Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[wilddog5]

i like the "dust screen" / "particle screen" idea my additions are

make then have a shield strength of 0.1
make then 5 times bigger than normal shields if the above is done
have the tech line improve 1 armor level in nebular and 0.1 shield per level of tech

this could deal with the nebular problem for civ ships and solve the civ shields people have asked for in the past

[James Patten]

Gah!  No, don't!  Please change it back.

I "third" the motion.  Likewise if I have a nebula nearby I work on heavily armoring some of my freighters so that they move at a decent speed.

[UnLimiTeD]

Why not add a tech line that allows to increase max armor on civies?

[LoSboccacc]

civilian and military grade armor in the component screen, with the civilian 10x more heavy? just following on the thought-train

10x seems to be the magic civilian-to-military ratio in this game. weight is the usual limiting factor.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

civilian and military grade armor in the component screen, with the civilian 10x more heavy? just following on the thought-train

10x seems to be the magic civilian-to-military ratio in this game. weight is the usual limiting factor.

Hmm! Interesting idea, although the weight penalty would be severe. Maybe instead of 10x as heavy, it could be 10x as fragile, or 5x. A type of armour that is fine for Nebulae but falls apart under weapons fire. That would be the easiest way to handle this without affecting the current mechanics too much

Steve

[jseah]

Actually, I'm not entirely sure the missile magnet ball of armour is really a problem. 

Armour costs quite a bit in duranium and it can't be prefabricated by planetary industry. 
The net result being that it sucks alot of shipyard time.  Time that could be spent building more missile and laser frigates. 
Any such shipyard can't build anything else.  You might as well just get a military shipyard instead of a commercial shipyard and turn out more combat ships, Lancaster's square law and all that. 

The cheap missile magnet would be armoured fighter engines.  You have miss chance due to high speed plus it takes 3-4 missile hits per fighter to kill.  Maybe more. 
These are buildable by fighter factories but require a carrier to get wherever they're going.  If you use a fleet doctrine that doesn't use fighters, these could serve as decent missile magnets for fairly low tech and cost.  In fact, by building fighter missile magnets, you might even be able to recoup cost vs missiles spent and simply outproduce your enemy by building fighters faster than he can build missiles. 


The exploit here is to get civilian shipping lines to build these.  Any system with a decent number of civilian ships then becomes a nightmare for ramming or missile armed fleets. 

[UnLimiTeD]

The original proposed solution of limiting max armor is not actually a problem.
As I noticed in my aborted AAR, those armor balls are way too expensive.
Even with 4 layers, They would last a decent amount of time, so just build several.
Alternatively, with more cost, but significantly less build time, 2-3 layers of armor and a few dozen CIWS do the job as well, and you don't even have to repair it.
Armored Cluster-Missiles do the job as well.

While we're at it, in the same way missiles are limited to 1 MSP+ (I still think there should be a tech line to reduce size), in the same vein it's possible to build a multi-stage missile, where each stage is above 1 MSP, but only the last one is really a useful missile, all others are just 0.1 MSP+filler.

The real solution to all those problems would be an AI change, like stopping NPRs from always shooting at the biggest target, which has proven to never be the right choice, and prioritizing big missiles over small ones, unless known, in which case WH size should do.

No matter what is done, someone will always find a way to fool NPRs to fire at useless junk.
Unless theres more spoilers.^^

[sloanjh]

A "Determination" roll for the AI if it isn't accomplishing what it wants to, which would cause it to change to a different objective.

I'm in the midst of fighting a bad guy (Invaders) whose ships have exactly the same speed as my FAC and are big and nasty.  I made a 4-squadron attack on the only bad guy TG with which I'm in contact.  Unfortunately, I had to close to within detection range in order to launch my missiles, so after I launched my strike the bad guy started chasing my strike group.

I managed to disengage most of the strike group by several iterations of scattering, with the TG I wanted him to follow making the largest course correction (hence fastest closure rate for the bad guys) and greatest number of ships - in each case this worked and they followed the one I wanted.  I was finally left with the bad guy following 2 1000 ton scout corvettes with military engines (important for fuel consumption), on their way out into deep space.  Note that the mass ratio between the bad guy TG and my corvettes was in the 100s.

And now for the problem:  the bad guys just blindly followed me for months, because they wouldn't give up.  The good news here is that they would eventually get at least one of my ships.  The bad news is that I performed a year-long mission kill on their TG at the expense of a scout.  In "reality", they would have either given up and left when they saw it was hopeless to chase my TG, or at worst split off an escort to do the chasing.

