Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[Andrew]

Why would PGM's be unique to CAS , at the moment artillery has precision munitions available and that will only get more common

[Scandinavian]

Precision munitions still aren't better than your fire direction. Even with undisputed air control, undirected indirect fire is mostly a way to punctuate press releases with explosions, not really a useful tool to attrition enemy formations. Target discrimination from the air is, so far at least, an art form that eludes the ken of human air forces. That *might* change with cheap, low-flying, high camera resolution, high data bandwidth drones. But it hasn't yet. (And probably won't, because people are going to learn how to shoot down drones too, eventually.)

Vehicles are more vulnerable than infantry and static positions, because they can neither hide nor dig in as well. But even vehicle casualties to undirected bombardment have proven lackluster and overhyped in a lot of historical conflicts where the defenders' archives have been opened to researchers. Turns out people who like launching undirected indirect bombardments often replicate their bad target identification in memoirs and after action reports, leading to exaggerated claims of effectiveness (and undercounted collateral damage). And for various institutional reasons the claims made by air forces about their operations tend to be given more air time and credence than the claims made by their victims.

Undirected indirect fire is really useful for blowing up oil and gas infrastructure. But oil and gas infra is, ah, temperamental at the best of times, and will blow up without much provocation.

In related notes, artillery (and orbital bombardment and CAS, both of which are really just expensive artillery) should probably have an efficiency bonus when used in an infantry support or counterbattery roles and an efficiency malus when not used in a combined arms role with infantry.

[nakorkren]

In the fleet orders tab where it lists currently queued orders, would it be possible to list the time to complete each step? It's been said before that order durations are solely based on distance, and that's unfortunate but ok, but it would help to at least be able to tell how long it'll take that colony ship to GET to it's target, particularly when it's on a Cycle and all you can tell is the total cycle duration.

[nuclearslurpee]

The ability to rename fighters in a squadron based on the squadron name would be useful.

What I envision here is that if you have, say, a dozen X-Wings on a carrier grouped as "Red Squadron", it would be nice to have a button to click which would name those fighters as "Red 01", "Red 02", and so on up to "Red 12". Purely for flavor and QoL of course.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Precision munitions still aren't better than your fire direction. Even with undisputed air control, undirected indirect fire is mostly a way to punctuate press releases with explosions, not really a useful tool to attrition enemy formations. Target discrimination from the air is, so far at least, an art form that eludes the ken of human air forces. That *might* change with cheap, low-flying, high camera resolution, high data bandwidth drones. But it hasn't yet. (And probably won't, because people are going to learn how to shoot down drones too, eventually.)

Vehicles are more vulnerable than infantry and static positions, because they can neither hide nor dig in as well. But even vehicle casualties to undirected bombardment have proven lackluster and overhyped in a lot of historical conflicts where the defenders' archives have been opened to researchers. Turns out people who like launching undirected indirect bombardments often replicate their bad target identification in memoirs and after action reports, leading to exaggerated claims of effectiveness (and undercounted collateral damage). And for various institutional reasons the claims made by air forces about their operations tend to be given more air time and credence than the claims made by their victims.

Undirected indirect fire is really useful for blowing up oil and gas infrastructure. But oil and gas infra is, ah, temperamental at the best of times, and will blow up without much provocation.

In related notes, artillery (and orbital bombardment and CAS, both of which are really just expensive artillery) should probably have an efficiency bonus when used in an infantry support or counterbattery roles and an efficiency malus when not used in a combined arms role with infantry.

I think you would be surprised what modern air to ground radar, thermal and other optical cameras combined with AI can do for surveillance effort at high altitudes. If you have total air dominance the drones can more or less operate with impunity to monitor and survey 24/7. These drones will see everything no matter the weather, more or less. Perhaps not in a heavy snowstorm blitz, but then no one would be able to do anything on the ground anyway.

It obviously will always be a group effort from many other surveillance platforms, ground and air...

[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.

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.

That was air power, not artillery. Desert Storm is also an outlier - the world's largest and most advanced air force, with allies too, could pound the defender for a month in impunity in the most favourable terrain possible. USA could not replicate its success even in Kosovo just few years later. But I do agree that complete air dominance combined with PGMs can get really effective in neutralizing your opponent.

However, artillery isn't there yet and probably never will. And anyway, this was as a response to the earlier poster.

[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.

That was air power, not artillery. Desert Storm is also an outlier - the world's largest and most advanced air force, with allies too, could pound the defender for a month in impunity in the most favourable terrain possible. USA could not replicate its success even in Kosovo just few years later. But I do agree that complete air dominance combined with PGMs can get really effective in neutralizing your opponent.

However, artillery isn't there yet and probably never will. And anyway, this was as a response to the earlier poster.

Dessert Storm has not been replicated because there has been no similar situation where one modern power went in with all force in all domains, this never happened in Kossovo so that is very different.

Artillery is certainly there when it comes to precision as they are able to strike with a few meters, as long as you have the coordinates. The new Anti-armour shells against vehicles have shown to have devastating effect against vehicles too, these are not just anecdotal facts. Artillery in current affairs stand for about 60-70% of all casualties of all sorts, that is pure fact. If any side also have air dominance then indirect (both ground and air launched) fire would likely cause even more devastation.

