Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[wilddog5]

Starports reduce the deployment time for all ships in a system (small shuttles move crew about the system replace sick/ injured crew ect).

I was thinking 0.1% per spaceport so you would need 1000 to negate that systems loss something only major colinies would have as thay have to be built on the spot.

This would allow things like pdc's on uncolinizable planets and JP defences without needing spacestations which steve seams reluctant to do.

[jseah]

^Each spaceport is half a research lab.  1000 space ports costs the same as 500 research labs, which I doubt many people even get to. 

If you make each spaceport cost the same as a CF, then sure.  If each spaceport gave 0.05 days deployment time decrease per day, then 20 spaceports could reduce deployment time 1 day per day, which is a pretty substantial investment.  (10 labs is ALOT)

[wilddog5]

OK 1000 spaceports might be a bit to much 1% per spaceport seams better, this is supposed to be a substantial investment afterall or you could have 100+ ships patrolling with no effort

the only other way would be one spaceport per ship or something similar

[swarm_sadist]

The spaceport could always be turned into something like the space elevator; a major project, but a major bonus to efficiency, speed and cost. A few things that could be changed with spaceports:
1) One spaceport for every ship being loaded and unloaded. You can then have a cargo handling tech in logistics that improves spaceports and their loading efficiency, somewhat like how advanced cargo loaders at seaports are today. At high levels, you may have spaceports cut down loading time by 400 times. Maybe an 'automated' spaceport for really busy planets?
2) Have spaceports reduce the cost of building ships in orbit, by having a cheap way of moving materials into orbit. Again, this is the space elevator idea. Alternatively used to reduce retooling and building time.
3) Make spaceports required for ships to load and unload material from, unless they have a special system such as a planetary landing system. Alternatively, only ships below a certain mass could load and unload at planets, with larger ships requiring either shuttles, special components or spaceports in order to do so. A larger planet limits the size of the ship more than a small planetoids, thus giving us a use for a moon base.
4) Reduce the cost of spaceports and have them act similar to maintenance bases. The more spaceports, the larger the ship it can service. This would make it so that there would be super large ships traveling between your large planets, and smaller ships to the pioneer worlds.
5) Have a planet and spaceport only be able to handle the loading and unloading of so many tonnes of material at once, with each new spaceport increasing the planet's ability to handle more cargo and passengers.
6) Have a spaceport act similar to a sector command, with civilian contracts going between spaceports more often than without. You can then set up the spaceports to act like airports or seaports, allowing the ships to stop off for refueling before continuing on to further destinations. This would allow the player to set up the 'stellar highways' that I've seen several times on this forum.
7) Make it so that spaceports are required to tax the civilian shipping. A large amount of shipping will overflow the spaceport, so more would be required to continue taxing at 100% efficiency.

[orfeusz]

One thing that would be really nice is a consecutive type numbering system.  Let's say that I'm building FACs, which I'm just numbering, and not actually naming.  I want to start with FAC-1 and go from there, keeping the numbering across types.  The idea is that you could specify a prefix (FAC-, PT-, U-, etc.) and build ships named by that prefix and using the next number.  It would be possible to do this manually, making a list with a bunch of names, but an automatic method would be even better.  I hope I'm making sense. 

+1

I would preffer if mining was just changed to make sense instead. I don't think it's logical or makes sense that all these minerals are in the same place so they can be extracted with a single mine. That only makes sense in the case of smaller asteroids (and could perhaps be their bonus).

Mining yield should instead be divided by the number of different minerals present (and you get to choose which ones you want to mine and which you want to ignore).

A planet with mineral A, mineral B and mineral C should need three mines to have the same base yield as a planet that only has mineral A. Or two mines if you ignore extraction of mineral C. Prefferably a checkbox right next the name where you mark which minerals you want to extract.

This would ofcourse require a rebalance with quite a bit higher base mining yields.

a lot of reblancing, but i think this is great idea.

[draanyk]

When assigning ground units to brigade HQ, or brigade HQ to division HQ, it would be easier if the list of possible HQs didn't include every HQ in the universe.  HQs that already have the max number of units assigned should not be in the list.  It would also be convenient if the HQs on the current planet were at the top of the list, or at the very least to sort the list by unit name.  It isn't clear how the code is currently sorting. . .  for example, my current list of brigade HQs: 11th, 16th, 21st, 26th, 41st, 50th, 31st, 36th, 61st, 51st, 56th.


