Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[rainyday]

It would be great if the game highlighted commanders with the "Story Character" flag set in the left panel of the main Commanders screen. This already supports colored text for characters with medical issues. It would make things a lot easier trying to find specific people when you have 100s of commanders in each rank.

EDIT:  It might also be useful if we could SM edit the age of characters as doing so in the database is somewhat cumbersome and error prone.

[Garfunkel]

Formation Level Capabilities, rather than Element Level Capabilities

But why? And what would happen if a unit/element is moved from formation A to formation B? Will it lose formation A capabilities?

Reduced Missile Radiation Research Line
We can research enhanced missile radiation if we want to glass planets, but what if we could research reduced missile radiation for tactical ballistic missiles for use in assisting ground forces without ruining the planet?

You can do that already via orbital bombardment from space ships and having FFD units on the ground. Having "clean" missiles that you can shoot safely from outside STO range means that they would basically lose their effectiveness completely. Currently players have to choose between bringing their ships into harm's way if they want to take the planet intact, or just glassing it into an irradiated hellhole.

[Coleslaw]

Formation Level Capabilities, rather than Element Level Capabilities

But why? And what would happen if a unit/element is moved from formation A to formation B? Will it lose formation A capabilities?

As it stands, to have various different formations with different capabilities you have to research several copies of the same element with the only change being their capability. If I want a formation that has jungle fighting, a formation that has mountain fighting, a formation that has desert fighting, and so on, I have to design and research what is essentially the same unit several times with the only difference between them being capability. God forbid the element I'm trying to give capabilities has various element types in it because that compounds the issue. At that point, the list of ground elements is going to be so cluttered with dozens of units whose only distinguishing factor is that one fights slightly better in extreme temperatures, one fights slightly better in the mountains, one fights slightly better in the desert, etc.

Any combat-related supporting elements will also require various versions, including artillery. So now you also have to research various different capabilities of artillery.

Then, if you have any HQs that double as combat units, you're going to have to research various different capabilities for them.

What I've resorted to doing is making "Elite" formations that have all capabilities because the micromanagement and clutter of 7 of the same-but-technically-different riflemen, tanks, artillery, etc., is just not worth it in my eyes. If one could just build, say, 6 of the same infantry battalions, then select the formation and do just a few clicks to give them a certain capability, then in my eyes it avoids a lot of player headache.

As for what happens to units moved from formation-with-capability to formation-without-capability, they would lose the capability, moral, and if the cost is greater you pay the difference (if not, you don't.) Again, I picture this as "retraining, rearming, refitting" whatever abstraction works for you. An alternative is that capabilities gets applied to the elements by the formation template. As in, I mark a template as having, say, desert warfare capabilities, its cost increases at the rate of the desert warfare capability, and once I build the formation, its elements have the capability.

I'm mostly just spitballing, I'm sure there are reasons like this that inevitably made Steve decide on capabilities being on an element-by-element basis rather than on a formation-basis.

Reduced Missile Radiation Research Line
We can research enhanced missile radiation if we want to glass planets, but what if we could research reduced missile radiation for tactical ballistic missiles for use in assisting ground forces without ruining the planet?

You can do that already via orbital bombardment from space ships and having FFD units on the ground. Having "clean" missiles that you can shoot safely from outside STO range means that they would basically lose their effectiveness completely. Currently players have to choose between bringing their ships into harm's way if they want to take the planet intact, or just glassing it into an irradiated hellhole.

Fair enough.

[Garfunkel]

Yeah, I can see the value in reducing the need to design and research basically the same thing over and over. You can work around it by having all your main forces jungle + mountain trained as that will cover all (near-)habitable planets for major campaigns and then have a small number of special forces-type units for fighting in extreme pressure, extreme temperature, and so on, for the few occasional situations that require that. There isn't really a mechanical need to have large numbers of units for each speciality.

Perhaps a better way would be to separate them into 2 different categories: inherent element level equipment & capability and formation level training & special equipment. This way gene mods and power armour and boarding capability would be inherent to a unit element (as well as avoid combat), whereas environment/climate/terrain capabilities would be done at formation level and could also be "re-trained & re-equipped" based on needs.

