C# Suggestions

[Droll]

Forgive me if this is a duplicate; I have about 20 pages of suggestions to catch up on!

An NPR generated when I was playing on 260% difficulty 80 years in.

I get that the size of NPR populations is dependent on the above factors in order to give some sort of challenge.
But what just happened is that the game spawned 30bn aliens on a world that can only accommodate 8bn population (they have 100% population density).

I think what should happen is either:
- Game respects the carrying capacity of the body
- Game creates designs of colossal orbital habitats in such a way that the carrying capacity + orbital capacity is sufficient to house the population.


EDIT: I should also mention this world had dangerous levels of CO2 as well which I had to SM replace with aesthesium.
EDIT: For the problem I pointed out in the edit, the game should, once it's decided that the planet in question will have an NPR, modify the body to actually have 0 cost for whatever alien it's decided to put there.

SJW: Max pop for NPR will now be the capacity of the planet. Also fixed dangerous gas problem.

This was a reasonable bug fix, but I suggest that this would be a nice place for future enhancement. If the population would be larger than the planetary capacity, then the game could give the new NPR extra colonies on nearby planets. Find some planets with reasonable colony costs and give them infrastructure and facilities. If they have minerals, move a few mines to them, otherwise financial centers or research labs or something. This should give a new NPR a lot more life.

This is inline with a previous suggestion that shouldn't be too far back that suggested that TN NPRs could be generated as interstellar empires.

[db48x]

These two bugs, now fixed, are related by a common factor:

Got what seemed like a couple hundred errors during system generation jumping into a new JP. Function #2608, #222, #224, #2339 in that order, and then repeating. Over and over.

According to a quick peek in the database, this is a new NPR (not a spoiler race) and they have been generated with the "pre-industrial" flag.

Edit: So, I don't know if this is intended or not, but when I approached their planet I discovered that they have two separate empires for the same NPR race on the planet. I'm only detecting STO and ground forces for one of them.

Update on the strike-through text: This system actually spawned with both a 1) Pre-industrial NPR, and 2) Rakhas on the same body. That seems like a bug, although it's an interesting situation with roleplay implications. Also, apparently they're not hostile to each other even after time progresses. I don't think they can detect each other. Maybe this bug created an interesting enough situation not to fix it. (Except for all the error messages I originally got above on system gen)

I don't know, because I never saw the aliens five hops away. My ship was destroyed by unknown, unseen ships and STO weapons.
I neglected to add a thermal sensor to my geo survey ships, and now I pay the price.

However, I started the game with no NPRs, so I don't see how these two races could be the same race. They certainly didn't hop from Cadbury to Mabel without me seeing them. And they couldn't have grown from Mabel to Cadbury: Mabel didn't exist (i.e., I did not discover it) until years and years after Cadbury.

If they are both the same spoiler race, it is odd that one has ships and STO weapons but the other does not.

I am guessing, but I think what happened was as follows

• Cadbury population is Rakhas but doesn't have either STO weapons or tracking stations.
• You land in Cadbury but the Rakhas don't detect your ground forces and therefore don't have an alien race record for your race.
• Mabel population is also Rakhas but this one does have STO weapons.
• Mabel population detects your survey ship and destroys it with STO weapons.
• Rakhas now have an alien race record and classes you as hostile
• Rakhas in Cadbury launch an assault because they now know you exist and ground combat doesn't actually need a sensor contact

I'll add at least one tracking station to Rakhas to prevent that situation (assuming my guess is correct).

They both involved populations that exist on the same body but that cannot detect each other. I suggest that some thought be given to how this could be resolved. The easiest way is for there to be immediate mutual detection, but with different text in the logs than for detecting ships. A more creative way might be to allow for a degree of stealth; it might be quite interesting to stealthily land on a planet with Rakhas or a pre–industrial race with no capability of detecting ships, and try to study them from afar.

[Blogaugis]

Except that the crew count is irrelevant because there is a button labelled "conscript" which when checked, makes such stations not take crew from the officer/crew pool. Also for completeness, crew grade does not improve the productivity of modules so gameplay wise there is no reason not to check a terraformer as a conscript ship.

