Suggestions Thread for v2.4.0

[MinuteMan]

In the ground forces window.
The STO targeting tab.

Being able to filter on location would be handy.

And maybe make applying the settings explicit with a button to click.
Instead on when you select the formation. Now it often is a back and forth game of setting target type, but then you didn't want all weapons, so you redo it. Etc.


On the Formation Templates tab.
When viewing an existing template, can you show in the summary if the Point Defense checkbox was checked or not. I know you can see it based on Tracking speed. But I like it to be explicit.

On Unit class design
When creating an STO element, settings a default "Targeting configuration" would be handy.

[Falryx]

I was putting together a multifaction Sol start today and realized that the 'customize NPR' code will only work for non-Sol NPRs.  Even if I created a new race and the the Home System to Sol, the database generated two different SystemIDs with SystemNumber 0.

SystemID	SystemNumber	Age	AbundanceModifier	Stars	GameID	JumpSurveyPoints	SystemTypeID	DustDensity	SolSystem	etc.
14656	0	5.0	1	1	123	400	0	0	1	etc.
14677	0	2.0	0	1	123	402	0	0	0	etc.

The only way to create a multifaction start on Earth is to start with >1 Player Races and set them to be the same species in the Player Race creation window and tick the NPR box.  On the plus side, this works.  On the minus side, you don't have the ability to adjust things like potential weapons preferences, shields, missiles, size modifiers for ships, etc.

It would be cool if either:

(a) Player Race creation opened up some of the additional configuration parameters (mostly the size modifiers and the weapons stuff) if you ticked the NPR box.

OR

(b) customizing NPRs had a way to designate "NPR is the same species and perhaps NPR shares the homeworld as two options.  In the former case you could have a post-collapse galactic empire with a number of NPRs that are also same-species as the player race.  The latter would mean you share a homeworld - just like the logic works above.

Anyway, just a thought to open up some additional playstyle options. 

[Viridia]

Maybe we could have multiple tractor beams per single tug (now, we can add them, but only one works), with a limit in the ship mass: i.e., one beams for a tug up to let's say 6,000 ton, two up to 9,000 ton, etc., and a maximum of 6 or 8 beams per ship.
Or, beams of different mass and different ability to tug multiples ships. And a corresponding research line to increase this mass and ability.
Now, one beam is 500 ton and can tractor one ship; then, we could build 800 ton beam that can tractor two ships, for double research points; then more, 1,000 ton for three ships, for 1.5 RPs of the previous level, etc.
I don't know anyway which proposal is simpler in coding terms between the various ones discussed here.

This would be invaluable for my current Honorverse style playthrough and the next one I have planned

[paolot]

... ...

Each ship only being able to tractor a single ship seems completely logical to me: No matter how big the tractoring ship, the towed ones would be way too close together. For such big size differences that tractoring multiple ships could possibly become an option, hangars are the way to go. 
Tractoring instead does not care about how big the towed ship is (slows things down, but towing is always possible) - leave that the way it is. 

We already accelerate from zero to several thousands of km per seconds violating the inertia law, as well as we jump from a system to another violating the relativity law.
We could also have the ability to tug some ships while maintaining them at fixed positions, avoiding they hit each other.
As someone else said, having multiple options is a benefit for the players. 

[skoormit]

Currently we can assign one governor per colony.
Which means I end up with a very large number of unassigned civilian admins who don't do anything at all for their entire careers.

Why not allow us to assign more governors?
For any bonus type, the colony could simply use the max bonus from the assigned governors.

Perhaps an installation is required for each governor slot after the first.
I'm thinking it should be big and expensive, to make it a non-trivial decision. Maybe akin to a Sector Command.
Maybe it also requires workers, so that you can't just flood every new colony with a governor for every bonus.

[Garfunkel]

The system command facility has been proposed before, allowing us to assign 3 levels of governors, which would help.

[DNAturation]

I kind of want to see capacitor boosting or something to use more power in ships. They could cost exponentially more power the more you increase it (ex. 16 charge rate capacitors at 12 charge tech but they draw 32 power instead of 16), or stuff like engines could also require power from the power plant, or a baseline power requirement dependent on ship hull size for life support etc.
Power plants are a tech I only research because engines are gated behind them, when designing ships I'm perfectly fine using power plants that are like 3 tech levels behind because power just isn't that important, and the needed power plants take up so little tonnage that updating designs for power plants with new tech doesn't actually get me that much extra tonnage shaved off. There should be more ship systems that draw power so that it actually matters for design.
Power plants have some tech additions that increase their power output at the cost of catastrophic damage when hit, but there's never really a point in taking those because you just don't need that much power.
Maybe I just suck at ship designs and I'm missing something, but usually mine are like 25-40% engines and fuel, 15-25% weapons, 20-30% defenses... 1% power plant.
If power plants made up like 10-20% of a ship tonnage, squeezing some tonnage out by boosting it would become more tempting.

