. This defense in turn could be affected by a tech line, to make it scale to the weapon power of the comparable offensive techs, but the policy itself is not a technology; it can go back and forth according to political priorities.

That's a good idea and would be another wealth sink. We don't know if the other new wealth sinks in C# are sufficient, but such a feature - that would then provide protection against collateral damage - could be a cool feature. Although, it might face the problem of electronic hardening, in that it would be useful in only such niche cases that nobody would ever actually use it.

Doesn't Infrastructure currently fulfill this purpose?  If I build a thousand extra LGI (or just 'I') on a colony, other installations are that much less likely to be hit, and the increase in ColCost due to bombardment is mitigated if not entirely compensated for.  And some (perhaps significant) portion of the collateral damage causes zero reduction of my industry.

Sure, it has the believability drawback of being able to ship your 'armour' to any colony you like -- and the civilians will do so if you're not careful -- but it's already in the game, costs money & minerals & time to build, and while it scales infinitely it can never be 100% effective.