The only crew based argument is the CO officer, but that's also relevant because you just set the officer priority to 0, this means that ground based installations just have the governor bonus advantage, which is more than closed by the cost gap between ground and orbital.

Yeah you don't need navy grade crew for the terraformers so its not the same.

Well then...
So that's what the 'conscript' means... Thank you.

I guess then it is somewhat relevant if you are creating a multi-purpose station with armor and weapons and a terraforming module, but it is rather ineffective.
Otherwise, the same. Installations need to be improved.

[QuakeIV]

I personally think its not really critical, but yeah terraforming installations are inferior in pretty much every way.

[Lord Solar]

I've played for a bit, and the weapon I find really lackluster is mesons. This weapon needs a direct buff; this could be addressed through the "Meson Armor Retardation Chance" tech line so that the Meson has much greater chance to penetrate armor. The chance should at least scale with armor rather than being left behind so mesons actually get worse at higher tech levels.
Buff Mesons
please

[Droll]

I've played for a bit, and the weapon I find really lackluster is mesons. This weapon needs a direct buff; this could be addressed through the "Meson Armor Retardation Chance" tech line so that the Meson has much greater chance to penetrate armor. The chance should at least scale with armor rather than being left behind so mesons actually get worse at higher tech levels.
Buff Mesons
please

Honestly all you'd need would be to make it be % chance to ignore armor as opposed to % chance to ignore each layer of armor. Right now at max meson retardation (7% chance to be absorbed per layer), ships of armor level 10+ become virtually immune to mesons.

I think mesons were meant to be an anti-small weapon and not be very powerful against large ships, but they get completely superseded by AMMs in the anti-small role.

[Bremen]

I've played for a bit, and the weapon I find really lackluster is mesons. This weapon needs a direct buff; this could be addressed through the "Meson Armor Retardation Chance" tech line so that the Meson has much greater chance to penetrate armor. The chance should at least scale with armor rather than being left behind so mesons actually get worse at higher tech levels.
Buff Mesons
please

Honestly all you'd need would be to make it be % chance to ignore armor as opposed to % chance to ignore each layer of armor. Right now at max meson retardation (7% chance to be absorbed per layer), ships of armor level 10+ become virtually immune to mesons.

I think mesons were meant to be an anti-small weapon and not be very powerful against large ships, but they get completely superseded by AMMs in the anti-small role.

I actually think the main preciptator of the change was Steve having visions of thousands of STO mesons blasting entire armadas out of the sky. I do agree that the nerf hit them too hard and they no longer have much of a role, though.

The change I'd like to see would actually be for larger mesons to do multiple points of damage and each failed armor penetration roll would reduce the damage by 1. So if you had a heavy meson that did 3 damage, and it failed its 7% (or whatever) chance, it does 1 damage to the armor and the remaining two points continue rolling to penetrate the rest of the armor.

[nuclearslurpee]

Honestly all you'd need would be to make it be % chance to ignore armor as opposed to % chance to ignore each layer of armor. Right now at max meson retardation (7% chance to be absorbed per layer), ships of armor level 10+ become virtually immune to mesons.

I think mesons were meant to be an anti-small weapon and not be very powerful against large ships, but they get completely superseded by AMMs in the anti-small role.

Actually for a 7% retardation chance, 10 layers of armor would block about 50% of meson shots, as (1-0.07)^10 = 0.484. So mesons are a bit less bad than they seem but still pretty bad given that this is the max tech and at the same tech level ten layers of armor is really a bit light if anything.

In my view a big problem with mesons is that they are RP-intensive (not ideal for a specialized weapon with limited applications), and two of the techs are both purely +range effects and are quite redundant as a result. That said, I don't think having a flat %chance to ignore all armor is a good buff, as it is too extreme and basically brings back the VB6 mesons (very problematic) with a side helping of RNG which can only add frustration. Frankly the current state feels like a harsh nerf intended to remove mesons from the game without actually removing mesons from the game since people like the flavor but the actual concept is problematic.

I think any solution is going to have to come from giving the caliber/focal size tech line a better effect, which is tricky as any new effect needs to scale so as not to become a perfect anti-armor weapon at high tech levels while being passably useful at lower tech levels. One thought would be to have the caliber techs specify the number of armor layers which can be passed through by (1-x)% chance where x is the retardation tech level. For balance this may need to be something like sqrt(caliber/10) with a minimum of 1 (10 cm) and maximum of 2.83 (80 cm).

