Suggestions Thread for v2.0

[StarshipCactus]

That being said, I personally think that engaging a target to throw off the accuracy of the target's shots is a pretty good and quasi-realistic idea to add some further consideration to beam combat.  Probably focusing targets will still be a major thing, but you will at least want to 'pay the bills' so to say on keeping a target sufficiently heavily engaged as to degrade its ability to shoot accurately.  Personally I think this should only really effect direct fire weapons.  There would also need to be some feedback on whether more firepower needs to be allocated (it should probably be more for bigger targets), otherwise it wont be particularly fun because there will be no clear way to know what effect you are having.

To me, this sounds like a bunch of extra micromanagement. Having to set up your fire controls to allocate shots against every ship in the enemy fleet to degrade their targeting is tedious already, then having to adjust after every increment until you find the right sweet spot. Meanwhile the enemy is doing the same (assuming the NPR is capable of this... if not they are screwed!), so the net result is that the battles take much longer which means many more turns of clicking through 5-second increments and fiddling with BFC assignments. No thank you.

IMO, there is such a thing as having so much tactical detail that it drags the whole game down, even if it is in the name of "realism". I think Jorgen has given the better approach, if you want the tactical micro then manipulating engagement ranges with split formations is a better approach and carries the added risk of being vulnerable to a surprising missile attack against an isolated subformation, which I think with the 2.2 changes is a very present risk.

Agreed, I'm personally not a fan of adding unfun extra micro. Less micro is better than more micro in 80% of cases.

[Andrew]

A lot of the reasons for why splitting fire between Capital wet navy ships was a good idea really do not apply in Aurora (or space in general) unless you change the mechanics.
1) Confusion over fall of shot. In water navies radar and computer fire control mades this irrelevant, this is even more true for Laser/railguns in space where the shot goes in a straight line
2) 'Softening up' Most hits on Battleships partiularly at fairly long range do not penetrate the Citadel and so are not a risk to sinking the ship but lots of critical parts of the ship particularly Fire Control systems cannot be armoured. So ships fire control degrades as they take hits , an unengaged ship will still have fully effective fire control when it reaches decisive range. To make this a factor in Aurora it would be necessary to change the armour  model so that some ship systems are easy to take out with light hits at long range, worse at any range an Aurora ship does not degrade its fighting or maneuver ability until armour is breached and cumulative hits on armour shorten the time to breach it whereas it does not matter how many 8 inch shells hit a dreadnought they are never going to breach its armour.
2a) Fluke hits. At any range sheer bad luck can see a battleship killed or crippled by a single hit even when the armour should normally prevent damage(Hood , Bismarck, South Carolina, Scharnhorst) were all crippled or killed by one lucky hit and it was a contrubuting factor in the loss of several  other capital ships
3) Crew distraction, never sure how much of this actually happened given the limited awareness of the crew about what is happening around them. But in Aurora were 5 seconds is a long time in beam range combat the crew are probably not a factor, the ships guns are being directed by the computer systems following preset protocols, a fleet can die in a minute of beam fire there is no time for people to intefere . Computers don't care about incoming fire until they explode. Modern anti-missile engagements are handled by computers for the same reason, people just are not fsat enough

[AJS1956]

Hi,

I have a few suggestions for things that would improve my game experience. None of them are at all necessary but all would be nice to have!

1) Can you alter the naming themes so that;

If the first line of the text file starts with a symbol (I suggest a semicolon) then whatever comes after will be the default theme name. that way, people can add their theme names in the files and spare a certain amount of typing by the player.

2) Can you add creation date to ship classes?

This would be set the first time the class was locked. I know that players can lock classes manually (and can unlock them retroactively - but that is up to the player and their own policy on using SM). If a class has a creation date it could be put on the Class Design tab below the range bands, for example.

