Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[nuclearslurpee]

For parasites, maybe a possibility is for the new Squadrons to remember standing orders somehow? That way, a Squadron of survey ships can be detached from their carrier, be given an order to split into single-ship fleets, and automatically carry those standing orders through.

For fleets, maybe a new movement order that sets standing orders from a template could work. E.., a survey ship can be ordered to move to a system and then given the "Adopt Standing Orders from Template" order once they jump in.

[Scandinavian]

Another option (which is compatible with the other excellent suggestions) is to let subfleets remember the standing orders they had when they were full fleets, and have a command (available to fleets that contain subfleets) saying "split into subfleets and set conditional orders".

[Warer]

Box select weapons in Ship Combat tab.

[Vivalas]

Would be really neat to get an option to award medals to not just "officers assigned to a command", but an option for "including any previous officers assigned to these commands." We especially have history now for ships which may help with this.

Because I like creating medals for "campaigns", including colonization campaigns where I give awards to any officers assigned to logistical ships, but then all the ones who were helping out earlier but then got promoted up don't get a medal, unless I track them down, which really isn't feasible. (I like having awards be a visual metric for me of what my officers have been involved in, to make it easier RP wise for me to visualize their exploits).

[Warer]

Capacitor Boosters a distinct component or design option that can be attached to beam weapons that boosts their RoF by increasing their capacitor charge rate by Capacitor Recharge Rate Tech per HS (ie a 10cm laser at CRR 1 would have a RoF of 15s but you can choose to add 100tons to it to boost it's RoF to 5s)

[Serina]

~Snip~

Standing orders are assigned at the fleet level, rather than the ship level, so it wouldn't work simply for ship classes. It could potentially be done for fleets that only contain that ship class.

Copy fleet orders/standing orders to all fleets under parent admin command?

The former only for fleets in the same system, if able to carry out those tasks, the latter only if able to carry out those standing orders.

Edit: A new disaster start/ countdown to a supernova, possibly even two, One option being a nearby star shows signs of going nova, gotta scoot, and the second being the sun is showing signs of going Nova, gotta flee.

[mike2R]

One thing I don't much like about beam combat is that the optimal tactics are to focus down one ship after another. 

On a practical level it adds to micromanagement in fleet battles (constantly reassigning fire controls, while having to calculate how many to assign to a target to kill but not overkill).  And it kind of just doesn't feel right - even if its arguably realistic, I want fleet engagements to be more of a naval battleship engagement where ships engage each other all along the line.

As I understand combat between dreadnaught and later twentieth century battleships (which admittedly comes entirely from watching Drachinifel on YouTube...), there are a couple of reasons why fleets didn't focus fire individual ships down despite having the range to do so, which could probably be modelled in Aurora, if desired.

Firstly a ship that was not receiving incoming fire itself was free to lay its own guns without distraction, and would shoot more accurately. So leaving a major enemy combatant unengaged was something to be avoided.  A non-stacking accuracy penalty for any ship that has taken more than a certain amount of damage could model that. The damage threshold would need to be high enough that it couldn't be cheesed by plinking - maybe a ratio to the ship's size.

Secondly was ships tracking their own hits by looking for the fall of their own shots to adjust their guns - more than one ship firing on a target made it much harder to do.  This doesn't make a great deal of sense in an Aurora context, but could be handwaved (confusion caused by multiple fire control returns or something).  Mechanically, each additional attacker on a single target could create an accuracy penalty for all attackers.  This could be set at a level where it is low enough that it is still well worth engaging with additional ships if you have them, but high enough that there is an incentive to attack an unengaged target if one is available.  And probably capped, so there is no further penalty for more than, say, 3 attackers so as not to cripple swarms of small craft.

With rules like that, a fleet engagement would be much more each ship picking a target (auto-assignment would work really well too..) and blasting at it.  It would feel much more like a slugfest, and many ships would accumulate damage. Rather than just ending a fleet engagement with one damaged ship, and all the rest either destroyed or pristine.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I usually "fix" this by not moving all the ships in one fleet. A soon as one ship is focused on it will fall back. The choice is now to allow many enemy ships the opportunity to close and shoot more accurate and powerful on you and chase after the one retreating ship or change focus to another ship. If you have decent shields this works even better and is why shields is so damn important in beam combat.

In my multi faction games beam combat generally end up with ships spread out for that very reason as task-forces spread out in formations rather than all firing from the same position.

[Garfunkel]

One thing I don't much like about beam combat is that the optimal tactics are to focus down one ship after another. ..

But those things only make sense because of technological constraints at the time. Modern naval ships, well actually already in WW2, did not have those constraints. Radar was used to both track ships and shots. And then of course airplanes and missiles changed naval combat completely. Similarly, if you go back about a century from WW1-era battlewagon slugfests, you'll see that navies tried their best to focus fire on a single enemy ship and fired at multiple targets only if they were unable to 'cross the T' of the enemy fleet.

Now, what I would like to see is individual ship captains occasionally taking action on their own, whether it's firing at a different target, charging forward or even breaking off from the engagement, to make Aurora less of a God game where the player controls every little detail completely. But I also know that others would not like that sort of thing at all.

