Official Suggestion Thread for 5.14 or later (inc Spoiler)

[waresky]

Subject: AUTOMATED TURNS button:
a more ready and easy to use KEy associated at "Automated Turns" for easy to CUT-OFF damned Automated.

Mouse didnt r easy and not even r ok.

please associate it an Function key for FAST and secure stop damned automated 5-sec ...ty

[Hawkeye]

Subject: AUTOMATED TURNS button:
a more ready and easy to use KEy associated at "Automated Turns" for easy to CUT-OFF damned Automated.

Mouse didnt r easy and not even r ok.

please associate it an Function key for FAST and secure stop damned automated 5-sec ...ty

Well, CTRL+F8 works for me

[waresky]

Our "friends" ..spoilers.

Ive set Automated fire in a nearest system for hunting Precursors ships..when one single battered Earth ship retun in Sol System..and encounter an our "spoiler" friend..made a firefight..andf ive lost whole my Earth population for revenge.

Steve..not good ur late "New".

Srry

Edit later: now ive more than 200hundereds useless and bad looking game Aliens ships stationed in Sol..are u crazy?

[Kurt]

Steve -

Once again this suggestion is from the Terran Campaign, so I make it with the understanding that I am using 4.77 and things may have changed.  I don't think so, though, which is why I'm making the suggestion.  

I am encountering a problem in the Campaign, and I've got a couple of ideas on how to fix it.  The problem is with maintenance facilities.  Essentially, what is happening is that I've got squadrons of ships stationed all over to provide protection against attacks.  Many of my colonies are intended to produce resources for major population centers.  Titan and Nova Terra are examples of this.  Both exist only to produce resources for Terra and Mars.  Titan's resources are sent to Mars via mass driver, while Nova Terra's are sent via a freighter on a regular run.  The problem is that eventually the mass drivers or freighters deplete the resources and when that happens I get all sorts of error messages on the Event screen informing me that maintenance wasn't performed on my ships stationed at those locations.  For Nova Terra that will persist for another five day update, then everything will be okay as resources accumulate, at least until the freighter arrives again.  For Titan there is no solution.  Once the mass drivers reduce the resources to zero they never rise again, unless the production outstrips the shipping capacity, in which case one resource accumulates while the others remain at zero.  

I can think of several possible solutions:
1.  Currently, resources are either picked up by freighters or shipped out by mass drivers before production/maintenance is performed.  If you changed that to the other way around, then there would always be resources available for maintenance.
2.  If you made it so that mass drivers and "Pick up all resources" commands left enough resources for maintenance and production, that would work too.  Say enough resources for one months production & maintenance at current consumption levels.  To pick up more you'd have to tell the freighter to load X amount of Y mineral.  
3.  Finally, you could change maintenance so that if no resources are available, maintenance facilities would use maintenance supplies stockpiled on the planet.  This would steadily use up the supplies, but it is better than nothing.  

Kurt

[sloanjh (OP)]

I can think of several possible solutions:
1.  Currently, resources are either picked up by freighters or shipped out by mass drivers before production/maintenance is performed.  If you changed that to the other way around, then there would always be resources available for maintenance.
2.  If you made it so that mass drivers and "Pick up all resources" commands left enough resources for maintenance and production, that would work too.  Say enough resources for one months production & maintenance at current consumption levels.  To pick up more you'd have to tell the freighter to load X amount of Y mineral.  
3.  Finally, you could change maintenance so that if no resources are available, maintenance facilities would use maintenance supplies stockpiled on the planet.  This would steadily use up the supplies, but it is better than nothing.  

4.  Set up "reserve levels" of each mineral on each planet below which any export mechanism (mass driver, freighter, ....) would not take them.  This is a slightly different spin on the long-standing suggestion about mass-drivers, except this moves it to being a record on the populations mining state (as opposed to the mass driver state).  So for example if I set a reserve level of 1000 Duranium on a planet, the planet had 1454 Duranium, and a freighter was told to load all Duranium, it would only load 454.  This way of doing it might be easier to code up, since it's essentially just changing the way that "minerals available" are calculated....

John

[Texashawk]

Just 2 little things that sort of disturb the immersion for me - stupid, but perhaps easily fixable?

1) Fighters, depending on how they are set up, can have from 15-30 people. Somehow that seems... like a lot of people on board for a hyper-fast tactical attack craft, but maybe that's just my sensibilities.
2) Gender pronouns are ignored in the events log. It's a bit weird to hear 'Stephanie Bell has been involved in an accident that will effect his long-term health.' or some such.

This game is so awesome (literally) that little things like that really stand out.

Thanks for your time!  

Steve

[welchbloke]

Just 2 little things that sort of disturb the immersion for me - stupid, but perhaps easily fixable?

1) Fighters, depending on how they are set up, can have from 15-30 people. Somehow that seems... like a lot of people on board for a hyper-fast tactical attack craft, but maybe that's just my sensibilities.

I've always thought of Aurora fighters to be analogous to something like a MTB, E-Boat or PT Boat.  As a result, the numbers seem fine to me.

2) Gender pronouns are ignored in the events log. It's a bit weird to hear 'Stephanie Bell has been involved in an accident that will effect his long-term health.' or some such.

