Suggestions Thread for v2.4.0

[boolybooly]

I read some earlier posts about MSP and then had a little mishap of my own which got me thinking. What if bigger engineering departments could reduce MSP maintenance cost? Which would give us something to consider when designing to manage fleet MSP consumption.

The source of this idea is a little story in its own right which I will explain. I am still playing v2.1.1 so forgive me if I am missing out later versions' maintenance mechanics. It happened recently in my current game at a well populated outpost in Proxima Centauri that through 'administrative negligence' the colony's MSP ran out and PPV orbitals with varying MSP storage and build costs accrued deployment at different values per class, which puzzled me until I realised colony MSP ran out followed by the orbitals' onboard MSP, resulting eventually in deployment clock starting then component failures. It became apparent that box launcher based orbitals lasted longer than turret based orbitals due to lower build costs and thus lower maintenance costs and as luck would have it slightly higher onboard MSP stores.

I found this interesting and in digesting this mishap wanted to direct the empire towards an MSP consumption economy drive, wondering if I had missed a way to influence vessel maintenance cost in some way, besides making cheaper PPV vessels and avoiding deployment and concluded I had not. As I understand it engineering volume improves maintenance life and reduces the 5yr MSP requirement significantly but does not change maintenance costs.

The C# wiki rules say maintenance cost is 0.25x build cost per annum regardless, so orbitals can have very small engineering components and it will make no difference to maintenance cost as long as EMR (effective maintenance rate) from maintenance facilities is 100% and they have MSP supplies. If I understand correctly, its only when EMR is less than 100% that maintenance life and 5yr figures come into play in relation to the maintenance failure hazard, as happened at Proxima Centauri causing an alert for component failure and inability to repair due to lack of MSPs, which caught me by surprise! 

e.g. a 1000t ship with build cost 280, can have different sizes of engineering bays giving practical maintenance life of between 7.5 to 1.5 yrs and figures for 5yr use between 150 and 1500 MSP respectively but maintenance cost will always be 70 MSP/pa. What if maintenance cost was a bit lower or higher depending on engineering space, to reflect the better maintenance life and repair facilities that larger engineering departments provide? Just thought it might be worth a mention.

[SevenOfCarina]

I am not sure if this has been suggested before, but I'd like to see wealth production scale off the number of service sector workers instead of manufacturing sector workers.

Basically, instead of the current system where
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Workers Employed in TN Facilities
I'd instead like to have:
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Total Service Sector Workers * (Workers Employed in TN Facilities)/(Total Manufacturing Sector Workers)

Right now, colonies with a high manufacturing sector percentage are also the colonies that produce the most wealth relative to their size. With this change, a smaller manufacturing sector is no longer "lost" productivity - bigger colonies with large service sectors produce more wealth, while smaller colonies generally have more workers available for manufacturing. This would both be more natural and also create strategic implications, since spreading out your population to boost manufacturing will now have the side-effect of reducing wealth production.

Obviously the wealth production rate would need to be scaled down by a factor of two-ish to compensate.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I am not sure if this has been suggested before, but I'd like to see wealth production scale off the number of service sector workers instead of manufacturing sector workers.

Basically, instead of the current system where
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Workers Employed in TN Facilities
I'd instead like to have:
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Total Service Sector Workers * (Workers Employed in TN Facilities)/(Total Manufacturing Sector Workers)

Right now, colonies with a high manufacturing sector percentage are also the colonies that produce the most wealth relative to their size. With this change, a smaller manufacturing sector is no longer "lost" productivity - bigger colonies with large service sectors produce more wealth, while smaller colonies generally have more workers available for manufacturing. This would both be more natural and also create strategic implications, since spreading out your population to boost manufacturing will now have the side-effect of reducing wealth production.

Obviously the wealth production rate would need to be scaled down by a factor of two-ish to compensate.

