Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Grigio87]

Grigio, if you want maintenence free ships build large hangarbay PDCs. full sized ships can be placed into mothball for when you need them.

I try 
Are you sure that ship in PDC's hangar don't consume mineral for maintenance?

Another trick is scrap ship and stop the related scrap task in "Shipyard Tasks" tab.

[swarm_sadist]

I'm thinking they should bring back sensor ambiguity. The ability to instantly see everything there is to know about another race from a long distance thermal scan is just silly. I am thinking of three tiers of detection.

Tier 0 coulld be invisible to sensors, either because the emissions are so small they aren't looked at or there is no emission reaching the sensors.

Tier 1 could be a sensor blip, 'unknown:IR:600W/sr', which would yield no useful information besides a general (read ambiguous) bearing, distance, type and intensity. The 'marker' would then be placed within in the general area (IE: within 1 million kilometres) of the actual object and not updated at regular intervals, making it effectively a contact lost marker. Occasionally, there could appear 'ghosts' (false positive) and 'shadows' (false negative), which would add a bit of mystery to my current campaign (Earth and 100 Tracking Stations). Maybe even make it so a poorly trained or disciplined ship does not always check their scanners in a sub-pulse.

Tier 2 you'd be able to see the outline of the ship, tell what race built it and what make it is (if known). You'd be able to determine the exact energy emissions, in W/m2, which could allow you to guess future Tier 1 contacts with said ship. You could determine engine power, shield strength and pretty much everything else currently detected in Aurora.

Tier 3 would provide everything possible about the target, depending on the sensor. A thermal sensor would be able to check for weapons on the outer hull, if their powered and (when their powered) how powerful they are. An EM sensor could detect things like capacitors that are charged (and from that fire rate), sensor systems, antennae, communications (orders) and maybe even search for internal computers. This would have to be for military scanners only and for extremely close ranges, to balance the game. Maybe 0-500,000km for large sensor ships early in the game.

[Hazard]

With the changes pending for fuel harvesters and the ability of civilian routes to create fuel harvesters of their own to supply your and others ships with, the ability to set a conditional order for your tankers to transfer fuel from any harvester to your own colonies would be useful. 

Likewise, the ability to set a specific colony of yours in a system as the 'fuel depot' of the system would be nice, especially when the harvestable gas giants are a long distance from any jump points, while whatever you set down as the 'depot' would hopefully be closer. 


For terraforming: It would be nice to create a hydrosphere and following on that a biosphere for a planet, with the lack of those things imposing a habitability penalty.   That way, they don't end up being just another uninteresting line in the planetary report, rather than something actually important. 

[Zook]

A couple of user-definable "system bookmarks" under the sub-pulse-length bar that take you directly to the system. For my campaign that would be Sol, Altair, Orleans and perhaps El Dorado. That would save a *lot* of clicks, and the pulse bar could lose a few pixels anyway.

[crys]

i think its very nice to advance the game with new features, and i like most of thouse suggestions.

but once in a while i must think about things that are a little bit anoying in this game.


one of my main problems is, that the game gets very slow 20-30 years in the game, even without AI-empires.
i wanted to start a game with 3 AI-empires recently, but the first 30 day cycle took 3-5 mins so i didnt even start playing.

often even getting allready calculated statts, like the economy windows are slow. 20-30 years into the game, it will take several(5+) secounds to load any of the economy pages of larger worlds(homeworld), including alot of actions on the same economy window side. like turning troops to cardres, or even disbanding them, or building ships.


ok you propably think first uh - he must have an old pc, and in some way youre right, i have an E6600 core2duo, with 2gb ram, running win xp. but this still means there is allways one idle core for this game.

please if you have time, have a look into things which are calculated over and over, without time advancing =).

maybe my DB is messed up ok, ill see with the next version of this game =)

[telegraph]

1.  It would be nice if mouse wheel worked for scrolling in grids(for example current research projects, economics summary . . .  ). 
It is currently quite a chore to use scroll bars everywhere.

2.  It would also be helpful if we could tune which messages generate interrupts more precisely, pure regexp approach would be fine. 
For example:
In some cases I would care to be interrupted only by Exceptional officer, in other - only by exceptional officer with certain skill or certain set of skills, sometimes any officer at all will draw my attention. . .  It would be nice if it was configurable.

