Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[blue emu]

Given all the attention given to tractoring in terms of modular design, I think some sort of tractor "power" should be introduced...

I would certainly second any elaboration of the current tractor-beam system.

... even if Girlinhat and I are the only real "Modular Design" freaks on the forum. It would still be appreciated.

[Marc420]

Designable missile warheads ...

Make the missile warhead a Player designable component.  This would allow for variations in the warheads on the missiles.

For instance, my quickie search of this thread on 'warhead' found a suggestion to mount a one-shot beam weapon as a warhead on a missile.  That would be one idea for what could go on there. Here are some others.

Differentiate between an "Armor Piercing" warhead and a "High Explosive" warhead.  Think of the current types of warheads as an HE type of round.  They generally seem to blow a crater into the target's armor.  An Armor Piercing type of warhead design would apply a different damage pattern that goes deeper into the armor, at a cost of less pure 'damage' explosive power.

You currently have 'enhanced radiation' warheads as a flag that could be set on the missile design, so the above could probably fit into the same system as just another flag indicating to use a different damage pattern.

However, my idea goes a bit further than that in that you could also have other specialty warheads. 

-- Normal 'nuclear high explosive' warheads.  Does the most damage pts per size of warhead. Using the current 'cratering' damage pattern.
-- Armor piercing warheads.  Less damage pts, but formed into a special 'shaped charge' that does a better job of penetrating armor. 
-- Enhanced radiation warheads.  Against ships, this warhead does less damage, but kills more of the crew.
-- Chemical warheads.  Does no damage at first. But spreads a chemical agent across an area of the ships hull that then slowly starts to eat away the armor in that area.
-- Biological warheads.  Similar to chemical in that it does no damage but then starts to eat away the hull.  Maybe at a slower rate than Chemical, but requires a different counter-measure to stop the agent.
-- Target markers.  A type of chemical warhead that does no damage.  But, various flavors of this could add 'heat', 'em emissions' or a stronger return on an active sensors.  Basically, these 'paint' the target to make it easier to see and hit.
-- EMP warheads.  Designed to unleash a strong EMP burst near the target ship(s).  Attacks ships nearby with an attack that only effects electronics.  Can effect multiple ships, but with effectiveness decreasing based on the square of the distance from target ship to missile explosion point.
-- An earlier post in this thread mentioned trying to put something like a one-shot 'beam' weapon on a missile warhead.  Or I think I saw something somewhere about an "X-ray laser" warhead that could provide a powerful beam weapon attack. Both of those sorts of ideas would fit into this scheme of making the warhead a PDC.

Chemical and biological warheads could be combined with counter measures to stop the damage.  A shipyard or maybe even a ship's shuttle could 'clean' the contamination off the ship. Just not likely to be something you'd want to do in the midst of a battle though.  At least not in societies that would care for the safety of that shuttle crew.

In general, if the warhead design was made a separate piece from the rest of the missile design, then players could be given various options for different 'flavors' of warheads, each of which has a different type and amount of damage that it does for a given size package to fit on a missile.  The system could generally work where a player designs a size 4 missile that's capable of handling say a size 2 warhead.  Then, the player could design several different warheads to fit on that missile and move to producing those quicker since the missile part hasn't changed.

------------------------
On a different but related note, missiles that use Thermal sensors could tend to home in on the heat producing parts of a ship. Ie, heat seeking missiles would tend to head for the engines.  Likewise, EM sensing missiles could tend to home in on things like Active Sensor components that are strong em emitters.  Basically, just weight the DAC table differently by increasing the score of some components based on the type of weapon that's doing the damage. 

[LizardSF]

Just a note -- Enhanced Radiation warheads are in the game already, you just need to research the right tech. There's several levels.

Stealing from other games, I like the more exotic weapons from SEIV and SEV: Engine overloading weapons and weapon overloading weapons, in particular. These weapons make it easy to cripple enemy starships without destroying them, which has a lot of advantages if you want to board, but they're expensive to research, power hungry, and need planning to use effectively.

(I'm probably trending the wrong way in comparison to the core Aurora audience, in that I'd like to see more "weird" and "exotic" technologies like teleport bombs, gravity beams, and so on, and both the designer and the player base seem to lean towards harder sci-fi and more realistic physics. So it goes.)