Also, I just finished conquering an NPR system, and my cruiser squadrons suffered some light damage.  The "ships requiring repair" screen is helpful, but it would be more helpful if the fleet screen ("Task Groups") had some indication, perhaps colour-coding the row display.  I haven't touched MS RAD tools in a while, but if the colour-coding works on a per-cell basis, then this could be used to draw attention to different situations.  For example, low maintenance supplies (whatever "low" is determined to be) could be indicated by highlighting the Maint Supplies cell for the ship in question, while damage to the same ship could be indicated by colour-coding on some other cell, such as the ship name.  Crew months approaching deployment period could be colour-coded one colour, while exceeding crew deployment time could be colour-coded another colour (the crew months cell specifically).

[draanyk]

I've noticed with terraforming planets and advancing time with the 30 day button that the turn processes the full terraforming capacity on the last turn required to complete the terraforming order, which causes too much atmospheric change. For example, I just had an instance where I wanted to stop adding greenhouse gas at 0.78 atm, and when the turn finished processing, the content was around 0.95 atm, which made my planet quite a bit warmer than I had wanted. There was some NPR-caused short turns happening, so I had turned on the Auto Turns, but I suspect the massive addition of gas was due to the large number of terraforming modules I have in orbit (annual capacity of 1.5 atm change) and that I must have been close to the 0.78 atm limit when I advanced time.

The current workaround is to advance turns from the Environment tab of the planets screen and, when we start to get close to the desired amount, start advancing in 5 day periods.

Less micro-managey behaviour would be if in the current turn a planet only needs to add 0.01 atm to finish the order but has terraforming capacity to add 0.8 atm, then it only adds the required 0.01 atm and ignores the remaining capacity.

[Jumpp]

It'd be cool if we could give orders to unload a certain quantity of something, in much the same way that we can give an order to load a certain quantity.

[wilddog5]

i don't think I've seen this idea but given the size of this thread well if it has it has.

i very rarly research Gauss cannon velocity beyond 20K and never used CWIS for imperial ships (placed them on civi ships for private enterprise but that no longer applies)

so i was thinking that Gauss cannon size for CWIS could decrease per Gauss cannon velocity level on the account that better components are being used, thus encouraging CWIS usage a bit more

[swarm_sadist]

Again, going back to mesons; randomly hit anything inside the ship, including the armour columns, strike craft and the munitions. If a meson should hit a warhead, bypassing all magazine armour, then the warhead should blow up.

I don't think I've seen this idea but given the size of this thread well if it has it has.

I very rarely research Gauss cannon velocity beyond 20K and never used CWIS for imperial ships (placed them on civi ships for private enterprise but that no longer applies)

So i was thinking that Gauss cannon size for CWIS could decrease per Gauss cannon velocity level on the account that better components are being used, thus encouraging CWIS usage a bit more

I don't think that has ever been mentioned before. Good catch.

[Nathan_]

Include comets into the no movement for planets/moon option, Every little bit helps.

[vonduus]

Perhaps this is an old and unfeasible idea, but anyway, here it comes:

On the F3 screen on the left there is a drop-down menu where you can select system view for any known star system.

Suggestion: Is it possible to have a similar drop-down where you can select any fleet (TG) and then the system screen will center on this fleet?

Right now, I go to the TG screen and select my task group, and then from that task group's window I push the button "system map". What I want is a dropdown on the F3 screen that bypasses this and takes me directly to the relevant system, centered on the fleet i chose in the drop-down.

[Conscript Gary]

If unknown active sensor ranges are indeed estimated using a static assumed EM Sensitivity level, it would be neat to have that as a slider in the sensors tab, preferably defaulting to your own tech level.

[forgottenlord]

Not sure if this has come up but a "R&R" order for locations capable of providing such to ships - the ship sits there until the crew months hits 0.  This would mainly be for the benefit of survey ships who have automated order queues so you can force them to sit there without either taking on new orders or giving messages about how they couldn't find the next location on their order list, but I could see this benefiting in all sorts of ways such as scheduling them on large patrols, etc.  Would also be useful if you ever felt like making morale apply to civilian operations.

Another thing I'd love is to have a conditional order for this: when months deployed exceeds designed deploy time or is at X% of designed deploy time, go to suitable location for R&R.

[Nathan_]

Additional point defense orders for missile fire controls: invert the interceptors to incoming ASMs so that point defense missiles thin out each wave for beam pd rather than try to intercept an entire wave. So rather than 2v1 or 4v1 I have a 1v2(one interceptor for every 2 missiles) or 1v4(one interceptor for every 4 missiles).