C# Suggestions

[QuakeIV]

I actually dont use them because they just get left on a planet until time immemorial because I never noticed they didnt find anything.  I also support this idea.

[AlStar]

I highly suspect that this (or ideas like it) have already been suggested, but *shrug* doesn't hurt to re-hash some things.

Boarding combat - currently, 99% of all boarding combat seems to consist of a squad of highly trained, heavily armored marines against the hapless spacers aboard whatever ship gets boarded.

Thoughts (to be taken individually or mixed and matched):
1. Armory Module - perhaps with size scaling with number of crew. Upgrades typical crew from light weapons and half racial armor to regular weapons and racial armor.
2. Robotic Defender Module - provides X number of defensive troops for the ship. Default with same stats as a normal infantry, with a possible upgrade tree that can lead to heavily armored or heavy weapon variants. Could be RP'd as either actual robotic troops, or as automated boobytraps / hidden turrets in the ship.
3. Ship Security Module - a module that can be filled with X tons of troops, selectable from your currently researched ground combat templates. Set in the ship build menu. Then, when you queue up a new ship to be built, the cost of the troops will be added to the cost of the ship, and when the ship is completed, it will have the troops on board. (Basically, a troop transport bay, but without having to micromanage loading up individual defensive compliments of troops for each ship.)

[Droll]

I highly suspect that this (or ideas like it) have already been suggested, but *shrug* doesn't hurt to re-hash some things.

Boarding combat - currently, 99% of all boarding combat seems to consist of a squad of highly trained, heavily armored marines against the hapless spacers aboard whatever ship gets boarded.

Thoughts (to be taken individually or mixed and matched):
1. Armory Module - perhaps with size scaling with number of crew. Upgrades typical crew from light weapons and half racial armor to regular weapons and racial armor.
2. Robotic Defender Module - provides X number of defensive troops for the ship. Default with same stats as a normal infantry, with a possible upgrade tree that can lead to heavily armored or heavy weapon variants. Could be RP'd as either actual robotic troops, or as automated boobytraps / hidden turrets in the ship.
3. Ship Security Module - a module that can be filled with X tons of troops, selectable from your currently researched ground combat templates. Set in the ship build menu. Then, when you queue up a new ship to be built, the cost of the troops will be added to the cost of the ship, and when the ship is completed, it will have the troops on board. (Basically, a troop transport bay, but without having to micromanage loading up individual defensive compliments of troops for each ship.)

I like all of this but no. 3 sounds hard to implement if you want it fully automated and also making sense - what you suggest here would mean that a shipyard would also "train" the troops which kind of sidesteps the requirement to have GU training facilities. So doing it properly would be a lot of work.

[QuakeIV]

There is already a concept of being able to produce ship components either via factories or shipyard.  I personally think that doing some production in the shipyard is reasonable.  Particularly for convenience.  I think if the troops were pretty fundamentally confined to the ship and generally still had to go somewhere to replenish this complement, then it would be reasonable.

[nuclearslurpee]

I highly suspect that this (or ideas like it) have already been suggested, but *shrug* doesn't hurt to re-hash some things.

Boarding combat - currently, 99% of all boarding combat seems to consist of a squad of highly trained, heavily armored marines against the hapless spacers aboard whatever ship gets boarded.

Thoughts (to be taken individually or mixed and matched):
1. Armory Module - perhaps with size scaling with number of crew. Upgrades typical crew from light weapons and half racial armor to regular weapons and racial armor.
2. Robotic Defender Module - provides X number of defensive troops for the ship. Default with same stats as a normal infantry, with a possible upgrade tree that can lead to heavily armored or heavy weapon variants. Could be RP'd as either actual robotic troops, or as automated boobytraps / hidden turrets in the ship.
3. Ship Security Module - a module that can be filled with X tons of troops, selectable from your currently researched ground combat templates. Set in the ship build menu. Then, when you queue up a new ship to be built, the cost of the troops will be added to the cost of the ship, and when the ship is completed, it will have the troops on board. (Basically, a troop transport bay, but without having to micromanage loading up individual defensive compliments of troops for each ship.)

I'm not sure what any of these add to the game mechanically that isn't already doable by sticking a troop bay with some highly-trained, heavily-armored defenders. The armory at least functions differently, but the other two are basically just troop bays with a little flavor on top, not really worth coding in a new mechanic for.