Then the formula for the %chance a meson shot penetrates changes from (1-x)^n, where n is the number of armor layers, to (1-x)^(n/c) where c=sqrt(caliber/10) is the number of armor layers bypassed by each check and fractional values are preserved. In this case at max tech level a meson can penetrate about 28 layers of armor about 50% of the time, rather than 10, which is I think reasonable given the cost, size, and ROF for such a large weapon. At base tech level nothing has changed, so much like shields a few levels of research are needed to produce a useful weapon. A mid-tech meson cannon with 25 cm caliber and 24% retardation will have a 50% chance to penetrate 4 layers of armor, which sounds maybe a bit frightening but this is already possible with a 9-damage laser that also does armor damage so I think it is fine.

[xenoscepter]

I've played for a bit, and the weapon I find really lackluster is mesons. This weapon needs a direct buff; this could be addressed through the "Meson Armor Retardation Chance" tech line so that the Meson has much greater chance to penetrate armor. The chance should at least scale with armor rather than being left behind so mesons actually get worse at higher tech levels.
Buff Mesons
please

Honestly all you'd need would be to make it be % chance to ignore armor as opposed to % chance to ignore each layer of armor. Right now at max meson retardation (7% chance to be absorbed per layer), ships of armor level 10+ become virtually immune to mesons.

I think mesons were meant to be an anti-small weapon and not be very powerful against large ships, but they get completely superseded by AMMs in the anti-small role.

I actually think the main preciptator of the change was Steve having visions of thousands of STO mesons blasting entire armadas out of the sky. I do agree that the nerf hit them too hard and they no longer have much of a role, though.

The change I'd like to see would actually be for larger mesons to do multiple points of damage and each failed armor penetration roll would reduce the damage by 1. So if you had a heavy meson that did 3 damage, and it failed its 7% (or whatever) chance, it does 1 damage to the armor and the remaining two points continue rolling to penetrate the rest of the armor.

 --- I made this exact same suggestion myself, not so very long ago...

[Froggiest1982]

Would be nice under the Empire Mining Tab of the Economic vie to have a further column for the total access.

Currently, you have minerals in the stockpile and the stockpile change. Adding the total mineral we have access to between all colonies will help to identify immediately if there is a mineral we are going to need soon.

Eventually, a stockpile change filter by time (same as the wealth) could be also appreciated.

[Kiero]

I would love to see a fighter size ship that can operate without a crew, like a drone.

[nuclearslurpee]

I would love to see a fighter size ship that can operate without a crew, like a drone.

It's worth noting why this isn't currently possible, because it makes an easy (if partial) fix available:

Currently, it is actually possible to design a ship with a single crew member (box launcher missile bomber with a small/slow enough engine), however it is not possible to get down to zero crew on a self-propelled ship because engines have a required minimum crew of 1. However, above this minimum the required crew is just the engine size (in HS) times the EP boost modifier, rounded to the nearest integer. Thus the only change required would be to allow rounding to zero in the engine crew calculation.

This would allow zero-crew fighters to be possible at least for box launcher designs, without adding a weird exception in the C# code for a separate "drone" class which Steve would probably not want to do as part of the design approach to C# is eliminating weird exceptions like that.

For beam fighters I don't know if there are any beam weapons which can be built with no crew requirement (even 1/4 size railguns require 3 crew, though I don't remember is 0.5-HS Gauss has a requirement or not?).

[Kiero]

The solution might be another "crew quarters" module that would fulfill all ship crew requirements but would provide 0 crew.

[QuakeIV]

I don't personally like the idea of 'crew module but actually not' as an unmanned solution.  Id argue to fully implement that you would need to design 'auotnomous' parts that are heavier, but not require a crew quarters.  Additionally, perhaps maintenance failures just stay broken.

[Droll]

Additionally, perhaps maintenance failures just stay broken.

This alone would make them a small-craft only thing as the way failure rates work you wouldn't be able to stop a large autonomous ship from detonating in orbit. Unless you add a special "repair droid garage" component that is 250-500t which enables autonomous repairs.