C# Suggestions

[Kristover]

This is a minor request for us roleplayer types but I really liked the miscellaneous component feature in the last update and I used it specifically to ‘specialize’ my ships.  I felt it a good compromise solution for those that didn’t want to micro didn’t have to engage with it and for those that wanted it, it added to their game.

I was wondering if we could have something similar in this update for colony installations?  I would like to add ‘flavor’ to my colonies.  A easily constructed installation that has no gameplay function (people don’t have to engage with it) but us micro-RPers could add? 

Thanks and looking forward to next update!

[Droll]

I do not know the specific lore of active sensors and how they do their sensing but I thought that it would be cool if the fleets that have multiple ships in them would have their crosssection "combine" in some way, which would obfuscate the amount/size of ships but instead give you the overall size of the fleet. As you draw closer (maybe depending on sensor resolution in some way) individual ships in the fleet can be resolved and you'll get a better idea of the number of ships instead of just overall fleet tonnage.

This would also be interesting for stealth ships, making it preferable for them operate alone (very interesting for the new pirates) and also making it harder to just have massive fleets with 95% reduction to their active signatures as they're small signatures would all combine into one larger one.

It also opens up strategies with the cloaking bay. Having larger ships with cloaking bays means that uncloaked escort ships can effectively screen for them against not just missiles but maybe even beam weapons. Alternatively you can use this to "hide" your smaller screens and obfuscate your PD ability.

Or just cheese it with a cloaked fleet and a massive slab of uncloaked armor.

The way I'm thinking is that the combined tonnage cant be targeted by weapons. The only exception being self-guided missiles. In-fact such missiles become much more valuable as when they close, they'll be able to detect individual ships hidden in the "mass", targeting them and giving you intel about fleet composition.

Also the idea of a "mass" of tonnage being spotted works really well with the star swarm

Edit: You could also do something similar with thermal and EM signatures. Finding ships in orbit of a large colony for example could be quite difficult this way as their thermal and EM signatures would be hidden within the populations signature. Alternatively you don't need to change thermal and EM, since an active lock is needed to target and fire on enemies the suggestion still holds meaning with current passive detection.

[Stryker]

An optional auto pause feature that is player definable.  For example, once per year I like to check my colonies, fleets, research, production, etc.  Other players may want to do it more or less often.  Or not at all (thus the optional aspect).

Until something like this is added I suggest creating a small station around your capital and give it a repeating "send message" order to your capital every 365 days. This will in-effect pause your game once a year.

I personally have it set up to cycle 3 -365 and once 366 day orders to account for leap year some my game "auto-pauses" every Jan 1st.

Good idea.  I never thought of using a message in this way.

[Stryker]

Would it be possible to get the color schemes back for sectors.  Currently it's red, which is also the color of unfinished jump point surveys.

[Kristover]

One other feature that I think would be cool is ministries.  In my longer games, I tend to have a lot of civilian administrators and scientists with nothing to do.  I think resurrecting a variant of the old ‘staff’ function that we had with VB6 naval administrations would be cool.  Attach it to Sectors and put it in a new tech line (admin tech) and have something like an economics, justice, defense, science and education minister, or so forth that you can assign to those roles and they would offer a fraction of their bonus to their area.  For that matter, you could re-add the naval staffs with a similar setup.

[alex_brunius]

So, currently an issue I perceive with the game is that it's quite alot of tedious Micromanagement to mine out those asteroids, yet they do contain easily accessible minerals that would be neat to get access to, and that lore wise probably would be lucrative for civilians to go after...

How hard would it be to add some civilian ships that work a bit like sorium harvesters but instead they swoop around our colonized systems and stripmine asteroids for us, so we can just visit a single location and buy all those juicy minerals once they have filled those cargo holds for us with minerals from dozens of asteroids?

[Droll]

So, currently an issue I perceive with the game is that it's quite alot of tedious Micromanagement to mine out those asteroids, yet they do contain easily accessible minerals that would be neat to get access to, and that lore wise probably would be lucrative for civilians to go after...

How hard would it be to add some civilian ships that work a bit like sorium harvesters but instead they swoop around our colonized systems and stripmine asteroids for us, so we can just visit a single location and buy all those juicy minerals once they have filled those cargo holds for us with minerals from dozens of asteroids?

Your basically asking for civilians to get orbital miners in addition to the sorium harvesters they can already get. As long as people can turn it off I have no qualms with this and it would push civies to completeness.

[xenoscepter]

So, currently an issue I perceive with the game is that it's quite alot of tedious Micromanagement to mine out those asteroids, yet they do contain easily accessible minerals that would be neat to get access to, and that lore wise probably would be lucrative for civilians to go after...

How hard would it be to add some civilian ships that work a bit like sorium harvesters but instead they swoop around our colonized systems and stripmine asteroids for us, so we can just visit a single location and buy all those juicy minerals once they have filled those cargo holds for us with minerals from dozens of asteroids?

 --- I'd add in here the ability for Civilian Shipping Lines to be told to collect from CMCs with the addition that CMCs would build a Cargo Shuttle Station for the purpose of loading / unloading them.

[nuclearslurpee]

--- I'd add in here the ability for Civilian Shipping Lines to be told to collect from CMCs with the addition that CMCs would build a Cargo Shuttle Station for the purpose of loading / unloading them.