The armory is an interesting idea but in the proposed form would be blatantly overpowered as it upgrades the entire crew of a ship to basically full light infantry. I also don't think the mechanic makes sense as it's simply not how shipboard armories work in any real navy, in most cases including a troop bay is a more realistic model of an armory module.

[QuakeIV]

What a ship security module adds is making staffing actual security forces on the ship way easier.

I think the Armory is reasonable if there is a sufficient weight aspect to it.  It seems to me like the crew should still be inferior to dedicated troops, just better armed than otherwise.

[Droll]

What a ship security module adds is making staffing actual security forces on the ship way easier.

I think the Armory is reasonable if there is a sufficient weight aspect to it.  It seems to me like the crew should still be inferior to dedicated troops, just better armed than otherwise.

You could just make it so that a single armory arms a certain number of crewmen. That way you can't just cheese it on large ships with one armory for everyone.

[QuakeIV]

I agree it should scale to crew, you had already mentioned that so I was just mentioning, if the weight (per crew) is big enough then it should be possible to make it not-imbalanced.

[Steve Walmsley]

I have been considering some form of 'armoury' module to allow the crew to be better armed for a while. It is less micromanagement than building ground forces to assign to ships where the intention is solely to improve boarding defence. The armoury could be a fixed size and would arm a fixed number of crew with personal weapons with the rest of the crew functioning as they do now. There are a few caveats however.

1) It is unlikely that crew would be as well trained as the troops in a regular infantry formation
2) It is unlikely than crew would be able to function in powered armour
3) It would unreasonable for an armoury module to auto-upgrade crew weapons when that doesn't apply to normal infantry formations.
4) What happens to the ability of the armoury to equip crew after they have been in a battle and some have been killed.

1) and 2) could be handled in 2 ways. Either assign some form of attack penalty, which reduces the effect of having the armoury, or handwave it and assume the 'armoury' module is also used to train the crew.

3) is trickier. The only real way around it is make the armoury a designed module that has fixed weapon and armour strengths at the time of creation. if I did that, I could also have a 'training' option on the module that makes it larger but allows the crew to function at full effectiveness. Plus maybe a 'powered armour' option that also increases size but allows crew to use powered armour. Although that is starting to get more complex.

4) is also tricky. In normal ground combat, when someone is killed their equipment is also lost so the armoury should be less effective after a battle, but I don't want to track weapons held by individual armouries.

The various questions above are why I haven't yet moved forward with this type of module. Perhaps a better option is to give ships an assigned group formation type in the same way as ordnance (which would have to fit within their troop transport capacity), so when they are built they pick up their ground formation. That, together with queueing ground units, solves a lot of the micromanagement. I can even have a name template for the formation so it gets renamed when assigned to the ship.

[xenoscepter]

 - I already use static units and vehicles for boarding defense, the former being ship board turrets, the latter being used as trams on space stations for the ferrying of supplies and providing heavy weapon support. Since ground formations defend their mothership, anything goes really, or so I assume...

[Jorgen_CAB]

- I already use static units and vehicles for boarding defense, the former being ship board turrets, the latter being used as trams on space stations for the ferrying of supplies and providing heavy weapon support. Since ground formations defend their mothership, anything goes really, or so I assume...

Only infantry is used in ship combat, so I don't think that either static nor vehicles will help you much there.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have been considering some form of 'armoury' module to allow the crew to be better armed for a while. It is less micromanagement than building ground forces to assign to ships where the intention is solely to improve boarding defence. The armoury could be a fixed size and would arm a fixed number of crew with personal weapons with the rest of the crew functioning as they do now. There are a few caveats however.

1) It is unlikely that crew would be as well trained as the troops in a regular infantry formation
2) It is unlikely than crew would be able to function in powered armour
3) It would unreasonable for an armoury module to auto-upgrade crew weapons when that doesn't apply to normal infantry formations.
4) What happens to the ability of the armoury to equip crew after they have been in a battle and some have been killed.

1) and 2) could be handled in 2 ways. Either assign some form of attack penalty, which reduces the effect of having the armoury, or handwave it and assume the 'armoury' module is also used to train the crew.

