Change Log for 6.00 discussion

[swarm_sadist]

50 cals are not designed to hurt warships - gauss cannons definitely are!  But that aside, the gameplay implications are less than appealing.  You basically eliminate an entire branch of beam weaponry as collateral damage.  Or if you try to balance them appropriately (RP costs included), Gauss cannons would either be underpowered against wall fields or totally overpowered against ships without them.  Or relegated entirely to point defense duties - glorified CIWS.  Arguably they are sorta that way already, but oh well.  

Well, it seems that his idea was for a heat resistant shield (like the one on an Orion drive), or ablative (like the space shuttle).  Those only prevent damage from thermal energy, such as a nuclear explosion or a laser hit.  Kinetic rounds such as gauss, while much weaker, would be unaffected.  The orion drive can actually be crippled because the nuke FAILED to go off. 

And I would hardly call a gauss gun a capital ship weapon or glorified CIWS.  I would say they shine more in the anti-fighter role.  Also for interceptors.

There's also a dramatic range nerf to railguns and lasers while presumably leaving mesons untouched.     In short, you'd have to a massive balance pass for existing weapons to address these problems.   

Well, mesons are suppose to be the long range, guaranteed damage weapon.  I always though of mesons as The Traveller style weapons, which were basically nuclear flak guns.  Harder to aim the larger shots, but even a close miss would damage the enemie's armour.  A direct hit would detonate inside the ship, a guaranteed kill on smaller ships.  I always found it funny that Aurora meson have two techs to increase range, one of which does it without increasing mass.  But that would ruin the balance we have in place now.

[Deutschbag]

Just curious, is it worth it to start a new 5.60 campaign? I wanna start a new one, but I don't know if it'll be worth it to start one now if 5.70 is gonna be released soon, or is the release still a ways off?

[wedgebert]

Just curious, is it worth it to start a new 5.60 campaign? I wanna start a new one, but I don't know if it'll be worth it to start one now if 5.70 is gonna be released soon, or is the release still a ways off?

That depends entirely on your personality. I personally have trouble starting any kind of new game when I know there's a major release on the horizion. Waited months for the new Dwarf Fortress to come out, I currently can't play Civ V because there's an expansion pack coming out next week and even tried to start a new game of Aurora a week or so ago. However knowing that at least a few of the things that bug me will be fixed soon (for some definitions of soon at least) along with new features, I couldn't get past the game creation screen.

Now if you're not quite so picky as me and you enjoy 5.6, then go ahead and start a new game. If you have fun then it's worth it.

[Steve Walmsley]

Just curious, is it worth it to start a new 5.60 campaign? I wanna start a new one, but I don't know if it'll be worth it to start one now if 5.70 is gonna be released soon, or is the release still a ways off?

A way off yet. I have quite a few changes left to code and a lot of testing.

Steve

[Deutschbag]

Okay then, I went ahead and started a new one.

It reminded me of something that's bugged me for a while, though: The promotion scores for ground officers. I feel like ground combat bonus gives way too much of a promotion score bonus compared to ground training. After all, ground training is a skill more important to higher officers than the combat bonus. Any chance you could change it so that ground combat bonus gives less of a promotion score boost and ground training gives more?

[Gyrfalcon]

That's debatable. An effective military commander is more likely to get promoted (assuming an absence of politics) in wartime over an effective trainer. While for meta-game reasons, you would want the person with the highest training scores in charge of brigades and divisions, from a RP perspective it does make sense that the commanders with the best grasp of military tactics would be more likely to be promoted.

[Deutschbag]

But then the issue occurs that officers with combat skill bonus but no trainer bonus don't get auto-assigned to lead brigades and divisions, so they get retired after 6 years. What this ends up meaning is, your most combat-effective officers (read: the ones that should be commanding battalions) are constantly getting promoted and then retired because they have no trainer bonus.

[xeryon]

I'm stuck on the whole new-Sol thing.  As soon as Steve posted those screen shots I couldn't bring myself to continue my current 5.6 game or start a new one.  *Very impatiently waiting - though trying hard not to show it*

As for officer distribution, the auto-assign feature really could use some tweaking.  I too have found officers unassigned to ships because of a lack of certain attributes.  Even though the lack of training bonuses makes them a poor choice for initial deployment they still bring bonuses to the ship that are useful at other times.  When quality officers are in short supply any warm body at the helm is better than nothing.  The current fix for this seems to be to overbuild on the training centers so you have a glut of officers for auto-assign to choose from.  Either that or resign yourself to micro-management of officer assignments.