So the fundamental problem is that the AI is still too predictable - you can game it and control its actions by "showing" it targets (transponders work well for this).  In this case I'm not even gaming it - it's just pursuing an unreasonable course that I can't break it out of.  I think the way to fix this would be to have each TG have a weighted set of objects, and possibly a weighted set of "how well did this objective work in the past" - while a TG is pursuing an object, the "not working" number would grow until it reached a threshold determination level, at which point a saving roll would be made for continuing to pursue the objective.  If the roll failed, then the TG would switch to another objective.

I'm sure this would still have the AI performing unreasonable actions, but this would at least introduce some unpredictability.

John

[sloanjh]

The original proposed solution of limiting max armor is not actually a problem.
As I noticed in my aborted AAR, those armor balls are way too expensive.

The problem is the side effect it has on limiting freighter/colony speed in nebulae.  Or are you saying that the proposed solution shouldn't be implemented because it is to a problem (armor balls) that the game already penalizes sufficiently?

The real solution to all those problems would be an AI change, like stopping NPRs from always shooting at the biggest target, which has proven to never be the right choice, and prioritizing big missiles over small ones, unless known, in which case WH size should do.

No matter what is done, someone will always find a way to fool NPRs to fire at useless junk.
Unless theres more spoilers.^^

Ok, that's weird.  While you were posting this, I was posting about a completely unrelated AI problem.  I agree with what you're saying here - it would be nice if there were some randomness in target selection, e.g. random choice weighted by mass/signature.

John

[sloanjh]

Add a warning when one starts construction of an obsolete class.

I just went from Thermal-10 to Thermal-14.  This meant a whole wave of e.g. Spruance II --> Spruance IIB minor design improvements.  In most of my SY, I immediately launched a retool, but this can't be done in those building new slipways until after the slipway is completed.  It also isn't necessary, since both designs can be built by the same SY.

In the past when this happened, I've had cases where Spruance II is obsolete, but it still shows up before Spruance IIB in the class-to-construct pull-down when I want to build a new Spruance (I assume this is because the SY is still tooled for Spruance II, even though it's obsolete).  If I don't notice this, then I end up building a Spruance II when I meant to build a IIB.  It would be nice if Aurora would warn me that I'm about to build an obsolete class, so that I can either realize what's going on or click "yes, I really want to do this".

John

[Beersatron]

The ability to predefine routes would be great and might help with the current cap of 4 jumps that is set for Civilian Shipping.

Say you want to ship something to Persei Gamma 6 which is 5 jumps from Earth, you would have to set up a colony half way and setup demand/supply orders in such a way as to force the civies to move them to the half way point and then onwards to Persei.

What if there was an interface like the current fleet ordering where you can set up a one way route that is origin->destination. So I would make a route like:

Sol -> Alpha Centauri JP -> Gliese 345 JP -> Procyon JP -> Hypia JP -> Persei Gamme JP

The civies would then look at these stored routes and would compare their current Supply position with the Origin and the Demand positions with the Destination - factoring in the security status and any banned bodies etc.

If there is a match then they will use the predefined route.

Not sure if the Origin and Destination should just be the System or if it has to be an actual Colony.

Thoughts? Am I describing this correctly?

The idea is that this gets around the exponential pathing issue that made Steve restrict civies to 4 jumps maximum.

[sloanjh]

The ability to predefine routes would be great and might help with the current cap of 4 jumps that is set for Civilian Shipping.

Seconded.

John

[Thiosk]

Could it function somewhat like the sector list?

Perhaps linked with commercial spaceports?  Such spaceports would allow you to put together a managable list of worlds to consider as part of a trade network.  Levels extend distance much the way higher sectors do.  So instead of checking out 4 jumps for opportunities, they check systems that are on the trade list.  You still want them to autocolonize and do such things, so maybe they can check three jumps out from the network.

[Beersatron]

Could it function somewhat like the sector list?

Perhaps linked with commercial spaceports?  Such spaceports would allow you to put together a managable list of worlds to consider as part of a trade network.  Levels extend distance much the way higher sectors do.  So instead of checking out 4 jumps for opportunities, they check systems that are on the trade list.  You still want them to autocolonize and do such things, so maybe they can check three jumps out from the network.

Oh, that sounds good! Tie it in with the spaceports, so to start you have to build the colony yourself to the point were you can staff the spaceport and then after that you start to attract the civies!

[Peter Rhodan]

My biggest pet hate:::::


In the F2 Population window can you PLEASE add a second choice of menu filter below Empire for planetary systems so that you can list all Populations or just the Populations in a particular system - I am getting so tired of looking Gliese XYZ AII body amongst 200 other Gliese something bodies...........


Please Steve...