3) is trickier. The only real way around it is make the armoury a designed module that has fixed weapon and armour strengths at the time of creation. if I did that, I could also have a 'training' option on the module that makes it larger but allows the crew to function at full effectiveness. Plus maybe a 'powered armour' option that also increases size but allows crew to use powered armour. Although that is starting to get more complex.

4) is also tricky. In normal ground combat, when someone is killed their equipment is also lost so the armoury should be less effective after a battle, but I don't want to track weapons held by individual armouries.

The various questions above are why I haven't yet moved forward with this type of module. Perhaps a better option is to give ships an assigned group formation type in the same way as ordnance (which would have to fit within their troop transport capacity), so when they are built they pick up their ground formation. That, together with queueing ground units, solves a lot of the micromanagement. I can even have a name template for the formation so it gets renamed when assigned to the ship.

In my opinion it would be much better if you changed the UI to better support small ship based security forces and marines. I would like the ground troop screen to be able to filter out troops onboard ships or that you can flag formations as ship security/marine forces so the game understand these are troops assigned to the ship rather than being transported from one place to another.

We should then also be able to see such forces in the ship information screen as more like part of the ship, perhaps even in the ship info screen as if then parasites and missiles are added.

I think this would be better and would fit better in general in my opinion. People on ships should usually be dedicated marines or not.

[Droll]

I have been considering some form of 'armoury' module to allow the crew to be better armed for a while. It is less micromanagement than building ground forces to assign to ships where the intention is solely to improve boarding defence. The armoury could be a fixed size and would arm a fixed number of crew with personal weapons with the rest of the crew functioning as they do now. There are a few caveats however.

1) It is unlikely that crew would be as well trained as the troops in a regular infantry formation
2) It is unlikely than crew would be able to function in powered armour
3) It would unreasonable for an armoury module to auto-upgrade crew weapons when that doesn't apply to normal infantry formations.
4) What happens to the ability of the armoury to equip crew after they have been in a battle and some have been killed.

1) and 2) could be handled in 2 ways. Either assign some form of attack penalty, which reduces the effect of having the armoury, or handwave it and assume the 'armoury' module is also used to train the crew.

3) is trickier. The only real way around it is make the armoury a designed module that has fixed weapon and armour strengths at the time of creation. if I did that, I could also have a 'training' option on the module that makes it larger but allows the crew to function at full effectiveness. Plus maybe a 'powered armour' option that also increases size but allows crew to use powered armour. Although that is starting to get more complex.

4) is also tricky. In normal ground combat, when someone is killed their equipment is also lost so the armoury should be less effective after a battle, but I don't want to track weapons held by individual armouries.

The various questions above are why I haven't yet moved forward with this type of module. Perhaps a better option is to give ships an assigned group formation type in the same way as ordnance (which would have to fit within their troop transport capacity), so when they are built they pick up their ground formation. That, together with queueing ground units, solves a lot of the micromanagement. I can even have a name template for the formation so it gets renamed when assigned to the ship.

Your final suggestion is a very good one.

As for your concerns - The power armor stuff I think is a non-issue, just have the armory upgrade the crew weapons and keep their armor the same. The whole point of the armory is to improve the damage dealing potential of crew against gene modded space marines in power armor which are the most likely assailants. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the armory to also provide armor.

As for the weapon tracking problem, an alternative would be for the armory to not arm existing crew - but instead add a specific amount of "security personnel" who are better armed and form another defensive element during boarding combat. This creates a life support burden but also solves the problem of needing to track equipment. When a red shirt gets shot their equipment goes with them and can only be replenished with the "replace crew" order. This also sidesteps the training question since they are trained security personnel who are specialized in defending ships.

[TMaekler]

When the order to refuel or restock is auto-generated by the game it should check if such orders are already in the ship's queue. It is a bit annoying when I set up a deep space recco to return home manually and have them stop at some fuel depots on the way and the auto-generate deletes all of that making the ship stranded in deep space...

[xenoscepter]

- I already use static units and vehicles for boarding defense, the former being ship board turrets, the latter being used as trams on space stations for the ferrying of supplies and providing heavy weapon support. Since ground formations defend their mothership, anything goes really, or so I assume...

Only infantry is used in ship combat, so I don't think that either static nor vehicles will help you much there.

 - Don't formations defend their own ship? I thought the infantry-only was with regards to the attacking force only...