Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[nakorkren]

The context:
The shipyard tab is usually pretty sparse, in that you have a small handful of shipyards (probably not more than 10 even at a massive shipbuilding center of your empire) and then the panel below to control Shipyard Activity and individual slip activity.

The suggestion:
Add an additional details panel in the lower half of the screen showing info about the selected shipyard and the overall sum of those details for all yards. E.g. workers in that yard, total cost of shipbuilding in that yard, and even (if you're willing to add the hooks in the background to support it) the BUILD QUEUE for that yard. Even if you don't add the build queue, it would be helpful to know, without needing to go look up the equation and do the math, how much of your workforce and budget is being consumed by your repair yard vs your FAC yard vs your battleship yard.

[mike2R]

When setting Themes for Star Systems, please add a checkbox for random picks.
Similar to ship names.

Would be nice to have one for the reporting names for Alien ship classes as well (preferably on by default, so you don't have to rename the ships discovered in first contact).

[Ush213]

Import/Export Army Organizations as CSV.     

With the new changes coming to 2. 2 and the ability to create buildable army organizations.  Is it possible to add a feature that lets you import or export community-created organizations?
similar to the medals.     

Prerequisites for imports to work would be you would need the ground unit tech researched.  Otherwise, the upload would fail.  A pop-up would say failed but also tell you what you are missing.   

This would allow new players to get involved in using armies and not be overwhelmed with the challenge of learning the mechanics.     

It would also save existing long-time players from having to recreate their armies in each playthrough.  Cutting out a lot of micro and improving QOL

edit: spelling and left a bit out.   

[SpaceMarine]

Pre-amble: Many people who use ground forces have plenty of formations this is universal but the effort to drag these formations to their higher hq to create hierarchies is extremely time consuming and rsi inducing, this could be fixed by the implementation of the same planned assign box that ship weapons will now have.

Suggestion: Make it so that you can hit a checkbox to enable assign x, implement whichever number you want in x, when you move a formation of one type it will move as many formations of that type as you have specified to the area you want on that body or ship the formation is on, if there are too few formations then it will give a "you cant do that message", furthermore it will only effect formations of the same type on the same hierarchal level so you dont accidently pull formations out of their current hierarchies that you dont want.

[nakorkren]

I'd like to suggest eliminating stand-alone ECM and ECCM modules, and making them another drop down box when designing missile fire controls and beam fire controls, increasing mineral and wealth cost of the resulting fire control. Those are the two components which the ship's ECM and ECCM rating impact anyway, so it wouldn't necessarily change the mechanic. It would just eliminate the need to dedicate volume to a separate module, which I don't see a gameplay reason for doing. As it stands now, it doesn't make sense for ECM/ECCM tech to be so large you can't really fit it into fighters but also small enough you can put it on missiles, which seems inconsistent.

[nuclearslurpee]

I'd like to suggest eliminating stand-alone ECM and ECCM modules, and making them another drop down box when designing missile fire controls and beam fire controls, increasing mineral and wealth cost of the resulting fire control. Those are the two components which the ship's ECM and ECCM rating impact anyway, so it wouldn't necessarily change the mechanic. It would just eliminate the need to dedicate volume to a separate module, which I don't see a gameplay reason for doing. As it stands now, it doesn't make sense for ECM/ECCM tech to be so large you can't really fit it into fighters but also small enough you can put it on missiles, which seems inconsistent.

Partially agree. For ECCM this makes perfect sense, ideally with a premium +HS to the fire control in question, however ECM as a module affects the entire ship, not its individual fire controls. ECM should remain a separate component, however I do think it would be nice to have it be designable in some manner like shields or cloaking modules, with an adjustable size corresponding in some way to efficiency. It should retain the current non-stacking effect (although stacking modules for redundancy is fine) so that it is not optimal to spam 0.1-HS ECM on your 69,420-ton battleships.

[Droll]

I'd like to suggest eliminating stand-alone ECM and ECCM modules, and making them another drop down box when designing missile fire controls and beam fire controls, increasing mineral and wealth cost of the resulting fire control. Those are the two components which the ship's ECM and ECCM rating impact anyway, so it wouldn't necessarily change the mechanic. It would just eliminate the need to dedicate volume to a separate module, which I don't see a gameplay reason for doing. As it stands now, it doesn't make sense for ECM/ECCM tech to be so large you can't really fit it into fighters but also small enough you can put it on missiles, which seems inconsistent.

