C# Suggestions

[nuclearslurpee]

unsure if previously mentioned before:

commercial import and export of minerals for colonies via a set of radio buttons/dropdown list on the mining screen just below the CMC tax/purchase option
for import options:
A) do not import minerals
B) Import to reserve levels
C) Import mineral shortfalls [this is already calculated and displayed on the mineral screen as an orange highlight of a mineral]
D) Import everything in system

for export options:
A) do not export minerals
B) export to reserve levels
C) export everything anywhere
D) export to system only

Could lead to possible interempire trading as commercial fleets of friendlies and allies fill mineral movement contracts and the ghost minerals from tax CMC's are sent to friendly empires.
as usually i'm unsure how much of the current trade code would be applicable to such a idea.

I like this idea as it is much more immersive than mass drivers and much less micro work than manual freighter transport. I doubt it gets added because we have Mass Drivers and civvies cause enough lag already, but I really like it.

[Borealis4x]

Such a mechanic wouldn't be useful for inter-system trade, true, but extremely valuable for planets in other systems. I currently use cheap light traders to try and make all minerals available to system capitals and distribute them via mass drivers from their, but it is a very inexact science with the current tools available.

Since civies are too unreliable, I'd like to put my own ships under the control of a personal shipping company controlled by the civilian AI that always takes our shipping contracts and nothing else. Be a good dumping ground for obsolete freighters I cant convert.

[serger]

It's quite inconsistent now that the most natural type of armoured battle machines (those with mixed weapon, smth like main battle tanks and assault armoured machines), just as the most natural types of battle orders (mixed ones too - infantry with battle machines and mixed weapon types) are rather meaningless against most of decent, nearly-equal-tech enemies, at least during assault or meeting engagement, because with current ground battle model they have no option to select their targets, and so relatively low fire performance of armored battle machines makes them nearly useless in the beginning of battle with it's huge numbers of small targets. Battle machines with this ground battle model have only a niche of baffle pursuit force: elements, that are designed for the finishing blow against enemy's survived armored machines in the end of long, multistage battle.

To give them an ability to contribute in battle from it's beginning and to open a niche of midsized assault machines, I'd suggest to change battle model in two ways:

1. More dividing of front line and battle phase, so that each battle location will be separated from direct fire of units, placed on other locations, and, on the other hand, each battle phase divided to more successive (iterative) subphases.
2. Confined breakthrough rule can be added to these subphases, adding assaulting units an ability to continue an advance, while their opponents are suppressed. Confined breakthrough might be different from full breakthrough in that during subphases there is no ability to change opposing formation or even location, so assaulting subformation is just continue to push with their high-morale units againt opponent in the same location. That will make those units with high armour levels effectively more fire performance and give armors their natural assault role, instead of finishing blow tool in the most intense battles they are now.

[nuclearslurpee]

It's quite inconsistent now that the most natural type of armoured battle machines (those with mixed weapon, smth like main battle tanks and assault armoured machines), just as the most natural types of battle orders (mixed ones too - infantry with battle machines and mixed weapon types) are rather meaningless against most of decent, nearly-equal-tech enemies, at least during assault or meeting engagement, because with current ground battle model they have no option to select their targets, and so relatively low fire performance of armored battle machines makes them nearly useless in the beginning of battle with it's huge numbers of small targets. Battle machines with this ground battle model have only a niche of baffle pursuit force: elements, that are designed for the finishing blow against enemy's survived armored machines in the end of long, multistage battle.

To give them an ability to contribute in battle from it's beginning and to open a niche of midsized assault machines, I'd suggest to change battle model in two ways:

1. More dividing of front line and battle phase, so that each battle location will be separated from direct fire of units, placed on other locations, and, on the other hand, each battle phase divided to more successive (iterative) subphases.
2. Confined breakthrough rule can be added to these subphases, adding assaulting units an ability to continue an advance, while their opponents are suppressed. Confined breakthrough might be different from full breakthrough in that during subphases there is no ability to change opposing formation or even location, so assaulting subformation is just continue to push with their high-morale units againt opponent in the same location. That will make those units with high armour levels effectively more fire performance and give armors their natural assault role, instead of finishing blow tool in the most intense battles they are now.

I don't agree with the assessment here. Rather opposite, I think it is good that mixed machines/formations are not appreciably superior to monoform. This allows players to design units and formations according to whatever RP they wish without having to worry too much about deploying a "suboptimal" configuration.

