I have made the following changes and additions for v2.5
You no longer need to manually assign alien ships and alien classes using the Tactical Intelligence Window. When you get an active sensor contact, Aurora will automatically check to see if this ship has been detected before by your race. If not, the program checks to see if this is a new member of a known class. If it is, the program provides a default name for the alien ship and adds it to the known members of the class. If not, the program creates a new alien class and makes the alien ship the first member. If this is a new class, the program also checks the race that built the ship (not necessarily the race that is the current owner). If this is a known race, you will be informed which race built the ship. If not, a new alien race will be created and given a default name (Alien Race #21 for example). So a new contact might have the event text:
New Contact! Ship ID175 - Alien Class #70 (Alien Race #22). New Ship! New Class! New Race! TCS 214 T839The Tactical Intelligence Window now has a slightly different layout with the known alien races in the top left. As you select each known race, the class dropdown is populated with the known classes for that race. As you select an alien class, a list of known ships in that class are listed in the grid control showing the last time they were seen (possibly current), the system, the alien ship name, its speed, current shields and thermal signature.
You can rename races, classes and ships, as well as renumbering all known ships for a particular alien class. This means that what you call an alien race or an alien class is not necessarily what the aliens call themselves or their ships. For example, you might decide that Alien Race #22 is going to be called the "Arachnids" and that Alien Class #70 is the "Devourer". If you encounter a new ship of that class, the Event Message would be:
New Contact! Ship ID176 - Devourer (Arachnids). New Ship! TCS 214 T839Now lets say you use the renumber option for the Devourer class so Ship Ship ID175 becomes Devourer 001 and Ship ID176 becomes Devourer 002 (or you could rename them individually to whatever you like). Now you see one of the ships later in the game. The event would be:
New Contact! Devourer 001 - Devourer (Arachnids). TCS 214 T839Apart from the renaming, all of the above is handled automatically. Your intelligence staff classify each contact, determine its class and race etc and whether it has been seen before. New ships, classes and races are identified and given generic names by the program.
Tactical Intelligence in terms of determining the capability of each class works as before. Your staff keep track of every member of an alien class and inform you of the maximum observed speed (based on the movement of a contact over time), the max observed shield strength, shield recharge rate, ECM strength and armour strength. As members of a class use weapons and active sensors, details of the strength and performance of those sensors and weapons are recorded against the alien class description on the tactical intelligence window. This should be more useful than before though as it will be automatically recorded for every contact so you will get more information with much less effort.
New for v2.5 is that all sensor types will have a chance of learning technical information about the tech systems on alien ships. Some things are easier to learn than other, depending on the activities of the ship being scanned. The resulting tech data will be based on one or more of the background techs that went into the creation of the ship system and the number of tech points from each successful attempt will range from 0.1% to 10% of the total points needed for the next available level of that background tech. Thermal sensors will attempt to gain technical information on the performance of alien engines, while EM sensors will potentially gain information about shields. This can happen by scanning active alien shields over time or by assessing the results of a weapon hit on the shields. GPD sensors will try to analyse information on alien active sensors.
Active sensors provide a wide variety of potential information. Simply by scanning an alien ship over a period of time there is a small chance to learn some information about any of the ship systems. Other circumstances in which tech data may be gathered by active sensors include data on armour that is hit by a weapon, data on ECM systems used to reduce the chance of a hit and data on weapon systems in the act of firing. Much of this information can be gathered by any ships in the vicinity of a battle that are not taking part. For example, if two races were engaged in a battle, a third race could monitor every weapon being fired and every shield and armour hit. Engine and shield data could also be gathered by thermal and EM sensors while GPD sensors monitor the active sensors of the combatants. All of this data is gathered automatically and the players will be notified when data is gathered.
If you observe a tech a long way above what you are capable of researching, the points are added to a lower version of the tech. For example, if you were using Visible Light Lasers and you observed the firing of an X-ray Laser, you may gain research points towards Near Ultraviolet Lasers as they are the next step on the way to X-ray Lasers.
When tech data is gathered, it is held by the ship on which the sensor gaining the information is mounted (and a new tab on the Ship window lists any such data). That data will be downloaded automatically to the nearest population with research facilities as soon as the ship is within the same system. If required, a ship can choose to hold on to data so the automatic download is not triggered.
I hope these changes will add a completely new dimension to the intelligence gathering side of Aurora and make scouting and intel missions an important part of the game. One drawback is that these changes make some significant changes to the amount of data that is gathered and structure of that data so I think I will have to abandon my current campaign. Starting new campaigns is always a lot of fun though
Steve
