Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Well 90-ish percent of galactic mass *is* dark matter....

John

Hmm! How about a dark-matter alien race? You can't actually detect their ships or lock them up but they can fire on you. "I can see you Kirk, can you see me?". Actually, it is April 1st so perhaps not

Steve

[jseah]

Could I ask for a game simplification (similar to no maintenance) where minerals don't run out?  Basically mines don't reduce minerals in the ground. 

Minerals per year could be limited to a maximum of the amount in the ground.  (to avoid asteroids being insane)

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Could I ask for a game simplification (similar to no maintenance) where minerals don't run out?  Basically mines don't reduce minerals in the ground. 

Minerals per year could be limited to a maximum of the amount in the ground.  (to avoid asteroids being insane)

The easiest way to handle this would just be to SM yourself a very large amount of minerals

Steve

[jseah]

I would like this to happen for computer players and automatically for new systems. 

I could always do it manually of course, but automatically would be nice. 

[wilddog5]

Is it worth updating the nebula code to work like that of the black whole with how the speed reduction is processed (so you dont have to rember to set the conditional order or check fleet speed)

[Sloshmonger]

On the system window (and the new Production Overview window):

Can a project (Industrial, shipyard modification, ground unit training, shipbuilding, etc) that uses a mineral that has more demand than availability (Projected Usage greater than Stockpile Plus Production) be colored differently (red text)?

It's handy to know that the Uridium shortage that Earth experiences will halt production of the Nimbus-class cruiser but not the auto-mines needed to rectify the situation.

[metalax]

One problem with that is that it lists the total cost for the project, not what is expected to be used in the next year, which would leave it misleading for long duration projects if it displayed the warning colour.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Some display of available troop space might be nice.  For instance, my divisional transport can plunk 30 units-- a division plus replacements-- at the drop of a hat.  I can pick up the division easy-- but how many replacements can i fit on board?  Which of the three troopships need to pick up some extra units?

Who knows.

i'd love an x/y display on the ship summary screen, showing available capacity vs total capacity.

I have added a couple of summary lines to the "Cargo Carried" section of the task group window that shows total space available and total capacity for both troop transport bays and combat drop modules. For example:



If you need to see which units are on which ship, you can already click the Show Ground Units checkbox just to the left of the Ships list on the same window.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I mentioned this before, but I want to bee able to rename ground forces before i build them...

In v5.70, you can rename ground units that are being trained. If you click Add Task and then Rename, its functionally the same as naming before training. With the Rename button though you can also change your mind about the unit name partway through training.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

2 types of engineers, 1 type able to build and Xenoarchelogy and one type that is a combat engineer, able to build groundbases and participate in combat, to dig out entrenched enemy troops/bases... Or something like

The existing Engineer Regiment is now the Construction Brigade. Apart from the name change, everything is the same as before.

There is now a new Combat Engineer battalion, which has the same combat strength and cost as a Marine Battalion. Instead of the marine bonus for fighting on ships, it has double strength when attacking or defending a PDC.

I've also corrected the bug of starting races having access to TN ground forces they have yet to research.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

3: Be able to assign several battalions/brigade HQs at the same time to its parent HQ... Its abit tedious to do72 Heavy assault brigades one at a time...

If you transfer a brigade HQ to a new division HQ, any attached battalions will be moved with it, so you should only need to move brigades around rather than individual battalions.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

In two recent campaigns with Precursors, Star Swarm and Invaders switched on using Aurora 5.14 and 5.42 I managed to reach year 68 and 66 years respectively of the game, before the turn delays became intolerable, the record being one day of gaming taking six weeks of real time. When the designer password was available it showed most of the delays were due to the Invaders interacting with Precursors or Star Swarm. However towards the end it was difficult to positively identify what was causing the delays. Only two or three times in the 5.42 game was the slow down due to Invader interaction with NPR races, which was invariably fatal for the NPR.

Thus my experience is that if you switch on Invaders you probably only have 66-70 years of game time to play with. The reason appeared to be connected to the rate of Invader exploration. With the designer password it was possible to see they had explored hundreds of systems compared to much less for all other races. In the 5.42 game Invaders had explored 1118 systems (in a thousand star game!), seven of the NPRS had explored 100, 16, 6, 4, 88, 26 and 12 systems respectively, the player race had only explored 23 (I turtled). Precursors had knowledge of 184 and Star Swarm 75. That game lasted 66 years.

In the 5.14 game I don’t have the data for Invaders as trying to eliminate an Invader fleet in designer mode I crashed the game and eliminated such data for Invaders but the player race had explored 42 systems, five of the NPRs had explored 67, 78, 133, 174, and 2 respectively, While the Precursors had knowledge of 44 and the Star Swarm 32 systems. I would expect the Invaders to have had explored around the 1000 system mark going on the event record for them.

I guess you could limit the number of stars to a couple of hundred, but that means with the rate of Invader exploration they are going to find you pretty quickly. Another way would be to greatly slow down Invader exploration of the galaxy or if the Invaders discover a system containing either Precursors or Star Swarm to nullify that turn of exploration.

My choice would be to make Invader incursions a quite rare event so they would only intrude into a new system in the Galaxy once every 1 to 5 years, perhaps make it possible to specify this interval at the game start? I would not have them explore unless they find enemy ships or colonies when it would be reasonable for them to attempt the extermination of the foe.

I have started a new game with 5.56 without Invaders and 58 years, 80 systems explored I have had no slow downs what so ever – so far, although I may have eliminated the primary NPR early on!

Anyone have other thoughts

Thanks for the detailed report. It does sound like making Invader incursions more of a rare event would be a good idea. Therefore I have decreased the chance of a wormhole appearing and I have halved the chance of an incursion. I've also placed significant restrictions on the number of Invader survey ships. They will still explore a little but far less than at the moment. More along the lines of a normal NPR.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I say that terraforming should be moved to Biology.

Changed for v5.70. I had already done this for Newtonian Aurora so it makes sense to make the change here as well.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

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

In principle, I think I might in inclined to do something along these lines. I'll have to give it a lot of thought though.

Steve

[schroeam]

This may be too much for v5.7, but what about changing the way brigades and divisions are organized.  Using a similar technique as the task force organization, this would allow more flexibility in the arrangement as not all countries follow the 4 btn/bde, 4 bde/div model. 

Making a Corps, or Army, headquarters would also give the top field commander somewhere to go.  Right now in my game I have Colonels commanding Regiments (Battalions), Brigadiers commanding Brigades, and Major Generals commanding Divisions, with three Field Marshals commanding the senior division on my most heavily populated planets.  Having a Corps, or Army, Headquarters Battalion, along with the reorganization of ground units above, would allow Field Marshal Killemal Alyens to command the entire invasion army of six divisions.

Just a thought.

Adam.