Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[wedgebert]

That's kind of what I was thinking.   The only times I'd expect to have to deal with power outputs are

• Designing the ship in the first place
• Reprioritizing power after suffering damage, akin to Damage Control or shutting down sections of industry
• Turning systems off on a ship in order to increase the time it can spend on station (since life support and passive sensors would require power and therefore fuel)

Speaking of micromanagement, maybe I'm blind and can't find it, but is there a way to setup the default fire control and point defense assignments for a class at design time?  Similarly to how you can set the default missile and parasite complements?

[user-unknown]

Random thought while reading Honor Harrington series:

Systems with large amounts of civilian traffic but low planetary protection values could have a chance of spawning pirates, who attempt to board your civilian ships and steal your stuff.  They could be based on pirate equivalents of CMC, with sensor platforms, PDC defences, etc. and if you have ships captured by them too frequently, they gain wealth in the same way freight lines do, allowing them to build additional ships.  Could be divided by race too, so that pirates of a certain race get eg. tech equivalent to one or two levels behind their parent.

It could also be interesting to add some form of 'demand surrender' order, to allow fleets that massively outweigh other targets can request them to surrender without shooting, and be transferred to your nation without having to damage them.

[Brian Neumann]

Speaking of micromanagement, maybe I'm blind and can't find it, but is there a way to setup the default fire control and point defense assignments for a class at design time?  Similarly to how you can set the default missile and parasite complements?

Not quite, but you can set up the default for a class fairly easily from the combat screen (F8 I think).  When you are in the combat screen you pull up a ship you have already built then start assigning all of the weapons and eccm to fire control.  Then set up the point defense settings for the anti-missile launchers and all beam point defense.  Then hit the button on the far right for copy settings to the class.  This will only copy the settings over to existing ships, so you will need to go in occasionally to hit the copy button again to get the setup copied to all of the ships in the class.  Make sure you have beam weapons assigned a point defense setting regardless of the type of beam weapon.  In most cases if you are under missile fire you are also out of energy range of your enemy so you might as well get what use you can out of the weapons by using them to shoot down incomming missiles.  While it may not be all that accurate, anything they shoot down does help.  I don't recommend doing this with offensive missile launchers as they are both limited in ammuntion and not very effective in the anti-missile role normally.

Brian

[Brian Neumann]

Steve, it might be nice to have default weapon configurations for ships that they automatically copy from existing ships in the class.  It could be as simple as a script for when a ship is built to copy whatever the fire control settings are from the 1st ship in the class.  While it wouldn't be perfect it would help a lot for setting up the basic structure of weapons and fire controls, especially when a ship gets ambushed.

Brian

[HaliRyan]

I'd love to see a communications jamming module for my warships in the vein of ECM, giving a penalty to the targeted ship's (or fleet, if it's AoE) task force training percentage. The idea being that without instant communications they'd coordinate much more poorly.

An active sensor jammer could be interesting as well. Like an active ECM module that affects the sensors of a target ship or group rather than their fire control, but makes the ship doing it stand out like a neon sign maybe?

[IanD]

Should maintenance facilities be able to maintain 1000 tons of ships per facility rather than 200 tons as at present? There is no real requirement to maintain vessels below 1000 tons since fighters got moved into hangers for maintenance.

Regards

[Antagonist]

An active sensor jammer could be interesting as well. Like an active ECM module that affects the sensors of a target ship or group rather than their fire control, but makes the ship doing it stand out like a neon sign maybe?

Well, there isn't anything targetted atm, but there is cloaking systems?  It reduces your signature to an enemy, which is what you seem to suggest, only without the downsides of standing out or actually needing to see the enemy

[HaliRyan]

Well, there isn't anything targetted atm, but there is cloaking systems?  It reduces your signature to an enemy, which is what you seem to suggest, only without the downsides of standing out or actually needing to see the enemy

There is, but it's the inverse of what I'm talking about. Cloaking protects the ship mounting it from all enemies (great for a scout, but not so hot for an entire battle fleet), a jammer protects all friendlies from the ship being targeted (terrible for a scout, great for a battle fleet).