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I think there is a lot of room for weapons with interesting mechanics that attack enemies in an alternate fashion. You just need to be careful with it, and to make sure it doesnt steal the thunder from regular ol pew pew pew pew.  It's fairly easy for weapons like this to hover between useless and overpowered. We have the example of microwave beams to work from.

Specialist weapons also provide a lot of room for special enemies like the Star Swarm and Invaders.  They could even be unique technologies to those races.  The modular ships thread made me think it would be interesting ot have a unique-NPR that utilized modular ships instead of traditional ships... ^^

Engine overloaders from SEV were particularly interesting in that engines were the main Supply storage and most ship functions required Supply. So a engine-crippled ship was combat ineffective unless it was designed with emergency supply storage.  It was a strategic mechanic above and beyond simply destroying enemy engines. 

[Caesar]

Corrosive Missiles

We currently have normal missiles, laser warhead missiles and radiation missile warheads.
The radiation missile and normal missiles deal damage in one pattern, the laser warhead in another. Respectively:

Code: [Select]

WH = 9
Armor = 2

  Normal             Laser
--xxxxx--          ----x----
---xxx---          ----x----
x++++++++          xxxxxxx++


x: Damage
-: Armor
+: Internal Component

Yesterday my fresh squadron of warships fought a swarm. Their armor level was two and my warheads were level four. Sadly, I was not even able to damage any of their internals as I could penetrate only two levels of armor. Two shots in the same spot were needed to damage the ship's components. My poor fleet was summarily slaughtered, so I started thinking of new ways to deal with armor and missiles. I suggest a new type a damaging missile that instead of penetrating as far as possible damages only the top layer of armor where it hits, like this;

Code: [Select]

WH = 9
Armor = 2

Corrosive
xxxxxxxxx
---------
+++++++++


x: Damage
-: Armor
+: Internal Component
This kind of damage might seem useless at first, as you will need at least three shots to damage the internals of this ship versus the two of the normal missiles, but that is not the point of this missile warhead.
A normal missile will have to hit the exact same spot twice to deal any real damage if the targeted ship is well-armored. Corrosive missiles will be especially useful against larger ships as they will 'soften' the armor in large areas.

Take a new example (The missiles will strike the same armor areas.):

Code: [Select]

WH = 9
Armor = 2
Armor width = 25

         Normal                                                            Corrosive                                                      Corrosive + Normal
---xxxxx----------xxxxx--                                          yyyyyyyyy----yyyyyyyyy---                                          yyyyyyyyy----yyyyyyyyy---
----xxx------------xxx---                                          -------------------------                                          ---xxxxx----------xxxxx--
xx+++++++++++++++++++++++                                          +++++++++++++++++++++++++                                          xxxxxxxx+++++++++++++++++


x: Normal Damage
y: Corrosive Damage
-: Armor
+: Internal Component

The corrosive missile will give the normal missiles EIGHTEEN possible strike locations in which they can maximize their penetration and damage the internal components. Two salvos of two normal missiles will provide a maximum of ten possible strike locations. The corrosive missile is also not influenced by the eternal (and infernal) 1,4,9,16,etc.. pattern. A better warhead is a better warhead.

Edit:

-- Chemical warheads.  Does no damage at first. But spreads a chemical agent across an area of the ships hull that then slowly starts to eat away the armor in that area.
-- Biological warheads.  Similar to chemical in that it does no damage but then starts to eat away the hull.  Maybe at a slower rate than Chemical, but requires a different counter-measure to stop the agent.

I only read this suggestion after posting my own. No plagiarism was intended, although I think my idea is very similar except for the fact that this way of dealing with damage would be easier for the player to understand/for the program to process.

[UnLimiTeD]

It is quite intriguing that people actually want missiles to have less armor penetration.^^
The question is:
What would you do if you find an enemy with 3 Armor?
You'd have the same problem as now again.^^

[Caesar]

Of course not. You fire one corrosive missile and effectively remove one layer of armor. Then you'll fire another warhead which WILL penetrate and do internal damage.

If you'd use normal warheads the chance would be much smaller that you hit the already damaged spot on the armor, as it covers less squares.

You should not use JUST the corrosive missile. You should combine it with normal warheads.

