Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[UncleBob]

Carying the two more plausible suggestions over from the other thread, as suggested:

1.   Installed installations.   It is a bit irritating how everything in the Aurora universe seems to be portable, even a factory that was in use for the last few decades.   It might be a nice Idea that would add even more need for planning to put installations into a "storage" after being constructed, where they don't have any benefits.   From there, they could either be transported away or installed on the planet.   Once installed on whatever planet, they bring their benefits, but cannot be removed again. 

2.   Power.   We're running into a real life energy crisis currently, yet so far no 4x game has wasted any thoughts on power.   Make power a resource and you will have immediate benefits in terms of complexity all over the board: More installations that must be built, one more factor to balance, and more stuff to research.   Might even be coupled with special resources for advanced powerplants.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

The combat options pane really needs a way to turn autofire and synchronized fire on and off for every ship or every ship of a given class in a fleet. Turning synchronized fire on for a group of fifty fighters sucks.

You can turn Sync Fire on/off on the Task Groups window for the whole fleet. It is on the History / Officers / Misc tab.

Steve

[Vanigo]

You can turn Sync Fire on/off on the Task Groups window for the whole fleet. It is on the History / Officers / Misc tab.

Steve

Yeah, someone mentioned that. That's a really unintuitive place for it, though; there should really be a button or something on the combat options pane.

[UnLimiTeD]

Maybe a possibility to Auto-Assign Officiers of only the selected branch?
Like, only captains.
I always find it annoying to reassign Ground officers to the fitting battalions/brigades after auto-assigning my Navy Officiers.
Which are generally only selected after crew training.

[ndkid]

Given the tendency for certain errors to hit multiple times (such as the infamous UpdateAllSensors overflow), can we get a menu option to log errors to a file, or the game log, or something, rather than causing popups?

[ExChairman]

Not sure if someone said it before, but I would like to bee able to plot carrier laucnh in the movement.
Ex.
Jump to X system.
Launch all fighters
Jump back to Y system

[James Patten]

I have discovered the joys of pre-constructing ship installations, then being able to significantly reduce the amount of time a new build or refit takes on a ship.  However, it's a mystery just how much time is saved until the build is ordered, and you check it on the Shipyard activity tab.  It would be nice to be told that the job will really be done on X date, and even nicer to know what installations are being taken out of inventory to make it happen.

Are installations taken out of inventory as soon as the build is ordered, at the end of the build process, or somewhere in between?  And if I cancel a build with no build progress, do those installations get put back in inventory?

[Beersatron]

I have discovered the joys of pre-constructing ship installations, then being able to significantly reduce the amount of time a new build or refit takes on a ship.  However, it's a mystery just how much time is saved until the build is ordered, and you check it on the Shipyard activity tab.  It would be nice to be told that the job will really be done on X date, and even nicer to know what installations are being taken out of inventory to make it happen.

Are installations taken out of inventory as soon as the build is ordered, at the end of the build process, or somewhere in between?  And if I cancel a build with no build progress, do those installations get put back in inventory?

To get a rough idea on the true done date I take a look at the class design and the % of cost each group of components takes. So say the engines are 30% of the cost and I have enough of them on planet then I can expect the build time to be 30% less. I'd definitely like an indicator of build time using components though!

They get taken out of inventory at the start of the build and they are not returned if you scrap the build. Pretty sure the components are deleted from the DB as soon as build is started so there is no way to track what was used.

[James Patten]

Fighter suggestion:

When I launch my fighters, it'd be nice to have a button that acts like the Detach button but detaches all the fighters into their squadron(s), as defined on the Fighter window.  The new task group would have the name of the squadron as the group name.  So I launch my 10 fighters as a squadron, the new squadron name is the "Ranger Squadron" (for example).

Troop suggestion:

I designed my carriers to have room for a Marine company, and included in my carriers is a drop ship.  I initially loaded up my marines and thought that they were loading into the troop transport bay.  Later I gave the command for the marines to be moved to the drop bay of the drop ship, which was inside the ship.  This command would have taken almost a day to complete! and I couldn't do anything else while this was happening, so I canceled that command.  Later I found out that my marines were already in the drop bay.  So I don't know if the canceled command completed when I canceled it or if the troops were loaded into the drop bay initially.  It would be nice if a) the load troop command was a little clearer as to where the troops were going, and b) we could transfer troops between transport bay and drop bay (and back) while the ship is on the move.

[ardem]

Suggestion for Log exporter to be in Tab delimited or another style of delimited, alternatively cut the number of commas in the logs, as you cannot bring it into an excel spreadsheet easily.

A selfish request but I am sure it would be a fairly simple one.

[waresky]

Carying the two more plausible suggestions over from the other thread, as suggested:

1.   Installed installations.   It is a bit irritating how everything in the Aurora universe seems to be portable, even a factory that was in use for the last few decades.   It might be a nice Idea that would add even more need for planning to put installations into a "storage" after being constructed, where they don't have any benefits.   From there, they could either be transported away or installed on the planet.   Once installed on whatever planet, they bring their benefits, but cannot be removed again. 

2.   Power.   We're running into a real life energy crisis currently, yet so far no 4x game has wasted any thoughts on power.   Make power a resource and you will have immediate benefits in terms of complexity all over the board: More installations that must be built, one more factor to balance, and more stuff to research.   Might even be coupled with special resources for advanced powerplants.

2nd.
Nice question for POWER.
But lot of work for Steve,balancing,NPR..etc..

[UnLimiTeD]

Something I'd always tried to create but failed due to the constraints of ship building;
Space Bases. 
Probably more a suggestion for II, but I figured it might be easy to implement.
Basically a new ship class, like PDCs, that can't use engines, and has to have stuff like Maintenance storages, but with a slower maintenance clock and less breakdowns, maybe -50% each.
It is a lot easier than thinking of a system for creating actual "planets" or the like, and would allow for prolonged deployment in strategic positions.
Obviously, you'd have to tow it back to a Planet every few years.

[mberkers]

This probably won't get read for a while, but I'd like to be able to put multiple engines on my fighters and/or gunboats/LAC's.  I know they're limited to a single engine, so my idea was to add to the current list of engines (Military/Commercial/Fighter/Gunboat) a couple more, like Fighter Dual Engine (takes 2. 5x size/HS of a single engine), and maybe Quad Engine (takes 5x size/HS of a a single Fighter engine).  And of course Gunboat Dual and Quad engines.  Don't know how doable it is.  but it would let us build much faster fighters and gunboats by dedicating more HS to engine

Matt B

[ardem]

Suggestions:

Commander Section: Longer then 5 year rotation period, mainly used for administrators

Ship Design: Ability in the Ship Design to choose the rotation period for that design

Task Group Orders: Ability when you set the tick boxes they stay set on the last setting.
Task Group Orders: Task group selection is a listbox not a dropdown box, perhaps even a radio button for Commercial/Military.

Event viewer: Ability to resize window, or make the font smaller to fit more on my screen (I have good eyesight)

Combat Window: When selecting shields On, it displays like active sensor do

Fighter Armour can be repaired

Crews can be transfered, if the crew is larger then the same experience is transfered (extra crew experience is lost), if smaller the experienced is based on percentage of total.

MOST IMPORTANT REQUEST: A tickbox to do automated turns regardless of events, until turned off, especially for those long missile battles.

[Nistenf]

Is scroll bars for the big windows completely out? I can't play with my small monitor =(