[MinuteMan]

I kind of want to see capacitor boosting or something to use more power in ships. They could cost exponentially more power the more you increase it (ex. 16 charge rate capacitors at 12 charge tech but they draw 32 power instead of 16), or stuff like engines could also require power from the power plant, or a baseline power requirement dependent on ship hull size for life support etc.
Power plants are a tech I only research because engines are gated behind them, when designing ships I'm perfectly fine using power plants that are like 3 tech levels behind because power just isn't that important, and the needed power plants take up so little tonnage that updating designs for power plants with new tech doesn't actually get me that much extra tonnage shaved off. There should be more ship systems that draw power so that it actually matters for design.
Power plants have some tech additions that increase their power output at the cost of catastrophic damage when hit, but there's never really a point in taking those because you just don't need that much power.
Maybe I just suck at ship designs and I'm missing something, but usually mine are like 25-40% engines and fuel, 15-25% weapons, 20-30% defenses... 1% power plant.
If power plants made up like 10-20% of a ship tonnage, squeezing some tonnage out by boosting it would become more tempting.

I think currently "energy use" of the ship without weapons is abstracted.
I honestly don't know how it would play if every ship, station, etc needs at least one powerplant and everything uses power.
It might provide some interesting design choices regarding single point of failure (one powerplant) vs multiple.

There might even be an angle where any "Engine" needs powerplants, separate or incorporated in the engine design?

Or another idea might be to use "powerplants" as an energy source for "afterburners" for engines? I think I saw that proposed somewhere else.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

There will be no general power usage, apart from energy weapons. Power plants tend to be fairly compact, but expensive for their size, so the % cost might be 4-6% even if the size is 1-2%. Aurora is an operational, rather than tactical, game so ship level power assignment is mainly abstracted. I made the decision long ago not to go down the Star Fleet Battles route. That is a great game, but its on a different scale.

[nuclearslurpee]

Power plants have some tech additions that increase their power output at the cost of catastrophic damage when hit, but there's never really a point in taking those because you just don't need that much power.

If power plants made up like 10-20% of a ship tonnage, squeezing some tonnage out by boosting it would become more tempting.

I regularly use the boost tech for beam fighters, so it does have some uses even though it is more situational than some other techs.

[Ghostly]

I think abstracting ship engine/general ship power use is a good thing, I wouldn't be caught dead having to design/fit a reactor for each and every commercial design. It makes sense that a nuclear/fusion/AM engine would come with an integrated power plant capable of powering the rest of the subsystems anyway.

Now, I'm definitely not the first one to suggest this, but it does occur to me that shields drawing power would be a nice addition. They're massive and relatively cheap for their size, the opposite of power plants, and it would make sense that just as one needs power (via reactors or missile volatiles) to inflict damage, one would need some sort of power (and definitely not the fuel kind  ) to prevent it. Such a change would also provide an additional vulnerability to the heavily shielded ships that are very strong in mid-to-late game.

Additionally, this could pave the way for implementation of a simple ship power management system, whereas a vessel lacking power due to sustained damage or purposeful design could be toggled to prefer fully powering either weapons or shields. Not only that would offer an interesting gameplay decision (should a fleet suffering damage try to cut its losses or retain its maximum firepower to the bitter end?), the whole "full power to weapons" schtick is a massive sci-fi cliche and doing it in Aurora would feel very appropriate.

As for balancing it out, I reckon charging 3-4 power per a point of recharge rate would be appropriate? Shields are (usually) more massive than any given weapon on a ship, and their recharge rate tech scales far slower than capacitor recharge.

[Froggiest1982]

I think abstracting ship engine/general ship power use is a good thing, I wouldn't be caught dead having to design/fit a reactor for each and every commercial design. It makes sense that a nuclear/fusion/AM engine would come with an integrated power plant capable of powering the rest of the subsystems anyway.

Now, I'm definitely not the first one to suggest this, but it does occur to me that shields drawing power would be a nice addition. They're massive and relatively cheap for their size, the opposite of power plants, and it would make sense that just as one needs power (via reactors or missile volatiles) to inflict damage, one would need some sort of power (and definitely not the fuel kind  ) to prevent it. Such a change would also provide an additional vulnerability to the heavily shielded ships that are very strong in mid-to-late game.

Additionally, this could pave the way for implementation of a simple ship power management system, whereas a vessel lacking power due to sustained damage or purposeful design could be toggled to prefer fully powering either weapons or shields. Not only that would offer an interesting gameplay decision (should a fleet suffering damage try to cut its losses or retain its maximum firepower to the bitter end?), the whole "full power to weapons" schtick is a massive sci-fi cliche and doing it in Aurora would feel very appropriate.

