C# Suggestions

[Froggiest1982]

I noticed one of my ground officers was assigned to a unit I did not produce. It appears to actually be a ground unit owned by one of my civilian mining companies. Presumably the unit is stationed on the mining comet as some base security. However, I cannot see or have any access of this unit (as far as I can tell) outside of this indirect confirmation through my officers.

It would be nice if civilian ground units were listed in the formation menu, as civilian ships are.

Under Ground Forces Tab, tick Show Civilian on top.

You will get Civilian Forces listed in the OOB.

[Ektor]

Could we get a separate message when an administrator or admin commander leaves duty? I usually don't bother reading the reports of who retired because given the several tens of officers I usually have, there's always some random person retiring, but it's actually super important to admin commands since for some reason there's no auto assign for them. Auto assign for admin command would be great, as well.

Also, another thing I've thought about, the "load minerals until full" order has been added which is an absolute lifesaver and I'm really glad it got added, but there should be a similar order for refuelling. "Refuel from hub until full." Why? So we could set transport tankers parked on fuel harvesters that would function the same way as mineral transporters.

[Froggiest1982]

Auto assign for admin command would be great, as well

While I understand why many people ask for this and as said all other times it popped up, I am against that as it could lead to confusion assigning officers not suitable for the task. I think a solution similar to the colony governors that it's optional would be better.

Polemic Note

Off-Topic: show

However, on this last point, something that I pointed out it's already happening. People are complaining because the auto assignment is not behaving as they want. This is the problem with automation: it's automatic. If you want control it's called manual.

[Ektor]

I'm rather satisfied with colony auto-assign, actually. I'd love a similar feature for admin commands.

[Droll]

I'm going to repeat one of my older suggestions:

The ability to create hierarchy templates for ground construction so that if I make a very detailed OOB for a single division I don't have to take the time every time I want to expand my army.

I ask because I like to make my hierarchy go down to company level and it takes a long time to form a divisional hierarchy even if you know what you are doing.

[Droll]

Double clicking on a terraforming related event should open up the environment tab of the relevant body.

[nuclearslurpee]

I'm going to repeat one of my older suggestions:

The ability to create hierarchy templates for ground construction so that if I make a very detailed OOB for a single division I don't have to take the time every time I want to expand my army.

I ask because I like to make my hierarchy go down to company level and it takes a long time to form a divisional hierarchy even if you know what you are doing.

Seconded.

Piggyback: it would be nice to be able to set ground formations to a default field position (front/support/rear) in the formations window instead of manually setting every formation after construction.  If I have a battalion full of static heavy bombardment, I think it's safe to say that I'm not going to be putting any of those in the front line and it would be nice to have that reflected at build time, not post-deployment.

[SerBeardian]

I would suggest that the "you can't change a locked design" error happen after you try and actually change a locked design.

It is so incredibly annoying to try and take a look at a component on a design and have it throw you an error, and then you have to go looking for the component in the component list instead. And good luck if that component is obsolete, because then you have to look through all your obsolete components to find this one thing... It's just so much easier to just find the ship that has the component and look at it in the current design.

[Kristover]

Ground Combat Spam:

I got involved in my first super-extended ground campaign last night - a nice-sized multi-Division affair that lasted several months where I had technological overmatch, but they had terrain advantages, and I had to reinforce and resupply many times.  While I had noticed it previously with smaller combats, this one was simply too much with the 100+ messages per 8 hour phase and I found I started losing track of the other things I needed to do in the empire - including the space component of the conflict I was engaged due to the spam.  Here is the thing, I like the spam in some instances - it certainly gives me very useful feedback about my design choices and situation - but at some point I got the point and I don't need all of the info.

What I propose is either a better filtering mechanism that allows messages to be better filtered out of the event list - or ground combat summaries written to a separate tab on the events that DOESN'T show up in the 'display on map' function.  This I think a good compromise for those that like the granularity of the information but don't want to be assaulted by it.

[Barkhorn]

Suggestion: Include some kind of system for salvaging wrecked ground units, to simulate capturing and using enemy equipment.  In WW2, the Germans, Russians, and Japanese made extensive use of captured weapons and vehicles.  For instance, many of the shore batteries guarding the Atlantic Wall were French guns the Germans had captured.