Further, even if there is no tangible difference between mixed formations and mixed forces of monolithic formations, there is still a clear value in having combined arms in some capacity whether this means at the company/battalion level or by landing one armored division for every two infantry divisions to make an assault.

The topic of random vs selective targeting has been debated as nauseum in many threads by now. I will only say that personally I largely prefer the ground battle system as it is, due to its simplicity and general friendliness to RP over minimaxing. I personally would consider accurate targeting something of a restrictive headache, depending on its implementation, and certainly don't want to deal with a complicated frontage system in my game that was advertised as being about spaceships.

[papent]

Such a mechanic wouldn't be useful for inter-system trade, true, but extremely valuable for planets in other systems. I currently use cheap light traders to try and make all minerals available to system capitals and distribute them via mass drivers from their, but it is a very inexact science with the current tools available.

Since cities are too unreliable, I'd like to put my own ships under the control of a personal shipping company controlled by the civilian AI that always takes our shipping contracts and nothing else. Be a good dumping ground for obsolete freighters I cant convert.

I would love to loan out part of my Government fleet to Civvies groups. mass drivers are very practical unless you trying to ship minerals between a primary and secondary with distance in billions of K

[serger]

I don't agree with the assessment here. Rather opposite, I think it is good that mixed machines/formations are not appreciably superior to monoform.

My point was not that they are not appreciably superior to monoform. My point was that they are obviously inferior to monoform both in the first and in the final phases of battle.
You say you want an RP freedom and less micro during ground battles and less penalties with efficiency? Well, what I proposed is serving your declared goal exactly: you'll have much easier way to balance army against averaged opponent, while more scurpulous players will have their complicated toys too.

[nuclearslurpee]

I don't agree with the assessment here. Rather opposite, I think it is good that mixed machines/formations are not appreciably superior to monoform.

My point was not that they are not appreciably superior to monoform. My point was that they are obviously inferior to monoform both in the first and the final phases of battle.
You say you want an RP freedom and less micro durinf grounf battles and less penalties with efficiency? Well, what I proposed is serving your declared goal exactly: you'll have much easier way to balance army against averaged opponent, while more scurpulous player will have their complicated toys too.

In what way are they obviously inferior? The only thing I am really aware of is that mixed CAP and AV are more GSP-heavy than using CAP and sending in AV after the enemy infantry are dead, which is admittedly not ideal but a fairly small issue in relative terms. Any other mechanics that I can think of are suitably averaged over the formation so that two mixed formations will perform similarly to two distinctive formations. Unfortunately your OP is not very clear as it only mentions target selection.

[serger]

In what way are they obviously inferior? The only thing I am really aware of is that mixed CAP and AV are more GSP-heavy than using CAP and sending in AV after the enemy infantry are dead, which is admittedly not ideal but a fairly small issue in relative terms.

An opportunity of losing your supply before the end of battle, caused by GSP load of inefficient (in this stage of battle) heavy AV weapons, will be enough, obviously! You can lose all the battle because of this supply shortage only.

But that's not all. Throwing your battle machines in the battle while they just cannot decently contribute yet - it's causing them to suffer losses from enemy infantry, static and light vehicles AV weapons! And in the end of battle, when you'll desperately need these your armoured machines, because they are the only ones that can cope with enemy counterparts - you'll have not enough of them any more because of that early losses!

[Jorgen_CAB]

It's quite inconsistent now that the most natural type of armoured battle machines (those with mixed weapon, smth like main battle tanks and assault armoured machines), just as the most natural types of battle orders (mixed ones too - infantry with battle machines and mixed weapon types) are rather meaningless against most of decent, nearly-equal-tech enemies, at least during assault or meeting engagement, because with current ground battle model they have no option to select their targets, and so relatively low fire performance of armored battle machines makes them nearly useless in the beginning of battle with it's huge numbers of small targets. Battle machines with this ground battle model have only a niche of baffle pursuit force: elements, that are designed for the finishing blow against enemy's survived armored machines in the end of long, multistage battle.

