C# Suggestions

[TMaekler]

Obviously not a small change so nothing to take lightly... 

The construction yards have all of that build in. They do the research while they construct the first ship or retool for it.

Well, that is just my in-lore explanation. And research is already jam packed and for my taste a too strong factor in "winning the game"... I don't think we should put more on this factor.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Obviously not a small change so nothing to take lightly... 

The construction yards have all of that build in. They do the research while they construct the first ship or retool for it.

Well, that is just my in-lore explanation. And research is already jam packed and for my taste a too strong factor in "winning the game"... I don't think we should put more on this factor.

I think the opportunity cost for just creating new versions is too simple and research would be more expensive and so building more jack of all trades ships make more realistic sense than it does currently in terms of opportunity cost from a research perspective.

I also find that having ships based on templates also would impose more interesting ship design considerations and some important restrictions.

So I think it should be quite viable to do this as the cost to retool can often be kept very low most of the time between a refit from one type to the next.

The changes to shipyards also make it so having one yard for every type of ship quite affordable so the retooling is rather cheap for the most part.

[serger]

I think it might be quite simple and very good change to have a logarithmic research costs instead of linear from the size.
Smaller components and hulls are really not much simpler then larger ones, and R&D times for missiles, planes and battleships are nearly equal really.

(I understand that it can be made as home rule, but it's very micro-heavy to implement this home rule every time - we must remember separately to not use this, and this, and this component and GF unit until next year, and keep all research labs busy with some research of straw to load population and economics, and then remember to reward or not reward some scientists... Umpffffff. My hope is that Steve likes to conduct stories and read details as they flow, not calculate and script the very small detail unassisted!)

[serger]

And, in addition to the previous, I'd remind that new GF units, missile-size ordnance and small (fighter-sized) crafts are unaffected by shipyard's retooling process completely, and exactly these objects are very cheap with linear rule, so in those cases we have to rely on home rules ONLY if we want to have some realism.

[shepard1707]

I still think it'd be really handy to have some way to automatically number Hulls in a class, while still having the ship's have Given names.  It's just dang useful to know which ships are older and which ships are newer.

[nuclearslurpee]

I still think it'd be really handy to have some way to automatically number Hulls in a class, while still having the ship's have Given names.  It's just dang useful to know which ships are older and which ships are newer.

Seconded. Since we already have prefixes and suffixes, it would be great if typing "Number" into those fields inserted the number, same as how "None" is recognized as the code to have no pre/suffix except adding a number instead.

Advice to commenter: you can see the ships in a class sorted by age in the Class Design Window, Ships in Class tab as they are by default sorted by launch date.

[QuakeIV]

I'd personally argue for a function of total RP cost of the constituent components, to reflect the cost of integrating more complicated parts.

Perhaps somewhere in the domain of 10-20% of said cost?

e: Honestly 10-20% actually feels excessive.  It seems like you should be able to get more than 5-10 ship designs out of your components before integration costs exceeds the RND cost of the initial hardware.

[Ektor]

I'm not sure whether this has been brought up before, but I'd love an option to make a robotic race, where you need to build facilities to have pop growth, kinda like gene editing facilities existed in VB6. Perhaps the robots could even take TN materials to build, so you could unlock robot building as a tech through research to boost your population growth. Maybe robots could have tolerances and such and could have a tech line dedicated to them, like biology messes with the tolerances of biological races.

[TMaekler]

Max Population Factor:

Aurora basically simulates only population which is capable of working productively. Children and older people are not modelled. Thinking that through I was wondering of the actual pop max of 12B for Earth isn't too large. Let's say that we actually have around half of the worlds population in the worker age bracket, that would mean that a maxed out earth in Aurora would have 24B people living here.

Whilst maybe possible, having 12B workers seems to me to be too much in terms of the production values Aurora has. How many 10.000 over 10.000 of production factories could earth have?!?

So I was thinking about adding some kind of population factor: Humans for example do have 0.5. So max pop would still be 12B, but only 6B of them would be in the worker age bracket. And so on.

Other races could perhaps have a factor of 0.7 - and thereby be better of with larger populations. Or 0.3 and have to compensate for their lack of production with massive pop growth... .

[Jorgen_CAB]

Max Population Factor:

Aurora basically simulates only population which is capable of working productively. Children and older people are not modelled. Thinking that through I was wondering of the actual pop max of 12B for Earth isn't too large. Let's say that we actually have around half of the worlds population in the worker age bracket, that would mean that a maxed out earth in Aurora would have 24B people living here.

Whilst maybe possible, having 12B workers seems to me to be too much in terms of the production values Aurora has. How many 10.000 over 10.000 of production factories could earth have?!?

So I was thinking about adding some kind of population factor: Humans for example do have 0.5. So max pop would still be 12B, but only 6B of them would be in the worker age bracket. And so on.

Other races could perhaps have a factor of 0.7 - and thereby be better of with larger populations. Or 0.3 and have to compensate for their lack of production with massive pop growth... .

I'm not saying that I dislike this idea because I don't... but I generally just assume that population already take old and young people into account as is so there would be no immediate need for this. When a factory need 50.000 workers that is just general population and only part of them will actually be working not everyone. Both children and seniors are still an important part of society in different ways so there is no need to differentiate them. We still end up with the same numbers at the end.

[serger]

Besides, about Max Population.

I think it will be good, if it will depend on the "depth" of planet's surface properties in the sense of population's tolerance intervals. So, say, if your population have temperature interval -10..10C, and planet's average surface temperature is -10, then you will have Current Max Population = 1/2 of Ideal Max Population + current infrastructure with minimal colony cost (that is - you can establish a city in the middle of Antarctic, if you have enough infrastructure). Terraform this planet to 0C - and you'll have Current Max Population = Ideal Max Population + current infrastructure.

[serger]

There was an autoсalculated field in VB Aurora's Class Design window named Power Required - it was very helpful, especially for new players, and for anyone who doesn't have a fun with routine arithmetic.
Will be cool to have it in C# again.

[Ektor]

My current game is locked into 6 hour increments due to NPRs. I really, really wish that we could have our time increments not be disturbed by their activity. I'm not even talking about when it goes down to 5 seconds because I understand computing battles must be harder on the game, but when nothing's happening, I really wish I could play with 5 day increments again.

[nuclearslurpee]

One of two suggestions:

(1) Preferably, remove the Ground Combat Command skill from the game. This has been discussed many times and the general consensus is that is a limiting, unfun mechanic (or it would be, if it worked) which functions uniquely to every other skill in the game which are strictly bonuses.

(2) At a minimum, remove this skill from the commander auto-assign algorithm, as presently all it accomplishes is leaving numerous battalions devoid of commanders. As far as I know, the skill doesn't even work as intended so is a completely artificial limit on commander assignments, and even if it is WAI it does not mechanically prevent a commander from leading an "oversize" formation, and as a fraction of a bonus is better than no bonus I would much rather see commanders with low Command skills still assigned to formations they lack the skill to command at full effectiveness.

[Ektor]

snip

I really agree. I have a lot of ground commanders that are unassigned and formations with no commander. I think it should be better implemented.

I'm not sure whether I've said this before, but I'd really like the possibility to have different tech speed modifiers for part design and research. I love doing 15% research games, but I don't want designing a single ship to take multiple years.