Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[sloanjh]

A "replace with conscripts" button of the Ship (F6) screen.  A "replace with standard crew" would be nice too.  Copying the state of the "conscripts only" button when a class is copied on the F5 screen would be nice too.

I just realize that, as I often do, I just put naval personnel on my terraformers and tugs by forgetting to click the "conscripts" box in the class design window.  Oops   At present, there really isn't a good way to fix this in SM mode, unless I kill the ship and SM a copy (which is a bit drastic, plus I don't know how it interacts with my crew reserve pool).  It would be so much easier if there were a tiny button I could push that would give all those navy guys to go back to the crew reserve and send the press gangs errrr I mean recruiters out into the streets to grab some civies.

Another thing that I often run into is having a bunch of ICBM missile bases with crews that are trained up to the 28% level, while my crew reserve pool is empty and I'm throwing barely-trained gutter-scrapings onto my new construction.  My commander of personnel would REALLY like to get his hands on this source of trained personnel by rotating crew through the missile bases rather than leaving them there ad infinitum.  If I had the "replace with conscripts" button I could get the crew out of the bases that way, but then the pendulum would swing too far in the opposite direction.  A "replace with standard crew" would basically reap all those training points and put them into ships that are going out into the fleet (think of it as pulling out the most seasoned NCOs to ride herd on the conscripted masses who've had minimal training).

John

[chrislocke2000]

Not a big one but it would be great if we could get a number of rounds to fire order in the combat screen. Ie set the number of volleys of missiles your ships will fire before stopping. Would help having to use lower increments on turns in order to count out number of missiles away before giving the cease fire order and in turn having to reset the auto fire option for all my missile defense ships

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I just tried out the new (in 5.3) tractor orders, and they're (almost) perfect!

The one improvement I would like would be to place the tow into the target fleet if specified.  In other words, if I'm towing "Genesis 002" and give a "release tractored ships" order with TG "Terraforming Mars" as the target, then I'd like Genesis 002 to show up as a member of Terraforming Mars, rather than a new TG "TR Genesis 002".  When targetting a population, the current behavior of spawning a new TG is fine.

This will indeed cut a big chunk of micromanagement out of my games - Thanks!

Added for v5.42. When a fleet is the destination of a release tractor order, the released ship(s) will be added to the destination fleet.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Copying the state of the "conscripts only" button when a class is copied on the F5 screen would be nice.

Added for v5.42

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Reverse-sort the research and queued-research panes.

I like to have 3-researchers going in each tech field, with each one having something queued (so as to not lose progress).  Whenever I add a new project (or adjust labs, or ...) the scrollbar resets to the top of the list when it refreshes (actually, what I'd really like is for the scrollbar not to reset, but I figure that that's hard....)  It just occurred to me that the projects that I'm most interested in are the most recent ones, which are exactly the ones at the bottom of the list which are most likely to be off-screen.  If the sort order were reversed, then the most recent projects would be at the top of the list and visible after the reset.

For v5.42, the scrollbar no longer resets. If you add a project to the queue, the bar scrolls to the bottom. If you remove a project, the project above it in the list is selected and the scroll bar moves accordingly.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Very minor suggestion: Can the Leader screen indicate whether a given officer is male or female? With some of the name sets I have trouble guessing.  A little embarrassing when I'm doing a write up, and suddenly discover I've been using the wrong pronoun!

Added for v5.42, although not every theme has the male/female flag so in that case it will default to male.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Was it suggested to mark designs as "not avaliable to civilians"? Sometimes I want to make a design for a specific task and don't want to have them in tons flying around for civilians.

I have added this but it needs a database change so I may take it out temporarily if I release a v5.42. Remind me to put it back for v5.50 if that is the case

Steve

[Ziusudra]

Is there a reason the Class Design window cannot be minimized?

On the Class Design window in the Design View tab: what do you think about being able to collapse the component groups? (Like you can with GU HQs. )

The Damaged Ships, Shipping Lines and Tech Data on ships windows are re-sizable but the contents don't change. 

