v2.0.0 Changes Discussion Thread

[TMaekler]

If so can it happen that we are going to run out of lower ranks if there are not enough academies?

while true I don't really see this happening very often especially with the changes to the academies and truthfully i'd rather have this issue then the issue we have now where we have way to many lower rank officers for the amount of Senior officers we need especially if you play like i do and model the entire officer core from O1s to O10s

Agreed. This new system is way better and problems can be handled easier. It "doesn't really matter" if a lot of your 1.000 fighter planes don't have an officer onboard; but it does if there is a broken link in the upper ranks.

[xenoscepter]

 --- Maybe the wrong thread to make such a request, but could we get the Super Heavy / Ultra Heavy ground weapons rounded out. Or at least the Ultra-Heavy Anti-Vehicle? It bothers me that they're the only class of vehicle currently without a hard counter...

[Jorgen_CAB]

--- Maybe the wrong thread to make such a request, but could we get the Super Heavy / Ultra Heavy ground weapons rounded out. Or at least the Ultra-Heavy Anti-Vehicle? It bothers me that they're the only class of vehicle currently without a hard counter...

The hard counter to these vehicles are either static or medium tanks armed with Heavy Anti-vehicle weapons... these weapons are enough to knock them out. Depending on technology differences your anti-tank platforms are more efficient at their job than these super heavy or ultra heavy platforms, these platforms have such awful fire-power for their cost they are no really useful for anything but role-play.

If you make them more easy to take out they would just become even more worthless from a game mechanic to build.

[Vivalas]

First off, I'm super excited the officer corps mechanics are being re-worked. Having all starting officers being the same age always made me have to look the other way for RP reasons, so thanks for tweaking all that.

Second off, I'd like to second the proposals that starting age either be drastically shifted upwards or made a variable players can set. It would greatly help with immersion, for those who are more into the personnel side of the roleplay, I think. The crew tooltip always mentioned "enlisted and junior officers" for your total racial crew amount, so I always assumed the new lieutenant commanders were being promoted up from that abstract pool of crew, not graduating straight out of the academy.

I've always wanted to write a utility that generates service histories for your officers prior to attaining the minimum rank aurora tracks (generally lieutenant commander) and now that we have proper tracking of age, it's very tempting to jump on this after 2.0 drops. I dunno how much more you want to go into the officer stuff Steve, but if you want to make that a part of the base game as well that would be interesting  (basically just looking at what ships existed before an officer is "created" and generating a short history of service for the officer based on their bonuses. E.g., large tactical bonuses maybe had division officer/ department head roles in weapons, maybe the engineering officers had some section duty in an engine room or something, etc.)

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

First off, I'm super excited the officer corps mechanics are being re-worked. Having all starting officers being the same age always made me have to look the other way for RP reasons, so thanks for tweaking all that.

Second off, I'd like to second the proposals that starting age either be drastically shifted upwards or made a variable players can set. It would greatly help with immersion, for those who are more into the personnel side of the roleplay, I think. The crew tooltip always mentioned "enlisted and junior officers" for your total racial crew amount, so I always assumed the new lieutenant commanders were being promoted up from that abstract pool of crew, not graduating straight out of the academy.

I've always wanted to write a utility that generates service histories for your officers prior to attaining the minimum rank aurora tracks (generally lieutenant commander) and now that we have proper tracking of age, it's very tempting to jump on this after 2.0 drops. I dunno how much more you want to go into the officer stuff Steve, but if you want to make that a part of the base game as well that would be interesting  (basically just looking at what ships existed before an officer is "created" and generating a short history of service for the officer based on their bonuses. E.g., large tactical bonuses maybe had division officer/ department head roles in weapons, maybe the engineering officers had some section duty in an engine room or something, etc.)

You means something like the Traveller pre-game career path?

[Lornalt]

I tend to think of academies as not as  fresh out of school type of institutions but rather like a war college. It RPs better that way, If you ignore the ages lol...

[Vivalas]

First off, I'm super excited the officer corps mechanics are being re-worked. Having all starting officers being the same age always made me have to look the other way for RP reasons, so thanks for tweaking all that.

Second off, I'd like to second the proposals that starting age either be drastically shifted upwards or made a variable players can set. It would greatly help with immersion, for those who are more into the personnel side of the roleplay, I think. The crew tooltip always mentioned "enlisted and junior officers" for your total racial crew amount, so I always assumed the new lieutenant commanders were being promoted up from that abstract pool of crew, not graduating straight out of the academy.

