C# Suggestions

[Droll]

I think it depends on the "assign all" checkbox, or is that only for target assignment?

I think the latter, it definitely doesn't work for PD mode assignment, which gets annoying when I want to turn my AMM cruisers on/off to manage ammo...

We really need a checkbox for "Assign All of Type" - which works with PD assignment and missile loading while we're at it.

This reminds me of one thing I'd love to see which I keep forgetting to drop here - add fire control and missile assignment as a template to the ship design screen, similar to the ordnance template. In 99% of situations I will want all builds of a given class to have the same FC assignments and I invariably forget to do the assign all step at some point, especially with fighters, so just stating at the ship design level how I want FCs to be assigned would be an amazing QoL addition.

Yeah even a simple "default" template would work, though for missile ships the ideal might be to have the ability to make multiple templates that you can swap to depending on what missiles you want to be firing.

[Sebmono]

Yeah even a simple "default" template would work, though for missile ships the ideal might be to have the ability to make multiple templates that you can swap to depending on what missiles you want to be firing.

A default is all I was thinking of as a first cut, to keep things simple. Setting FC assignments does feel like something I'd expect to do as part of the design process.

[nakorkren]

2nd'ed (or 4th'ed, or what ever) on making a default FC/weapon template as part of the design phase.

Another suggestion regarding boarding/troop loading: Make fleets with multiple ships capable of loading troops execute troop loading/unloading manuevers in parallel, or alternately make the per-unit load time depend on how many units are queued to load and how many ships are able to load. Would probably be easiest/best to implement this just like the option to "Unload all", by giving a "Load ALL Ground Units from Stationary Fleet" option. That said, I don't know whether the current "Unload all" option reflects having multiple ships in a fleet unloading simultaneously unloading.

The reason I bring this up is that right now if you have multiple ships capable of loading troops within the same fleet, and you're loading one (or some) units onto each ship, there's no way to take advantage of that fact to speed up loading. I.e. I have two ground units, and two shuttles, but if the shuttles are in the same fleet, that fleet has to set up two "Load Ground Unit from Stationary Fleet" orders, which will be processed serially. If you split the two ships apart into two fleets, each can execute a single loading action, and hence finish in half the time. Not a big deal with two units/two ships, but when you're talking a reasonable number of boarding shuttles to be effective during combat, and it becomes a BIG time-suck to split the fleet apart, and if you don't, you get a hugely longer loading time. In my specific situation, I have 16 units, one on each of 16 boarding shuttles. So if I split my fleet into 16 fleets, I can load all troops in an hour. If I don't, it takes 16 hours.

[nakorkren]

Another suggestion: On the fleet Movement Orders tab, make the orders able to be moved up or down the queue of orders, similar to research/industry.

I suspect this isn't as easy as it seems, since the orders available depend on what orders precede it, but within a system it would be really helpful. An example use case is you're following a fleet at a fixed range while hammering it with weapons. As their ships blow up, you want to collect the life pods, so right now each time you have to clear the current "follow" order, order pickup of the lifepod, then reorder the follow at a fixed distance.

[Garfunkel]

Another suggestion: On the fleet Movement Orders tab, make the orders able to be moved up or down the queue of orders, similar to research/industry.

I suspect this isn't as easy as it seems, since the orders available depend on what orders precede it, but within a system it would be really helpful. An example use case is you're following a fleet at a fixed range while hammering it with weapons. As their ships blow up, you want to collect the life pods, so right now each time you have to clear the current "follow" order, order pickup of the lifepod, then reorder the follow at a fixed distance.

This has been suggested before but Steve always shoots it down because it is really easy to introduce logic errors that will break the orders and/or the game.

For your case, either collect the lifepods after the battle - they will survive long enough - or detach a ship with that as a special task.

[Kristover]

Suggestion:  The Addition of 'Air Forces'

I have thought about it a bit and the current implementation of Ground Support Fighters is a noble attempts to add something cool and interesting to the game - truly, I love the attempt at the feature. But right now is only partially implemented and so unwieldy that I doesn't seem many players use it.  But it leaves an obvious gap in the ground combat game of no 'air-breathing' air support/combat which almost would surely be there.

My proposed solution is to introduce specialized air units to the ground construction module.  They would use the existing vehicle base size types with a check box that would indicate if this is an air unit or not.  The characteristics of the air units would be as such:

1. Air Units cost double the vehicle base size type selected.

2. Air Units use double the supply that an equivalent unit would use.  This couple with #1 means that it is expensive to maintain air forces.

3. Air Units don't contribute any occupation value to a colony - you can't use only air forces to occupy a planet. 

4. Air Units can use any weapon type that a ground vehicle unit can.

5. Air Units can only be attacked by ground air defense weapons or weapons mounted on another air unit - this simulates air to air combat.

6. Air Units can support or target ground units in a fashion similar to artillery/bombardment units. 

7.  FFD components in forward units can supply bonuses to Air Units in a similar fashion to artillery/bombardment units.

8.  Air Units cannot be assigned 'capabilities' like Jungle Fighting/Desert Fighting etc. This is not to make them overpowered.