Wealth generation used to be based on total population. It was changed to the current method for C#. Here is the post explaining why:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg112448#msg112448

[SevenOfCarina]

Wealth generation used to be based on total population. It was changed to the current method for C#. Here is the post explaining why:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg112448#msg112448

Yes, but the industrialisation multiplier (i.e., fraction of the available manufacturing workforce employed in TN industries) retains all of these benefits.
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Total Service Sector Workers * (Workers Employed in TN Facilities)/(Total Manufacturing Sector Workers)

1) High population, low industry nations are now easy to handle as most of the population does not generate wealth (it is assumed that the wealth from agriculture and service is used to cover welfare, health, education, etc. with a net wealth of zero).
2) Conventional starts do not generate huge excess wealth
3) As a nation industrialises, its wealth generation capability grows naturally, which reflects historical trends.
4) The planned wealth reserve cap can be removed.
5) Financial centres grow in importance and have more of a wealth impact (in relative terms) compared to VB6.

High population, low industry nations will have a low industrialisation factor, hence the wealth generated by their service sectors would be correspondingly low. However, as more TN industry is added and a greater fraction of the manufacturing workforce is employed in them, the industrialisation factor will rise and thus the wealth generated will also increase.

The idea is that a colony with, say, a 55% service sector and a 40% manufacturing sector will have more workers available for manufacturing (for its size), while a colony with a 70% service sector and a 25% manufacturing sector will have fewer workers available for manufacturing, but will also generate more wealth because of the greater number of service sector workers (assuming, of course, that both colonies are equally industrialised).

I am mostly just interested in creating a trade-off between the manufacturing and service sectors. Right now, you want to maximise the size of the manufacturing sector because manufacturing workers both produce stuff and generate the wealth needed to produce that stuff, so there is an excessive incentive to spread population around into small colonies to "maximise" manufacturing workforce. By decoupling this, losing manufacturing workforce to the service sector no longer feels as bad because it now results in higher wealth generation (assuming, of course, that the industrialisation factor remains constant).

[skoormit]

I am not sure if this has been suggested before, but I'd like to see wealth production scale off the number of service sector workers instead of manufacturing sector workers.

Basically, instead of the current system where
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Workers Employed in TN Facilities
I'd instead like to have:
Annual Wealth Production = Wealth Production Rate * Total Service Sector Workers * (Workers Employed in TN Facilities)/(Total Manufacturing Sector Workers)

Right now, colonies with a high manufacturing sector percentage are also the colonies that produce the most wealth relative to their size. With this change, a smaller manufacturing sector is no longer "lost" productivity - bigger colonies with large service sectors produce more wealth, while smaller colonies generally have more workers available for manufacturing. This would both be more natural and also create strategic implications, since spreading out your population to boost manufacturing will now have the side-effect of reducing wealth production.

Obviously the wealth production rate would need to be scaled down by a factor of two-ish to compensate.

It's an interesting idea, but there is one side-effect I don't think we will like.
Higher population colonies will have a greater wealth multiplier than smaller colonies.
Therefore when we spread out population (which we still will do as much as possible, because population growth remains the long-term economic bottleneck), we will be incentivized to leave financial centers on the homeworld (and/or our largest other colonies), and move actual production facilities to smaller colonies.
This requires us to manage production and logistics across many smaller colonies.
Our current system doesn't penalize us for focusing smaller colonies on financial production, which means we don't have to choose between optimizing income and reducing logistical complexity.

[ty55101]

Ground units should get a chance to retarget the formation they attacked in the last ground combat round.

I have heard sentiment from a lot of players that they wish ground combat was more involved and then some people saying that they don't want to spend more time on it.

If Ground Units were to have a decent chance to retarget the same formation (25-50%) then it would allow players to change artillery and ship based support to have a decent chance of damaging certain formations. It would give an incentive for smaller recon formations to locate high value targets and "call in" artillery strikes. Taking STOs out with a smaller landing force in order for slower and less armored troop transports would also become more viable.

This gives an optional added layer to ground combat meaning that some players get the added layer while others can interact with the game in the exact same way.

[SevenOfCarina]

It's an interesting idea, but there is one side-effect I don't think we will like.
Higher population colonies will have a greater wealth multiplier than smaller colonies.
Therefore when we spread out population (which we still will do as much as possible, because population growth remains the long-term economic bottleneck), we will be incentivized to leave financial centers on the homeworld (and/or our largest other colonies), and move actual production facilities to smaller colonies.
This requires us to manage production and logistics across many smaller colonies.
Our current system doesn't penalize us for focusing smaller colonies on financial production, which means we don't have to choose between optimizing income and reducing logistical complexity.