[mike2R]

This may be more hassle than its worth to change, but one minor issue I run into is that routes which include LP jumps can get outdated as orbital motion moves planets move LPs around. 

E.g. A jump between LPs for an outer and inner planet around the same primary will be a shortcut when the outer planet is in one position, but many years later, when the outer planet has moved significantly around its orbit, it will involve flying a much longer route compared to not using the LP at all.  This becomes an issue with things like mineral freighter routes that have longstanding cycled orders, and with order templates that are made in early game and still used much later.

A solution would be to not have LP baked into the route, but be something a fleet calculates for each order as it starts it.  So when its next action involves moving somewhere, it makes a calculation then to see if it can save time by using an LP jump, and incorporates it if so.  This would also let fleets on old orders take advantage of newly created LPs

[superstrijder15]

Right now the mineral window sort by mineral amount, starting with Duranium, then for places without Duranium it sorts by system name but not alphabetically (I think it might be order of discovery/generation). It might be nice to allow sorting on any one mineral or on the systems, to allow finding bodies with high amounts of a specific mineral more easily and allow finding systems which have the minerals I need.

[Coleslaw]

Element "Refits"

What if we could "refit" elements to another element that is of the same base type? For instance, say I have an infantry element with PW, but I design and research a modern infantry element with PWI and a capability. In the ground units screen, I could go to that element in a formation (or at any superior HQ formation to select ALL the elements in an entire formation) and select the element in the tree (i.e., at the very top of the hierarchy), then select "refit to", then make my selection like I'm refitting a ship. Then, it'll remove the old units, I pay the difference in cost between the original element and the new element, and it submits new "refit formations" to the ground force construction queue that automatically get attached to their original formations once they're completed. If a formation gets moved from a planet before the refit formation is complete, it just gets added to the population like a regular new formation.

[nakorkren]

A few ideas for ground combat:

• Make Artillery ignore the target's fortification bonus but have an extra malus vs units with evasion. This would make artillery more useful in assaulting dug-in defenders without making it overpowered, and make light vehicles more useful as a counterbalance vs artillery-heavy forces.
• Update the existing breakthrough mechanism (where attacker who achieves breakthrough get a 2nd attack round) to be based on the relative size and and maneuver of sum of front-line attackers vs front line defenders, and have the 2nd attack be weighted to be more likely to be against support or rear echelon units. It's possible this is how it already works (at least how the 2nd attack is targeted), but I haven't been able to find enough documentation to confirm/deny. This would make actual formation size less critical in determining breakthrough (so people can make formations whatever size their OOB heart desires) and give both assaulting and defending forces a reason to keep some units on attack and some on defense, lest you open yourself up to massive breakthroughs. You could also give the defenders some partial credit (0.25?) for their own front line attackers since they should at least help screen from the enemy attackers. 
• Add a new mechanism called "Rout", where the attacking unit gets a 2nd attack round against the same target, and make it based on relative size of attacking unit vs defending unit and the moral of the defending unit

[xenoscepter]

 --- I had an idea for designable hangars, thought I'd share it here. So instead of what we have now, you know, with the various modules we'd have bespoke modules which we designed, not unlike engines or the like. Unlike the modules we have, Hangars would be a "one type only" much like engines or jump drives are. You can have as many of the same type as you want, but you cannot mix different types.

 --- You would choose size from a drop down, not unlike Jump Drives, and that would determine Capacity. You would have a dropdown for Refueling, Repair (DCR in effect), and Reload. These three would have a 1.0x multiplier to start, and increasing that would increase size and cost.

 --- These new bespoke Hangars would come in one of two types, Commercial and Military, chosen from a drop down like Jump Drives. These would follow the existing rules as is with regards to ship types. All Hangars would provide Maintenance and Deployment Freeze / Reduction as they already do with respect to type of hangar.

 --- Optionally, Commercial Hangars could be cheaper per Capacity than Military. Likewise, Hangars could have the option to build in armor. It might also be useful to allow Refuel / Repair / Reload multipliers of less than 1.0x all the way down to zero, but having no size reduction only cost reduction. Unless something else would have been increased, in which case the aize would decrease but never fall a certain threshold of Capacity plus... Something else. I haven't mathed that one out yet.