To give them an ability to contribute in battle from it's beginning and to open a niche of midsized assault machines, I'd suggest to change battle model in two ways:

1. More dividing of front line and battle phase, so that each battle location will be separated from direct fire of units, placed on other locations, and, on the other hand, each battle phase divided to more successive (iterative) subphases.
2. Confined breakthrough rule can be added to these subphases, adding assaulting units an ability to continue an advance, while their opponents are suppressed. Confined breakthrough might be different from full breakthrough in that during subphases there is no ability to change opposing formation or even location, so assaulting subformation is just continue to push with their high-morale units againt opponent in the same location. That will make those units with high armour levels effectively more fire performance and give armors their natural assault role, instead of finishing blow tool in the most intense battles they are now.

I don't agree with the assessment here. Rather opposite, I think it is good that mixed machines/formations are not appreciably superior to monoform. This allows players to design units and formations according to whatever RP they wish without having to worry too much about deploying a "suboptimal" configuration.

Further, even if there is no tangible difference between mixed formations and mixed forces of monolithic formations, there is still a clear value in having combined arms in some capacity whether this means at the company/battalion level or by landing one armored division for every two infantry divisions to make an assault.

The topic of random vs selective targeting has been debated as nauseum in many threads by now. I will only say that personally I largely prefer the ground battle system as it is, due to its simplicity and general friendliness to RP over minimaxing. I personally would consider accurate targeting something of a restrictive headache, depending on its implementation, and certainly don't want to deal with a complicated frontage system in my game that was advertised as being about spaceships.

No... the best units in the game are specialised units and you ALWAYS want to keep your heavier guns in reserve until you eliminated most of the lighter enemy units. (medium vehicles with heavy or medium guns is awesome for their cost to fight enemy vehicles this way). This creates a rather boring micro intensive way to conduct battles. If you assault a world you should basically keep your heavy gunned units in orbit so they don't waste shots and thus LOG units against enemy infantry they will not hit anyway and even if they hit them it is not wort it. Once most of the enemy infantry is taken care of by your CAP and HACP equiped heavy vehicles and infantry you retire most of the CAP vehicles and land the vehicles and heavy artillery with the heavy guns to blast all of the heavy enemy stuff upp.

This is the effect of random targeting. The current mechanic only allow RP on the surface due to how the mechanic work.

I NEVER do this in the game as the AI don't do it and when I play multi-faction it certainly is not fun doing it. But... from a pure mechanic purpose this is what you should do!!!

[nuclearslurpee]

No... the best units in the game are specialised units and you ALWAYS want to keep your heavier guns in reserve until you eliminated most of the lighter enemy units. (medium vehicles with heavy or medium guns is awesome for their cost to fight enemy vehicles this way). This creates a rather boring micro intensive way to conduct battles. If you assault a world you should basically keep your heavy gunned units in orbit so they don't waste shots and thus LOG units against enemy infantry they will not hit anyway and even if they hit them it is not wort it. Once most of the enemy infantry is taken care of by your CAP and HACP equiped heavy vehicles and infantry you retire most of the CAP vehicles and land the vehicles and heavy artillery with the heavy guns to blast all of the heavy enemy stuff upp.

This is the effect of random targeting. The current mechanic only allow RP on the surface due to how the mechanic work.

I NEVER do this in the game as the AI don't do it and when I play multi-faction it certainly is not fun doing it. But... from a pure mechanic purpose this is what you should do!!!

I remember this from the last thread on the subject.

In my mind, the issue here is essentially that mixed formations will run out of supplies faster, which is not optimal but can be managed by bringing more LOG units along, at least in theory. Combat efficiency is not strongly affected as far as I am aware.

On the flip side, if we change the targeting system to be "perfect", for sake of example we'll say every weapon always targets the largest element it has 100% kill chance or as close as possible against, the system becomes much less RP-friendly as now the balance swings completely towards monolithic formations. If an enemy has, say, 50% CAP and 50% MAV weapons by tonnage, with perfect targeting the optimal approach is to send only one kind of unit which renders one of those two weapon types ineffective, either infantry to render the MAV minimally effective or heavy armor to neutralize the CAP. This is then the same issue as we already have except that the determining factor is combat efficiency, not supply efficiency, which I at least would consider a much worse problem to have.

Given that no system can be perfect, and there have been quite contentious discussions about this in the past I think the present system is at least satisfactory, and certainly I do not want to see ground combat become even more micro-intensive nor do I want to always be designing my formations with an eye towards maintaining some optimal ratio of forces to frustrate enemy targeting.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I remember this from the last thread on the subject.