3.  It would be nice to have a "hardcore" mode with all cheats and SM-mode disabled.  It should work as a one-way transition, so that a universe might be set-up in SM mode, then game would be "hardcored" and player forced to play by rules.
This suggestion is different from the SM-mode switch because it should affect non-SM cheats, like "assign to any location".

[Hawkeye]

1.
telegraph: "hey, programm, I am turning the mousewheel, why aren´t your lists scrolling down, damnit!?"
Visual Basic 6: "Mousewheel? What the heck are you talking about, never heard of such a thing!"

3.
Well, just don´t go SM and leave the "assign to any location" box un-checked. This _is_ (mostely) a single-player thing. Yes, some self-control is required, but I am sure you can do it!

[telegraph]

1. I suggested an improvement, not asked about why it is not there yet.

3. Self-control would not stop AutoAssignments from sending a captain to the ship half universe away by the means of thin ether. This feature-request is not only about disabling one checkbox, but enforcing fair play overall. In case of leaders assignments it would be fun to have an automated courier ship(luxury required) try to take a commander from his current location to his assigned ship. It would be nice if a ship that was nullified by black hole that all officers on board are dead too(I had such situation, I had a ship with flag bridge full high-ranking officers and a good captain crash into the singularity horizon. Only two persons that were not commnading anything (rotated stuff) died. Captain and all TF survived somehow...)

[TheDeadlyShoe]

it's not a matter of 'yet', it's just not going to happen because it's unsupported by VB6.

ps you could always liquidate those officers yourself...

[Jeltz]

Question: how many Research Lab can I build for maximize all my research project? I have sufficient or I have a surplus of RL? Actually the number is achieved with paper and pencil. An helpful index (RLI) on the Reserch tab must be:

RLI = (sum of max RL actually manageable for all the reseachers) - (the total number of RL in the colony)

if RLI = 0, Ok! Every resercher may have assigned the max number of RL
if RLI = n > 0, I must build n RL for reaching the max capability for every resercher 
if RLI = n < 0, there is a surplus of RL, I need more reserchers...

Is it a good idea?

[Theokrat]

Question: how many Research Lab can I build for maximize all my research project? I have sufficient or I have a surplus of RL? Actually the number is achieved with paper and pencil. An helpful index (RLI) on the Reserch tab must be:

RLI = (sum of max RL actually manageable for all the reseachers) - (the total number of RL in the colony)

if RLI = 0, Ok! Every resercher may have assigned the max number of RL
if RLI = n > 0, I must build n RL for reaching the max capability for every resercher 
if RLI = n < 0, there is a surplus of RL, I need more reserchers...

Is it a good idea?

Maybe that's just me, but I never had more RL than manageable by my scientists. I was actually under the impression that scientists were spawned by research labs (and not the academy), so the number of scientists would always be proportional to RL and baring some freak bad luck with the random numbers, there would always be someone ready to move into a new lab...

[Zook]

But it's rarely useful to assign the max number of RL to a scientist, because the time gained decreases with every lab.

[telegraph]

But it's rarely useful to assign the max number of RL to a scientist, because the time gained decreases with every lab.

I am pretty sure it is not so.
every technology has a RP cost. every lab generates a flat amount of RP, influenced by research rate tech and scientist bonus. every 5-day the generated RP are substracted from the needed RP. Once RP needed is 0 - you got your tech(+- 5 days).

[Erik L]

There are three things that affect research points gained; the basic tech (RP per annum), the scientist's bonus, and the scientist's admin rating.

For example (numbers all made up):
A scientist with admin rating 2 (10 labs), and a bonus of 0%, with a base rating of 100RP/lab. If the scientist is assigned 1 lab, he generates 100RP per year. If he has all 10 assigned, he generates 1000RP per year. If his bonus is 10%, he generates 1100RP per year with 10 labs outside of his field. In his field he generates 1400 RP per year.

Increase the base tech to 150, and your scientists generate more RP. Add more labs to a particular scientist, and he generates more RP. He gains bonus, his RP goes up.

[Grigio87]

Very simple idea:
Hangar, Boat Bay, Grav-Sensor = Commercial module (not military)

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With Civilian Hangar we can build big Mothership (big Hangar, CIWS, maintenance module, fuel storage, maint supplies), Space Station, ecc...

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Grav-sensor M - Geo-sensor C, what is the sense?