C# Suggestions

[Garfunkel]

Yeah, agreed with Density here. I always make three different transports:

1. Slow and cheap garrison hauler that moves units from Earth to colonies during time of peace.
2. Big and armoured landing juggernaut that drops armoured regiments on enemy planets.
3. Fast and expensive assault shuttle that commits boarding actions.

And I could see situations where I have different varieties of those three as well. Troop transport modules also include life support and training facilities for the troops as Elminster said, so that they maintain their combat capability despite long voyages.

What I would like to see is emergency carry capability:

If a ship and/or fleet has both cargo capability and cryogenic capability, then it can carry ground units with some ratio between the two- this would allow for emergency transportation in early game or crisis situation, where the soldiers are shoved into cryo-pods like colonists are while all their gear is packed away in the cargo holds. The ship/fleet could not commit boarding or drop actions, only unloading that would take 2x the usual amount. That way you would still want to make purpose-built troop transports.

Instead of completely disabling shipping lines, would it be possible to just impose a cap on them? I would like to have the shipping lines upgrade their ships to be honest.

There are caps to them and they definitely do upgrade their ships. What sort of numbers are you seeing currently?

[nuclearslurpee]

I mean, do we really need so many different types of transport components? Can we simplify it from:
3+ (cryogenic, cargo, troop with boarding and drop) to 2+ (cargo not requiring a life support, cargo requiring life support with boarding and drop)?

In VB6 at least for some time, the boarding and drop capabilities were part of the same component, which led to fairly silly situations where full assault battalions were used to capture ships. Separating the two is much more reasonable in terms of the resulting behavior.

As far as cryogenic transport goes it would be rather tricky since the tonnage of a formation is not purely (or, depending on how you roleplay, even mostly) the tonnage of actual soldiers. Equipment, supplies, etc. are in my mind the majority of troop tonnage and a cryogenic module does not really make sense to reduce the transport size of a main battle tank for example. Overall I think the three variations we have are entirely suitable, really I just wish they weren't split into three techs as it makes designing troop transports in the early game a rather annoying process since there is not enough free RP to build every type without seriously compromising in another area.

[nuclearslurpee]

Apologies for double post, but I also have a suggestion which I think should be separated from the above discussion:

Currently, a number of quantities which scale with starting population at game start have hard limits beyond which they do not scale. The most obvious of these is research points and research labs which are both capped at 200,000 and 50 respectively (corresponding to 1.25b population). Similarly the number of starting officers is capped at, IIRC, 200 (where the default is 150 officers at 500m pop) which tends to be not enough at high populations with a lot of free BPs.

I would suggest that these and any other hard caps are removed and the scaling with population is directly proportional for all populations, possibly with a minimum for very low-pop starts.

While it is trivial for the player to change these quantities at game start, the bigger issue in my mind is the NPR balance. Additionally I think removing particularly the 50 Labs hard cap would help generated NPRs in the later game period remain competitive, as right now it is possible for the player to easily exceed the generated NPR starting tech levels once they have 75 or 100 labs and a few levels of RP boosting tech since new NPRs are still limited to 50 labs on spawning.

Of course players may still want to do e.g. 8b pop starts and the like, for which NPRs starting with 1.28 million RP might be a bit excessive, but I think it is best to enable the NPRs to scale effectively under a wide range of conditions and then trust the player to adjust the start as needed to reach their preferred balance (i.e., by starting with a smaller population and manually scaling up as desired themselves).

[Kiero]

An idea for a new feature:
The naming theme for ships. Created automatically from retained characters' names, after their death or retirement.

[MasonMac]

Yeah, agreed with Density here. I always make three different transports:

1. Slow and cheap garrison hauler that moves units from Earth to colonies during time of peace.
2. Big and armoured landing juggernaut that drops armoured regiments on enemy planets.
3. Fast and expensive assault shuttle that commits boarding actions.

And I could see situations where I have different varieties of those three as well. Troop transport modules also include life support and training facilities for the troops as Elminster said, so that they maintain their combat capability despite long voyages.

What I would like to see is emergency carry capability:

If a ship and/or fleet has both cargo capability and cryogenic capability, then it can carry ground units with some ratio between the two- this would allow for emergency transportation in early game or crisis situation, where the soldiers are shoved into cryo-pods like colonists are while all their gear is packed away in the cargo holds. The ship/fleet could not commit boarding or drop actions, only unloading that would take 2x the usual amount. That way you would still want to make purpose-built troop transports.

Instead of completely disabling shipping lines, would it be possible to just impose a cap on them? I would like to have the shipping lines upgrade their ships to be honest.

There are caps to them and they definitely do upgrade their ships. What sort of numbers are you seeing currently?

Ah, right now there are probably around 30+ civ ships in total?