[LizardSF]

I kind of like how the mechanics work, even if I've been on the losing end of every battle I've fought so far (but each time, I've done better and better, learned from my mistakes, and learned more about how the basic game works, how to fight and maneuver and what kind of sensors to build and so on). However, I can see how a "concussive force" mechanic could be useful, to reflect that there will be some slight internal damage even if armor isn't fully penetrated (there might be already, didn't someone mention that armor 'leaks' while force fields don't?)

[Gidoran]

Just a random thought I'm jotting down partially so I don't forget it right before I fall asleep, but:

Very Large Arrays. If I'm remembering things correctly, you can make up for having crappier sensors by having more of them, pointing them all at the same thing, and then combining all the pictures. So while one crappy resolution sensor would only pick up a little bit, if you have a hundred, or a thousand... It'd add up pretty quickly.

The short-hand of how this could work is to make it so if you have a lot of sensors that are overlapping (Let's say you have 10 anti-missile sensors in a fleet), you could pick up targets from much further away than each one individually could because of the added resolution from stacking them together. I'm not sure if this is incompatible with the current paradigm of sensors in Aurora, though. If someone knows yea or nay, could they elaborate? I'd be appreciative.

[UnLimiTeD]

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.

[Marc420]

Orders UI.

My suggestion would be to consolidate the various ways of setting orders into one system. 

1)  Show default and conditional orders in the main orders list.  Do something perhaps like

Code: [Select]

Move to Earth
Refuel at Earth
Move to Mars
-----------
[C] If fuel less than [50%], then refuel at [nearest/largest] colony or tanker [within X jumps]
[C] If supplies less than [20%], then resupply at [nearest/largest] colony or supply ship [within X jumps]
[C] If speed less than [Max], set speed to [Max]
-----------
[D] Gravitational Survey on Next Survey Location [within X billion km]
Where [C] and [D] of course represent the conditional and default orders.  Have a fixed rule of Bottom to Top execution of [C] and [D] orders (within that group) to say that in case of conflicts, higher up the list wins.

2)  Move the OOB and Cargo list portions of the Orders Tab over to the second 'special orders' tab instead.  Put new controls for adding, editing or removing Conditional and Default orders to this area of the Orders Tab.  They'll be room on the Special Orders Tab for the OOB and Cargo list since the controls for the default and conditional orders on that tab would go away.  A little re-arranging and its possible to free up a column on that tab the same size as the space currently used on the Orders tab.

3)  Controls for setting these orders could maybe look like the following.
Row 1 -- Three buttons for "New", "Edit" and "Delete".  Edit and Delete are inactive unless something selected on the order list.  Edit sets up the following controls to show the current state of that selected item in the order list.
Row 2 -- Radio buttons for "Conditional" or "Default" orders
Row 3 -- Drop down list showing available Conditional or Default order types based on radio button selection above.
Rest of area.  Room for controls specific to an order type that appear in this area when an order is picked from the drop down list.  So, for example, for 'refueling' orders, this could have controls for -- Percentage of fuel at which to trigger the order -- where to refuel (colony, tanker, etc), and a distance limit of how far to go to refuel [number of jumps].  The flow for a player giving the orders would be to put the controls in the "New" state (only needed to get out of an Edit mode possibly), select that they want a conditional order, select that they want a Refueling order, then, when these additional controls appear, set the order the way they'd like it.

I guess you'd also want an up and down control for moving the conditional and default orders up or down in their section of the list.
---------------------
I see two benefits to this.  One is that it helps make the total orders that a ship has more obvious.  The default and conditional orders aren't hiding off on another tab using this system.  The second is that it would potentially free up the system to allow unlimited numbers of Default and conditional orders which are currently limited by the control design.  This way, a player wouldn't be forced to choose the two conditional orders most important to him.

---------------
Along the same lines, if you could use the Naval Organizational Tab to apply Default and Conditional orders to groups of ships, that would be really cool.  That way, the head of say my Logistics branch could set a standing conditional order for all of the cargo ships that says to Increase Speed to Max if doing less than Max Speed and easily apply it to all ships in that branch.  Probably difficult to do under the existing system as that sort of command would have to worry about whether it changes existing conditional orders assigned to one of the two slots.  But, in a more unlimited system, it just gets added to the list of each ship.  (Hmm, would need a way to have the Logistics commander to say that this new standing order is "High" priority (ie, added to the top of the list and thus over-riding others) or 'Low' priority (ie, added to the bottom of the list and thus possibly over-ruled by other orders).  Or, maybe you could make a new class of orders of [CO] "conditional organization" orders that fit in priority between [C] and [D].  That way, organizational orders would be always over-ruled by whatever specific orders already given to that TG.

