Suggestions for v5.1

[Father Tim]

Before the change, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to make 'Unlock Design' an SM-only function, but now that I've used it for a bit, I agree with Beer & Sloan - it's REALLY annoying.  Change it back, please.

How about moving PDC's so that their commanders are drawn from the ground force officer list

Seconded, with caveats.

John

How about this - allow any officer/leader/scientist/whatever to be assigned to any project/post/ship/brigade/whatever.  Leave the automated assignments as is, but allow the player to do what he or she wants - even if it's contrary to the 'rules'.  If I want to put a ground forces Major in charge of a research project, I should be able to.  I know perfectly well he'll have 0% research bonus, and an Admin raing of 1, but I should be able to do it.  LIkewise if I want a prominent scientist in charge of a survey vessel - I know she has no applicable bonus, but if I want to do it, I should be able to.

That way, everybody can be happy.  If someone wants GF officers in charge of their PDCs, or Naval officers, or a mix of both, the player can have that.  If they don't care enough to assign the 'renegades' themselves, they can live wtih whatever Aurora gives them.

[sloanjh]

How about this - allow any officer/leader/scientist/whatever to be assigned to any project/post/ship/brigade/whatever.  Leave the automated assignments as is, but allow the player to do what he or she wants - even if it's contrary to the 'rules'.

I really like this suggestion, especially since it probably makes the code simpler....

John

[sloanjh]

This is merely a cosmetic change for ground unit names, so it might not be worth the coding and DB change....

I like to name my battalions by type and number within the type, e.g. 1st Armored, 2nd Armored, 1st (not 3rd) Infantry, 2nd Infantry, etc.

My problem occurs in the various displays (e.g. during officer assignment) - most of them sort alphabetically, so I end up with

1st Armored
1st Airborne
1st Infantry
10th Infantry
2nd Armored
2nd Airborne
...

What I'd like is all units of the same type together.  So the proposal is to split the names of ground units up into to pieces: a "type name" (or whatever you want to call it) and a "sequence number".  So the 1st Armored would have a type name of "Armored" and a sequence number of "1".  If sequence number was "none" or blank, then it wouldn't be part of the name, e.g. a type name of "Rico's Roughnecks" and sequence number of "none" would come out as "Rico's Roughnecks".  The ordering could then be based on the type name, with a secondary ordering based on the (numerical, not string) sequence number.  

Actually, the same sort of thing could be done for task groups too - right now I'm naming my TG "Ferret 001", "Ferret 002", etc. so that the sorting doesn't put Ferret 1, 10, and 100 next to each other.

This isn't high priority - on the ground units side I've simply started naming things "Armored 1st", "Armored 2nd" etc., then read them right to left.  Just a thought that's been nagging me for a while....

John

[Rathos]

I would like to suggest that Civilians be able to use jump-drive capable ships as well as jump-gates. My civilians can't go between my planets because I don't build jump-gates, instead all of my ships have jump-drives (Except one basic freighter I made to see if that was why no civilians were appearing, and they did right after I made it.)

[MoonDragon]

I would really like to see racial wealth displayed under the summary screen. Or under the wealth tab. Or anywhere else really that is in plain sight. It took me 3 games and about 20 hours of playing before my eyes accidentally caught the number in the titlebar of the population window.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Vista (and Windows 7) GUI, but they have a new display scheme called Aero. It makes window titlebars semi-transparent, and blue by default. So, a semi-transparent blue text on a dark blue background of the system view window is darn hard to see. Especially if one doesn't know that they should be looking there.

[Drakale]

Got 2 small suggestions that occurred to me while playing

1- A jury rigging(or recycling) tech could be added that increase the amount of mineral gained from scrapping, make refits faster(but still cost as much mineral as before) and make salvaging more efficient/yield more parts. I like the concept of a tinkerer civilization that has a knack for assembling and disassembling constructs.

2- Jump gates could stand to be harder to build in my opinion. Right now if I build a few gate constructors(5-6) early with lots of fuel and decent engines, I can rather easily build gates at all the discovered jump points. In comparison maintaining enough jump ships for the fleet is a much bigger expense. The only case I need jump ship is to invade a hostile system, and even then, a one way trip with a task-force is a viable if potentially dangerous tactic to secure and then build a way back in half a year. If jump gates took 3-5 years to build then only the major system would be linked and the choice between a jump capable fleet and a massive jump gate building infrastructure would be a little harder to do. Or am I wrong in thinking jump ships are not worth the effort?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Jump gates could stand to be harder to build in my opinion. Right now if I build a few gate constructors(5-6) early with lots of fuel and decent engines, I can rather easily build gates at all the discovered jump points. In comparison maintaining enough jump ships for the fleet is a much bigger expense. The only case I need jump ship is to invade a hostile system, and even then, a one way trip with a task-force is a viable if potentially dangerous tactic to secure and then build a way back in half a year. If jump gates took 3-5 years to build then only the major system would be linked and the choice between a jump capable fleet and a massive jump gate building infrastructure would be a little harder to do. Or am I wrong in thinking jump ships are not worth the effort?

The problem with jump gates is that while they make your life a lot easier, they also make it easier for an invading alien Empire . For example, non-jump precursors can't follow you out of a system unless you provide them with a jump gate. It is also quite slow to build in a chain because you can't start gates in the next system until you complete them in the previous one, unless you have a large civilian jump ship to escort the construction ships.

Steve

[Drakale]

Depends how you define slow :p

For me 1 year to build a 2 way gate is quite fast... You are right for the invasion part however. I did not have to deal with a full scale NPR invasion yet so I might revise my strategy at that point.

[Andrew]

I would defeinetly not want the building time of jumpgates to increase

[Rathos]

I would like to be able to design missile launchers larger than 24 size too. I don't see why we shouldn't be able to (with enough time and resources) build massive 100 size launchers that fire five stage cruise missiles every hour or so =D

[Sherban]

Can you destroy (target) jump gates? It might be one solution to deal with NPR invasions.

[Poojawa]

I'm sure I'm not the first to request/suggest this, but I figured it'd be better than working on some necromancy on a newly-joined forum.

But!

Perhaps could we have drag boxes to adjust the sizes of the windows, rather than being stuck with the width of 1024? my primary computer I'd like to play this on is a max of 1600x900 (widescreen), while the laptop I discovered this gem is 1600x1200.

And no, I've tried fiddling with the unsupported monitor resolutions and the LG monitor basically told me to piss off <,<

[Father Tim]

Can you destroy (target) jump gates? It might be one solution to deal with NPR invasions.

No, you can't (though it's a much-discussed topic).  And it would be, which is why you (currently) can not do so.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I would like to be able to design missile launchers larger than 24 size too. I don't see why we shouldn't be able to (with enough time and resources) build massive 100 size launchers that fire five stage cruise missiles every hour or so =D

That is something else that was originally in v4.8 and was lost when I suffered a corruption in the master DB before Xmas. I'll add it for v4.9

EDIT: Missile Launchers now go up to Size 100 in v4.9

Steve

[Rathos]

I would like to be able to design missile launchers larger than 24 size too. I don't see why we shouldn't be able to (with enough time and resources) build massive 100 size launchers that fire five stage cruise missiles every hour or so =D

That is something else that was originally in v4.8 and was lost when I suffered a corruption in the master DB before Xmas. I'll add it for v4.9

EDIT: Missile Launchers now go up to Size 100 in v4.9

Steve

Sweet. Why not size 10000 launchers as well? That way we can fit a missile big enough to destroy a planet.  :roll: