Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would like to see that ships get a reduction of their TCS value when in orbit of a planet. Lets say that they get a 50% reduction while in low orbit of something and are able to mask their signature. But they should only be able to do so if they detected the active scanner.

As long as a ship is aware of an active scanning device they would effectively have half their signature.

I think that this would give some additional strategic/tactical depth to the game.

[Task]

Some of my suggestions; I dont know if these are already implemented and I have just not discovered them, or understand how they work:

Have gifted officers be able to be assigned to naval academies to further improve the quality of naval candidates produced by said academy.

I would like a ship component that reduces required crew; maybe something like smart/expert systems, A. I.  modules, etc.  I really would like one that reduces fighter required crew especially.  I refuse to finalize a fighter design that has more than 2 crew, just me, I'm am weird.

I would like the ability to add more ground forces ranks to the rank structure.

I am sure to come up with a few more that most other people would call dumb, but I'm guessing the idea is to just throw ideas out there and get the ball rolling, right?

[Hawkeye]

Have gifted officers be able to be assigned to naval academies to further improve the quality of naval candidates produced by said academy.

This smells a lot like WitP-AE´s Tracom

[se5a]

Could we please have a notification about turn interruption? like a flashing taskbar and/or a sound ping?

Turns take long time to process, so I tend to read something else on my screen. A notification about an interrupt would greatly improve my experience. Thank you.

sort of along these lines:

a way to allow notifications without interrupt.
if the event updates filter window is a winforms dataGridView it should be fairly easy interface wise to add two check-box columns, one for whether to filter it or not, another to interrupt or not - course linking that to the interrupt code may or may not be so  trivial, depending on how it's handled.

I like to run on auto at 5 day increments with the event updates window showing, of course there's always interrupts that I may want to view in the event updates, but not actually interrupt. which means setting the Min Inc. ofc that means if there's something REALLY important (like an enemy ship seen or whatever) I'll still get the interrupt, but if it's not important enough to interrupt but I want to view, like.. you know, 'Jump Gate Underway' or 'research complete, research started' I can keep an eye on the event updates, but if it's like. 'Inactive Lab' then it'll interrupt and I can assign the lab.

 

[Brian Neumann]

Would it be possible to set up a sub que for the industry on a planet.  I often like to build ship components to make the actual shipbuilding go faster, especially for big ships.  What I would like to do is to go into the ship design screen (F5) and have a checkbox next to all of the components used that can be built by industry.  Select the ones I want and have this show up on the industry tab as a single line to be built.  Once selected they would follow each other in being built.  As components are built they would be placed in the stockpiles as now.  This way instead of having to select ten different components for a ship individually each time I built that ship I could go ahead and select them as a group.

Hope this makes sense.

Brian

[sloanjh]

Would it be possible to set up a sub que for the industry on a planet.  I often like to build ship components to make the actual shipbuilding go faster, especially for big ships.  What I would like to do is to go into the ship design screen (F5) and have a checkbox next to all of the components used that can be built by industry.  Select the ones I want and have this show up on the industry tab as a single line to be built.  Once selected they would follow each other in being built.  As components are built they would be placed in the stockpiles as now.  This way instead of having to select ten different components for a ship individually each time I built that ship I could go ahead and select them as a group.

+1  (Good idea on the checkbox, Brian, to avoid clutter).

I would suggest that the components are all scheduled simultaneously, with amount of industry proportionately divided amongst them according to cost.

John

[Conscript Gary]

Or even have another category in the industry dropdown next to ship components for class components. As in it displays say, 'Tribal components' or 'Karhae Components', with the expected behavior if built.

[jseah]

Can we have <1 research lab unassigned not interrupt?  It should still flash, but interrupting makes moving research labs a *major* pain.  I often build twenty freighters (which is really far more than I normally need) in order to move them just so they don't interrupt for multiple days in a row. 

[IanD]

I would like Empires on the same planet be able to share system data but NOT geological data or gravitational data. I.E. This system exists through this jump point and has these planets etc, but no more. I sure Steve could knock this off over the festive break. 

[Vordarian]

It would be great to have the possibility to set a ship to 'unmanned'.  And thus to be able to

-mothball older ships during peacetime, perhaps saving a percentage of maintenace costs
-tow them out with a tractor beam to use up as target ships
-drifting derelicts?

[swarm_sadist]

Might I suggest having the fire control active contact screen show ships in order of their distance to the task group? It would be nice to have all the ships within range of my guns at the top of the list.

[devhyfes]

When I design a new tech, such as a new engine or weapon, and click "create", I get no feedback.   As an inexperienced user, this leads me to believe that my click didn't register or that there is a bug.   

A better behavior would be: User clicks the create button, and upon DB insert of the new project, an alert appears with text such as "Design Created! Before this design can be produced, it must be researched at a lab.  "

An even better behavior would be to help new users understand where to look for the technology.   "A new research project for this design has been created under <tech tree area>.   Before it can be produced, it must be researched at a lab.  "

An even better (^2) behavior would be to have a button on the dialog that disables this alert ("Don't tell me this again") so that advanced users do not have to put up with this any more. 

Also, I don't believe it auto-refreshes the list of available projects to show this new design.  .  .  if not, this would be nice.   

I know it isn't a huge change/issue, but it would have saved me an hour or so of troubleshooting. 

[CheaterEater]

Would it be possible to tweak maintenance costs/breakdowns for large engines? I want to take advantage of larger engines for better fuel economy, but the effective cost of these engines for small ships becomes prohibitively large. As an example, a 120 HS ship uses a 25 HS engine rather than 5 5 HS engines. The total cost is the same, but the single engine turns out to be a single 525-MSP item. This entails adding excessive engineering spaces so that it isn't sidelined by a bad roll. I'm OK with the cost for a combat repair, I've made the choice to have a single component rather than many, but there's little I can do to protect my engines from maintenance problems. Would it be possible to have partial failures so that I don't lose the whole engine at once and can pay part of the cost at a time? A secondary part of that would be aided repairs, such as if my ship is in the same fleet as a maintenance ship could it draw from the pool available in the fleet to effect repairs rather than relying on its own small portion? This would enhance the usefulness of maintenance ships in fleet operations and give a way to trim down combat ships' support portions.

A second suggestion is to add some type of non-specified "tractor ship" order to tugs. A tug fleet could use this on another fleet, where they would tractor as many ships from the other fleet in a non-specific order as they have tractors available. This would make transferring asteroid miners, terraforming bases and fuel harvesting bases much easier as I wouldn't have to specify exactly which one I want tractored for each tug for each trip. This quickly becomes tedious for large fleets and I end up using the SM move option and remove some fuel from my homeworld to compensate.

[Nathan_]

CIWS should randomly engage missiles from any particular wave. right now they seem to engage the most recently spawned missiles, which means that a small mirv bus in front of your heavy hitters can save you(if not the other player) a lot of grief from point blank defense. Here is the post where that is being discussed: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,5806.msg59499.html#msg59499

[Nathan_]

Append orders to sub fleets: Right now we may copy and overwrite orders from the superior formation to all sub fleets, but in the case of surveyors that are almost finishing for example, I'd like the option to append a "move to jumppoint/colony" order at the end of their already scheduled orders. subfleets with no orders would get and carry out the order right away, while the surveyors with a little work left would do that, and then perform the appended order.