3) I often use Reserve levels on the mining page to control the flow of minerals around each system. I know many players find this as too much micro management so I suggest the following changes/additions.
A) Between the word Reserve and the first reserve limit (for Duranium) put the word limit which, when clicked on allows the player to enter an amount and ALL mineral reserves levels are set to this.
B) Between the bottom reserve level (for Gallicite) and the Total line put the word clear which, when clicked on clears all reserve levels.

Since I often use individual levels for each mineral but some are repeated, these additions would allow me to set up my preferred levels quicker.

Thanks,

Andy

[kilo]

Hi,

I was thinking about STO elements again. What do you think about getting a new BFC choice? At the moment, there are  4x range / 1x tracking speed and vice versa as options. These are quite handy for dedicated long range and AMM weapons. There are kinds for which neither really fit, as they do neither have a long range nor can they be mounted in turrets. For those, a cheap x1 / x1 version would be very handy.

[Blacklight]

Hey Steve, is there any chance NPR carriers will make a return with the changes to NPR fleets etc? it would be really awesome to see them make use of carriers once more.  And honestly having NPR's surprising you with large fleets of missile fighters or beam fighters etc would be really fun.  Especially with a missile revamp making their missiles more interesting.

[Droll]

2) 'Softening up' Most hits on Battleships partiularly at fairly long range do not penetrate the Citadel and so are not a risk to sinking the ship but lots of critical parts of the ship particularly Fire Control systems cannot be armoured. So ships fire control degrades as they take hits , an unengaged ship will still have fully effective fire control when it reaches decisive range. To make this a factor in Aurora it would be necessary to change the armour  model so that some ship systems are easy to take out with light hits at long range, worse at any range an Aurora ship does not degrade its fighting or maneuver ability until armour is breached and cumulative hits on armour shorten the time to breach it whereas it does not matter how many 8 inch shells hit a dreadnought they are never going to breach its armour.

Doesn't Aurora already make the distinction between components protected/not protected by armor? Specifically I recall that turrets do not benefit from the armor belt, hence why they have an armor option to add HTK and make them more resilient. Or am I imagining things?

[GrandNord]

I've had a few thoughts about the changes to missiles.  Hopefully in 2. 2 Salvo size will not be the be all, end all of missile warfare and adaptability and versatility will become and important part of designing ships and missiles.

In that vein, maybe it would be very interesting to allow for hybrid missile launchers (or maybe just box launchers? Designing a reload system that would accept such a wide variety of sizes would be hellish IRL), that could allow for several different sizes of missiles to be put in a launcher, as long as the total missile size would be below the launcher size.

For the sake of balance this could be done at a size and cost premium, sacrificing firepower for versatility, and allowing us to create truly multirole fighters. 
Maybe to avoid any silliness like 20 size 1 missiles in a launcher there could also be a size cutoff under which the missile would not be accepted.  Something like 20% of the launcher size maybe?

That would allow us, for example in a size 20 launcher, to put something like 1 size 20, or 5 size 4, or 2 size 5 and a 10, so this seems reasonable.

I think that this would lead to some really interesting designs, as multirole fighters are not particularly viable currently, and mirrors the wide variety of possible loadout current aircrafts can mount.


Regarding chaff, flares and decoys, as you said you will probably allow them to be put on ships.  First I think there should be different versions for different types of detection, a thermal seeking missile shouldn't be fooled by a decoy generating a grav sensor return, with the inverse for direct control by MFC or integrated grav sensor.  This would allow for some interesting possibilities.

Second, I don't think they should be an infinite resource in a ship, since this would just be a boring flat hit chance decrease.  They should have a capacity in my opinion, and I guess a good way to refill them would be with hangars, supply ships and colonies, using MSP to refill them.

Maybe the chaff, flares, etc launchers could be designed component too? With the ability to choose the resolution or signature being imitated as well as the size of the launcher, influencing the chances of fooling fire control and the internal magazine of the launcher.  That would allow you to choose between bigger, but fewer launchers that would last longer in battle but have a lower chance to fool enemy hits and smaller, more numerous launchers that would increase their effectiveness but limit the amount available.

