Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[TheDeadlyShoe]

While I'm still enough of a n00b that any alien race kicks my ass because I'm only just learning the basics of combat, the most common complaint I've seen about Aurora from those who've gotten past the "WTF IS THIS?" stage is "The AI is really stupid", that you've got this amazingly deep set of systems for detailed combat and an enemy that can't use it well enough to challenge a moderately experienced player. So, based on that, I'd second the idea of scriptable AI, as it seems that's one of those things which can be "outsourced" without undermining Steve's vision of the game.

The AI is competent at combat.  It's that it doesn't have a coherent research strategy like a player does.  So if you go 50 years and an NPR goes 50 years and the NPRs tech isn't a match for you militarily.

Also, NPRs often get completely stalled by minerals shortages. You can get around this by SMing them excellent homeworld minerals deposits. 

Bear in mind that the game is essentially built as a roleplaying mechanism, with multiple races played by the same person...

That said, I think AIs with preset ship designs and research priorities would be really cool. There's some problems with this approach,  and a few ways to do it.  But it would mean you could fight - for example - NPR versions of Steve's NATO and USSR factions. 

[jseah]

Firecontrols require high speed imaging, connecting several sensors allows to see stuff, but to actually shoot at it, you need that picture without time delay.

Firecons not having arrayed sensors makes sense. 
A somewhat similar argument could be made for active sensors, although see below. 

The same doesn't apply to passive.  Telescope arrays can see what individual telescopes can't. 
Active sensors can have the same mechanic apply only to the EM sensitivity portion of the active. 

[sloanjh]

While posting in the Newtonian thread I had a wild idea:

Make the cost of a drive design (both jump and non-jump) go like sqrt(size), rather than size^2 (jump IIRC) or size^1 (non-jump, e.g. military, fighter, missile etc.).

The idea here is that an original design driver for Aurora was to discourage swarms and encourage large multi-role designs.  That didn't work out, mainly (IMNSHO) because of linearity in design and production cost - "splitting" a ship design in two results in two smaller ships with the same total mass, cost, and performance.  This penalizes multi-role ships because the unsplit ship will only be able to use one type of system (survey vs. military vs. jump vs. ...) at a time - it can only be at one place to do perform these roles at any particular time.  Jump drive cost makes this even worse - large drives (ships) are discouraged and small drives (ships) are encouraged.  Armor cost was intended to help with this, (it will go like size^(2/3)) but my experience is that the effect isn't really strong enough to notice in practice.

If the cost of propelling a single ship vs. two half-ships went signficantly down, then there would be a strong driver to offset the disadvantage of having "dead mass" on a multi-role ship.

Note that if applied to missiles, this helps to solve the "sandblasting with AMM is more efficient than big missiles" problem - 1xStr-4 missile is less expensive than 4xStr-1.

I realize this is a major disruption, and you probably won't have time to do it due to the work on Newtonian Aurora.  OTOH, I don't think it would "wreck" the game mechanics, since the overall combat systems would remain the same - it would simply skew how the systems are lumped together (one big ship or several small ones).  The only mechanics difficulty I see would be to decide the size at which to match the new costs with the old cost, i.e. what are "Mult" and "RefSize" in Mult*sqrt(Size/RefSize) - from this point of view it is very similar to the sensor range equation change.  OTOH, I think it has a lot of up-side potential.

John

[Antagonist]

I would like to see a modifier in game setup for racial tech RP costs, such as halving or removing RP costs for racial modules entirely.

I can do it individually with the SM I suppose, but a game option would be useful too.

Related, a modifier that can reduce the high-end RP costs but leave low-end somewhat the same could be useful too.  In my games for instance I generally avoid making size 50 sensors simply because of the prohibitive RP cost, while size 5 or 10 sensors don't bother me as much.

[PTTG]

"Retire ALL selected officers"

Currently, only one officer can be fired at a time. I want to be able to retire dozens at once.

[Zed 6]

"Retire ALL selected officers"

Currently, only one officer can be fired at a time. I want to be able to retire dozens at once.

Sounds like a purge or maybe the Emperor has good cause to be so paranoid.

[DatAlien]

Im sure I suggested this befor or someone else did it, but it would be nice to set which the future Scientist can study at your Military Academy, I mean if you terraform every planet you settle on, you need no scientist with specialisation on Biology/Genetic.
It would be nice too to be able to change the boni of your Officer in SM. Another thing that would be nice if you could add shipyards in SM.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

you can add shipyards. with Spacemaster on, go to the manage shipyards screen. There is a button labeled SM SY Mod.  Pressing Add will add a 1000 ton military or 10000 ton commercial shipyard.

[Yonder]

Im sure I suggested this befor or someone else did it, but it would be nice to set which the future Scientist can study at your Military Academy, I mean if you terraform every planet you settle on, you need no scientist with specialisation on Biology/Genetic.

I would like to have some sort of way to affect my Scientist makeups as well. Maybe you could pay a yearly "Scholarship" fund for any of the Scientist types that you want to, and that amount will influence the likely type and starting skill of your scientists?

(I'm playing a no-missiles game and a third of my scientists are very nice Missile/Kinetic weapons guys. ARG! It's almost enough to make me switch to Railguns/Gauss cannons.)

[UnLimiTeD]

Railguns are no missiles!
Aside, I'd like to suggest that instead of everyone and their mother trying to avoid genetics specialists, make them useful.
Bioweapons come to mind, but I'd be happy already if it somehow ties into Ground Combat Strenght.
It could also improve Infrastructure efficiency by means of custom biospheres.

[PTTG]

I say that terraforming should be moved to Biology. And maybe a longevity treatments for officers.

[Vanigo]

And population growth speed. And maybe more space-efficient cryogenic capsules, luxury transports, and crew quarters. It's been suggested before, though.

[PTTG]

The AI is competent at combat.  It's that it doesn't have a coherent research strategy like a player does.  So if you go 50 years and an NPR goes 50 years and the NPRs tech isn't a match for you militarily.

How about we split AI a bit? It sounds like there's two or three big areas where the AI is rather weak:

-Tech Priorities
-Colony Priorities/mining
-Military Strategy (As opposed to tactics)

I see ways that these could be improved. For instance, NPR aliens could have "tech scripts" which would detail the priority they'd use to research things, randomly determined from the start. These scripts could even be selected by the player (for instance, if they want an enemy that specializes in a particular tech.)

I don't know how smart the AI is when it comes to colonies, but perhaps the SM could similarly point out some planets that NPRs will give priority for settlement.

[PTTG]

When you zoom to a body on the system map, update the camera position to track that body every time increment. I could foresee this being annoying in combat, so there might need to be a checkbox.

[Antagonist]

What I REALLY want to customize and script on AI side isn't so much Tech Priorities and military strategy of NPRs, but rather player fleet commands like 'Refuel at 30%'.  I'd like the ability to make my own fleet orders and alter the ones that are already there.

As for NPRs AI it's something I personally would leave to someone else and just download DonSomeguy's AI script pack v0.32 for my game, but it'd still be better than vanilla.

Another observation about customizable AI in scripts is that its not wasted effort for the day when Aurora II eventually happens.  It's be a new codebase, but the scripts would still be valid with an assumed minimum of modification.