Auto Admin Commands

[serger]

Assigning civilian admins to every single tiny colony has almost zero effect on your playthrough.
Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have all these trivial leaders assigned to trivial outposts without me needing to do anything.
But leaving those outposts leaderless is not going to affect the overall power of my empire. It just doesn't matter.

It seems that having admins assigned you are raising them in the terms of their bonuses, so no assignments for junior admind - much worser future senior admins - much weaker major administrations bonuses - very considerable loss of strength and tempo.

[skoormit]

Assigning civilian admins to every single tiny colony has almost zero effect on your playthrough.
Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have all these trivial leaders assigned to trivial outposts without me needing to do anything.
But leaving those outposts leaderless is not going to affect the overall power of my empire. It just doesn't matter.

It seems that having admins assigned you are raising them in the terms of their bonuses, so no assignments for junior admind - much worser future senior admins - much weaker major administrations bonuses - very considerable loss of strength and tempo.

Assigned leaders seem to get bonus increases more often, but unassigned leaders definitely do get them.

In my game, I assign all civ admins to a colony. If I don't have a colony to assign when a recruit shows up, I'll make a new one.
After many decades I end up with a large number of useless admins, and the handful of useful ones that are running my important colonies were already useful (or near-useful) on the day they first arrived.
I feel that I could ignore all the "Administration 3  Terraforming 5%  Logistics 5%" nobodies from day one and lose almost nothing in the long run.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Assigned leaders seem to get bonus increases more often, but unassigned leaders definitely do get them.

That was how it worked in VB, which was why research farming was a thing.  The exploit that allowed it (0 research facilities assigned to an active project) has since been closed, but I don't think skill improvements have changed.

[serger]

I don't use obvious exploits (such as creating empty colonies to train admins), and usually don't have enough small colonies to give long exp to all my junior admins, and so I'm usually choosing only the most promising of them to have such exp. And it's obvious that with admins it's not so important even in short run to have some good leader, as with research. It's still going to signifantly affect the overall power of the empire, it's just going to make considerable result in the future, smth like 25-50 years at least.

[TMaekler]

Assigning rules to admin commands might be a solution for job automation.

Once a new post is created you can declare it either as
- automatic
- automatic via rule
- manual

If set to automatic the commander is assigned fully automatic by game default parameters.
If set to automatic via rule, you can define a selection rule for the command post and if a fitting commander is found by the assigning routine, he gets assigned to the post. A rule would look like this:

If mining >10 assign commander

If logistics =0 AND mining >10 assign commander

If logistics >5 OR mining >5 assign commander

If set to manual every vacant position gives you an entry in the event log so you can fill it manually.

[skoormit]

I don't use obvious exploits (such as creating empty colonies to train admins), and usually don't have enough small colonies to give long exp to all my junior admins, and so I'm usually choosing only the most promising of them to have such exp. And it's obvious that with admins it's not so important even in short run to have some good leader, as with research. It's still going to signifantly affect the overall power of the empire, it's just going to make considerable result in the future, smth like 25-50 years at least.

One man's exploit is another man's RP is another man's workaround.
The way I see it, any empire with population in the billions would have jobs for civ admins other than running entire colonies.
Minister of Production. Chief of Logistical Planning. Grand Panjandrum of Terraforming. Assistant to the Assistant Director of the Department of Redundancy Department. Etc.
The game does not offer these, so I make tiny colonies rather than leave my presently unneeded CAs unassigned.

Calling it an exploit assumes that the cost of doing it "by the book" is non-trivial.
But the cost is trivial. Infrastructure to support 50k colonists (and the freighter bandwidth to move it) costs almost nothing, and you don't need that many.
I'm 40 years into my current game. Having built the home academy up to level 3 early on, I now have 38 CAs.
I have 2 sectors, 8 colonies that matter, and 10 CMCs I purchase minerals from. That leaves 18 CAs assigned to busywork colonies on otherwise useless bodies in the home system, all of which I seeded with infrastructure in the first five years of the empire. Seeding is cheap and easy, and seems like something the populace of an empire would be keen to do upon developing TN technology.

How did we get here? We are discussing if an auto-assign feature for civ admins would be useful.
And sure, it would. At least a little.
If all it did was assign any new CA to a colony right away, it would save me a few clicks every game year.
Making it do much more than that would take non-trivial development effort. Only Steve can decide if that effort is worthwhile. In my opinion, there are better things to spend it on. There's no game balance issue here.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In terms of Academy and characters I would like the game to eventually handle this quite differently.

