Some simple quality-of-life suggestions

[Desdinova (OP)]

With the game advancing past the bug squashing stage, I thought I'd offer some QOL suggestions as I figure that's the area Steve will address first. In general, I think C# Aurora is way ahead of VB6, but there are definitely some clunky or unintuitive areas:

I'm really missing the "refuel from tanker" default order. Not having it makes automatic exploration much more difficult. I also really miss the escort options; dunno if that's coming back.

It would be great to have a right-click menu for fire control targeting & configuration. It took me a long time to figure out you had to assign targets and point-defense modes by drag-and-drop. Being able to right-click a fire control and assign a target or set the PD mode would be much faster and easier.

I wish the default behavior for dragging a fleet onto another in the naval organization tab was to have it join the parent fleet as a subfleet rather than merge them. Maybe make it optional with a "merge as subfleet" checkbox. Right now I don't really make use of subfleets as they're hard to manage. Honestly, while I like the addition of admin commands, I really miss the VB6 naval organization, because it allowed you to create a tree of any depth and split off any amount of that tree as a fleet or sub-fleet very quickly and easily, and was excellent for fighter squadrons. I haven't tried a carrier game in C# yet, but I hear there's some issues with air wing management.

I wish there was a button like "Manual flag officer promotions" or something that prevented people from being promoted above Captain. At least in my organization there are far fewer admiral jobs than there are promotion candidates, if I don't manually set all my captains to "do not promote", my most valuable people get promoted out of their billets and have nothing to do.

[NuclearStudent]

Rip in peace refuel from tanker.

[Steve Walmsley]

Fighters are managed via Squadrons, which were introduced in v2.0. They make fighter management very straightforward.
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12523.msg158331;topicseen#msg158331

You can isolate flag ranks from auto-promotion by including a 'blank rank' that has no commands associated with it. Nothing will ever be promoted into that rank and therefore nothing will be promoted beyond it.

For v2.6, when drag-dropping a fleet on to another fleet in the Naval Organization window, if you hold shift the dragged fleet will become a sub-fleet of the target fleet.

I'm not sure why I omitted the auto-refuel from tanker order. It possibly had something to do with the fact that tankers can move around and may not be there when the orders are executed. I'll give it some thought. I'm not sure what you mean by the Escort order.

Right-click and select on fire control assignment isn't much different than click-drag in terms of effort. There would need to be sub-menus for PD more, priority, target, etc, on a right-click menu. Maybe hotkeys is an option for PD modes.

[Ghostly]

Fighters are managed via Squadrons, which were introduced in v2.0. They make fighter management very straightforward.
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12523.msg158331;topicseen#msg158331

You can isolate flag ranks from auto-promotion by including a 'blank rank' that has no commands associated with it. Nothing will ever be promoted into that rank and therefore nothing will be promoted beyond it.

For v2.6, when drag-dropping a fleet on to another fleet in the Naval Organization window, if you hold shift the dragged fleet will become a sub-fleet of the target fleet.

I'm not sure why I omitted the auto-refuel from tanker order. It possibly had something to do with the fact that tankers can move around and may not be there when the orders are executed. I'll give it some thought. I'm not sure what you mean by the Escort order.

Right-click and select on fire control assignment isn't much different than click-drag in terms of effort. There would need to be sub-menus for PD more, priority, target, etc, on a right-click menu. Maybe hotkeys is an option for PD modes.

Dragging subfleets will come in very handy, but would it be possible also to implement movement orders to absorb fleets as sub-fleets and transfer/detach subfleets from a fleet? This way we could make full use of sub-fleet functionality without pausing each time fleet composition has to change.

As for the fire controls, right clicking as opposed to dragging will maybe save a second every time a target is assigned, but over time, it really adds up. I still think the best way to handle the fire control micro would be to have BFC/MFC priority settings for alien classes which would lead to more fire controls of the respective type getting assigned to high priority targets during auto-target selection.

As for the escort order, maybe what Desdinova meant is that all Escort/Formation Orders are controlled by buttons now, and are thus impossible to automate or queue in advance. Being able to order a subfleet with escort settings to be detached or recalled  as a movement order would also make formations much more useful.

[Steve Walmsley]

You can already attach and detach escorts as sub-fleets and they remember their escort orders

You can already order fleets to join other fleets as sub-fleets. I don't think there is a 'Detach Sub-Fleet' order (rather than a button), but that could be added.

I'm not convinced on the right-click as the menu would be very long without sub-menus and once you add those sub-menus you are adding clicks, not removing them. I guess part of it is that I don't find fire control setup to be time-consuming now, with the auto-setup, the various copy options and Fire-at-Will, or I would have already done something about it

[Ghostly]

You can already order fleets to join other fleets as sub-fleets. I don't think there is a 'Detach Sub-Fleet' order (rather than a button), but that could be added.

Thank you for considering it! I've made my case on the usefulness of more sub-fleet, squadron and escort-related movement orders here https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13681.0, sorry if it ended up being too much of a wall of text, but what it boils down to is that the more types of fleet orders can be executed as movement orders (which can be cycled or queued in advance), instead of only being available as dedicated buttons or through menu dragging (which can't), the further ahead we'll be able to plan and have our plans be executed seamlessly without the need for further adjustments.

There's a plethora of use cases for this: convoy escort rotation, jump tender handling, damaged parasite recovery, parasite transport between colonies, it's all there.

As for the FC assignment, it only gets really time-consuming in those rare massive battles where one has numerous priority targets and too much firepower to focus fire on each and every one in turn. I''ll admit right-click targeting will be of little use there though if the drop-down list would separate into class-based sub-menus past a certain size, I wouldn't be so sure, that's why I'm advocating for a class priority system for weighted selection during auto-targeting instead.

[Droll]

You can already order fleets to join other fleets as sub-fleets. I don't think there is a 'Detach Sub-Fleet' order (rather than a button), but that could be added.

Thank you for considering it! I've made my case on the usefulness of more sub-fleet, squadron and escort-related movement orders here https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13681.0, sorry if it ended up being too much of a wall of text, but what it boils down to is that the more types of fleet orders can be executed as movement orders (which can be cycled or queued in advance), instead of only being available as dedicated buttons or through menu dragging (which can't), the further ahead we'll be able to plan and have our plans be executed seamlessly without the need for further adjustments.

There's a plethora of use cases for this: convoy escort rotation, jump tender handling, damaged parasite recovery, parasite transport between colonies, it's all there.

As for the FC assignment, it only gets really time-consuming in those rare massive battles where one has numerous priority targets and too much firepower to focus fire on each and every one in turn. I''ll admit right-click targeting will be of little use there though if the drop-down list would separate into class-based sub-menus past a certain size, I wouldn't be so sure, that's why I'm advocating for a class priority system for weighted selection during auto-targeting instead.

It honestly would be nice if I could assign priority targets based on FC if this ever gets done. Some of my ships will often have PD, Anti-Fighter Secondary and Anti-Capital primary armaments and the anti-fighter stuff is often too weak to economically break through capital armor and I might not want the primaries firing on the closest fighter over the incoming cruiser.

[John Storm]

I don't know if others have suggested it, or if Steve said that he wouldn't do it but I had to reinstall my OS on my laptop and thus reinstall Aurora. I love the game and I had the ResizeWindows patch from the approved mods but I don't know how to make it so it works again with what is still on github. I'd like to be able to resize the windows so i could play. If Steve was willing to do it and put it in as a feature then great, but if someone just did what was already done and provided it to everyone then good as well.