A Cargo Shuttle Station shouldn't be necessary, I'm fairly sure the civilian ships come with their own cargo shuttle bays - otherwise they wouldn't be able to ship things to most colonies that actually need stuff.

[alex_brunius]

Your basically asking for civilians to get orbital miners in addition to the sorium harvesters they can already get. As long as people can turn it off I have no qualms with this and it would push civies to completeness.

Pretty much yeah. I would consider civies in a more complete state when:
- They can do asteroid mining ( as suggested above )
- Civilian tankers ( and a few relevant trade goods they can ship ) are added
- All mined minerals & fuel from sites & harvesters are automatically delivered by civies to the systems largest colony ( once enough to be worth a freighter/tanker trip is in place at extraction site )
- All mined minerals & fuel end up in a civilian open market on that colony that you can conveniently buy from ( should probably also decay with about 2-5% yearly to account for civilian use unless there is some "buy all of it" option like for CMC currently )
- You can request civilian contracts for mineral & fuel delivery in addition to installations ( potentially also automated to maintain certain reserve levels that you have set )
- Ability to tax civilians by type of activity if you feel certain types of civilian growth are getting out of hand ( even raising their taxes taxing them to death if you want to )
- Ability to prioritize civilian freighter activity between infrastructure delivery, other trades, contracts and mineral fetching ( potentially connected to above taxation levels )


I agree it's not for everyone, and that it could potentially lead to alot of extra computation and slowdowns so being able to limit them or turn it off would be great. But I think it would greatly help with automating the maintanance of larger empires. The way I look at civies is that I would rather the CPU spend 30 seconds extra on calculations while I read some more Aurora fiction instead of me having to spend 300 seconds on tedious repetetive tasks in the game to accomplish a similar result.

[Droll]

My suggestion is that when an NPR is generated mid-game, the game should go through the system and ensure that there is something extra for the NPR to work with. Yes, in a sol start you aren't guaranteed abundance but you are as the player guaranteed to get something on the other bodies of the solar system beyond the poor resources of earth. Especially since NPRs are bad at resource management this might help them be a little more competitive.

Adding to this, it may be worth giving NPRs a larger starting stockpile of resources (if they don't already, I have not checked) to account for the fact that, especially on higher-population starts, important minerals may be depleted in only 5-10 years and the NPRs often struggle to establish a robust offworld supply of key minerals. This doesn't solve the problem but it does provide a bit more of a buffer for the NPRs to keep their industry and shipbuilding functional while a crunch is resolved.

I'm replying to these as it is relevant to the discussion around NPRs being bad at empiring. One of my NPRs just ground my game to a halt because I made the grave error of allowing NPRs to trigger precursors, leading them to find one of their outposts. Said NPR won that engagement which is cool, but they then decided to bombard the world they fought over with 1000s of AMMs (I did power through the 5s increments thankfully).

The problem of being stuck in 5s increments due to this is well known and documented, but it also exemplifies a flaw in the AI and the way it treats potentially valuable worlds. This planet was a very good potential colony candidate for their empire and thanks to hostile presence was probably not surveyed. The spoilers in question usually guard valuable planets in general but now this NPR, through AMM bombardment has given it 2200 radiation and 4400+ dust, effectively rendering it un-colonizable in the foreseeable future.

Now if you read the spoilers you know the type of spoiler race we are dealing with, so my suggestion is along the lines of  - "why doesn't the NPR even attempt to launch a ground invasion to preserve the planet?" and if it does want to bombard the planet, why is it using AMMs? can NPRs at least try to use enhanced radiation or larger ASM missiles so that we don't have to sit through potentially hours of 5 sec increments?

This was made even worse because the garrison's PD STOs were shooting down 80 of 85 AMMs per 5 secs.

[nuclearslurpee]

This was made even worse because the garrison's PD STOs were shooting down 80 of 85 AMMs per 5 secs.

This is probably why. The NPRs are not clever enough to figure out how to attack a planet with a lot of STOs in any other way besides hurling missiles at it until it breaks. Or firing lasers at it until it breaks, as the case may be. This is in spite of the fact that NPRs always build a number of massive assault transports with several systems' worth of armor for the express purpose of making such an opposed landing.

[Destragon]

I'm not sure if Steve personally makes lots of use of the wealth screen, but for me I would kinda like it if the wealth button on the map screen was replaced with one to bring up the shipyard screen.

[Fistandantillus7]

I'm not sure if Steve personally makes lots of use of the wealth screen, but for me I would kinda like it if the wealth button on the map screen was replaced with one to bring up the shipyard screen.

No matter what tab I want on the economics window I simply press the research button, it is bright cyan and my mouse gets there without me looking. If we are going to have four buttons to that window, shipyards makes more sense than wealth/trade. Moving the Fleet/Naval Organization window button to follow next would make more sense too; having it in the middle of the various design buttons is an odd choice.

[nakorkren]

I would dearly love a "refuel fleet evenly" button, for those situations where I need to split the fuel I have in a tanker across a fleet to maximize the range of the fleet because I don't have enough to totally refuel the fleet. As it stands now, I have to manually designate each ship high refuel priority, advance time until they have the right amount, change that ship's priority back to 0, then do the next one, etc.