C# Suggestions

[Droll]

I'm a bit late to the discussion, but just wanted to comment that speed does affect combat. For ground-based AA-fire: "The chance to hit is (10% x (Tracking Speed / Aircraft Speed) x (Morale / 100)) / Environment Modifier." (http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=C-Ground_Combat#Ground-based_AA_Fire). I'm currently preparing to invade the Rahkas with 200 fighters where I have increased the speed from 9.500 to 15.000 and reduced the number of fighter pods from 2 to 1 to see if the survivability outweighs the lower fire power.

I recall earlier tests showed the AA tracking and fighter speed interaction isn't properly implemented, right now AA has very high accuracy against fighters AFAIK.

If that is the case, then I see why excessive AA severely limits the effectiveness of GSF's, but it also means that we don't really have a way of evaluating them properly if they aren't implemented completely yet. At the very least it shows that speed should be a design parameter if a rework is to be done. That would also speak to the above points about armor. If you can't increase survivability by increasing speed, but only through armor, then shock damage at higher tech levels become debilitating.

The problem I have with speed and GSFs is what happens with planets that have atmospheres. You can very easily get GSFs with comparable speed to missiles way beyond the racial tracking which I assume AA will use. How would you model the effect of atmospheric pressure on the top speed / effective evasive ability of GSFs? Would you even gain anything mechanically from modelling that? There isn't really a way to design the aerodynamic profile of fighters, all we know is that they can land/takeoff from planets that may or may not have atmospheres.

And this is completely ignoring the whole issue of air-to-air combat, which has not been a part of the GSF discussions for the obvious reason of NPRs don't use fighters.

[xenoscepter]

he problem I have with speed and GSFs is what happens with planets that have atmospheres. You can very easily get GSFs with comparable speed to missiles way beyond the racial tracking which I assume AA will use. How would you model the effect of atmospheric pressure on the top speed / effective evasive ability of GSFs? Would you even gain anything mechanically from modelling that? There isn't really a way to design the aerodynamic profile of fighters, all we know is that they can land/takeoff from planets that may or may not have atmospheres.

And this is completely ignoring the whole issue of air-to-air combat, which has not been a part of the GSF discussions for the obvious reason of NPRs don't use fighters.

 --- GSFs are Trans-Newtonian, they don't fully exist in our reality, so it makes some sense that the laws of aerodynamics as we know them might not fully apply to them or indeed even apply at all.

[Droll]

he problem I have with speed and GSFs is what happens with planets that have atmospheres. You can very easily get GSFs with comparable speed to missiles way beyond the racial tracking which I assume AA will use. How would you model the effect of atmospheric pressure on the top speed / effective evasive ability of GSFs? Would you even gain anything mechanically from modelling that? There isn't really a way to design the aerodynamic profile of fighters, all we know is that they can land/takeoff from planets that may or may not have atmospheres.

And this is completely ignoring the whole issue of air-to-air combat, which has not been a part of the GSF discussions for the obvious reason of NPRs don't use fighters.

 --- GSFs are Trans-Newtonian, they don't fully exist in our reality, so it makes some sense that the laws of aerodynamics as we know them might not fully apply to them or indeed even apply at all.

How does the TN lore fit into ground wars? Are all infantrymen fighting in the aether because the power armor they wear are at least partially made of vendarite? Is it the same with their weapons? What about the tanks?

If they are somewhat in the aether then why does dominant terrain even have an effect on combat? Surely the fighting must still happen in our reality because of that as I am not aware of the aether being affected by planetary topology.

Also how does a fighter flying through the aether attack things on the surface of a planet? Do bombs and missiles just vanish from their bomb-bays and teleport to the correct spatial coordinate? Even so does a GSF flying at 60k km/s have the ability to even be targeted by ground AA? After all this thing could drop a bomb beyond the horizon and then disappear beyond AA range but they obviously can't since they have to be at the planet to run CAS missions. Would such a fighter even be able to attack with any degree of accuracy? Does it have to slow down during the attack run?

At least with space ships and STO weapons fire they are all existing in the aether so you don't need shots to effectively be trans-dimensional but I think the deliberately vague TN lore kind of fails in the context of planetary warfare.

[Density]

And this is completely ignoring the whole issue of air-to-air combat, which has not been a part of the GSF discussions for the obvious reason of NPRs don't use fighters.

That's a thing I've been thinking about while reading this discussion. If there were air units that were built as ground units, those should be much easier to implement for NPRs than GSF.

That being said, I do kinda like alex's "why not both?" suggestion. That is, add air units that are designed and built as ground units to represent tiny (in Aurora scale) atmo-only aircraft, while leaving GSF like they are now. There would still, idealy, be some rework to GSF, starting with addressing the micromanagement problem; either some way of autoassigning them or some other change to how they interact with ground combat so they don't have to be assigned one at a time in the first place.

[Garfunkel]

The problem with Xenoscepter's suggestion on how to improve existing GSF is that it introduces several new special rules, which is a thing that Steve has wanted to get away from. In fact, reading your post makes the new GSF sounds very much like the old PDC, in that they are a ship but, on a planet, and with a bunch of exceptions affecting them.

