Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[wedgebert]

I think it does, but only when they are in effect.  It replaces the maintenance state and clock with sensor delay and fire delay columns.

Is that why it's doing that?  I'd been thinking it was a bug and was about to report it.

[scvn2812]

Secondary and Tertiary ship name themes in much the same vein as the secondary officer name pools. Some of the fun ones like Andromeda have a very shallow pool of names to draw from so it would be nice to pull from some plan Bs rather than hit the randomizer that pulls from all name categories until you get one you like.

[Paul]

Suggestion: Specific targeting of ship systems.

This has probably been suggested before, but how about the option to target specific parts of a ship?

For instance you could give the order to target a ship's engines, shield generators, or weapons - or just a general attack on the ship as it is now. Attempting to target a specific location would come with an accuracy penalty, but any hits penetrating the armor would be focused primarily on the selected systems. Say a 90% chance to hit the selected system, with the other 10% going to generic parts like crew quarters and fuel storage and engineer sections which might be surrounding the system you're targeting.

This way you could specifically target a ship's engines to either slow it down so your slower ships can catch it, or disable it for boarding combat. Or use mesons to focus on taking out shield systems of a heavily shielded ship in order to follow up with a missile barrage.

The accuracy penalty could either be a set percent (maybe 30% or 40% reduction) or be based on the ratio of that type of part to the rest of the ship. In the 2nd case it would be easier to target a ship's engines when a third of the ship is engines, but targeting the 50 ton engine on a 500 ton fighter would be more difficult.

[Hazard]

I'd like to suggest the creation "Jump Anchor" parts.  Their main design stats would be size and efficiency and their purpose is to increase the 'weight' of a ship when it comes to jumping.  This would make it possible to create high efficiency commercial jump tenders that aren't freaking huge to make it possible for large civilian ships to get through.

[Dutchling]

Suggestion: make PDC use ground force commanders instead of naval commanders as officers.
Right now it doesn't make sense to have my 'korvettenkapitan' (German theme) command PDC.
GFCs having different abilities is ofc a problem and I don't really know of a solution to this. I just posted this anyway as maybe other people have a suggestion / opinion?

[HaliRyan]

A longevity research branch under biology to make your officers live longer (and thus retire at a later age).

The ability to make a jump drive usable by only the mounting ship in exchange for a size reduction could be very useful too. I'm thinking small scouts, survey ships, solo patrol vessels, and oversize fleet flagships could all make good use of such a change.

[Brian Neumann]

A longevity research branch under biology to make your officers live longer (and thus retire at a later age).

The ability to make a jump drive usable by only the mounting ship in exchange for a size reduction could be very useful too. I'm thinking small scouts, survey ships, solo patrol vessels, and oversize fleet flagships could all make good use of such a change.

There is already a size limit on designing a jump engine.  If you design below the limit then the jump engine only works on the mounting craft and cannot take any companions with it.  This covers the small end of your request.  There really isn't anything currently that allows for a smaller version of a jump engine in exchange for no companions on the jump.

Brian

[HaliRyan]

There really isn't anything currently that allows for a smaller version of a jump engine in exchange for no companions on the jump.

Brian

Err... that's sort of why I was suggesting it? 

[Erik L]

Err... that's sort of why I was suggesting it? 

Wouldn't that be the self-only jump engines?

[HaliRyan]

Wouldn't that be the self-only jump engines?

Yes and no. Self-only is currently a design limitation, not option. I was suggesting an option to purposely make a jump engine self-only for the benefit of reduced space on the system.

Example - Say you had a fleet flagship that was significantly larger than your main ships. It'd be nice to be able to have a jump drive built specifically for it that only allowed it to jump itself, but was smaller than a standard jump drive capable of moving a similarly sized ship. Obviously not at such a reduced cost that it made the squadron jump version obsolete, but something like 50-70% the size of the normal version.

[UnLimiTeD]

I'd reckon it'd be more like 80-90% of the size.
So far the fluff goes, opening a worm hole of the needed size simply leaves enough space for others to slip through.
Though, why don't you simply build more ships that size?

[HaliRyan]

Maybe do to the investment required for a ship of the size, or for RP reasons for your race, or as simple a reason as the ship being intended for solo operation and thus the ability to jump others with it being superfluous. There's lots of reasons and situations for it to be useful I think.

[Thiosk]

Limit NPR civilian Industry Size

Limit them to something reasonable, like 50 or maybe 100 ships absolute total-- its hard enough on the game cycles when my civ industry is >200 ships but if the NPRs develop industries of comparable size.............

[Theeht]

Could ships from deleted task forces go into an "unassigned group" or something?  It can be frustrating to accidentally delete something important when trying to delete an empty group.

[sublight]

Conventional Drone engines for the conventional starts please.

It's a little thing, but it feels strange that you can design a 7,000 km/s+ 'Missile' from day 1 in a conventional start, but I'd like to preserve the option of a conventional start IBM alternative: especially for a Martian vs Earthman conventional set up. Maybe have a 0.05 power/MSP starting conventional drone drive, followed by a 500p or 1000p 'Drone Thermal engine' tech to achieve the normal Trans-Newtonian starting drive?