Yeah, I know, I don't seem to make 'small' suggestions. 

[LizardSF]

I'd really love for there to be "fleet policy" options that apply to any ship unless another order overrides it.

For example, "fleet policy" is "resupply if you're below 20% supplies". Whoops, all my warships just left their assigned route to the enemy and started going home!

Obviously, you'd need to be able to clear this on a ship-by-ship level. Of course, this opens up the possibility that you'd forget to clear default orders and have your ships do exactly the wrong thing... but that's kind of why we love Aurora, right?

"The enemy is in sensor range, Captain."
"Excellent. Order the missile teams to open fire."
"Erm, yes, well, we didn't exactly LOAD any missiles. We Refueled and Resupplied, but no one issued us orders to Load Ordnance, so, you know, we didn't bother."

[Antagonist]

Just a random thought I'm jotting down partially so I don't forget it right before I fall asleep, but:

Very Large Arrays. If I'm remembering things correctly, you can make up for having crappier sensors by having more of them, pointing them all at the same thing, and then combining all the pictures. So while one crappy resolution sensor would only pick up a little bit, if you have a hundred, or a thousand... It'd add up pretty quickly.

The short-hand of how this could work is to make it so if you have a lot of sensors that are overlapping (Let's say you have 10 anti-missile sensors in a fleet), you could pick up targets from much further away than each one individually could because of the added resolution from stacking them together. I'm not sure if this is incompatible with the current paradigm of sensors in Aurora, though. If someone knows yea or nay, could they elaborate? I'd be appreciative.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-06-24

Unrelated: Why no ticketing system to collect all these ideas, then use this thread as a discussion and not an archive?
How often does Steve go back and read ALL the old ideas?

And also, about all these fleet automated behavior ideas, I stand by my earlier idea of making AI behavior scripted and modifiable by players.  This would apply both to the AI (which would need to be SIGNIFICANTLY smarter to deal with Newtonian physics, while Steve isn't an AI expert.  Its also not the best use of his time IMO when he could be adding features, while outsourcing the smartening of AI to his fans.) and player fleet orders, which should be easy to customize and have programmed behavior.

[LizardSF]

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.

[LizardSF]

I'd like to see the name field for racial techs -- missiles, engines, sensors, FCs, etc -- split into two parts: A "generated" name like "Size 4 Anti-Ship Missile" which changes every time to change the options as you futz with things, and a "user" name like "Fireball-C". While it's a very minor thing, I find it annoying to decide on a cool name for my missile/engine/whatever, then decide to tweak a setting, then have to retype the name because the generated name changes. I *like* the generated name portion of racial tech because it's informative.

(In a world where Steve has nothing better to do than add cool features to Aurora, I'd like to see generated names be user-controlled, so we could specify, probably in the racial profile scheme, something like, Missile names are in the form '%PlayerName Size %MissileSize Missile - %Warhead:%Agility%Speed', so the default name for a missile might be "Fireball 3 Size 5 Missile - 10:64:22000", for a missile with size 5, a strength 10 warhead, 64 agility, and so on. Another player might want missiles to be in the form of "Series %SeriesName, Class %PlayerName, Strength %Warhead Missile", so the generated name would be "Series Gygax, Class Fireball, Strength 10 Missile". )

While I'm suggesting name-related options, I'd love the following as options you can set on the class design screen, on the same tab you set ship names, etc.:
a)Any new ship of a class will re-use the name of a destroyed (but not scrapped) ship of the same or a related class, with a numerical addendum, so if the Gryphon class DD Manticore is destroyed, the next Gryphon class ship to be commissioned will be the Manticore II.
b)The names of any commander who dies in battle will be added to the pool of ship names for future ships of that class or related classes, overriding default naming schemes.

Building on the last, I'd love for there to be a generated list of "Died in battle" names, which could then be assigned to be the naming scheme for any future class of ships. This would be a dynamic list for each empire, and would obviously be empty at the start of play.