[Dutchling]

At the Bay12 Aurora thread we were talking about the maintenance system and someone said this:

I kinda wish there was an intermediate maintenance option that made ships have a set rate of failure not based on an overhaul clock, and just require resupply with maintenance supplies every so often. That way resupplying a fleet of defense bases would be as simple as sending a supply ship every few years, instead of having to send tugs and give a bunch of orders to tow them back and forth. Maintenance facilities could be changed so that instead of keeping a ship at 0 clock or rewinding the clock they would reduce the failure rate of ships in orbit and take the supplies from the planet so you don't have to give the order for the ships to resupply constantly. With a system like this I'd even like to see civilian ships require maintenance, maybe at a reduced failure rate so they can go further between resupply and don't require as many engineering sections. It'd make more sense to have civilian and military parts instead of the whole ship, so you could still use civilian engines on a military ship for reduced maintenance cost if you wanted to - and putting one military part on a civ ship (like, say, grav sensors) wouldn't suddenly make your commercial engine start breaking down.

[davidr]

I would like to be able to gain information about friendly NPR vessels that visit ones Homeworld i.e. type of vessel , usage and number/type of weapons present , if any . If vessels are on trade missions then the planets owner should have the information on the visiting non owned ships.

DavidR

[Herode]

When you have some order set to repeat anyhow (repeat N times or cycle) and you click the "delete all" orders button, then the repeat/cycle feature should be unchecked (or some poped up dialog should ask you if you want it unchecked or not).

[Dutchling]

When you have some order set to repeat anyhow (repeat N times or cycle) and you click the "delete all" orders button, then the repeat/cycle feature should be unchecked (or some poped up dialog should ask you if you want it unchecked or not).

This.
So much.

[waresky]

I would like to be able to gain information about friendly NPR vessels that visit ones Homeworld i.e. type of vessel , usage and number/type of weapons present , if any . If vessels are on trade missions then the planets owner should have the information on the visiting non owned ships.

DavidR

-1

Me no,srry.

"Fog Of War"..

Obviously my 2 cents:)

[Jacob/Lee]

I have an idea, what about another spoiler enemy, space zombies¹?

They'd be like the swarm, only purely reliant on anything else there. The swarm can reproduce via wrecks that workers can create after mining, the zombies are totally reliant on other races to expand their fleet. They would have some motherships filled with small "troop transports" filled with "zombies" (which I picture more as tough organic matter rather than ships, the "zombies" being more like animalistic parasite things instead of dead sentients) and when a ship came in range they dumped out a few of the transports. The transports would then close in and ram straight through your hull, no need for the boarders to blast a hole, they would just punch right through your shields/armor. Then boarding combat would begin, when (if) the crew dies off the ship starts to badly contort and metal and flesh would fuse together to form this perverted organic body thing, a la Space Pirates and Zombies. These "zombie ships" would be armed with the weapons the ship had originally. If missiles were on board, they possibly could get turned into these organic suicide cannons which loaded small amounts of boarders (Say, 5 every missile size) onto a ship. That, combined with large enough/enough missiles could possibly land a whole company on board an enemy ship and the cycle would continue. If it could be added, these ships, being organic masses mixed with metal rather than solid metal, could regenerate damage at a slow rate. For the sake of balance, certain systems on the ship could be destroyed by the infection, like microwaves and shields. The marines/parasitic zombies of these vessels could have their readiness/strength increased by picking up life pods, where they would butcher the crew and add to their ranks. Obviously, this is a very rough idea and may need to be changed a lot to fit the current limitations of the game or to stop them from being able to run over everything they meet.

1)note: that is just a stock name I used, something more ~original~ can be used in place of it.

[jseah]

There is a problem that boarding a ship underway generates massive amounts of losses. 
And that AMMs will gun down all the transports before they even get close. 

But otherwise, nice idea. 


Make it a special NPR race that when it invades a planet, its troops slowly covert the captured population into it's home population.