Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[schroeam]

Steve,

Officer Assignments...

Is there any way to "fix" the auto assignments.  I might be thinking too complicated, but my biggest complaint is that the auto assignments appear to focus on an officers training ability (ships) and ground combat ability (ground forces).

I would like to make each class of ship have a specific auto assignment requirement:

Crew Training - Warships with <75% training
Fleet Initiative - Warships with >75% training, ships with no obvious specialty, and orbitals (lack of engines)
Factory Production - Jump Gate Construction Ships
Fighter Operations - Fighters
Logistics - Colony Ships, Cargo Ships, Freighters, Troop Ships
Mining - Asteroid Miners, Sorium Harvesters
Terraforming - Terraformers
Political Reliability - secondary ability when no officers exist with the primary ability

Ground Force Training - Division and Brigade Commander
Ground Combat - Battalion, Company Commander
Xenoarcheology - Engeering Brigade
Political Reliability - secondary ability when no officers exist with the primary ability

Also I would like to see the Division and Brigade units turned into something like the Task Force Command structure.  This would do two things:

Allow for more customized division and brigade sizes (more realistic to the armies of today)

Provide the Generals a staff much like their space fleet contemporaries.

Just a couple thoughts.

Thanks.

Adam.

[Antagonist]

From http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,3811.0.html

This is because the Civie code can not handle the possibility of that jump tender being moved by the player before it gets their. Since the tender if under your control you may move it without knowing there are civs enroute, the civies get their and cant jump.

I guess it is like a present day cargo vessel relying on a government owned tug to push it into harbour, but the tug has been moved else where for some Super Sekret Government job.

I would like the ability to be able to run a jump gate-less empire.  That is, the ability for civ ships to use any jump tenders I place at jump points.  To do this either assumptions that if a ship has remained there for 5 days you can use it, cancelling if it does move, or else some player order 'provide jump tenders' that indicates to the civvies that they may use this without fear, but again cancelling if it does move.  The 'build jump gate' order will imply that it can also provide jump tenders (if it has a jump drive) due to the reliance that the ship will stay put at the jump point for extended amounts of time.

EDIT: Also, would be nice to be able to mount passives on civ ships without it being mil-spec.  I would be okay with a limitation like HS size 1 and less are civ, over is mil, to indicate the complexity of the equipment before it is milspec.  EM sensors is basically a radio antenna and a thermal sensor is an IR camera, not really the most advanced equipment ever, though I imagine the fancier ones would indeed get very complicated very fast.  I am fine with active sensors remaining fully milspec.

EDIT II: This would also get complicated very fast code-wise, but realistically multiple sensors working together would work better than a single sensor on its own.  I suggest REALISM-wise that multiple sensors in a task group can serve to sense further the more there are, all wired together with some slight parralax to help tease out additional details.  I would also be okay with this being shot down for purely game-play and balance reasons.

Also, thinking of or bouys as a Very Large Array: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-06-24

[Charlie Beeler]

I am going to leave the Min Jump Engine Size as a starting tech. I think have the same setting for other size-based tech progressions.

Of the base jump engine techs this is the only one that has no prerequisite tech while the others require jump point theory and are not starting techs. 

With regard to ground forces, there are a lot of techs that have TN tech as their only prerequisite so I can't really use that as a justification for having them immediately available. On the other hand, I think some starting ground forces are reasonable anyway so I will include all the above except engineers as starting tech.

Perhaps change engineers from having Trans-Newtonian Technology as the prerequisite to Mobile Infantry Battalion and be in-line with Assault Infantry Battalion and Brigade Headquarters as second research tier ground forces.

[Gidoran]

Wouldn't it make sense for Civilians to be able to make commercial geosurvey ship designs? They already can make mining stations on their own, so it wouldn't be too huge of a leap from there to assume they'd probably be willing to crew their own boats to find more minerals instead of waiting on governmental action.

They'd be limited by jump drives/gates, so if you want to limit them to where you've already secured you can keep a jump drive off them, while it would free up some of the micromanagement to more important things. . .  like Mr.  Frisky, your next door suddenly-turned-hostile neighbor.

And actually to go along with this line of thinking, you could make it so that civilians could make asteroid miners as well instead of setting up CMCs on individual asteroids.  The only real difference would be it would come out of a line's shipping budget instead of thin air as best I can tell, but it would go along with their new found prospecting capability well.

[Thiosk]

Wouldn't it make sense for Civilians to be able to make commercial geosurvey ship designs? They already can make mining stations on their own, so it wouldn't be too huge of a leap from there to assume they'd probably be willing to crew their own boats to find more minerals instead of waiting on governmental action.

