Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Shadow]

More technologies in the Biology/Genetics category!

What I have in mind is a series that improves the health of officers (less likelihood to develop medical problems), one that gradually improves officer lifespan (and therefore mandatory retirement age) and a series of fertility techs that improve racial population growth. The lifespan tech could be something like the Honorverse's prolong: each breakthrough could only be applied to fairly young officers. Could either be a normal progression of small bumps, or better yet, larger, much more RP-intensive technologies with much more marked effects, like 50-year jumps. Up to a total lifespan of maybe 200-250 by the Photonic Age.

[EarthquakeDamage]

More technologies in the Biology/Genetics category!

What I have in mind is a series that improves the health of officers (less likelihood to develop medical problems), one that gradually improves officer lifespan (and therefore mandatory retirement age) and a series of fertility techs that improve racial population growth. The lifespan tech could be something like the Honorverse's prolong: each breakthrough could only be applied to fairly young officers. Could either be a normal progression of small bumps, or better yet, larger, much more RP-intensive technologies with much more marked effects, like 50-year jumps. Up to a total lifespan of maybe 200-250 by the Photonic Age.

Perhaps each species could have a lifespan multiplier, with long-lived races balanced by low population growth.  There could be a new tech line for creating subspecies that trades lifespan for growth or viceversa, so you could create a long-lived caste for officers and a short-lived one for colonies you want to grow quickly.

[Shadow]

I'm not sure an increase in lifespan would be balanced (or even logically followed) by a sensible decrease in population growth. A decrease in births would be offset by the decrease in mortality. You would have to really lower births, which I can't find a plausible reason for, to have a real effect on growth.

[Rastaman]

Less (or no) crew requirements for fuel storage and cargo space.

I'm in the process to design a supertanker kind of ship that transports fuel between colonies. It's about 250 000 tons and can carry 200 000 000 liters. It needs 12000 crew members for the the fuel tank alone! 12000 people for  200 000 m3 come on. Oil tankers in RL with similar weight probably have only a couple of people who check on the cargo.

A similar sized cargo hold (200 000 in game tons) has a couple of hundred crew, still a lot.

[EarthquakeDamage]

I'm not sure an increase in lifespan would be balanced (or even logically followed) by a sensible decrease in population growth. A decrease in births would be offset by the decrease in mortality. You would have to really lower births, which I can't find a plausible reason for, to have a real effect on growth.

In genetically engineered species, maybe not.  Evolved species, however, tend to have a negative relationship between lifespan and reproduction rate.  Compare rodents and insects to humans and IIRC various tortoises.  I imagine the primary difference is the age of maturity versus total lifespan.

Such a trade-off still makes sense from a game balance perspective.  All else being equal, an increase in longevity would increase population since death is delayed even if the birth rate is unchanged.

[Rastaman]

I'm not sure an increase in lifespan would be balanced (or even logically followed) by a sensible decrease in population growth. A decrease in births would be offset by the decrease in mortality. You would have to really lower births, which I can't find a plausible reason for, to have a real effect on growth.

Growth could also be made dependent on general prosperity, where high per capita income means less growth. Cloning is another issue.

[Shadow]

Such a trade-off still makes sense from a game balance perspective.  All else being equal, an increase in longevity would increase population since death is delayed even if the birth rate is unchanged.

You're right about that. It would double the benefit of an increased lifespan and make hypothetical fertility techs redundant or excessively effective. However, if the mechanical effect of a longevity tech is merely the gradual postponing of the mandatory retirement age (and likely drawing out the chances of medical problems, modified by potential medical techs), the problem would sort itself out: population growth would be left untouched.

[UnLimiTeD]

Population growth is currently calculated per time increment.
It logically goes down as life span increases, as an intelligent being is seemingly not more likely to produce more offspring if it lives for longer.
Thus, while total population goes up as more people live at the same time, effective growth rate would actually go down because it is the same absolute growth, being a percentage of a larger population, and stretched over a longer time frame.

In addition, looking at the negative growth rates in modern industrialized nations like japan, germany, etc, medical improvement and general prosperity seems to result in lowered growth rates in absence of measurable religious influences.

From a pure gameplay perspective, a lower growth is absolutely reasonable, for the aforementioned reasons, and because a longer childhood means it takes longer for new members of society to reproduce.

But if we go that far, we should do it for real, also including various traits that have effects on the population, to actually allow people to customize a bit.

Though, this opens the next can of worms, which I'm not sure should be priority.
An insect population, for example,  would have extremely high populations, with high growth rates, and a lowered production and research, where the production is kept up by numbers. This would require them to have more workers per installation, and mean more deaths in the case of a nuclear exchange.

[Shadow]

For a genetically-enhanced species, artificially longer lifespans wouldn't necessarily mean longer childhoods. More like longer adulthoods.