I think an adjustment to how non-combat craft are assigned officers would help.  I often see quality officers assigned to otherwise worthless craft and main-line warships go unstaffed.  If I manually assign them the assignments default back at the next auto-assign unless I force them permanently.

[Person012345]

Ah, the bug fix is good. This actually affected me in my current game, as I had human freighters shipping things from my home planet to earth and I wasn't getting any taxes for it. At the time I actually just assumed I had misunderstood the taxation mechanics and thought nothing more of it IIRC.

[chrislocke2000]

Steve

Great to hear you are progressing with a test campaign, what did you settle on for a scenario?

Any chance you could drop a few example ship designs, am dying to see the impact of all of your changes!

[Deutschbag]

It'd be cool if you could even turn it into a fiction thing. Even if just a technical gameplay fiction just showing how the changes effect the game.

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve

Great to hear you are progressing with a test campaign, what did you settle on for a scenario?

Any chance you could drop a few example ship designs, am dying to see the impact of all of your changes!

I have been doing some writing up, although not much. Here is the starting blurb I came up with:

In late 1940 the Third Reich directly controlled much of Europe and was either allied or had friendly relations with the remaining independent European powers, with the exception of the United Kingdom. Plans to invade the UK had been abandoned after the Battle of Britain and Germany turned its gaze on the Soviet Union. Japan was heavily engaged in its Chinese war and the United States remained an isolationist power. The Soviet Union was recovering from the purges of the late 1930s and had recently fought a costly but successful war with Finland.

On November 1st 1940, the Swedish scientist Niels Bohr published a paper describing a new theoretical field of physics, quickly dubbed as Trans-Newtonian, which would transform the world, opening up new manufacturing processes and allowing weapons of incredible power. Scientists around the world initially dismissed the claims as fantasy, especially the existence of the so-called Trans-Newtonian minerals which Bohr asserted could be mined from the core of the planet. Albert Einstein, normally an academic opponent of Bohr in debates on classical physics vs. quantum physics, declared his support for Bohr's theories and suddenly every nation in the world began to take notice. Within months, the theories were accepted as facts and work began on extracting the new minerals and converting factories to use the newly discovered technologies.

All the major powers realised that once new Trans-Newtonian weapons were available, continuation of the war in Europe could lead to the destruction of the entire planet. A peace conference was held in Geneva and a non-aggression pact was signed between the British Empire and the Third Reich. Germany remained in control of much of Europe and those European countries that had not been conquered, such as Italy and Spain, soon fell under strong German influence. In the Far East, Japan concentrated on conquering China as quickly as possible. Plans for a strike against the USA were abandoned as Japan's lack of natural resources were no longer an issue. The UK quickly transformed its own industry and began building up the industrial potential of the major Commonwealth countries, such as Canada, Australia and India. The USA, conscious of its limited population compared to the other major powers, began to emerge from isolation and sought to build alliances with other nations in the New World, such as Brazil and Mexico.

By the end of 1945, the world was split into five major power blocs; the Commonwealth, the United States, The Empire of Japan, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. All their industry was fully converted to the new Trans-Newtonian technology. While it remained obvious to the leaders of the great powers that an all-out world war would result in nothing less than mutual destruction, they all had a new goal in mind - the conquest of space. Almost simultaneously, the five great powers turned their eyes toward the heavens, in search of new resources and new worlds to conquer.

Commonwealth
Australia, Burma, Canada, Iceland, India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Malaya, Malta, Nepal, Newfoundland, New Zealand, New Guinea, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom
Population: 525m
Wealth and Industrial Percentage: 75%

Third Reich
Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria,  Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Ruanda-Urundi, Spain, Turkey, Yugoslavia
Population: 360m
Wealth and Industrial Percentage: 100%

United States
Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Philippines, United States
Population: 210m
Wealth and Industrial Percentage: 150%

Empire of Japan
China, Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Japan, Portuguese Timor, Korea, South Pacific Mandate
Population 700m
Wealth and Industrial Percentage: 25%

Soviet Union
Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Soviet Union
Population 180m
Wealth and Industrial Percentage: 100%

All nations start with no shipyards, 30 research labs, and 50,000 research points that may only be spent on Construction/Production techs. The UK and USA are Friendly, as are the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan. All other relationships are neutral.

(I guess I should really start a thread in fiction)

[symon]

Hmm, this has all the makings of a good campaign!

[TheDeadlyShoe]

China loses before the game even starts? A new low!   

[Beersatron]

China loses before the game even starts? A new low!   

Ha!

That was one of things I liked about the last campaign, China were making a come back.