Partially agree. For ECCM this makes perfect sense, ideally with a premium +HS to the fire control in question, however ECM as a module affects the entire ship, not its individual fire controls. ECM should remain a separate component, however I do think it would be nice to have it be designable in some manner like shields or cloaking modules, with an adjustable size corresponding in some way to efficiency. It should retain the current non-stacking effect (although stacking modules for redundancy is fine) so that it is not optimal to spam 0.1-HS ECM on your 69,420-ton battleships.

Having ECM rating scale with ship size would be excellent, makes it harder to have massive battleships that can avoid every attack while also giving big aid to fighters/FACs. Would allow Steve to remove the special small-craft modules and just use ship ECM + FC Electronic warfare module. Honestly, instead of placing an ECM/ECCM component, there should be an additional design option in FC creation for Electronic Warfare on the MFC and BFC design windows. That way the only additional component is the module you mount for ships, reduces clutter a little.

[superstrijder15]

Add seperate police forces and/or stunner weapons.

Basically, IRL armies make bad (riot) police forces and police forces make bad soldiers. But in Aurora you can send some artillery to a place and the artillery will happily go around somehow quelling unrest. I think it would make sense to make a capability that is essentially a specialization into unrest reduction, which limits the unit to weapon types that are not too destructive such as up to CAP or HCAP, or maybe Light Anti Vehicle (I don't think unrest would really reduce from people losing their house to artillery being used to shoot some protesters a block away). These units would get a big bonues to reducing unrest, allowing you to use a very small police force to stop unrest.
Army units that have weapons to heavy to be used for police specialization units should not count towards police strength, but instead give a small amount of protection, allowing you to pick between a small fleet or a relatively big army but one that perhaps doesn't need as much maintenance for your protection.

I also suggest adding stun weapons. These should have less damage than other weapons, but both be better at police work (its effectively like using water hoses or rubber bullets rather than standing around with real bullets loaded: you can actually shoot protestors without instantly having a bloodbath) and give increased chances of getting information as they allow you to capture more prisoners. They should probably do effectively 0 damage to medium vehicle and up.

[nuclearslurpee]

Army units that have weapons to heavy to be used for police specialization units should not count towards police strength, but instead give a small amount of protection, allowing you to pick between a small fleet or a relatively big army but one that perhaps doesn't need as much maintenance for your protection.

This is already basically how it works, FYI. The effectiveness of a unit for "police duties" is based on sqrt(size), so while a larger unit does provide more suppression points per unit, they provide less per ton. The most efficient policing unit is therefore the INF+PWL, although PWL are so weak that they are basically useless for any real combat jobs aside from boarding parties.

At the same time, it doesn't make sense that larger units shouldn't contribute anything to police strength, if you think a 60-ton main battle tank cannot do effective police actions then Hungary c.1956 has a bridge to sell you. Note also that "unrest" as a mechanic constitutes any number of things, in fact usually the most important source of unrest mechanically is that the population does not feel protected from the alien menace, in which case a few dozen 155mm howitzers could go a long way towards addressing that. I do think that unrest suppression in general is a bit over-strong, you can effectively garrison a population of >10m with a single infantry battalion (5,000 tons, 500-1000 soldiers) and that ratio just seems insufficient - but I think the mechanic as it is works reasonably well given that it is a simplification of numerous factors into a single metric for the primary purpose of motivating colony garrisons and/or fleet patrols.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I'd like to suggest eliminating stand-alone ECM and ECCM modules, and making them another drop down box when designing missile fire controls and beam fire controls, increasing mineral and wealth cost of the resulting fire control. Those are the two components which the ship's ECM and ECCM rating impact anyway, so it wouldn't necessarily change the mechanic. It would just eliminate the need to dedicate volume to a separate module, which I don't see a gameplay reason for doing. As it stands now, it doesn't make sense for ECM/ECCM tech to be so large you can't really fit it into fighters but also small enough you can put it on missiles, which seems inconsistent.

Partially agree. For ECCM this makes perfect sense, ideally with a premium +HS to the fire control in question, however ECM as a module affects the entire ship, not its individual fire controls. ECM should remain a separate component, however I do think it would be nice to have it be designable in some manner like shields or cloaking modules, with an adjustable size corresponding in some way to efficiency. It should retain the current non-stacking effect (although stacking modules for redundancy is fine) so that it is not optimal to spam 0.1-HS ECM on your 69,420-ton battleships.