In my mind, the issue here is essentially that mixed formations will run out of supplies faster, which is not optimal but can be managed by bringing more LOG units along, at least in theory. Combat efficiency is not strongly affected as far as I am aware.

On the flip side, if we change the targeting system to be "perfect", for sake of example we'll say every weapon always targets the largest element it has 100% kill chance or as close as possible against, the system becomes much less RP-friendly as now the balance swings completely towards monolithic formations. If an enemy has, say, 50% CAP and 50% MAV weapons by tonnage, with perfect targeting the optimal approach is to send only one kind of unit which renders one of those two weapon types ineffective, either infantry to render the MAV minimally effective or heavy armor to neutralize the CAP. This is then the same issue as we already have except that the determining factor is combat efficiency, not supply efficiency, which I at least would consider a much worse problem to have.

Given that no system can be perfect, and there have been quite contentious discussions about this in the past I think the present system is at least satisfactory, and certainly I do not want to see ground combat become even more micro-intensive nor do I want to always be designing my formations with an eye towards maintaining some optimal ratio of forces to frustrate enemy targeting.

No... it is not just LOG units but this is actually a VERY large saving as heavy wepaons will consume huge amounts of GSP in comparison to CAP or HCAP weapons.

I have actually done testing and the difference can be quite substantial even if you disregard LOG units. Just the fact the the enemy waste all their shots on mostly low value units of yours and you increase the amount of infantry versus tanks and your tanks are less likely to be hit by enemy AT weapon. Once the enemy infantry has been whittled down you add your AT tanks and withdraw the CAP/HCAP tanks and now your heavy weapon have great effect. If the enemy have little or no tanks or heavy vehicles then there is almost no reason to use your heavy weapon units at all.

From a mechanic point of view mixed weapon units is rather bad. You can have mixed formations, that is fine. You can add and remove elements as you see fit during a battle from your formations.

You also can't underestimate the importance of the cost of LOG units... they are neither cheap or small in size... why not bring more small arms fire to kill the enemy infantry faster rather than bring more LOG units. It is a pure math question, that is the problem with random targeting... it becomes mostly relatively easy math.

If the targeting was a bit more unpredictable I think it would add to the the game. This could be attained through some event system. This could be tied with the planets type, terrain or the general colony typed and infrastructure on the colony. This way mixed units and mixed formation could become more important and support RP a bit more.

I think just adding a rule that heavy weapons on units withhold fire if the formation they fire on is too weak could make this much less pronounce and mixed weapon units (and formation) less of a drawback to use. A heavy weapon should only fire under some specific circumstance. This could be both up and down the scale. You could also flag a formation to always fire no matter what as an option. Now it would actually make sense to have a few AT tanks to support your infantry or light mechanised force.

[QuakeIV]

Could just have an 80% chance that your vehicle will target an ideally suited target to its weapon (or closest match) instead of being completely random or completely predictable.

[nuclearslurpee]

No... it is not just LOG units but this is actually a VERY large saving as heavy wepaons will consume huge amounts of GSP in comparison to CAP or HCAP weapons.

I have actually done testing and the difference can be quite substantial even if you disregard LOG units. Just the fact the the enemy waste all their shots on mostly low value units of yours and you increase the amount of infantry versus tanks and your tanks are less likely to be hit by enemy AT weapon. Once the enemy infantry has been whittled down you add your AT tanks and withdraw the CAP/HCAP tanks and now your heavy weapon have great effect. If the enemy have little or no tanks or heavy vehicles then there is almost no reason to use your heavy weapon units at all.

From a mechanic point of view mixed weapon units is rather bad. You can have mixed formations, that is fine. You can add and remove elements as you see fit during a battle from your formations.

You also can't underestimate the importance of the cost of LOG units... they are neither cheap or small in size... why not bring more small arms fire to kill the enemy infantry faster rather than bring more LOG units. It is a pure math question, that is the problem with random targeting... it becomes mostly relatively easy math.

If the targeting was a bit more unpredictable I think it would add to the the game. This could be attained through some event system. This could be tied with the planets type, terrain or the general colony typed and infrastructure on the colony. This way mixed units and mixed formation could become more important and support RP a bit more.