[jseah]

Just a few automation orders which I would find extremely useful:
Less than 25m population:
 - Toggle to automatically set the colony as source of colonists when population > 25m

Purchase minerals with excess:
 - Toggles purchase of civilian minerals when above/below a specified wealth number (buy when above, don't buy when below)

Customizable auto-turn interrupts:
 - Have certain events be ignorable (as an option) in auto-turn
 - Ones I find most irritating:
New naval / ground forces officer  (I have tons of them, telling me I got a new officer is only useful for admin and research)
Unrest decreasing (I've solved the problem, or it went away, all's fine and I don't need to stop)
EDIT: Team skill increase is also irritating
 - The new minimum increment function doesn't help much as I don't want to ignore things like research complete


And here's three not an automation order but a workaround for one.  (can't expect the game to manage your infrastructure for you)
Sell infrastructure:
 - Only available on 0 colony cost planets with >0 infrastructure
 - Click to give infrastructure to civilian sector (you get nothing since you earn the wealth when they ship it off planet, which simulates market demand, besides turning duranium into wealth sounds like a losing cause)

Civilian colonist shipping will not transport more colonists to a planet than infrastructure can support:
 - Might need to add a value "incoming colonists" to planets to track this

Civilian cargo shipping will not send more freighters to a planet than needed to complete a request:
 - Very irritating when my infrastructure trade collapses as I place orders for facilities to be moved as they are produced and the whole civilian fleet jumps back and forth between my planets chasing an order 1 freighter could have fulfilled.  
Perhaps I'm too nitpicky about efficiency but I tend to run things on a knife-edged balance and having your empire go into debt because of a certain trade failing (not to mention the loss in population growth) is slightly irritating.  

[EarthquakeDamage]

Just a few automation orders which I would find extremely useful:
Less than 25m population:
 - Toggle to automatically set the colony as source of colonists when population > 25m

...

And here's three not an automation order but a workaround for one.  (can't expect the game to manage your infrastructure for you)
Sell infrastructure:
 - Only available on 0 colony cost planets with >0 infrastructure
 - Click to give infrastructure to civilian sector (you get nothing since you earn the wealth when they ship it off planet, which simulates market demand, besides turning duranium into wealth sounds like a losing cause)

I think these could be handled by more general quotas/target values.  We could establish target values for population/installations/minerals, above and below which civilians will export and import respectively.  Maybe mass drivers could be a little smarter to help meet in-system mineral quotas.

While I'm on the subject of target values, terraforming can and does overshoot the endpoint.  This is not usually a problem, though it can be if you need precision (e.g. setting the temperature of hot planets like Venus to accommodate one or more races) and have a monstrous number of terraformers.

May as well throw in a few more suggestions:

• We should be able to automate governor and task force commander assignments.  As is, it's easy for months to go by without realizing one of your governors or the TF commander died.  Besides, we can already automate assignments for individual ships and the TF commander's underlings (Ops, Logistics, &c).
  For governors, perhaps we could select the traits we consider important for a given planet/sector using checkboxes.  Want high population growth and factory output?  Select those two boxes and it'll assign the available candidate with the best combination of growth, factory, and political (it's already used for promotions, and it makes sense to use it here) bonuses.
• Any event type we've set to ignore (so it doesn't show up when we view the events list) should probably not cause interrupts.  There could be a 3-way toggle for this:  Show, Don't Show, Don't Show and Don't Interrupt.  Or maybe a 4-way toggle, with all possible combinations of "Show" and "Interrupt".

[UnLimiTeD]

Less (or no) crew requirements for fuel storage and cargo space.

How about a Civilian Fuel tank?^^

[Shadow]

Fuel storage is already a non-military module. Plus I don't think a somehow more commercial tank would necessarily need less crew than the standard one.

[schroeam]

A ground forces suggestion:

How about creating a task force structure for ground forces?  Just like task groups can be assigned to task forces and benefit from their assigned staff officers, divisions could be assigned to higher formations (Armies or Corps dependant upon your preference).  I know Steve has shifted focus to Aurora II so this could be a suggestion for that as well.

I would like to second this.  We have Colonels for battalions, Brigadiers for Brigades, Major Generals for Divisions, and Lieutenant Generals for...  They would fit in well as either Army or Corps commanders based on a TF style organization. 

I would also like to suggest somehow allowing one TF to be assigned to another TF, thereby creating a true Chain of Command.  Each superior TF would have the same effect on the junior TF as they would on any TG under their direct command.

Just a thought I've been chasing around my head for a couple months.

Adam.

[Shadow]

Now for a proper suggestion. The mechanic that deals with intelligence gathering from salvaged vessels needs to be tweaked a bit. Right now, the game only adds component information to the Tactical Intelligence notes when the salvaging triggers an Alien Class Scanned event. However, it doesn't gather information from actual salvaged components, which by all means should trigger the aforementioned event and provide extra data. I mean, if you salvage 8x Size 1 Missile Launchers from the wreck of X class, the Tactical Intelligence entry should say X class boasts at least eight Size 1 Missile Launchers.