I've always wanted to write a utility that generates service histories for your officers prior to attaining the minimum rank aurora tracks (generally lieutenant commander) and now that we have proper tracking of age, it's very tempting to jump on this after 2.0 drops. I dunno how much more you want to go into the officer stuff Steve, but if you want to make that a part of the base game as well that would be interesting  (basically just looking at what ships existed before an officer is "created" and generating a short history of service for the officer based on their bonuses. E.g., large tactical bonuses maybe had division officer/ department head roles in weapons, maybe the engineering officers had some section duty in an engine room or something, etc.)

You means something like the Traveller pre-game career path?

Hehe, yes, that's a bit of a stretch perhaps but that's the idea.

[dsedrez]

Playing my new game, I've just realized there's a potential problem with the new promotion scheme. I got a very long list of officer promotions and reassignments in the beginning of a new year, and it reminded me of this discussion here.

With Aurora C# we don't have tours of duty, but when officers get promoted they leave their posts and get reassigned to new ones, letting other officers assume their old ones (if you use automated assignments). So there's at least a partial rearrangement of the officers in charge, which eventually allows good junior officers to find good positions.

With the new scheme, there'll be even fewer officers being promoted, and the positions being open for assignment and reassignment may not contemplate all skills. So new officers may not find a position for a long time. AFAIK promotion scores also take into account previous postings, and that may compound the problem. Officers may get stuck in a posting, without the skills or score required for a promotion, and block more qualified officers from climbing the ladder, so to speak.

So I think there'll be a need for tours of duty again. Either that, or the player may use the button "Reassign Naval" to simulate tours of duty. There'll be a need for a similar button for ground officers too. There's already a "Reassign All Colony Governors" for administrators, but it's located in the Governor tab in the Economy window.

Which leads to another problem. With the current scheme, I can set some officers with critical skills with "do not promote" so they won't be promoted (and then reassigned). But the "Reassign Naval" button ignores that and reassigns them all, and that's the reason I almost never use it now.

I suggest changing the checkbox "Do not Promote" to "Do Not Remove", and that the "Reassign" buttons respect that in the new version. It would go a long way towards minimizing this problem.

Additionally, if there was a way to find all those officers with that box ticked, and the Academy commanders too, it would prevent the manually assigned officers from clogging up everything. Maybe a button "Unassign Naval" which would unassign (for later reassignment) all the officers with that box unchecked, could be used for that: it would be much easier to pinpoint the remaining officers with postings in the list, and check whether it's time to replace them with someone else.

[nuclearslurpee]

I suggest changing the checkbox "Do not Promote" to "Do Not Remove", and that the "Reassign" buttons respect that in the new version. It would go a long way towards minimizing this problem.

I think this should be considered necessary, the ability to keep an officer in a specific position is essential for roleplay IMO.

The rest... I do not think it is a big concern. The officer promotions will be driven by continual expansion. As more ships are built more command are opened, and over time a smart player will be expanding the admin command hierarchy as well, both as new capabilities are developed and as branches of the hierarchy are needed in other systems and sectors. It's not too likely for the officer ranks to stagnate completely unless the player just stops expanding entirely, which is rather antithetical to the core gameplay of Aurora - one of those four Xs is "eXpand" after all.

[ZimRathbone]

So I think there'll be a need for tours of duty again. Either that, or the player may use the button "Reassign Naval" to simulate tours of duty. There'll be a need for a similar button for ground officers too. There's already a "Reassign All Colony Governors" for administrators, but it's located in the Governor tab in the Economy window.

Which leads to another problem. With the current scheme, I can set some officers with critical skills with "do not promote" so they won't be promoted (and then reassigned). But the "Reassign Naval" button ignores that and reassigns them all, and that's the reason I almost never use it now.

I suggest changing the checkbox "Do not Promote" to "Do Not Remove", and that the "Reassign" buttons respect that in the new version. It would go a long way towards minimizing this problem.

I already do this to simulate the ADF practice of MIMO (March In, March Out) which generally results in mass changes in assignment on a three year cycle (usually around the summer holidays in Jan/Feb).  One year of the three has around 40% of people changing jobs, the other two are a bit lighter and have 20-30% personnel switching. It was a bit easier in VB with the Tour of Duty mechanic but its still adequate.  I do notice though that sometimes the reassignment has the same person back in the same slot several times.

[dsedrez]

So I think there'll be a need for tours of duty again. Either that, or the player may use the button "Reassign Naval" to simulate tours of duty. There'll be a need for a similar button for ground officers too. There's already a "Reassign All Colony Governors" for administrators, but it's located in the Governor tab in the Economy window.

Which leads to another problem. With the current scheme, I can set some officers with critical skills with "do not promote" so they won't be promoted (and then reassigned). But the "Reassign Naval" button ignores that and reassigns them all, and that's the reason I almost never use it now.

I suggest changing the checkbox "Do not Promote" to "Do Not Remove", and that the "Reassign" buttons respect that in the new version. It would go a long way towards minimizing this problem.

