Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[EarthquakeDamage]

From the mind of Paul at Bay 12, submitted without his knowledge or consent ('cause I'm a right bastard ):

I never really liked the addition of the wormhole aliens. They're a never ending threat that you can't fight back against - all you can do is kill the ships that come through.

Now if there was a way to research their engine tech and learn how to travel the wormholes, then send fleets back through after them - then it wouldn't be so bad. At least then you would have a goal - stop their incursion once and for all, even if it takes 500 years of building up to do so. As-is, there really isn't a goal associated with the wormhole aliens, other than kill them as they come through and don't die. I mean, at least give us a way to close up their wormholes.

It could have been done really well, like being able to research the tech that opens the wormholes and discover how to close them. Say for example to close them you have to destroy the wormhole generator on the other side, which involves sending a fleet through to take out their defenses and destroy it. The catch is, once it's gone the ships left over there have no way of getting back - so you're left with a choice of how many ships should you leave on the other side to destroy it, and can you get away with leaving one small ship to finish it off when they might get reinforced at any time. Maybe you could eventually research the wormhole generators themselves, and build your own to be able to launch attacks against their generators and get your ships back home with your own generator, then turn it off until you need it again. Eventually you may even be able to turn the tables and get on the offensive, making strikes against their worlds, which would be extremely well defended and require a massive strike force to even have a chance.

Just an example of something that IMO would have made for better gameplay than "Wormehole opens. Aliens stream through endlessly."

[UnLimiTeD]

Hell, why does everything have to be beatable?
Closing wormholes, sure, then new ones will be created.
But how is that explainable when it isn't even possible to close regular jump points?

[Shadow]

Hell, why does everything have to be beatable?
Closing wormholes, sure, then new ones will be created.
But how is that explainable when it isn't even possible to close regular jump points?

Because I believe that, due to the Invaders' superior strength, they otherwise rob the spotlight from the player. They become the main concern of the game and the freedom you'd normally have to explore and expand becomes permanently subjugated to their invasions. Everything else becomes secondary. That is, if you want your colonies to survive.

I replied to that post at Bay 12 as well...

Now if there was a way to research their engine tech and learn how to travel the wormholes, then send fleets back through after them - then it wouldn't be so bad. At least then you would have a goal - stop their incursion once and for all.

(...)A similar goal to defeat the Invaders would be neat. Wormhole traversing could be a technology you can't research and must be obtained from captured/salvaged Invader vessels. Once you got your hands on it, you'd use it against them and destroy their primary base and industrial capacity.

Or simply to close their wormholes as they appear. If you're quick enough, maybe even before ships start streaming through.

Well, I guess that either way they will be the player's primary concern if enabled, but a way to at least temporarily defeat them would give you a fulfilling goal to work towards. Temporary defeat in the sense you could wipe out a single Invader base and delay them across the board, but years later wormholes could begin to reappear, generated by a different Invader force.

EDIT: By the way, I know this can be handled manually, but it would be cool if the Invaders made their appearance not from the beginning of the game (since an early strike can easily wipe out the player) but some point further into it. Maybe after reaching a general level of technological development, or something more unique, like accidentally activating an ancient Invader beacon while excavating Precursor ruins. You'd think the Invaders wouldn't bother to exterminate races until something (hopefully not simple space travel) convinced them said races are a potential threat.

[Charlie Beeler]

Mainly railguns. As I just posted on the Bay 12 forums, you'd use missiles to exterminate population, but kinetic weapons for precise strikes*. You could use the latter against populations, but it'd take far longer. And I do recall at least kinetic hits on a planet raise a measure of dust into the atmosphere, so using them for days against civilians would have a similar detrimental result as glassing through nukes.