Artillery and air-to-ground effects in Aurora is underperforming by ALLOT... even during WW2 artillery was the main contributor to casualties where artillery and mortar stood for abut 65-70% casualties and small arms for about 15-20% in the European theatre. In the Pacific artillery casualties was smaller as artillery was not a useful on the smaller islands, so more like 50%, bit still higher than small arms that was about 30%. These figures was taken from a study made by the "Office of Medical History" in the US.

[Garfunkel]

There's more nuance to that argument but it's also very much off-topic for this thread. If you want to continue discussing it further, open a thread in Off-topic and we can keep going there, Jorgen.

[SikeSky]

Why are very small jump engines restricted to standard transit only? I'd like to be able to create small jump scouts that can fit a good number on a carrier, but even with fairly advanced jump tech I have to put aside ~500 tons for a jump drive capable of squadron transit.  The part I like most about Aurora's ship design is the complete freedom it provides when it comes to doctrine, but this just puts a foot down on what I'd like to do.

[nuclearslurpee]

Why are very small jump engines restricted to standard transit only? I'd like to be able to create small jump scouts that can fit a good number on a carrier, but even with fairly advanced jump tech I have to put aside ~500 tons for a jump drive capable of squadron transit.  The part I like most about Aurora's ship design is the complete freedom it provides when it comes to doctrine, but this just puts a foot down on what I'd like to do.

There is a tech line which can be used to reduce the minimum size for a squadron jump-capable jump drive, with the highest level being size 2 at 250k RP - so it is clearly meant to be considered as an advanced capability. It is possible to change these values in the DB if you consider the concept objectionable, or you can use SM mode to research the maximum tech level - any of these methods are more than okay as using SM mode is part of how Aurora is meant to be played!

[nakorkren]

When you get hit by something that does shock damage, the message just says, "Damage per Hit 25   Penetrating Hits 1", but does not indicate that it didn't technically penetrate, it was actually shock damage. Could the summary instead say something like "Total Hits 1   Penetrating Hits 0   Concussive Hits 1"? That may help players recognize when shock is playing a factor in combat, at least when it applies to themselves getting hit.

The attacker who succeeds at causing shock damage despite not penetrating currently sees "Total Hits 1   Penetrating Hits 1", which I would argue is inconsistent and misleading since it didn't actually penetrate and you as the attacker would have no way of knowing that it did internal shock damage, it would just look like a normal armor hit. However, in the interest of having fun game (rather than being a slave to realism), I would recommend that the attacker get the same summary as the defender i.e. something like "Total Hits 1   Penetrating Hits 0   Concussive Hits 1", just without the detail that the defender gets about what was actually damaged internally.

[superstrijder15]

Could we get a way to "repair" ground units without havign to guess or calculate their losses and make a seperate formation consisting of those losses whcih is then used as replacement? I was thinking of something like how in construction or shipyards you can pick multiple options. The GU training window could get such a dropdown with the default being constructing formations, and the alternative something like "reconstiture formations". Picking that would let you select one of your formations, and the difference between it and the formation template would be calculated & it would build those exact units. Until that is finished, the unit would have some limitations (eg. slowly losing fortification rather than gaining it, not being able to be moved onto ships and not being able to be put in attack mode) but afterwards you could be sure the units were full strength. 
The replacements mechanic would still be useful for combat but this reconstitution would allow easier control over what reserves you have.

Ideally there would also be a "reconstitute unit and all subordinate units" optiono which allows easily reconstituting eg. an army, which then automatically reconstitutes all its corps, all of their divisions, and so on.

Seperately, I would also like a "load ground unit and all subordinates" order for ships so I can easily load an entire army without havign to load each unit in the OOB seperately.

[Garfunkel]

Separately, I would also like a "load ground unit and all subordinates" order for ships so I can easily load an entire army without havign to load each unit in the OOB separately.

This already exists.

[Carthar]

Raiders are a great early game enemy but become a micromanagement hassle by the mid game.  A sunsetting mechanic for them would be nice.  Yes you can just turn them off after a while, but that feels less thematic. 

I'd love to see a sunsetting mechanic, something like:
    - A tech that can be researched which can stop raiders spawning
    - Research and build a device that stops spawns in a system
    - Having all the jump points stabilized would prevent spawning in that system by stabilizing the ether
    - A certain amount of PPV in a system would lock that system down
    - Research a jump drive that can jump to their home base and destroying it would stop the spawns
    - Spawn of some sort of "boss" fleet after a set amount of time/exploration that when defeated would stop the spawns

Anyways, that is my 2 cents. .

[nuclearslurpee]

Raiders are a great early game enemy but become a micromanagement hassle by the mid game.  A sunsetting mechanic for them would be nice.  Yes you can just turn them off after a while, but that feels less thematic. 

I'd love to see a sunsetting mechanic, something like:
    - A tech that can be researched which can stop raiders spawning
    - Research and build a device that stops spawns in a system
    - Having all the jump points stabilized would prevent spawning in that system by stabilizing the ether
    - A certain amount of PPV in a system would lock that system down
    - Research a jump drive that can jump to their home base and destroying it would stop the spawns
    - Spawn of some sort of "boss" fleet after a set amount of time/exploration that when defeated would stop the spawns

Anyways, that is my 2 cents. .

Would an interesting alternative be that the Raiders attack less frequently, but in greater force, as the game advances? That way as an empire grows, the micromanagement load from Raiders would not grow so much, and they would hopefully remain challenging enough to fend off that they remain fun to play against.