I already do this to simulate the ADF practice of MIMO (March In, March Out) which generally results in mass changes in assignment on a three year cycle (usually around the summer holidays in Jan/Feb).  One year of the three has around 40% of people changing jobs, the other two are a bit lighter and have 20-30% personnel switching. It was a bit easier in VB with the Tour of Duty mechanic but its still adequate.  I do notice though that sometimes the reassignment has the same person back in the same slot several times.

I've just tried "Reassign Naval" in my current game, it's the beginning of a new year so I thought it fit. There aren't yet too many officers and jobs so I could check them manually. Besides the micromanagement, I found that it thought many of my ships were "troop transports", because I'd put small troop transport bays in many ships for RP reasons. So my large terraforming station received a logistical specialist with zero terraforming skill instead of the Story Character/Do Not Promote Commander I've given it. My intelligence ship, with a small PD mount, received a tactical specialist with zero intelligence skill... With this setting, I'm not even sure if they'd acquire the necessary skills if I forgot to check on them...

[nuclearslurpee]

I've just tried "Reassign Naval" in my current game, it's the beginning of a new year so I thought it fit. There aren't yet too many officers and jobs so I could check them manually. Besides the micromanagement, I found that it thought many of my ships were "troop transports", because I'd put small troop transport bays in many ships for RP reasons. So my large terraforming station received a logistical specialist with zero terraforming skill instead of the Story Character/Do Not Promote Commander I've given it. My intelligence ship, with a small PD mount, received a tactical specialist with zero intelligence skill... With this setting, I'm not even sure if they'd acquire the necessary skills if I forgot to check on them...

This probably is not a bug. I had a similar issue with survey ships and raised it with Steve, who told me that what happens is that if there are not enough Survey-skilled commanders, a survey ship can also be considered a generic military ship later in the auto-assignment routine and receive a Training/Reaction/Engineering/Tactical-skilled commander. In your case, you probably have run out of eligible Terraforming commanders (especially if many of them are consumed by more-important postings according to the auto-assign logic), and Logistics-skilled commanders are the very last command positions assigned before the sub-command modules are filled.

Class priorities for super-specialized ships like harvester/miner/former stations can address this by bypassing the usual assignment logic - a commander with those skills will correctly be assigned to those roles instead of being tapped for Fighter Pilot duty or whatever.

[TMaekler]

Wondering if we could get an addition to the new officer promotion system? If I want a specific officer to go through a certain career path (for RP reasons) I have to set him as "do not promote". This however is messy when I want to promote him and have to kick out other officers for him. So how about an extra flag? When "Do not Promote" is enabled I could also enable a new slot: If Position XY is vacant promote this officer to that position". That way I can steer some officers into certain places but do it all through the auto routine and all within the basic logic of the game.

[dsedrez]

This probably is not a bug. I had a similar issue with survey ships and raised it with Steve, who told me that what happens is that if there are not enough Survey-skilled commanders, a survey ship can also be considered a generic military ship later in the auto-assignment routine and receive a Training/Reaction/Engineering/Tactical-skilled commander. In your case, you probably have run out of eligible Terraforming commanders (especially if many of them are consumed by more-important postings according to the auto-assign logic), and Logistics-skilled commanders are the very last command positions assigned before the sub-command modules are filled.

Class priorities for super-specialized ships like harvester/miner/former stations can address this by bypassing the usual assignment logic - a commander with those skills will correctly be assigned to those roles instead of being tapped for Fighter Pilot duty or whatever.

I don't think it's a bug, just a limitation of any algorithm when they try to "read the mind" of the human player. At least in the case of the terraforming station, I only have one. And both the highest qualified terraformers were of the correct rank and unassigned after the algorithm ran... so class priority wouldn't have solved that.

Maybe letting us change what category our ship class belongs to? My station *is* classed as "troop transport". If I could change that to "terraformer" in a pull down menu in the Misc tab, that would probably solve it.

[Migi]

Maybe letting us change what category our ship class belongs to? My station *is* classed as "troop transport". If I could change that to "terraformer" in a pull down menu in the Misc tab, that would probably solve it.

Maybe I'm just having a dumb day, but I can't see any rules for auto-assignment/classification of ships.

I can find the ones for Commander Auto-Assignment, which doesn't list troop transport capacity at all.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg104046#msg104046


Either way I think the algorithm should consider whether the troop transport module is larger or smaller than say 10% of the ship mass.
It could also use the presence or absence of Cargo Shuttle Bays to determine if a ship needs a logistics commander, rather than having it as a final fallback option.


Aside from that, being able to override the category for a ship might be useful.
It might also be useful to be able to pick a specific ship category for a commander, and they are assigned to that category exclusively or as first choice.
Although I suspect what most people desire is a "do not automatically unassign" button.