Having ECM rating scale with ship size would be excellent, makes it harder to have massive battleships that can avoid every attack while also giving big aid to fighters/FACs. Would allow Steve to remove the special small-craft modules and just use ship ECM + FC Electronic warfare module. Honestly, instead of placing an ECM/ECCM component, there should be an additional design option in FC creation for Electronic Warfare on the MFC and BFC design windows. That way the only additional component is the module you mount for ships, reduces clutter a little.

Having ECCM part of the fire-control seems to me as a logical and more realistic step. But I would no like a system where ECM somehow scale with the size of the ship. That is not really how ECM works.

On the other hand I would like the game to have more electronic warfare systems in general and I hope that Steve at some point develop the sensor and electronic warfare system a bit more. I know he has talked about it before so let's hope it will happen at some time.

I also would like to have EMP missile warheads, much like microwave beams work. Being able to blind ships would make electronic warfare more interesting, why not have stealth missiles and counters to that and so on.

I also would like stealth in general to work different from how it currently works, so a completely new mechanic for it.

[superstrijder15]

I don't know if this exists already but I couldn't figure it out:
Allow us to move multiple systems on the galactic map at once. Probably by pressing shift then clicking multiple systems, then dragging them. That would make it much easier to adjust large parts of the map to make space for new things near the center.

[mike2R]

I don't know if this exists already but I couldn't figure it out:
Allow us to move multiple systems on the galactic map at once. Probably by pressing shift then clicking multiple systems, then dragging them. That would make it much easier to adjust large parts of the map to make space for new things near the center.

You can do this.  You can shift-click to box select a group of systems, and also ctrl-click to select additional systems.  You can then mass-position them by holding down the mouse button on empty space (doing it on a system moves just that one, even with multiple selected).  To unselect the group afterwards, you need to click on a system.

[mike2R]

QoL suggestion:  My game's got to that point where I've explored enough systems that I'm having trouble finding the one I want on the galactic map.  A system list you could select from, that would either centre the map on the chosen system, or highlight it in an obvious way to make it easier to spot, would be a real timesaver!

[superstrijder15]

I don't know if this exists already but I couldn't figure it out:
Allow us to move multiple systems on the galactic map at once. Probably by pressing shift then clicking multiple systems, then dragging them. That would make it much easier to adjust large parts of the map to make space for new things near the center.

You can do this.  You can shift-click to box select a group of systems, and also ctrl-click to select additional systems.  You can then mass-position them by holding down the mouse button on empty space (doing it on a system moves just that one, even with multiple selected).  To unselect the group afterwards, you need to click on a system.

I was so close... I did the thing where you touch one of the systems, since that is how you need to do it to move multiple grouped items in programs I used more often such as word.

EDIT: Is it also possible to rotate groups of systems? That could be useful if you want to permute "branches" of your map because you discovered a loop

[Coleslaw]

Formation Level Capabilities, rather than Element Level Capabilities

What if instead of having capabilities be applied to an element, they could be applied to the formation instead? For instance, say I create a regular infantry battalion with no additional capabilities. Then, I could duplicate the formation and give the entire new formation template extreme temperature capabilities. For capabilities like genetic enhancements, it would apply exclusively to the infantry in the formation, of course.

For non-capability elements that get added to such a formation after construction, the incoming units could have their morale set to 0 and you pay the difference in wealth cost between the non-capability element and the with-capability version of the element, abstracted as the incoming element is "undergoing retraining/refits/enhancements" as they are being implemented into the new unit. That way, you couldn't cheese your way into getting elements with capabilities by simply dragging them into a formation with a capability.

Theoretically, you wouldn't even have to create a new formation to do this. When selecting a formation on the ground units screen, there could be a button to change the formation's capabilities, in which case the rule in the previous paragraph would take place and apply to the units already in the formation.

So for instance, let's say I have an infantry formation that already has desert warfare capabilities, but I also want it to have extreme temperature capabilities. I select the battalion, click "Modify Capabilities", and select extreme temperature in addition to desert warfare. The formation's elements' moral goes to 0, I pay the additional wealth cost, and the formation now has the capability (with the units within not being combat effective in the slightest due to the 0 moral.) Eventually, their moral ticks back up to normal levels. If I were to drag a vehicle into a solely infantry battalion with genetic enhancement, I would think the game could easily recognize the incoming formation is a vehicle, and thus not do anything. The vehicle's moral would not be affected and no additional cost would be incurred, seeing as vehicles can not receive genetic enhancement.


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?