As for balancing it out, I reckon charging 3-4 power per a point of recharge rate would be appropriate? Shields are (usually) more massive than any given weapon on a ship, and their recharge rate tech scales far slower than capacitor recharge.

Here is the changes in respect to VB6 https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg102769#msg102769

I would also start by saying: Personally, I like how shields work

I was never a fan of having shields consuming fuel, mostly because it was so easy to have a ship dead in the water because we forgot to turn them off.

Perhaps a way I would be in favor of revamping the current model adding energy (instead if fuel this time) requirements will be the following:

• Shields should account for tonnage: meaning the greater the tonnage, the greater should be the amount of energy required to protect the ship
• Based on the above shields will have a fixed tonnage with a "desired" level of protection being the driver for the energy required

This would work on a similar way we have the small ships module for fighter/FACs

I.E.
Normal Shields for instance 500 tons: max energy output XXX and a formula to determine how much energy is required
Small Ships Shields for instance 50 tons: max energy output limited or reduced against original formula to avoid OP and to determine how much energy is required

the current shields techs will ensure that

• A: less energy is required for higher coverages at higher techs
• B: higher levels of protections are possible to be reached due to higher techs

The rationale is that a 20,000 tons ship would require way more energy to provide the same amount of coverage for the double of tonnage, currently this is not true but is artificially created by requiring a smaller or larger unit to fit the ship tonnage limitation or intended displacement, which as I stated previously, I think is fine giving the current model. However, higher tonnage would result in higher shield protection anyway, which is and unrealistic result of the current model limitations.

Please Note: All the above is to be considered only if we were actively discussing adding energy as requirement to the current model

[alex_brunius]

There will be no general power usage, apart from energy weapons. Power plants tend to be fairly compact, but expensive for their size, so the % cost might be 4-6% even if the size is 1-2%. Aurora is an operational, rather than tactical, game so ship level power assignment is mainly abstracted. I made the decision long ago not to go down the Star Fleet Battles route. That is a great game, but its on a different scale.

Just want to add my support to this design decision and go into more depth why.
In a game where you control a single ship it could be fun and make sense to distribute power between systems. In a game with fleets of ships over a whole empire it adds very little and opens alot of cans of worms like...
- Want to kite the AI enemy and kill 30 x your tonnage without a scratch? All power to engines.
- In a position to fire a first strike laser barrage? All power to weapons.
- The enemy is targeting your dreadnaught or you know a big incoming missile salvo? All power to shields on that ship.
Alot of very simple decisions that requires very little thought/strategy and just allow easier victories over the AI, and add more micromanagement clicks.

[Walter]

Currently we can assign one governor per colony.
Which means I end up with a very large number of unassigned civilian admins who don't do anything at all for their entire careers.

Why not allow us to assign more governors?
For any bonus type, the colony could simply use the max bonus from the assigned governors.

Perhaps an installation is required for each governor slot after the first.
I'm thinking it should be big and expensive, to make it a non-trivial decision. Maybe akin to a Sector Command.
Maybe it also requires workers, so that you can't just flood every new colony with a governor for every bonus.

The first thing that comes to my mind is "design by committee".

Maybe you have to build a slot for each bonus (think science department, CIC and so on) and each governor who has that bonus but is assigned to another slot has a chance to reduce the bonus of the governor that actually is assigned to that slot - meddling in the other guy's department, making them look bad to look better themselves.
If there is no slot for a particular bonus, the governor who has that bonus at the highest level is applied at a reduced value and the others may sabotage them as before.

In the next step you would want methods to specialize your governors - fewer bonus values to prevent them from messing up their colleagues' work.
Of course when it comes to getting new colonies on their feet you might need those generalists again.
Or you introduce political parties, where it becomes less likely, that governors from the same party would sabotage each other (still happens - just look at the news - but less often).
This could also happen in reverse, when two governors really like each other and are working together to look better by doing better jobs (outlandish concept, but here you have it).

Shutting up now.

[RocketPapaya]

I've been thinking it would be very nice to have an "at a glace" update on my fleets' status in the Naval Organization window, especially as my extrasolar colonies spiderweb out and I want to get my logistics set up and running well. So I whipped up this little example of appending some small symbols ahead of the fleet name to show whether that fleet is currently under orders.

I would precaution against adding any more information density than a simple binary like this - my intent here is to instantly acquire simple information on many separate fleets at once, the per-fleet order screen will of course offer the full information.

There's probably better options for the specific symbols. I did a simple double-chevron "move" symbol for Active fleets for example even though FDF Platforms 1 x6, while Active, is stationary while loading ordnance. Similarly the "orbit" symbol I drew for Idle fleets might not be the most precise when a fleet is idle but not in orbit of anything.

One additional small detail I want to point out was copying the status symbol into the description bar up top. Hopefully this would serve to signpost players as to the meaning behind it when they see it in additional context like that.