 --- Additionally a new feature/ mechanic could be a sort of Shield Boost; basically a system which would give a shielded fighter some shield strength on launch, allowing cheap very low recharge shields to be useful on Fighters by mitigating the recharge on the initial launch. Likewise, shield boost could allow shields to be overclocked, but induce a launch delay while the shields charged up.

 --- Gameplay wise I think this could add several things, verisimilitude chief among them. For role play, the player could have specialized hangar types and thus greater variety and character for their designs. Mechanically, this allows more investment in dedicated Fleet Carriers while Escort Carriers could conceivably be smaller and / or cheaper. Beam Based carriers could specialize in Refuel / Repair, but drop reload to 0 to make themselves cheaper and smaller. Missile Based Carriers could go heavy into Reload to increase effectiveness at a cost.

[Droll]

--- I had an idea for designable hangars, thought I'd share it here. So instead of what we have now, you know, with the various modules we'd have bespoke modules which we designed, not unlike engines or the like. Unlike the modules we have, Hangars would be a "one type only" much like engines or jump drives are. You can have as many of the same type as you want, but you cannot mix different types.

 --- You would choose size from a drop down, not unlike Jump Drives, and that would determine Capacity. You would have a dropdown for Refueling, Repair (DCR in effect), and Reload. These three would have a 1.0x multiplier to start, and increasing that would increase size and cost.

 --- These new bespoke Hangars would come in one of two types, Commercial and Military, chosen from a drop down like Jump Drives. These would follow the existing rules as is with regards to ship types. All Hangars would provide Maintenance and Deployment Freeze / Reduction as they already do with respect to type of hangar.

 --- Optionally, Commercial Hangars could be cheaper per Capacity than Military. Likewise, Hangars could have the option to build in armor. It might also be useful to allow Refuel / Repair / Reload multipliers of less than 1.0x all the way down to zero, but having no size reduction only cost reduction. Unless something else would have been increased, in which case the aize would decrease but never fall a certain threshold of Capacity plus... Something else. I haven't mathed that one out yet.

 --- Additionally a new feature/ mechanic could be a sort of Shield Boost; basically a system which would give a shielded fighter some shield strength on launch, allowing cheap very low recharge shields to be useful on Fighters by mitigating the recharge on the initial launch. Likewise, shield boost could allow shields to be overclocked, but induce a launch delay while the shields charged up.

 --- Gameplay wise I think this could add several things, verisimilitude chief among them. For role play, the player could have specialized hangar types and thus greater variety and character for their designs. Mechanically, this allows more investment in dedicated Fleet Carriers while Escort Carriers could conceivably be smaller and / or cheaper. Beam Based carriers could specialize in Refuel / Repair, but drop reload to 0 to make themselves cheaper and smaller. Missile Based Carriers could go heavy into Reload to increase effectiveness at a cost.

Another option could be maximum ship size, though I think many would prefer the maximum of this tech to be quite high as it can kill the "jump carrier" design that I know some people like using. A compromise would be to have a potentially quite expensive "uncapped" option which allows you to dock whatever but in the case of a combat carrier you could cap it to like 500 tons so that only fighters can dock or 1000 tons if you want FACs.

[Jorgen_CAB]

--- I had an idea for designable hangars, thought I'd share it here. So instead of what we have now, you know, with the various modules we'd have bespoke modules which we designed, not unlike engines or the like. Unlike the modules we have, Hangars would be a "one type only" much like engines or jump drives are. You can have as many of the same type as you want, but you cannot mix different types.

 --- You would choose size from a drop down, not unlike Jump Drives, and that would determine Capacity. You would have a dropdown for Refueling, Repair (DCR in effect), and Reload. These three would have a 1.0x multiplier to start, and increasing that would increase size and cost.

 --- These new bespoke Hangars would come in one of two types, Commercial and Military, chosen from a drop down like Jump Drives. These would follow the existing rules as is with regards to ship types. All Hangars would provide Maintenance and Deployment Freeze / Reduction as they already do with respect to type of hangar.