*Like to destroy PDCs, a specific group of facilities or, to more limited effect, ground units. For the latter, perhaps, you could add a more complex mechanic: being under orbital fire would slowly reduce the readiness of the target ground forces, but more importantly it would impose a significant combat penalty on them as long as they're being fired upon, leaving the enemy quite more exposed to attacks from your own troops. This would simulate support fire from your warships in orbit.

I know how things currently work. Hence why I'm making this suggestion.

It's not unusual for naval guns to be stocked with multiple kinds of ammunition. You wouldn't even have to specify which type of rounds are being used, since the system would load the right one for the job.

A couple of things to keep in mind when considering suggestions related to new orbital bombardment weapons.  These are things that Steve has stated in the past are hard and fast rules for Aurora:

1) Atmospheric density of 1 blocks beam weapons with the exception of meson cannons.
2) Planetary bombardment creates atmospheric dust (ie cools the surface) and radiation.  Both have segnificant negative impacts of populations. 

A couple of other things to consider about this suggestion:  Project Thor uses gravity for the bulk of the inertion and rounds segnificant large.  Aurora railguns fire projectiles at segnificant fractions of C.

[Shadow]

As I implied earlier, I'm not proposing the use of kinetic weapons as a safe planetary annihilation alternative to missiles, but primarily a tactical weapon to reduce the effectiveness* of enemy ground troops, not wipe them out, and support invasions (or planetary defenses if you somehow regain space superiority after enemy troops have landed). Much like battleship guns were used for fire support in real life during amphibious assaults.

As for projectile velocity, that's variable. Railguns could plausibly fire at a lower "muzzle" velocity if necessary: one would just have to provide less power to the weapon. Less power would theoretically mean a weaker electric current passing through the projectile and therefore a slower launch.


*Effectiveness reduction would come from surgical strikes to logistical targets, command centres, communication arrays and the like.

EDIT: I realize I also mentioned destroying specific groups of facilities, but that can easily amount of planetary annihilation, so you can ignore that.

[Rastaman]

Interesting discussion of the atmospheric effects of large scale relativistic kill vehicles/systems over at Orion's Arm:

Upon impact each projectile releases its accumulated relativistic mass in a huge explosion. At 99.9% of light speed, an RKKS projectile has a gamma of 22.4, and each proton has an energy of about 21 GeV, each electron 11 MeV. After penetrating a sectional density of about 0.7 ton/m^2, each proton or neutron in the spacecraft will have collided with a nucleus of a molecule in the air. This will disintegrate any atomic nucleus involved and give a spray of hadrons and mesons. Since the atmosphere of an Earth-like world holds about 10 tons per square meter of surface area, no part of the projectile can be expected to reach the ground un-disintegrated.

The protons, neutrons, and mesons produced will interact with air nuclei before they hit the ground, and the particles they produce will interact, and so on, until 10 tons/m^2 is reached. This about 14 interaction lengths, with each interaction dividing the energy of that hadron or meson amongst all the particles coming out of that collision. Since electronic losses alone will stop a 1 GeV proton within about 3 tons/m^2 (and the 1 GeV proton will participate in several nuclear interactions before this, thus dumping its energy even sooner), none of the hadrons or mesons produced in this collision will hit the ground.

Muons from charged pi-meson decays will hit the ground, this requires the pi-mesons to decay before they hit an air nucleus in order to produce muons. Neutral pi-mesons will decay almost immediately into high energy gamma rays, which will produce electromagnetic showers (a gamma ray is absorbed in producing a high energy electron and positron pair, which then produce more gamma rays as they slam into atoms, which produce more electrons and positrons). Some of the gammas from these showers
may also make it to the ground. In fact the proportion of primary radiation that will reach the ground from the 20 GeV initial proton and neutron energies will be very small, but a small proportion of a large number (the original kinetic energy of the spacecraft) is still significant.