The easy fix for this, to my mind, is to replace all the 'his' with 'their'.

[Father Tim]

2) Gender pronouns are ignored in the events log. It's a bit weird to hear 'Stephanie Bell has been involved in an accident that will effect his long-term health.' or some such.

The easy fix for this, to my mind, is to replace all the 'his' with 'their'.

I remember the name files being separated by gender, which led me to assume that each officer has a 'gender' flag set somewhere, which would make it easy enough to match up his/her properly.  Now that I think it through, I assume Steve would have written it that way if it was that easy, so probably there is no such flag.

'Their' was good enough for Shakespeare; it's good enough for me.

[sloanjh (OP)]

I remember the name files being separated by gender, which led me to assume that each officer has a 'gender' flag set somewhere,

This is a correct assumption - I've seen the flag in the DB. (IIRC )

John

[Aldaris]

Would it be possible to implement known exoplanets along with known real stars?
Unknown characteristics would be randomised, and other planets would be filled in as possible, but it would be interesting to see the planetary systems around Sol slowly standardize over the years.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extrasolar_planets, if it helps.)

[symon]

Can I suggest a way of allowing more SM control of system generation. Either I've been doing something wrong for a long time or it's not possible to adjust/control starsystems.

I've clicked Create system/delete system literally thousands of times but even with SM terraform cannot generate anything like a 'starting system that I have in mind'. At the moment, setting starting conditions seems very difficult, which would be a real pain for a multiplayer start!

[Trueknight]

I'm not sure if this is the right thread to post, since isn't sticked and it's been a while since the last post...i'm sorry if i'm wrong.

Anyway, i was thinking about this suggestion since a long time, i hope it can make it to the game. I haven't seen anything like that in the previous posts, but maybe i missed it...

The first(and maybe the most) thing i liked in Aurora was the great sense of RolePlaying that having individual "named" officers gave to the player.
I was thinking, though, that it's quite awkward to see naval and ground officers just pop out from nowhere; in my opinion it would be great from a Role Playing poin of view if the game could keep track of XOs and maybe the most high ranking officers of a given entity (ship, o ground unit).

In most of space opera that i've read/seen, great importance it's given to XO and senior officers on a ship, and i'd love to see a little of that in Aurora too, but before you start having an heart attack for the micro-management implications, let me explain what i had in mind  

There's nothing it can be done to address this or at least make it customizable?

What do you think about that? Thanks for your attention, i hope my bad english was clear enough to express my ideas to improve this GREAT game.

[IanD]

For the SM. A merge empires button.

This button would merge populations (doable now), missile and component stockpiles, mineral stockpiles, research including partially complete projects and RST (which would save me having to recreate all the components, missiles etc), shipyards with partially completed ships, and ship designs (if you transfer a ship currently while you have the ship design you cannot build them until RST is replaced), ships and fighter squadrons all with the push of one button – OK, several if you must..

The last is really annoying me currently. I transferred the fighter squadrons on the task force screen, but the fighter management screen refuses to acknowledge the presence of any fighters what so ever!

I am sure it wouldn’t take Steve more than an evening to knock this off

These thoughts were engendered by my current campaign.

I think your model for the effects of a nuclear attack on a population may need a little tweaking, especially if its a pre-TN population. The consensus appears to be from my very superficial reading that all agriculture would be impossible for at least the first year after a nuclear war involving about 100 15-kiloton weapons. Eurasia would go to –30C and North America –20C. The guestimates for the length of time this weather pattern would persist is from 1-10 years, thus after about six months a pre-TN population would be starving rapidly. A TN population with lots of available power may be able to slow the rate of decline with massive hydroponics factories build like skyscrapers (see Scientific American November 2009), but I would think a much higher population decline would be appropriate. Current world food reserves are between 60-120 days, which even with stringent rationing would not last long enough.
An item of equipment that could be added would be precipitators and would increase dust removal from the atmosphere. These units could either large as in Terraformers or small craft, built in shipyards or built in fighter factories. If the latter you would need a lot to have an effect. This would prevent a 10 year freeze, sterilising the planet.

Regards

[Zed 6]

1. Regarding Column sorting- Ctrl-F7 Technology Report & Ctrl-A Available Colony Analysis- Double clicking on a column allows sorting in a variety of ways. Being able to do the same on F2 Population and Production - Research ,Industry, Manage Shipyards and Ctrl-F4 Task Force Organization especially and probably others tables would be nice to have. Also on F2- Basic Pop List checkbox (Upper Left). This would be nice to be left in the state it was put in, so when the window is reopened it remembered it's state, instead of defaulting to unchecked.


2. Economics Page F2. The Main population location list on the left hand side. Colonies with population are sorted first near the top. That's fine, but colonies without population are sorted by number of mines. Sorting unpopulated colonies by Alphanumeric order would be a nice option.

[UnLimiTeD]

For the SM. A merge empires button.

+1!
Additionally, an other useful SM function:

SM Training!

I'm doing a little RP, of course with fleet training, and now creating an enemy for the obligatory fluff, I want a force that I can control immediately without delays, to actually look dangerous instead of unorganized.
Being able to set Task force training and maybe even Crew Training to an arbitrary amount of the fly would really help.