I think just adding a rule that heavy weapons on units withhold fire if the formation they fire on is too weak could make this much less pronounce and mixed weapon units (and formation) less of a drawback to use. A heavy weapon should only fire under some specific circumstance. This could be both up and down the scale. You could also flag a formation to always fire no matter what as an option.

This is enlightening. If there is a serious difference in combat performance that's a different matter.

I really like the rule suggestion at the end here since that could be applied asymmetrically. In other words, you could prohibit or at least limit how much heavy weapons fire at small targets while not limiting how much CAP and other light weapons fire at heavy targets, which preserves the role of armor as, well, armor - for the infantry. Something like:

Code: [Select]

%Chance to Fire = ( Base_Armour / Base_Penetration ) * ( Base_Hitpoints / Base_Attack )
applied after a target is chosen. Using base, not racial, stats so that a tech-based overmatch doesn't cause units to avoid firing because they would kill the low-tech enemy too hard or something. For example a MAV targeting a basic INF element would only fire 1/16 of the time. This could of course be modified to use an average, square root, etc. to get the desired balance, and random targeting can be retained which avoids the problems of selective targeting and keeps things "unpredictable".

What strikes me as clever about this rule is that it "fixes" the targeting problem without reducing the defensive efficiency of mixed formations very much - the heavy weapons conserve ammo by not firing at infantry (very often), but the infantry still "distracts" the heavy weapons from shooting friendly armored units so that mixed formations remain efficient for blunting enemy firepower.

Could just have an 80% chance that your vehicle will target an ideally suited target to its weapon (or closest match) instead of being completely random or completely predictable.

This doesn't really solve the problem from a mathematical analysis view, even with only a %chance for selective targeting the optimal move is to deploy a single base unit type to blunt the fire of all but one weapon type.

[Panpiper]

I expect this has been suggested many times. Could we have a feature that allows us to select which of a given field position a unit template will define by default? My infantry units are ALWAYS on Frontal Defence. My tank companies are ALWAYS on Frontal Attack. My medium artillery units are ALWAYS on support. My heavy bombardment is ALWAYS on Rear Echelon, all for instance.

Right now, every time we build anything, let alone anything with a deep hierarchy of units, we have to set each one, pretty much one by one.

[Jorgen_CAB]

This is enlightening. If there is a serious difference in combat performance that's a different matter.

I really like the rule suggestion at the end here since that could be applied asymmetrically. In other words, you could prohibit or at least limit how much heavy weapons fire at small targets while not limiting how much CAP and other light weapons fire at heavy targets, which preserves the role of armor as, well, armor - for the infantry. Something like:

%Chance to Fire = ( Base_Armour / Base_Penetration ) * ( Base_Hitpoints / Base_Attack )

applied after a target is chosen. Using base, not racial, stats so that a tech-based overmatch doesn't cause units to avoid firing because they would kill the low-tech enemy too hard or something. For example a MAV targeting a basic INF element would only fire 1/16 of the time. This could of course be modified to use an average, square root, etc. to get the desired balance, and random targeting can be retained which avoids the problems of selective targeting and keeps things "unpredictable".

What strikes me as clever about this rule is that it "fixes" the targeting problem without reducing the defensive efficiency of mixed formations very much - the heavy weapons conserve ammo by not firing at infantry (very often), but the infantry still "distracts" the heavy weapons from shooting friendly armored units so that mixed formations remain efficient for blunting enemy firepower.

Could just have an 80% chance that your vehicle will target an ideally suited target to its weapon (or closest match) instead of being completely random or completely predictable.

Yes... I think it should be based on formation mix. So if you fire on a formation that has 1000t infantry and 100t anti-tank tanks there would be a low chance that the main guns of your tanks fire (I think it could be a random chance they fire or not depending on the enemy composition). But the tanks CAP will certainly fire.

This actually would fix many things... it would make mixed units actually mechanically interesting and important and armoured units can be used in units to soak lighter weapons and the infantry could sort of "protect" the AT weapons from enemy AT assets to some degree.

You could still use random targeting and you would never feel you "waste" energy firing at the enemy. I also think it is somewhat more realistic this way. It would support role-play formation to a much higher degree.

Disregarding race tech might not be too good for the one with lower tech as they might need higher calibre weapon to deal with lighter vehicle on the enemy, in that case it is not wasting GSP. You probably could find a formula that fits. You also could have an override flag on the units as well though to fix those situations.