I don't really want civs exploring new jump points.  At all.  For performance reasons, I was trying to restrict jump point exploration in a slow, methodical manner, to prevent spawning tons of systems.  Well, found my first NPR, which found two other NPRs and spawned a bunch of precursors and swarm, and now i'm locked in a endless series of interrupts.  Its not TOO terrible, but I must press the 5 day button 5 times to advance a contstruction cycle.  Its always a series of 10 h, 14 h, 18h, 1.2 day, followed by 5 day cycle.  Constantly.

I am not against a civilian survey fleet, just don't let them explore new jump points.

I'd also make the additional suggestion here: If you spawn a space faring NPR, spawn in five or ten linked and explored systems for it, but don't let it send out its infinite-fuel and infinite-durability scouts, operating decades after their homeworld's destruction, uncovering system after system until game performance issues become immense. (or update the engine for multicore processors... either or )  At least track AI fuel usage, on scouts, to mitigate this problem.

[UnLimiTeD]

He asked for geosurvey, not gravsurvey.

Though multicore support is obviously a solution. X-D^^

[Brian Neumann]

I'd also make the additional suggestion here: If you spawn a space faring NPR, spawn in five or ten linked and explored systems for it, but don't let it send out its infinite-fuel and infinite-durability scouts, operating decades after their homeworld's destruction, uncovering system after system until game performance issues become immense. (or update the engine for multicore processors... either or )  At least track AI fuel usage, on scouts, to mitigate this problem.

Maybe have a limit of how many systems they can go from a colony.  If you put it at 5 systems then they would be able to do plenty of exploring, but not all over the map after their colonies were all captured/destroyed.

I don't know if this would be hard to do or not.  For simplicity maybe just every year (1st Janauary) check to see if they can get to a colony with the standard 4 system check that civilians use would be enough.

Brian

[Gidoran]

I don't think any civilian ships can explore new jump points as is, so that would have to be a new mechanic if added in.  The limitation of jump drive/jump gates was more to let you keep civ ships out of your frontier if you wanted to.

[waresky]

Some times ago,Civvie can explore Jump Point..but (rightfull) Steve erase this.

And for our,Commanders,are perfect.

Civvie better follow Governement Plans

[Thiosk]

CIVILIAN FLEETS for computational overhead reduction.

Along the theme of other recent posts, how about if similar ships band together into civilian fleets. Presently, ships seem to all act independently, which means orders must be calculated for each ship each cycle.  Is this how it works?  It seems a solution to this would be to allow ships to band together as the number of ships increase.  For instance, I have well over 200 independent civilian vessesls traversing my colonies, more every construction cycle, and they move in clusters anyway, so if they banded together into simple fleets that may reduce computational cost a smidge.

[Gidoran]

Side bonus to that would be a little more sense, anyway.  In an oceanic merchant fleet you can actually call for assistance and receive it in a decent amount of time, so ships go alone as needed.  But in a vacuum, anything going the slightest bit wrong is a major emergency, so it would make sense that they'd band together for the sake of survival.  After all, if I'm a merchie I'd rather have a couple of buddies of the same ship-type so we could exchange spare parts and if necessary have someone left behind to pick up my crew.

[Dutchling]

Suggestion:
Make fire control and active search sensors show and additional line on the map (if you have show sensors on) if they are of resolution 1. This line should be the detection line for size 6 missiles (or it might be configurable)
It keeps confusing me why I only see the missiles so close to my ship, and than I remember that the line is for a 1000ton ship and not missiles.

[Ziusudra]

Suggestion:
Make fire control and active search sensors show and additional line on the map (if you have show sensors on) if they are of resolution 1. This line should be the detection line for size 6 missiles (or it might be configurable)
It keeps confusing me why I only see the missiles so close to my ship, and than I remember that the line is for a 1000ton ship and not missiles.

This is an excellent suggestion.

BTW, 1000 tonnes if R20; R1 is 50 tonnes.

[Dutchling]

Another suggestion:
When giving a move order or an order that takes place at another place to a TG that has a speed of 1km/s, make them automatically go at max speed.
I've wasted a lot of time with ordering ship to go somewhere and only after a year discovering that they are only a few kkm further...

[Thiosk]

Magnetic Field Screening Effects of Gas Giants and Stars

Does the body have a large magnetic field?  Ships in orbit should be functionally cloaked-- this happens a lot in Sci Fi-- ships hide out behind moons and near stars, where sensor blindness takes effect.

Give ships an effective cloak-- maybe 90%-- when in orbit of a gas giant or star.