In my opinion there is no real need to generate the character until you actually need them and the Academy should basically generate points into separate pools you then can spend to recruit or rather automatically recruit someone when they are needed. You should also be able to choose how much point will go to each pool depending on the needs of your empire.

When you need a character one are created weighted with the skills you are searching for... there is no reason why we could not get characters that are weighted for the role we selected them for. But there should always be some randomness here.

There can then be times when there are less jobs than characters and then characters that don't have a job go into some assistance mode for a while. The more time that pass and you have not found a new job for them there would be a chance they retire from their position to pursue other careers in civil service.

I also would like a mode where we can't really choose which character take which position at all and there is a process for how they attain their positions with skills such a political contact being quite prominent over pure skill. I would like experienced and well decorated characters to get into positions high prominence and be promoted when there is a position open for them to fill. Every time you fill a high position in the hierarchy it should also cost some academy point as you increase the administration.


I don't like the current model of having a certain number of people at each level as that makes no sense, promotions should occur based on needs not on how many people you have running around doing nothing at the ground level. I think it is better to abstract the junior officers and administrators in a pool instead.

In fact such as system could potentially use the pool for other purposes as well that represent needed administration and officer competence. When you build a ship you would pay both crew and academy points to represent officers and enlisted crew. The same with military formations. When you build a Naval Headquarter, Sector commands, labs you lower the number of points you get in the academy pool every year as you need to continually staff these with experienced personnel.

Academies also should cost population to support as in real life allot of people are needed to staff, work and get educated there... actually hey allot of people. This would give more credence to population as an intellectual commodity and not just a resource commodity. Numbers obviously up to game balance of course.

I could also see that costs to run labs, headquarters and officer cores should have maintenance cost in academy points per year as well, the more advanced the hierarchy they more wealth and people you need to administrate it. So this would serve as a function to prevent too deep structures unless you have the population or economy to do it. You also could have some technology to increase the points generated by academies as well.

Also, the administration level should be both a skill and something you pay for when used and the cost should be higher the more you use. That is giving 10 labs to a scientist might cost you 20 points per year while 1 lab cost you 1 point per year from the science academy pool.

If you pay admin cost and it increases for planets you might want to add a mechanic that if you place an academy locally you reduce the cost of that planets administration by some fraction. This would be realistic as developed colonies would start to demand education and even labs. So there could be a reason to spread them around when colonies get large enough. Or, you get less and less point for each academy you build on the same planet, that would also make sense as a mechanic. Or tie it into the total population on the system so there is a cap in how many academies you can build and be efficient on each colony.


In general a system that work more automatically but you should be able to force character into positions and promotions for RP purposes, but in general otherwise it should run by itself if you want it to. There should be no need to create useless colonies to train administrators as that is just plain and simple dumb that you should have to do that. instead that would give you an increase in cost in the need to support those colonies with qualified people. The higher the admin rating of a colony the more point it will cost you to support it with administration.

[liveware]

I am actually in favor of a significantly more complex system for assigning civilian administrators. I think there is a great amount of room to grow in terms of making your governmental choices in the race window have an impact on gameplay.

For example, a democratic government might have elections every few years at each colony and elect new leaders. A republic might have a different automatic leader selection system. A monarchy would again be different. And a dictatorship different again. Etc...

This would of course take a huge amount of programming effort, so I doubt it will ever happen, but I can still dream.

I do seem to remember at least being able to chose a government type back in the VB version, though I'm not sure it had any real impact on gameplay.

[Droll]

I am actually in favor of a significantly more complex system for assigning civilian administrators. I think there is a great amount of room to grow in terms of making your governmental choices in the race window have an impact on gameplay.

For example, a democratic government might have elections every few years at each colony and elect new leaders. A republic might have a different automatic leader selection system. A monarchy would again be different. And a dictatorship different again. Etc...

This would of course take a huge amount of programming effort, so I doubt it will ever happen, but I can still dream.

I do seem to remember at least being able to chose a government type back in the VB version, though I'm not sure it had any real impact on gameplay.

In VB6 it didn't matter because the various stats weren't actually used. Governments would only affect things like xenophobia etc. so it was purely flavour.
In C# it would make a difference because of stuff like occupation resistance actually relying on stats like determination, militancy and xenophobia actually existing. As steve starts to involve the other stats I'm sure we will see further impacts.
A C# rendition of governments could also affect stuff like population growth/density, productivity and research rates. Overall allowing for more differentiation.

But how does the player change governments in a campaign?
If a player colony declares independence how do they choose their government if it is to be different?
Will we delve into unrest caused purely by political dissidence?
Can the player subvert other NPR governments and cause rebellions?
Can I "liberate" a NPR population by force and install a matching government to make friends?