The scale issue is certainly real and for that purpose, as well as the ability to better portray current, past, and near-future conventional armies, I'd love to see GSF become a 'proper' ground unit, especially if auto-assignment is introduced.

For all the reasons other people have already explained, keeping the space and the ground parts separate is probably for the best.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have always thought that fighters should have been a ground unit type. You could make them able to operate from space as a special ability, add a special module you can put into a ship or simply allow fighters to be transported in hangars as well as in troop transports or something.

In my opinion as already said, the current fighter mechanic have the same issues as the former PDC mechanic.

If we can't use box-launcher fighters as make shift ground support craft that is not a big loss because they are pretty bad at it anyway, especially as such craft rarely have any armour and would be destroyed even by light AA with little effort. The current fighter mechanic scale weirdly with increases technology as ground and space units use different mechanics for to hit and damage purposes.

Make ground fighters a ground unit and "fix" add some auto assignment of all types of support units be them artillery, fighters or ship bombardment. I also think all of these weapons should use FFD to target properly but should be able to support without.

Also make these support weapons have more impact on morale and not just damage to make them more worth while than they currently are. They probably also should increase the chance of breakthrough happening.

But then again I want ground units to have more combined arms effect in general so combat become a bit more dynamic and interesting. It currently is a bit one dimensional.

[DEEPenergy]

Grouping civilian contacts like we can group other contacts. So if you have a bunch of civilian ships sitting on earth it would look like Civilian Freight (x32) instead of listing them all.

[Scout1]

Pretty sure this has been mentioned before but it came up in the community discord and I realized it's still missing from C#:

Galaxy map zoom levels.  Zoom in! Zoom out! Especially zoom out!

[ArcWolf]

Grouping civilian contacts like we can group other contacts. So if you have a bunch of civilian ships sitting on earth it would look like Civilian Freight (x32) instead of listing them all.

would be great to see. One issue is civilian ships almost never form a fleet, so you wind up with 100s of single ship fleets. Having them group up would be nice too.

[cdrtwohy]

Grouping civilian contacts like we can group other contacts. So if you have a bunch of civilian ships sitting on earth it would look like Civilian Freight (x32) instead of listing them all.

would be great to see. One issue is civilian ships almost never form a fleet, so you wind up with 100s of single ship fleets. Having them group up would be nice too.

letting Civs build a fleets would help with late game slow down as well having 100s of objects to check every update is a lot of work on the code too.

[Migi]

I would like the option to hide comets and comet names for the tactical map. Sol is lousy with them and AFIK they are the only thing you can't hide.

[serger]

Also make these support weapons have more impact on morale and not just damage to make them more worth while than they currently are. They probably also should increase the chance of breakthrough happening.

Yep, because that's why they are effective IRL both for blitzkrieg and attrition strategies, despite their very bad cost / fire performance comparing to arty: you can concentrate nearly all of your air forces to support on narrow breakthrough area even without relocation, yet usually you cannot do it with arty.

And for the attrition strategy - I think air strikes without FFD might have twice or more better chances to hit non-combat and rear units comparing to arty, because air units are partly FFDs for themselves by their nature.

But then again I want ground units to have more combined arms effect in general so combat become a bit more dynamic and interesting. It currently is a bit one dimensional.

I think the most generalized interpretation of combined arms effect is that there are inevitable local random conditions of different nature for every combat episode, and some of that conditions are very advantageous or disadvantageous for different unit types, and so if you have no units of currently advantageous type - you have to forfeit in this episode, you cannot avoid it because it's random and unpredictable. And it's the natural way to represent this effect ingame: instead of the same local conditions for every round and every formation, it's possible and not very hard to implement conditions with random distributions, dependant on dominant terrain type. I think it will be enough to have only two conditions: close and ranged combat, where first is halving both evasion (too close to evade) and armor (close enough to aim at inevitable weak points). More hard terrain - more probable close combat conditions are.

[serger]

Ow, I have forgoten to write down the second half of my suggestion: disadvantageous elements become temporarily non-combat. So, vehicles will hide behind infantry during close combat (if there is any infantry for them to hide behind), while infantry will hide behind vehicles during ranged combat (again, if there is any vehicles for them to hide behind).

[Jorgen_CAB]

Ow, I have forgoten to write down the second half of my suggestion: disadvantageous elements become temporarily non-combat. So, vehicles will hide behind infantry during close combat (if there is any infantry for them to hide behind), while infantry will hide behind vehicles during ranged combat (again, if there is any vehicles for them to hide behind).

Adding some different unit behaviour based on type and terrain would probably work and make different unit types more distinct and interact with each other. It is important that there is not one perfect unit formation strategy in the game. Clearly vehicles would be allot stronger on a barren moon landscape and require much less infantry support, only infrastructure (urban areas) would require some infantry in large quantities in such places. Unit types could also have different roles as well, or rather weapon type influence the role of the type etc...

[kilo]

Is it possible to add automatic naming for space stations, habitats, mining bases and so on? Right now every station, which is constructed by construction factory is named class name + number. This is quite unfitting for a mighty terraforming base for instance.