[mike2R]

One thing I don't much like about beam combat is that the optimal tactics are to focus down one ship after another. ..

But those things only make sense because of technological constraints at the time. Modern naval ships, well actually already in WW2, did not have those constraints. Radar was used to both track ships and shots. And then of course airplanes and missiles changed naval combat completely. Similarly, if you go back about a century from WW1-era battlewagon slugfests, you'll see that navies tried their best to focus fire on a single enemy ship and fired at multiple targets only if they were unable to 'cross the T' of the enemy fleet.

I don't disagree about the realism side of it, I just wanted a somewhat plausible explanation for making the system feel better according to my own tastes    For me, ships fighting a general engagement with each other feels like a naval battle, and entire fleets focusing down one ship after another feels more like an RTS.  Its always the default tactic because its the most efficient, it just feels gamey since I've done it in so many games... And its rarely how real battles have worked - while you make a good point about radar fire control, that only became available at the very end of the battleship age.  Apart from the end of the Pacific war, actual engagements that happened have always tended more towards ship against ship (I'm sure Napoleonic War era sea captains tried their best to co-ordinate their fire, but given the range limitations of cannon, in practice it was much more either line against line or a general melee).

And mechanically I would find it more fun.  For example it would make design redundancy a lot more useful.  Right now when fighting the AI, all that really matters in terms of defences is how many rounds it takes the enemy to totally destroy a ship and pick a new target.  How long it can keep firing while they batter its lifeless hulk is a minor consideration.  But if a close battle resulted in steadily increasing damage across the whole fleet, the ability of ships to keep fighting after taking damage, and jury rig repairs between engagements, would be much more critical.  We have this wonderfully detailed damage system in Aurora, but I think the battle mechanics tend to prevent it getting the prominence it deserves.

[Jorgen_CAB]

The game is not realistic anyway so any mechanic you add can be handwaved with technobabble.

[QuakeIV]

Seems like there has been kindof a hard swing away from 'realism'.  As cool as it is to do whatever you want, its not usually fun if its not in any way related to reality and totally contrived.

That being said, I personally think that engaging a target to throw off the accuracy of the target's shots is a pretty good and quasi-realistic idea to add some further consideration to beam combat.  Probably focusing targets will still be a major thing, but you will at least want to 'pay the bills' so to say on keeping a target sufficiently heavily engaged as to degrade its ability to shoot accurately.  Personally I think this should only really effect direct fire weapons.  There would also need to be some feedback on whether more firepower needs to be allocated (it should probably be more for bigger targets), otherwise it wont be particularly fun because there will be no clear way to know what effect you are having.

[nuclearslurpee]

That being said, I personally think that engaging a target to throw off the accuracy of the target's shots is a pretty good and quasi-realistic idea to add some further consideration to beam combat.  Probably focusing targets will still be a major thing, but you will at least want to 'pay the bills' so to say on keeping a target sufficiently heavily engaged as to degrade its ability to shoot accurately.  Personally I think this should only really effect direct fire weapons.  There would also need to be some feedback on whether more firepower needs to be allocated (it should probably be more for bigger targets), otherwise it wont be particularly fun because there will be no clear way to know what effect you are having.

To me, this sounds like a bunch of extra micromanagement. Having to set up your fire controls to allocate shots against every ship in the enemy fleet to degrade their targeting is tedious already, then having to adjust after every increment until you find the right sweet spot. Meanwhile the enemy is doing the same (assuming the NPR is capable of this... if not they are screwed!), so the net result is that the battles take much longer which means many more turns of clicking through 5-second increments and fiddling with BFC assignments. No thank you.

IMO, there is such a thing as having so much tactical detail that it drags the whole game down, even if it is in the name of "realism". I think Jorgen has given the better approach, if you want the tactical micro then manipulating engagement ranges with split formations is a better approach and carries the added risk of being vulnerable to a surprising missile attack against an isolated subformation, which I think with the 2.2 changes is a very present risk.

[xenoscepter]

 --- Could we have a Small Ship Tractor Beam? Maybe 50~100 Tons, and restricted to moving Fighters or FACs. I'd like to make recovery ships for my fighters and FACs that themselves are not much bigger so they can fit in with my carrier groups.

[Jorgen_CAB]

If you want fire to degrade a ships ability to fire back then it should have diminishing returns for doing so. There could just be a simple formula for it where the more damage a ships takes, either on shields or hull that ship get a negative modification to fire back. This would be a major drawback for really large ship so it should perhaps be somewhat modified with the ship size, does not need to be linear if you want this to be more or less beneficial to smaller or larger ships.

This would incentivise you to not always focus fire.

There also could be an auto function that somewhat randomize and split fire naturally so we don't have to deal with this as much. The tactical skill of the fleet commander could also impact this where there is a bigger chance of a bit more focusing on one or a few ships and shifting focus away from ships that don't shoot back or whose fire is lower than other ships. I would personally like such a feature as it can be a bit tedious to manage FC in beam combat and the GOD power of efficiency are a bit extreme here. This could be an interesting feature for role-play as well in my opinion.

There could also be a tech line and component for beam fire-control to offset this penalty to some degree.

The current Auto-fire function is a bit simple and limited.