Theres so much that could be done with such a system but as mentioned it would require massive effort on Steve's part.

[liveware]

But how does the player change governments in a campaign?
If a player colony declares independence how do they choose their government if it is to be different?
Will we delve into unrest caused purely by political dissidence?
Can the player subvert other NPR governments and cause rebellions?
Can I "liberate" a NPR population by force and install a matching government to make friends?
Theres so much that could be done with such a system but as mentioned it would require massive effort on Steve's part.

Some of my thoughts:

1. A UI button which gives the player the option to 'reform government' which allows for a player to change a player race's government from one type to another. This process should take some significant amount of time. During 'reformation' there should be a malus to relevant empire statistics. For example, manufacturing capacity should be dramatically reduced and possibly ships/troops respond to orders more slowly (similar to jump shock or the effects of crew training). Possibly also there is an increased chance of rebellion or secession on colonies during a reformation. If a player declares a player race colony independent, that colony should select a random government type (possibly weighted towards the original player race government type) and enters a reformation as previously discussed.

2. The game does not currently implement political dissidence, only unrest. I am not sure this system needs to change at all except that I believe that if the political stability of a colony reaches 1% or less, the colony should enter a reformation and randomly select either to remain in the current player empire or secede and start a new government. Secession and rebellion should, I think, be handled somewhat differently, with secessions being relatively peaceful and rebellions being more destructive, resulting in the destruction of ground installations, infrastructure, orbital facilities, and possibly ships and troops. Of course, one always reserves the option to declare war on a recently seceded colony, turning things more violent, but secessions in my opinion should not be inherently bloody.

3. I think that would be interesting from a RP perspective. Perhaps it would make diplomacy and espionage more engaging and rewarding than in it's current form.

4. I think there is a lot that could be done here. For example you might consider the option of fighting galactic wars of liberation, whereby you liberate oppressed populations from their authoritarian overlords. Or alternatively you could enslave all life in the galaxy. This should be left up to the player in my opinion. My suggestion for this mechanic is that following a 'conquest' event during a planetary invasion, the 'conquered' population should enter a reformation and the player should have the option of choosing the new government type, or alternatively have the conquered population join the player empire as some sort of imperial citizen (not necessarily a fully fledged citizen, but this should also be a player option). Some examples of citizen types for newly conquered populations might be: slaves, vassals, serfs, limited citizens, full citizens, etc... Again it should be a player choice as to how newly conquered populations are integrated into the player empire.

I'm fumbling around in the dark a bit here because governments have never really been implemented, even in VB. The current system seems to tie race/species to most of the things I would usually associate with government-level traits. There is probably an argument to be made for a dedicated government window, or at least a section on the race/species window. Additionally, I would expect that each colony in a particular empire would share the same form of government, otherwise I don't think 'empire' or 'colony' would really be the correct terms to use.

[Droll]

I think there is a lot that could be done here. For example you might consider the option of fighting galactic wars of liberation, whereby you liberate oppressed populations from their authoritarian overlords. Or alternatively you could enslave all life in the galaxy. This should be left up to the player in my opinion. My suggestion for this mechanic is that following a 'conquest' event during a planetary invasion, the 'conquered' population should enter a reformation and the player should have the option of choosing the new government type, or alternatively have the conquered population join the player empire as some sort of imperial citizen (not necessarily a fully fledged citizen, but this should also be a player option). Some examples of citizen types for newly conquered populations might be: slaves, vassals, serfs, limited citizens, full citizens, etc... Again it should be a player choice as to how newly conquered populations are integrated into the player empire.

I definitely second the idea of being able to decide what rights each species gets in the empire what you suggested especially at the end of the quoted paragraph is actually really similar to how stellaris lets you handle things.

[Froggiest1982]

Since we barely touched the surface of the "politico" part of the game I would like to weight in both supporting what done from Steve so far and just asking for slight changes more in line with what done already and with less coding involved.

I think the aurora already handles well some things such as:

police forces - they are there and they do the job, so a militaristic dictatorship that relies on police is entirely supported
independence - colonies can already rebel if conditions are met
morale (bonus and penalties) - these are possible through overcrowding, better administrator, police, protection of the system and so on
trade - civilian needs resources and wealth
taxes - aurora does include taxation

Now what would be nice:

Adding a another modifier to the race that includes the political stability, so a more stable race for instance are more easy to sort out low morale and penalties
Morale should take also into account how rich such colony is considering the amount of people divided by the wealth generated. A poor colony is an unhappy colony
Trade should either provide stability if all resources are available or instability if one or more resources are scarce
Taxes should be modular with a standard rate set up by race which if exceeded generates penalties and if lowered generates happiness
Finally a political bonus (that simulates elections) where you receive a bonus if happiness is over a certain value at the beginning of x amount of years to be decided at start or a penalty if below

Overall I firmly believe the tools are there and should be fairly possible to add some small feature from a release to another and slowly build up the government management even more.