[Stormtrooper]

Less of a suggestion, but more of a question: Steve, when do you plan to implement black holes, nebulae and genetics? At this point I'm literally obsessed with black holes, I want to see them so badly

[Borealis4x]

Suggestion:
Variable cargo space/cryo pods/ground troop transport.
Simply cargo space you could design as a component of variable size.
Would be especially useful for boarding pods, rescue fighters and RP. Its cost/HS could be that of whatever cargo space is next down. So, 26kt would have cost of 25kt + whatever extra kt would add rounded up while 200kt would have that of 125kt +75 extra rounded up.

Ehhh. Cargo space is it is cuz everything you haul other than minerals are multiples of 2500. If this was an options I'd probably just design that same sized cargo pods.

I also think its important to keep ground troops transport sizes defined as it helps guide totally nooby players figure out how large to make their forces. So having a defined 5000 size cargo bay means I make my base units 5000 tons each. It gives you something to go on from nothing.

[Garfunkel]

Ah, right now there are probably around 30+ civ ships in total?

Sorry but you're going to have to live with a few more until they start upgrading ships instead of buying new ones. But it won't get to hundreds per shipping line like it used to.

[Elminster]

It would be nice to have more control over maintenance production.
In the early game you have to build many maintenance facilities to support your ships. But later you have research to increase the production rate for maintenance. At some point it could be that you may have way more production than usage, which is eating through your minerals (especially Gallicite).

While you could stop production entirely, you can also easily forget about it and be out of maintenance entirely when needed.

I suggest an adjustable percentage value, so you can tune down the production during peace time and crank it up again when needed.

[nuclearslurpee]

It would be nice to have more control over maintenance production.
In the early game you have to build many maintenance facilities to support your ships. But later you have research to increase the production rate for maintenance. At some point it could be that you may have way more production than usage, which is eating through your minerals (especially Gallicite).

While you could stop production entirely, you can also easily forget about it and be out of maintenance entirely when needed.

I suggest an adjustable percentage value, so you can tune down the production during peace time and crank it up again when needed.

I would like to both second and third this, but cloning technology has not yet been implemented in Aurora so I can only second this.

[Droll]

It would be nice to have more control over maintenance production.
In the early game you have to build many maintenance facilities to support your ships. But later you have research to increase the production rate for maintenance. At some point it could be that you may have way more production than usage, which is eating through your minerals (especially Gallicite).

While you could stop production entirely, you can also easily forget about it and be out of maintenance entirely when needed.

I suggest an adjustable percentage value, so you can tune down the production during peace time and crank it up again when needed.

I would like to both second and third this, but cloning technology has not yet been implemented in Aurora so I can only second this.

I also like this, especially if you do the same for fuel (though admittedly less essential as very few components use raw sorium)

[Froggiest1982]

It would be nice to have more control over maintenance production.
In the early game you have to build many maintenance facilities to support your ships. But later you have research to increase the production rate for maintenance. At some point it could be that you may have way more production than usage, which is eating through your minerals (especially Gallicite).

While you could stop production entirely, you can also easily forget about it and be out of maintenance entirely when needed.

I suggest an adjustable percentage value, so you can tune down the production during peace time and crank it up again when needed.

I would like to both second and third this, but cloning technology has not yet been implemented in Aurora so I can only second this.

I also like this, especially if you do the same for fuel (though admittedly less essential as very few components use raw sorium)

Agreed, I think that both Fuel and Maintenance should be handled in the production tab same as the Ordnance (on a dedicated dropdown menu).

Eventually, the Maintenance and Fuel start-stop buttons should be extended with a Factory one where when you stop, you are shutting down the production as it was in VB6, saving also workers that could be relocated elsewhere then. A cooldown restart would be also appreciated (again as it was already in VB6).

[Droll]

Eventually, the Maintenance and Fuel start-stop buttons should be extended with a Factory one where when you stop, you are shutting down the production as it was in VB6, saving also workers that could be relocated elsewhere then. A cooldown restart would be also appreciated (again as it was already in VB6).

This works well with the fuel refineries but is more difficult with maintenance facilities since they still have the function of maintaining military tonnage in orbit. Granted the same "problem" was in VB6 too but it's something to think about, shutting down MSP production doesn't necessarily make maintenance facilities idle.

[nuclearslurpee]

Fuel, as long as we're adding buttons we may as well, but I think it is less crucial since we can set a reserve of sorium which will not be converted to fuel. For MSP it is trickier since the minerals involved are a good deal more widely used than sorium.

[Froggiest1982]

It may be said already, but starting to feel the need for a Standing Orders Template

Also, the more I think about it and the more I realize that being the same for essentially every race and ship, such templates could be exported, imported and shared through the entire database.

I think I could spare something like 100/200 clicks and repetitions.