The radiation that makes it through the air to the ground will be scattered over a footprint with a radius of several hundred meters. Anything within that footprint will suffer the effects of the radiation. Anything outside that footprint is likely safe from the primary radiation. This means that a RKKS projectile will dump most of its energy in the upper to middle stratosphere. This amounts to about 2E18 J per kg of spacecraft, or about 400,000 MT per kg. It takes about 1 MJ/m^2 of radiant flux to flash fabric to flame and cause third degree burns to exposed skin.


Assuming a 100,000 ton RKKS weapon the energy of impact would be 2E26 J. If half of this energy goes into the heat pulse, this produces a radiant flux of 1 MJ/m^2 at a distance of 3 million km. Anything within line of sight of the air-burst is burnt to a crisp. The impact energy of 2E26 J is almost sufficient to blow off an Earth-like planet's atmosphere, which woould require around 3E26 J to remove completely. In addition the oceans and lakes of the rivers within sight of the impact explosion would start to boil, replacing the breathable atmosphere with high-pressure steam and effectively sterilising the planet.

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4771ba89da222

[Shadow]

Might not be the right thread for that. It's absolutely nothing like what I'm suggesting.

[Charlie Beeler]

As I implied earlier, I'm not proposing the use of kinetic weapons as a safe planetary annihilation alternative to missiles, but primarily a tactical weapon to reduce the effectiveness* of enemy ground troops, not wipe them out, and support invasions (or planetary defenses if you somehow regain space superiority after enemy troops have landed). Much like battleship guns were used for fire support in real life during amphibious assaults.

As for projectile velocity, that's variable. Railguns could plausibly fire at a lower "muzzle" velocity if necessary: one would just have to provide less power to the weapon. Less power would theoretically mean a weaker electric current passing through the projectile and therefore a slower launch.


*Effectiveness reduction would come from surgical strikes to logistical targets, command centres, communication arrays and the like.

EDIT: I realize I also mentioned destroying specific groups of facilities, but that can easily amount of planetary annihilation, so you can ignore that.

So your not actually proposing an alternate role for an existing beam weapon.  Which is good since beam weapons are specifically excluded from having the effect your looking for, precision weapons having a combat effect on dispursed troops in the field.

While I do agree with some of this, I higher doubt that it will be implemented.  Primarily because a driving concept in Aurora is that ground troops are the main counter to ground troops and that orbital naval gun support is not to be allowed. 

This goes back to our Starfire days.  Once you've taken the high orbitals made a few "demonstration strikes" it's all over but the shouting.  Ground troops there are basically for garrison work only.  A primary Aurora concept is that orbital bombardment is at best an large area effect not precision tool.  As long as a population does not have overwhelming troop strength in their face they will not capitulate. 

Before I'd get behind orbital naval gun support the AI's handling of ground troops would have to be significantly changed.  When looking at computer NPR's in developer mode I don't see brigade or division HQ's being assigned subordinate regiments.  If at the very least these HQ's are being assigned then, maybe, I'd accept the ability to target those HQ's for precision strikes to disrupt the command bonuses. 

Something else to consider,  any suggestion that has any hope of being implemented must have a significant improvement in play from Steve's point of view if it involves a significant amount of coding changes. 

[Shadow]

Alright, so we'll see what Steve says.

[WHCnelson]

   I don't know if anyone has mentioned this and if so...  :oSorry.
But, I think something should be added to the Diplomacy screen
for talking to other races.  These could include an offer for them
to surrender after destroying their moble units, ground units, and
shipyard...  and bombarding their population for one or two
incruments...     

[wilddog5]

Rather than having the civilian ships create orders every increment have them create them on the build timer (5 days) having them create a list of orders that have a total travel time greater than this.

While this will increase the build increment and add a slight delay in starting a contract it will reduce the normal increment time and allow the lines etc to run at maximum efficiently no matter the increment used so the player will not have to use smaller increments to get maximum wealth from these ships

[sloanjh]

The ability to choose flag and ship icons for alien races from the foreign relations screen.

