Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Mel Vixen]

hey wherever trade is there are pirates in some way or another so i would drop the underdeveloped part.  Thought it could not just be some "pirates" but some kind of defecting group of your own civ taking a place for theyr own that happen to have a special take on predator-capitalism. 

What about automated probes? I actually dont like to launch 100 people into space just for some basic scanning works. 

[Charlie Beeler]

This has been a minor thing, but on the officer front, it would be nice to see something related to combat proficiency on fleet officers similar to the Ground Combat bonus on ground officers.

Right now, the single most important stat for ship captains or fleet commanders is the training bonus. While that is and should be a key stat, just because an officer is an effective trainer, it is not an indicator that they would be an effective combat leader.

I found it odd to see that there was a Ground Combat stat for ground officers, but not for fleet officers when the training bonuses were the same.

The officer combat modifier is based on the Task Group (or Task Force if present in system) senior officer's Fleet Initiative.  That impact combat sequence resolution.  The combat resolution modifier is the individual ships crew grade.

To that same point, while we have Xenology, Mining, Survey, Logistics, ect. I would love to see something like Sensor Operations, Maintenance Operations, Weapons Officer.

Particularly for immersion/roleplay, it would be nice to have an officer who was a wizard at Sensor Ops, with the bonus adding to the detection range of the ship, or having Maintenance Ops bonus reducing the chance of failure on a ship, or Weapons bonus reducing the reload/refire rate on the ship.

Currently there is only one billit per ship and that is ships commander.  So far Steve has been unwilling to expand this.  That would entail a lot more micro-management than most players would be willing to perform.

[Charlie Beeler]

This has probably been suggested several times, and might already exist (haven't played too far to know for sure) but I think it would be cool if pirate organizations appeared in underdeveloped systems

Currently Precursers are filling the "pirate" role.

[Arwyn]

The officer combat modifier is based on the Task Group (or Task Force if present in system) senior officer's Fleet Initiative.  That impact combat sequence resolution.  The combat resolution modifier is the individual ships crew grade.
Currently there is only one billit per ship and that is ships commander.  So far Steve has been unwilling to expand this.  That would entail a lot more micro-management than most players would be willing to perform.

I don't mean for actual additional officers, I mean adding additional capabilities to the current commander. Right now you can have  a captain with multiple skills, so the suggestion would just be to add a few extra ones without touching the number of officers on a ship.

[Erik L]

Clear the DC Queue when a ship enters refit/repair at a shipyard.

[sloanjh]

Add a displacement (tons or HS) to the descriptions of sensors (and possibly any other system that can have variable mass, e.g. turrets) that show up on the first tab of the Class Design (F5) screen. 

Several times someone's posted a "look at my scout ship" design, and it's difficult to figure what the "sensor payload" of the ship is so that I can compare with my designs.

John

[bean]

I have a couple more things.
1. A miniature cargo handling system for small craft would be nice, so we can load our shuttles quickly.
2. I would like to see a medical tech/longevity technology tree added to biology/genetics.  At the moment, that's just wasted space for those of us who don't do genetic engineering.  It would reduce medical problems among the leaders you have.

[UnLimiTeD]

For the cargo handling, just create a military system.
Being smaller as all military systems are, but dedicated to dropships because of the maintenance failures of all military systems.

[Zed 6]

I just don't agree with the maintenance failure system as it works now. I would argue that it should be reversed in that non-military ships have higher failure rates and military ones less. Tho it may be the way it is now as players probably have more military ships than non-military. 

[Brian Neumann]

I just don't agree with the maintenance failure system as it works now. I would argue that it should be reversed in that non-military ships have higher failure rates and military ones less. Tho it may be the way it is now as players probably have more military ships than non-military. 

What is actually happening is that the civilian ships are assumed to have commercial interests paying for their maintenance.  Also historically military systems are always far more prone to breakage than civilian tech is.  This is not to say that the military tech is tougher, just that you put far more complicated stuff in a warship, and it is packed in far more tightly.  Both of these lead to a higher failure rate than civilian ships have.  This is especailly true as with most military ships space is at a great premium, where most civilian ships have for space to work with.  More space means they can be built for reliability more than performance.  You get the idea by now.

Brian

[Zed 6]

Ahh, there's your fault right there. "civilian ships are assumed to have commercial interests paying for their maintenance". That statement is so out of whack.  Commercial shipping usually only does maintenance after it's already broke. The company's bottom line is keep moving the goods. Yes military ships are quite complicated and most times overstuffed. but they do not lead to a higher failure rate. It's just the opposite, they have lower failure rates. Take for an example: 1 radar; the same company builds for both commercial and military, but because of higher military standards for production (ie mil-spec) the military version has higher quality and reliability than it's commercial counterpart. Every piece of equipment is tested 100 ways to Sunday under every kind of condition before its ever put in a military ship.  The navy's preventative maintenance programs go a long way to prevent or identify potential problems before they happen. Also the military ships generally carry most everything they need to efectuate repairs underway unless a major item requires a shipyard. More space on a commecrcial ship just means more space, not much else. Military crews are well trained in maint. and repair. Commercial ships; Chief engineer and his assistant, maybe one or two others.

[UnLimiTeD]

And that is precisely why Military ships in Aurora have maintenance costs and commercials do not; You just explained it perfectly.
If something breaks on a Commercial ship, it is very unlikely to be of any critical importance, and can be fixed in the next port without much hassle.
If on a Military ship something breaks, it needs immediate fixing, which costs, while on the civilian freight transportation, is is cheaper, and thus can be abstracted away easily.
With the current systems, a Freighter would need roughly 5000 tons of pure engineering spaces and several hundred men maintenance crews, when that in fact does not happen.
On a big freighter, there is simply nothing important that can break, short of the engine, and why would you inform the player 20 times in every 5 day tick that something on one of his ships has just broken and was repaired by the sole engineer of the ship, requiring a tenth of a maintenance supply? That is work, and it's work that the player can delegate to the inner workings of code, because no one cares.

[bean]

This is also a balance issue.  If you had to track component failure for all ships it'd get annoying quickly.  Military ships spend a lot of time in orbit of a planet with maintainence facilities.  Commercial ships don't.  I like it the way it is.

[ZimRathbone]

This is also a balance issue.  If you had to track component failure for all ships it'd get annoying quickly.  Military ships spend a lot of time in orbit of a planet with maintainence facilities.  Commercial ships don't.  I like it the way it is.

This is exactly why the maint system was changed to the current system as important stuff was being lost in the pile of civ maint messages, most of which were unimportant, and also to reduce the huge amount of (boring) micromanagement involved in getting civ ships overhauled & repaired

[bean]

Another couple of things have come to me.  First, it'd be nice if the SM could generate new colonies like the original colony for a given empire.  It's annoying to have to go through and add all the stuff if you want to start with multiple planets.  Second, I don't like the way refitting works.  You have to clone the class, then make the changes.  Then, when everyone's refitted, you have to delete the original and change the new one's name (if you want to keep the name).  This seems like a lot of trouble for a new sensor system.  What I'd propose is a "minor refit mode" where you change the class as-is.  It doesn't edit the existing units, but it does alter new-builds, and any that come back in can be refit as well.  It'd probably only work for certain things, like electronics, which are easy to change and have shorter lifespans.  Maybe the ship has to be within 5% or so.