There's already a very strong incentive to move production facilities to smaller colonies, because smaller colonies give you the greatest manufacturing bang for your population buck. I don't see how this would make things worse given the other incentives for spreading out industry (mineral resources, proximity to mining sites, local fleet logistics) still exist, and it's not like financial centres are very good anyway (the consensus advice has always been that you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping). Plus given typical homeworld population sizes, I don't think this should be a problem unless you have thousands of financial centres, in which case, why?

[skoormit]

There's already a very strong incentive to move production facilities to smaller colonies, because smaller colonies give you the greatest manufacturing bang for your population buck. I don't see how this would make things worse given the other incentives for spreading out industry (mineral resources, proximity to mining sites, local fleet logistics) still exist, and it's not like financial centres are very good anyway (the consensus advice has always been that you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping). Plus given typical homeworld population sizes, I don't think this should be a problem unless you have thousands of financial centres, in which case, why?

If you think financial centers aren't any good, we clearly follow very different approaches to economic growth.
For any given play style that minimizes the use of financial centers, my observation above is moot.

For my play style, which pursues very aggressive economic growth, financial centers are the best investment available in the game (with the arguable exception of terraforming).

I don't think I've ever heard anyone express the opinion that "you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping."
That seems to imply that players make a choice between increasing civ tax income or building financial centers.
But pursuing either one does not reduce the opportunity to pursue the other.


EDIT:
And in fact I have ~1500 financial centers in my current game, with a total population of ~2.5b.
Why? Because I need the income. I always want to build more stuff, and building financial centers increases my income faster than anything else, which then allows me to build more stuff.

[nuclearslurpee]

There's already a very strong incentive to move production facilities to smaller colonies, because smaller colonies give you the greatest manufacturing bang for your population buck. I don't see how this would make things worse given the other incentives for spreading out industry (mineral resources, proximity to mining sites, local fleet logistics) still exist, and it's not like financial centres are very good anyway (the consensus advice has always been that you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping). Plus given typical homeworld population sizes, I don't think this should be a problem unless you have thousands of financial centres, in which case, why?

If you think financial centers aren't any good, we clearly follow very different approaches to economic growth.
For any given play style that minimizes the use of financial centers, my observation above is moot.

For my play style, which pursues very aggressive economic growth, financial centers are the best investment available in the game (with the arguable exception of terraforming).

I don't think I've ever heard anyone express the opinion that "you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping."
That seems to imply that players make a choice between increasing civ tax income or building financial centers.
But pursuing either one does not reduce the opportunity to pursue the other.


EDIT:
And in fact I have ~1500 financial centers in my current game, with a total population of ~2.5b.
Why? Because I need the income. I always want to build more stuff, and building financial centers increases my income faster than anything else, which then allows me to build more stuff.

Seconded. I've found financial centers usually quite necessary at least in the early game.

In the current late game with 1000s of civilians, maybe not, but with the changes to civilians in 2.6 I think financial centers will remain useful into the later stages.

[SevenOfCarina]

If you think financial centers aren't any good, we clearly follow very different approaches to economic growth.
For any given play style that minimizes the use of financial centers, my observation above is moot.

For my play style, which pursues very aggressive economic growth, financial centers are the best investment available in the game (with the arguable exception of terraforming).

I don't think I've ever heard anyone express the opinion that "you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping."
That seems to imply that players make a choice between increasing civ tax income or building financial centers.
But pursuing either one does not reduce the opportunity to pursue the other.


EDIT:
And in fact I have ~1500 financial centers in my current game, with a total population of ~2.5b.
Why? Because I need the income. I always want to build more stuff, and building financial centers increases my income faster than anything else, which then allows me to build more stuff.

Huh, interesting. I used to invest in financial centres, but the issue is that they consume workforce that could instead be mining/manufacturing/researching and those require facilities, unlike wealth generation. I generally get better results by spending that workforce on research complexes so that I can keep my wealth production tech one or two steps ahead of the baseline.