I'm using an Enterprise icon for my ships on the Galactic Map.  I'm in contact with two NPR.  When I just went to mark their fleets in their home systems, I found that they're using Enterprise icons too.  Then I noticed that one of them picked the same flag as my race.  It would be nice to be able to change these in the same way you can now rename alien races.

John

[jseah]

I have always been irritated at the way different races in SF strategy games seem to be no more than reskinned aliens.  Aurora has avoided that with the special encounters but NPRs are still kinda bland. 

So here's my attempt at creating a different kind of NPR.  It behaves significantly differently and utilizes different strategies, not as a matter of arbitrary decisions but due to how it is different. 


Special alien race:  Like NPR, but spawns only once. 

The race consists of two populations.  Call them "upper" and "lower" for how the food chain goes.  Both populations are sentient and thus can perform industry. 

Fluff & biology:
Upper eats the lower race and in doing so has a 1/10 chance of hatching another upper race member from the corpse.  They don't have to eat very often but can do so at an extreme rate if given the chance. 
Lower race breeds like rabbits, fast enough to outbreed the minimum rate of eating from the upper race. 

This makes the dynamic very interesting as population constraints are incredibly tight. 


Mechanics:
Upper race has a food rationing system.  Each 1mil population growth requires the death of 10 million population of the lower race.  Population growth of upper race can be set by government policy on each planet from between 5% to 200%.  Population size does not affect birth rate. 
If there is no lower race on the planet, the planet is unsuitable for colonization. (!!)
Every planet that has the higher race dying due to unsuitable colonization causes unrest to increase empire-wide by 5%. 

Lower race breeds at 20%, unaffected by population size.  The population of lower race is not allowed to operate TN tech (see below) and they operate conventional industry fit for their population (population grants effective CIs don't exist to be moved or converted). 
However, since they are essentially food for the upper race, they incredibly restless and are perpetually at the lowest political status.  Furthermore, the garrison and space-firepower required per 1million population increases as the population size increases.  IE. big populations of lower race are incredibly difficult to control. 

When unrest modifier gets below 30%, the lower race instigates a rebellion and becomes an independent non-TN entity.  This will attack any upper race population on the planet and if successful, might even capture TN technology and become an NPR in it's own right.  As an NPR, the lower race is incredibly xenophobic only towards the upper race and starts at war with the upper race. 
The mere existence of a lower race NPR with TN tech inspires unrest on all captive lower race populations by 10%, potentially triggering an empire-wide rebellion.  All future rebellions join this new NPR or form a new one if the old one was destroyed. 
Any such lower race NPR returns to being a normal NPR with all the usual rules (population growth decreases to standard levels and no free conventional industry), fluff-wise being that they were kept in third world conditions and so had higher birth rates. 


Differences to normal gameplay:
Upper race has to perform a juggling act.  Too high lower race growth means they get impossible to control and will rebel.  Rebelling is very dangerous. 

The easy way to solve high lower race populations is simply to eat them.  200% growth per year will cause a population crash. 
However, doing this means the high race population will now increase and start to eat more.  Outgrow the lower race population and you could eat them all on the planet and everyone starves...

This forces the pair of races to continually expand.  There is no option, expand or implode due to rebellion.  The loads of free conventional industry gives a major boost to industrial capacity, to the point that they can support massive expansion.  At the same time, the requirement of strictly controlling higher race population means you cannot have enough population to support large TN economies (although mines and CFs are waste of population), most of which is tied up in shipyards manufacturing colony ships for population control. 

Which leads to a race that is low on tech but fields incredibly huge fleets and expands all over the place. 
Unfortunately for their huge fleets, the amount of firepower required to control their lower race population is exorbitant and forces them to spread out their fleet so smaller, higher tech opponents can defeat them in detail. 

[Thiosk]

I do like killing truly alien aliens.

[dooots]

Add a default order to clear default orders.  In my current game clearing the default orders of 24 gravsurvey ships is a real pain.