Also, since grav decoys will fool grav sensing MFCs, are you planning to make them fool BFCs also?

[JacenHan]

Doesn't Aurora already make the distinction between components protected/not protected by armor? Specifically I recall that turrets do not benefit from the armor belt, hence why they have an armor option to add HTK and make them more resilient. Or am I imagining things?

I'm pretty sure all components are protected by the armor belt (aside from shock damage, microwaves, and mesons, ofc). Turret armor only adds HTK for when the component starts taking damage.

[Blacklight]

@GrandNord
I believe you can already fire any missile from a launcher that is bigger than it FYI.   So you can fire size 1 missiles from size 2 launchers. 
You can only fire 1 at a time tho.  Whats to stop you just bringing a box launcher for each of the the missiles you mentioned?

[GrandNord]

The issue is that, as you said, you can only put one missile at a time inside, so using a variety of munition sizes in a bomber for example is actively detrimental to its performance, and the more useful thing to do is to create an entirely new bomber design with a different size of launcher, so in essence each craft will generally be specialized for one type of missile only. 

If you, for example, have a bomber with 5 size 5 box launchers you can only put 5 size 1 missiles in, when you could put 4-5 times that amount in a bomber equipped with size 1 launchers. 

In short, the feature of being able to put smaller missiles in a launcher than its designed size is so detrimental to the craft performance that it is basically unusable, when IRL aircraft don't really have this problem. 

Edit: Alternatively, putting several sizes of launchers on a craft doesn't really solve the issue at all, you're either limited to one, suboptimal static loadout with a few options or even more suboptimal loadouts when putting in smaller missiles in the big launchers. 

It might be something to be done in RP, but it's severely limiting the capacity of the fighters/bombers you make by essentially wasting a lot of space in them when you only need part of their loadout at any one time. 

[xenoscepter]

The issue is that, as you said, you can only put one missile at a time inside, so using a variety of munition sizes in a bomber for example is actively detrimental to its performance, and the more useful thing to do is to create an entirely new bomber design with a different size of launcher, so in essence each craft will generally be specialized for one type of missile only. 
~snip snip~

 --- You can already do this. For example, build a size 12 launcher. Then build say a size 4 missile. Then take a new design that is nothing more than a second stage loaded up with no fuel, no engine and three of the those size 4 missiles as submunitions. Set that to separate at the size 4 missile's max range. Boom, can of size 4 missile. And doing the same process you can load two size 6 missiles, twelve size 1s, etc.

   An example I came up with a long time ago, something of a concept ship more than a practical design of it's own: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11761.msg138937#msg138937

[Carthar]

A small amount of damage reduction either through a tech or gained by having some number of armor layers or shields would balance against NPR AMM spam.   

I like playing beam only and AMM spam was always an issue, but the new PD and Missile changes look to make it less fun. 

[Droll]

A small amount of damage reduction either through a tech or gained by having some number of armor layers or shields would balance against NPR AMM spam.   

I like playing beam only and AMM spam was always an issue, but the new PD and Missile changes look to make it less fun.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that ships can also have decoys not just missiles. That change alone is going to make most AMMs, which cannot afford real-estate for most forms of ECCM/ECM outright miss your ships en-masse.

Though I do like the idea of some sort of damage absorption, I recall there being an absorption shield tech but I think it's unused? (and I don't know how they worked)

[punchkid]

I would love the possibilty to show population numbers for each system on the galaxy map view

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Hey Steve, is there any chance NPR carriers will make a return with the changes to NPR fleets etc? it would be really awesome to see them make use of carriers once more.  And honestly having NPR's surprising you with large fleets of missile fighters or beam fighters etc would be really fun.  Especially with a missile revamp making their missiles more interesting.

Probably at some point, but not for v2.2.