[liveware]

Since we barely touched the surface of the "politico" part of the game I would like to weight in both supporting what done from Steve so far and just asking for slight changes more in line with what done already and with less coding involved.

I think the aurora already handles well some things such as:

police forces - they are there and they do the job, so a militaristic dictatorship that relies on police is entirely supported
independence - colonies can already rebel if conditions are met
morale (bonus and penalties) - these are possible through overcrowding, better administrator, police, protection of the system and so on
trade - civilian needs resources and wealth
taxes - aurora does include taxation

Now what would be nice:

Adding a another modifier to the race that includes the political stability, so a more stable race for instance are more easy to sort out low morale and penalties
Morale should take also into account how rich such colony is considering the amount of people divided by the wealth generated. A poor colony is an unhappy colony
Trade should either provide stability if all resources are available or instability if one or more resources are scarce
Taxes should be modular with a standard rate set up by race which if exceeded generates penalties and if lowered generates happiness
Finally a political bonus (that simulates elections) where you receive a bonus if happiness is over a certain value at the beginning of x amount of years to be decided at start or a penalty if below

Overall I firmly believe the tools are there and should be fairly possible to add some small feature from a release to another and slowly build up the government management even more.

I am not sure I agree with your assertion that colonies are able to rebel... I have several very 'oppressed' colonies which have not rebelled despite several decades of horrible conditions.

[liveware]

I think there is a lot that could be done here. For example you might consider the option of fighting galactic wars of liberation, whereby you liberate oppressed populations from their authoritarian overlords. Or alternatively you could enslave all life in the galaxy. This should be left up to the player in my opinion. My suggestion for this mechanic is that following a 'conquest' event during a planetary invasion, the 'conquered' population should enter a reformation and the player should have the option of choosing the new government type, or alternatively have the conquered population join the player empire as some sort of imperial citizen (not necessarily a fully fledged citizen, but this should also be a player option). Some examples of citizen types for newly conquered populations might be: slaves, vassals, serfs, limited citizens, full citizens, etc... Again it should be a player choice as to how newly conquered populations are integrated into the player empire.

I definitely second the idea of being able to decide what rights each species gets in the empire what you suggested especially at the end of the quoted paragraph is actually really similar to how stellaris lets you handle things.

I am guilty of being inspired by both Stellaris and Distant Worlds in some of my contemplations of what would be best in Aurora.

Though I must admit that though both of those games are excellent, neither can hold a candle to the depth and complexity of Aurora.

Stellaris is shiny, for certain, and has quite a good musical accompaniment, but Distant Worlds beats it in terms of strategic depth.

Aurora beats both in terms of tactical and strategic depth, lacking only in shiny graphics and nice music. Graphics can be imagineered and music is available from other venues, so for me, Aurora is my top preference in the 4x catergory and will probably remain there until I develop my own version of the game... someday many moons from now.

[Froggiest1982]

Since we barely touched the surface of the "politico" part of the game I would like to weight in both supporting what done from Steve so far and just asking for slight changes more in line with what done already and with less coding involved.

I think the aurora already handles well some things such as:

police forces - they are there and they do the job, so a militaristic dictatorship that relies on police is entirely supported
independence - colonies can already rebel if conditions are met
morale (bonus and penalties) - these are possible through overcrowding, better administrator, police, protection of the system and so on
trade - civilian needs resources and wealth
taxes - aurora does include taxation

Now what would be nice:

Adding a another modifier to the race that includes the political stability, so a more stable race for instance are more easy to sort out low morale and penalties
Morale should take also into account how rich such colony is considering the amount of people divided by the wealth generated. A poor colony is an unhappy colony
Trade should either provide stability if all resources are available or instability if one or more resources are scarce
Taxes should be modular with a standard rate set up by race which if exceeded generates penalties and if lowered generates happiness
Finally a political bonus (that simulates elections) where you receive a bonus if happiness is over a certain value at the beginning of x amount of years to be decided at start or a penalty if below

Overall I firmly believe the tools are there and should be fairly possible to add some small feature from a release to another and slowly build up the government management even more.

I am not sure I agree with your assertion that colonies are able to rebel... I have several very 'oppressed' colonies which have not rebelled despite several decades of horrible conditions.

Probably does not happen automatically, however all functions are there. Then this would also be another easy implementation.