Imagine having dropships dash past the orbital defenses to capture STOs and turn them on their former owners.

[SerBeardian]

This has probably been suggested in some form earlier but to help alleviate the RSI of weapon assignment:

---

1) In the firecontrol panel, group identical weapon types assigned to the same firecontrol group together under a subheading.
2) Let this group be collapsible so it can be hidden way.
3) Let use use this group as a mass-assign function, by letting anything done to the group be done to the weapons within that group.

---

There are many, many benefits to this:
Got 30 launchers? No problem! Drag the group heading to the firecon, now all 30 are assigned to that firecon. Drag that missile to the group and now all 30 are loaded with that missile!
Got 30 single 10% gauss turrets on that 40kton battleship? Well they're all on your PD firecon with a single drag and drop now!
Got two launchers sitting beneath that stack of 30 other launchers? Collapse that stack and now you can assign the lower ones without needing to open a second fleet screen!
Finally, no more relying on autoassign to assign large numbers of weapons and hoping against hope that it knows what you want amongst all your mixed weapon types, because if it doesn't you're in for a loooong day of drag and dropping...

[Droll]

This has probably been suggested in some form earlier but to help alleviate the RSI of weapon assignment:

---

1) In the firecontrol panel, group identical weapon types assigned to the same firecontrol group together under a subheading.
2) Let this group be collapsible so it can be hidden way.
3) Let use use this group as a mass-assign function, by letting anything done to the group be done to the weapons within that group.

---

There are many, many benefits to this:
Got 30 launchers? No problem! Drag the group heading to the firecon, now all 30 are assigned to that firecon. Drag that missile to the group and now all 30 are loaded with that missile!
Got 30 single 10% gauss turrets on that 40kton battleship? Well they're all on your PD firecon with a single drag and drop now!
Got two launchers sitting beneath that stack of 30 other launchers? Collapse that stack and now you can assign the lower ones without needing to open a second fleet screen!
Finally, no more relying on autoassign to assign large numbers of weapons and hoping against hope that it knows what you want amongst all your mixed weapon types, because if it doesn't you're in for a loooong day of drag and dropping...

I think it would be better if many menus (including ground OOB) would allow for shift-clicking in order to select and drag multiple list elements. This would achieve what you want as well I think.

[bankshot]

The "Equalize Fuel" order was removed as fuel transfer now requires a refueling system/hub and time to transfer fuel.  I would like to see it re-enabled for fleets that consist entirely of ships that are tankers (re: that have a refueling system or hub).  It should be subject to the normal time/movement speed constraints of standard refueling.

I normally use slow but not immobile Fuel Harvester/tankers with orders to transfer and return with minimum fuel reserve set to 5%.  When adding new ships to the harvesting fleet I have to manually partially refuel them to balance their tanks with the existing fleet or send a delivery tanker to empty the other harvesters. 

Also when you issue the "refuel from stationary tankers" command it pulls fuel from the target fleet in sequence, so your first few tankers get drained down to 5% before later tankers get touched.  This is good if you are delivering fuel with mobile tankers which could then be detached to be refilled, but is not desirable if your tankers are also harvesters.  So I have to send my delivery tanker back to get that last partial load to equalize all of the harvesters at empty. 

You could also consider changing the "refuel from stationary tankers" order to preferentially pull from the most full tankers so that each fuel draw would move the tankers towards equality, but that is probably a more complex code change and less useful overall. 

[Platys51]

Suggestion: Empty military formations and reinforcements

In my current campaign, I'm making 320kt construction companies.  1000 medium construction vehicles and HQ to control them.
Inevitably, I have ran into issues related to big military formations.  It would take decades to make single one of these in one facility.

And so, I made HQ formation and 100 vehicles in a second one.  Then I add all these manually into HQ formation until 1000 units is reached.

My suggestion is simple.  Give us ability to make formation that is empty or incomplete, with replacement template of whole formation.  Then, on every building cycle check for formations tagged as use for replacements and fill out the empty spots.

If we could tag formations as for replacement as we design them that would be ideal.

This change would mainly help with making and use of larger formations.

[QuakeIV]

I'd kindof prefer if ground training just worked like factories and you could have multiple facilities working the same job.