 --- Optionally, Commercial Hangars could be cheaper per Capacity than Military. Likewise, Hangars could have the option to build in armor. It might also be useful to allow Refuel / Repair / Reload multipliers of less than 1.0x all the way down to zero, but having no size reduction only cost reduction. Unless something else would have been increased, in which case the aize would decrease but never fall a certain threshold of Capacity plus... Something else. I haven't mathed that one out yet.

 --- Additionally a new feature/ mechanic could be a sort of Shield Boost; basically a system which would give a shielded fighter some shield strength on launch, allowing cheap very low recharge shields to be useful on Fighters by mitigating the recharge on the initial launch. Likewise, shield boost could allow shields to be overclocked, but induce a launch delay while the shields charged up.

 --- Gameplay wise I think this could add several things, verisimilitude chief among them. For role play, the player could have specialized hangar types and thus greater variety and character for their designs. Mechanically, this allows more investment in dedicated Fleet Carriers while Escort Carriers could conceivably be smaller and / or cheaper. Beam Based carriers could specialize in Refuel / Repair, but drop reload to 0 to make themselves cheaper and smaller. Missile Based Carriers could go heavy into Reload to increase effectiveness at a cost.

Another option could be maximum ship size, though I think many would prefer the maximum of this tech to be quite high as it can kill the "jump carrier" design that I know some people like using. A compromise would be to have a potentially quite expensive "uncapped" option which allows you to dock whatever but in the case of a combat carrier you could cap it to like 500 tons so that only fighters can dock or 1000 tons if you want FACs.

Why not add launch and retrieve capacity as well.

Right now I think that hangars can hold way too much tonnage for its size  too... fighter crafts and hangar crafts in general is very powerful in a fleets arsenal. They add quite a multiplicative force to a fleet that is hard to counter with your own fighters or small crafts around.

I have tried to play with multiple faction where one side refused to use small crafts and it always result in them being quite inferior in capacity in general.

[nuclearslurpee]

Make Artillery ignore the target's fortification bonus but have an extra malus vs units with evasion. This would make artillery more useful in assaulting dug-in defenders without making it overpowered, and make light vehicles more useful as a counterbalance vs artillery-heavy forces.

As much as this sounds realistic, I would not support this as it means artillery is even weaker for the defending units, which makes the design of defensive formations less interesting as they have fewer good options. I also am not sure it is actually realistic, used defensively artillery is certainly effective especially through collateral damage to the battlefield making an enemy advance more difficult.

Update the existing breakthrough mechanism (where attacker who achieves breakthrough get a 2nd attack round) to be based on the relative size and and maneuver of sum of front-line attackers vs front line defenders, and have the 2nd attack be weighted to be more likely to be against support or rear echelon units. It's possible this is how it already works (at least how the 2nd attack is targeted), but I haven't been able to find enough documentation to confirm/deny. This would make actual formation size less critical in determining breakthrough (so people can make formations whatever size their OOB heart desires) and give both assaulting and defending forces a reason to keep some units on attack and some on defense, lest you open yourself up to massive breakthroughs. You could also give the defenders some partial credit (0.25?) for their own front line attackers since they should at least help screen from the enemy attackers.

Documentation: Wiki page here, relevant Steve posts here about breakthrough and here about the Maneuver bonus (not much but confirms that it has an effect). Note that Maneuver is a commander skill so should be on a per-formation basis anyways. 2nd attacks can target the rear lines with the same probability as a normal attack from the front line attacking stance. Note also the importance of cohesion (which is where most of the formation size effect factors in) which is not mentioned in your discussion so I wanted to highlight this.

My sense is that this mechanic as proposed boils down to giving the larger force an even bigger advantage from numbers alone than they already get. Given that one of the complaints about ground combat is that it is "too predictable" I am not sure this is a good direction to move in. I will also note that right now we do not have a way to see the stance of enemy formations in the game, and I do not know how we could feasibly put that information into the UI. Without that information, a mechanic which directly depends on setting up your own formations to exploit or counter those of your enemy would be rather opaque and frustrating for the player.