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Hi to all,
First, I wanted to thank Steve for making such a wonderful and cool game.
Then, I've recently stumbled upon a banks' novel and I thought it would be interesting to have in aurora something like the Culture's GSV, that is enormous ships which are so big that they contain entire habitats inside so as to transport 100ks of people, without having to freeze them cryogenically.
These would be interesting from a strategic point of view because since GSVs are like movable planets, with their own shipyards and everything they could project power even more effectively than carriers.
I know it would require enormous shipyards to build such beasts, making it nearly impossible to do, still I think it would be interesting to see components like 'big, city-like, habitat' or 'ship construction module' to be added so as to make it at least theoretically possible, also allowing for smaller version of these ships to be actually built.

It isn't really possible at the moment without a huge rewrite of the population-related code because populations and industry are tied to system bodies. That is why I had to set up Orbitat habitats in the way I did. However, you mentioned 'movable planets', which is an interesting idea because if I added a way to move small asteroids that would effectively create a moveable population. You could add population in ground-based or orbital habitats, factories, shipyards, PDCs, etc and then move the entire asteroid and all its ground-based and orbital facilities at once. Obviously, the 'planetary engines' involved would be very high tech, very large and very expensive. I could also see some nightmare scenarios involving crashing an asteroid into a planet. Suffice to say this won't be in the next version but its an interesting idea for the future.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Is there a reason the Class Design window cannot be minimized?

Just an oversight. Fixed for v5.42

The Damaged Ships, Shipping Lines and Tech Data on ships windows are re-sizable but the contents don't change. 

They are bugs which I will fix for the next version. BTW, which window do you mean by Tech Data on Ships? I thought you might mean the Intelligence window or the Tech View window but those seem fine. Probably me just being dumb

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

On the Class Design window in the Design View tab: what do you think about being able to collapse the component groups? (Like you can with GU HQs. )

That might be useful but its a database change so I'll table it until after v5.42

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

This is an old one, but I figure it's worth a ressurection....

Go to non-integer sizes for beam weapons, and build the power plants into the design.  In other words, in the design window you would specify the recharge time (bounded below by the race's best recharge rate) and Focal Size (and reduced size if any), then Aurora would build a big enough power plant into the weapon to recharge it over that amount of time.

In the example in my previous post, for the 15 cm laser (power req of 6) and C3 recharge technology, you'd be able to choose recharge times of 10s, 15s, 20s, etc.  (10s = 5s*(6power/C3)).  If you chose 10s, it would build a power-3 reactor into the mount; assuming Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Tech (4.5 power/HS), the size of the mount would be 4.66 (4 for the laser, plus 2/3 rounded down for the reactor).  If you chose 15s, it the size would be 4.44 (Power 2/Reactor 4.5=.44 for the reactor in this case).  Note that I'm rounding down so that 3*(2/3) fits into 2HS; you seem to have already done this for reduced size launchers....

For the 20cm laser (power req of 10), it takes at least 20s to recharge at C3, which corresponds to a recharge rate of 2.5/5s.  So the size would be 6.55 (6 for the laser, 2.5/4.5=.55 for the reactor) with a recharge time of 20s.

John

I have been thinking about this one myself for a while. It would also make life easier for new players as sorting out power plants does cause problems. It is a fairly major change though as it would involve component design, the recharging mechanics and all the NPR beam-related design code (and I would have to change all the designs in my campaign . So this is definitely on the list but probably not until a major update and a new campaign for me.

Steve

[Ziusudra]

BTW, which window do you mean by Tech Data on Ships? I thought you might mean the Intelligence window or the Tech View window but those seem fine.  Probably me just being dumb

From Main Menu -> Empires -> "Tech Data on Ships" (5th menu item from the bottom).  The window title is "Tech Data held on Ships".

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

From Main Menu -> Empires -> "Tech Data on Ships" (5th menu item from the bottom).  The window title is "Tech Data held on Ships".

Aha! Yes, it was me being dumb

Steve

[voknaar]

For v5.42, the scrollbar no longer resets. If you add a project to the queue, the bar scrolls to the bottom. If you remove a project, the project above it in the list is selected and the scroll bar moves accordingly.

Steve

Could this also be applied to the 'System Generation and Display window'? It would be a neat little extra to not have it scroll back up after adding a colony to a moon when you have something in the order of 600+ asteroids, several dozen moons and a handful of planets to scroll thorugh.