Extra wealth production (past what's necessary to keep industry at 100% utilisation) isn't IMO that useful unless you have a bunch of civilians around to buy minerals from. I used to devote 10%-ish of my workforce to financial centres (so 1,250 for a population of 2.5B) and 20%-ish for research, but I get much better results by ditching the former and increasing the latter to 30%, which provides more than enough margin to keep the wealth production tech a full two levels ahead (aka a 1.4x ish multiplier over the standard tech progression, which is a similar multiplier to what you'd get with a 10% financial centre fraction).

Edit: Granted, this doesn't apply if you're playing with max tech.

[SevenOfCarina]

I apologise if this has been brought up before, but would it be feasible to implement a system where commanders also have a chance of losing efficiency bonuses once they reach a certain time in service?

I tend to treat my civilian administrators as abstractions of an entire government apparatus, and hence I assume the efficiency bonuses are tied not to a particular leader but rather to the entire colonial administration of thousands of civil servants. I find this better from a RP perspective because this leads to certain colonies being better than others at certain functions (which I RP as resulting from local expertise, incentives, and infrastructure), hence my colonies feel more real and unique. And it sometimes forces me to make sub-optimal decisions - like building up a new naval base not at the local warp point nexus, but one system over at a colony which is actually good at shipbuilding.

The problem, of course, is that immortal (story character) leaders tend to universally end up with sky-high bonuses of everything. I've been solving this by periodically randomising leader bonuses, but this gets tedious as the game progresses and I would really like an alternative. Essentially, past a certain time in service (say 20 years), I'd like to have commanders start rolling for a small reduction in their bonuses in addition to the usual rolls for an increase. Does this seem reasonable?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I apologise if this has been brought up before, but would it be feasible to implement a system where commanders also have a chance of losing efficiency bonuses once they reach a certain time in service?

I tend to treat my civilian administrators as abstractions of an entire government apparatus, and hence I assume the efficiency bonuses are tied not to a particular leader but rather to the entire colonial administration of thousands of civil servants. I find this better from a RP perspective because this leads to certain colonies being better than others at certain functions (which I RP as resulting from local expertise, incentives, and infrastructure), hence my colonies feel more real and unique. And it sometimes forces me to make sub-optimal decisions - like building up a new naval base not at the local warp point nexus, but one system over at a colony which is actually good at shipbuilding.

The problem, of course, is that immortal (story character) leaders tend to universally end up with sky-high bonuses of everything. I've been solving this by periodically randomising leader bonuses, but this gets tedious as the game progresses and I would really like an alternative. Essentially, past a certain time in service (say 20 years), I'd like to have commanders start rolling for a small reduction in their bonuses in addition to the usual rolls for an increase. Does this seem reasonable?

There is an East-West split in that assumption, Eastern cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) place a high value on the elder members of society, deferring to their wisdom, moral authority, etc. In the West, older people are seen as less capable, out of touch, etc.

Partly that is because as you get older, your perspective changes (based on a lot more experience of life) and you value different things (time vs money for example). Younger people generally don't have the same frame of reference (less life experience) so they can't understand that different perspective. In the East, that is understood and the elders are consulted for their hard-earned wisdom. In the West, they just assume older people are 'out of touch'.

So, apart from actual age-related diseases that impair mental faculties, which is covered by the medical conditions in Aurora, I don't subscribe to the Western 'older people are less capable' paradigm. I am certainly far more capable and wise than I was at half my current age, because I have twice the life experience and I have learned from twice as many mistakes

I realise that in your above suggestion, you reference 'story characters' that can't get ill, but being extremely capable is the whole point of story characters.

[Ghostly]

So, apart from actual age-related diseases that impair mental faculties, which is covered by the medical conditions in Aurora, I don't subscribe to the Western 'older people are less capable' paradigm.

Well, there's no correlation between commander skills and health as of now. I think a system of declining leader bonuses could work if tied to their health somehow, perhaps with increasing chance of happening the worse their medical condition is. A select few commanders would age gracefully and retire in perfect health with their skills intact, while others would slowly wither away and probably get replaced before their time was due. This would particularly affect homeworld governors whose bonuses might carry an empire's entire industry until one day they're gone with no one to replace them. A slow decline would be less abrupt and painful to deal with than suddenly losing your 50% SHIP 40% CON 40% POP not-quite-God-Emperor-of-Terra overnight.