Add a new mechanism called "Rout", where the attacking unit gets a 2nd attack round against the same target, and make it based on relative size of attacking unit vs defending unit and the moral of the defending unit

I think the current breakthrough mechanism is a reasonable approximation for a rout. What we term "breakthrough" can really represent any number of things on a battlefield... routing, flanking, rushing a trench, deep penetration, and so on - note that in Aurora we can have "front line defense" formations break through which implies an even greater range of possibilities. I don't think we need to start atomizing the many ways a formation can "break through".

--- You would choose size from a drop down, not unlike Jump Drives, and that would determine Capacity. You would have a dropdown for Refueling, Repair (DCR in effect), and Reload. These three would have a 1.0x multiplier to start, and increasing that would increase size and cost.

Steve has said in the past that he specifically does not want to deal with hangars having fixed refueling, repair, etc. rates which is why they currently just automatically upgrade. I will also say, the size/cost multiplier here would have to be very generous to make up for the major downside of having fewer fighters in a wing. I won't care about 2x refueling or reload rate if my strike wing is half the size. That being said, it could work if done well and I do like this idea of adding more interest into carrier design, although it is already one of the more complicated areas of ship design so I am unsure how well that complexity would be received by the player base.

--- Additionally a new feature/ mechanic could be a sort of Shield Boost; basically a system which would give a shielded fighter some shield strength on launch, allowing cheap very low recharge shields to be useful on Fighters by mitigating the recharge on the initial launch. Likewise, shield boost could allow shields to be overclocked, but induce a launch delay while the shields charged up.

This will not really do anything for shields on fighters. The root issue is that shield strength scales with size^(3/2), so any shield which is small enough to put on a fighter will give only about 30% to 40% of the base tech rate per HS, which is effectively nothing compared to the same size of armor. If you really want fighter defenses (why??) armor is so far superior it is not even funny.

Right now I think that hangars can hold way too much tonnage for its size  too... fighter crafts and hangar crafts in general is very powerful in a fleets arsenal. They add quite a multiplicative force to a fleet that is hard to counter with your own fighters or small crafts around.

Fortunately it is pretty easy to mod this, I have tried it before in a "hard mode" kind of modded DB and it made carrier design much more challenging, definitely not everybody's cup of tea though given how much of carrier efficacy is tied to the size of the strike wing.

I think Steve has said that the unrealistic space efficiency of hangars is a bit of a compromise for the fact that fighters are so large compared to most sci-fi canons, so this brings back some of the ability to model a strike wing of TIE Fighters or F-302s for those who like that sort of thing.

[Garfunkel]

Artillery is literally the defenders best friend. Even moving columns are relatively easy to hit, whereas dug in or fortified defender is relatively safe against artillery bombardment. This was true in WW1 and is still true today even with all the fancy precision munitions. The game should not have mechanics that fly completely against how things work in real life.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Artillery is literally the defenders best friend. Even moving columns are relatively easy to hit, whereas dug in or fortified defender is relatively safe against artillery bombardment. This was true in WW1 and is still true today even with all the fancy precision munitions. The game should not have mechanics that fly completely against how things work in real life.

I might not agree with moderns precision guided munition. They sort of make static fortification pretty pointless if you have total air dominance... that means you have the means to localize and destroy anything you want where you want, when you want... this we saw for example in Desert Storm. Enemy major fortifications was run over as if they were hardly there... it is only when the sides are roughly equal or lack proper air dominance and/or have lack of precision guided munition that fortification is really strong.

[Droll]

Artillery is literally the defenders best friend. Even moving columns are relatively easy to hit, whereas dug in or fortified defender is relatively safe against artillery bombardment. This was true in WW1 and is still true today even with all the fancy precision munitions. The game should not have mechanics that fly completely against how things work in real life.

I might not agree with moderns precision guided munition. They sort of make static fortification pretty pointless if you have total air dominance... that means you have the means to localize and destroy anything you want where you want, when you want... this we saw for example in Desert Storm. Enemy major fortifications was run over as if they were hardly there... it is only when the sides are roughly equal or lack proper air dominance and/or have lack of precision guided munition that fortification is really strong.

There is an idea here that might help with making CAS fighters more useful, as well as the (somewhat undewhelming) direct damage they do to units, they should also reduce the fortification level of the elements that they attack. Would also allow one to differentiate more between the various ground attack weapons.