This is kind of a baseline solution which can be discussed for refinement purposes.  As for the existing ground support fighters, I would argue rather than eliminating them repurpose them into orbital/sub-orbital support.  They will occupy a niche where they can be extremely useful if space/orbital control is uncontested - you will still want them for a well rounded invasion force - but they are still hideously vulnerable to enemy air defenses and if space control is contested.

In the end I think this is a good starting point for air units - they are powerful and if the enemy doesn't have air units or robust ground air defense capabilities, they will utterly dominate so you can't afford the ignore them.  Also they are expensive to build and expensive to maintain so you can't overbuild them - and if you don't have sufficient supply, they quickly become useless.

[Kristover]

Suggestion:  Additional of 'Ministers'

One problem I have in games is that I always wind up with a massive surplus of governors/civilian administrators.  I think it would be interesting if we could add in a second layer of administration to each colony and sector governor with the following positions:

Finance Minister:  Utilizes Wealth Creation or Logistics

Defense Minister:  Shipbuilding or Ground Unit Construction Speed

Industry Minister: Production or Mining

Science Minister: Terraforming and/or Population Control

A governor still remain the most important administrator to have on a colony because he contributes his full value but these other ministers contribute a fraction (25-50% sounds about right) of their bonus to the colony/sector and can be powerful multipliers.  They also have the ability to grow their skills - but JUST the skill for the ministry they hold - so that when existing governors die/retire you have qualified and experiences ministers ready to take over.

[papent]

Piggyback off of the last suggestion,

Suggestion: System governors
an additional admin level between colony and sectors, provides part of their bonuses to all colonies in their planetary system.

[Sebmono]

A couple ground forces related suggestions that have been on my mind:

• Ground Force Admin Commands - just like we have now for Naval Admin Commands, will give things to do for higher level ranks and also allow flexible organizing of units into larger groups(like Armies or Corps) for RP and tracking purposes, without having to build incredibly costly and enormous HQs.
• Named GF Construction Factories - just like we have now for shipyards, primarily for RP purposes.
• GF Reinforce Task at GFCF - analogous to the Repair task for ships, select a formation at the factory location and it will build that formation up to the full strength of the original template. This would be to reduce the micro involved in designing and building many replacement regiments which are just to reinforce existing units.
• Formation Level Terrain/Environment Training - rather than me having to design/research 3-6+ versions of the exact same unit but for different combat situations, I would love to just set a task for a formation at a GFCF to "train for jungle environment" and it applies that to every unit in the formation. The same costs would apply as if adding that to each unit in the design step. If I want to retrain with a mutually exclusive speciality, then I first have to pay to untrain (maybe at 50% cost or something) before paying the full cost to train. This would prevent just retraining before every battle as gamey since it would be very cost and time prohibitive, but would also more closely resembles how formations we're trained and retrained during WW2 and also eliminate a lot of nonadditive micro.

[nakorkren]

Back to everyone's favorite punching bag... ground combat.

I thought perhaps Heavy Bombard units could ignore (or partly ignore) fortification, with the intent that it would make them particularly useful when assaulting homeworlds which tend to be fully fortified. The game rationale is now you have a reason to bring Heavy Bombard units, the "real-life" rationale is that heavy artillery is one of the main ways you deal with enemy's fortifications.

As a corollary, we could then have fighters ignore (or partly ignore) evasion, making them more effective against vehicles on the attack. This would give defenders some buff to counteract the benefit to attackers of artillery, and again provide a reason to bring them to a fight, and would DEFINITELY jive with real life. Doesn't matter much how fast a ground unit is going, because relative to an aircraft with missiles (or even guns), you're still pretty dang slow.

[nakorkren]

QoL request... could we get a filter for the Commanders window to only show commanders who are unassigned?

[nakorkren]

Would it be possible for the events to NOT have a pre-defined "Word Wrap" length, and instead let it be defined by window size? On the main window I often have events that take up two lines because it wraps the last few words around to a new line even though my window is big enough to show the whole thing on a single line.

On a related note, it would be great if when the Event window maximizes to fullscreen, the text display area also got bigger, with the same result requested above that text would wrap based on the real size available. This just makes it so much easier to read Events when you're in a big battle and dozens of ships are reporting.

[nuclearslurpee]

Suggestion:  The Addition of 'Air Forces'

Something very similar has been proposed in several forms in this very thread... rummages around... starting from this comment.

I link this as the discussion went for several pages and was heated at times, so hopefully we can avoid talking in circles by repeating it and in the process keep blood pressures low for the holiday season. 

A couple ground forces related suggestions that have been on my mind:Ground Force Admin Commands - just like we have now for Naval Admin Commands, will give things to do for higher level ranks and also allow flexible organizing of units into larger groups(like Armies or Corps) for RP and tracking purposes, without having to build incredibly costly and enormous HQs.

I'd honestly prefer this to the current system. Once you get to the highest HQ hierarchy levels the leadership should really be administrative, not based on field formations. I tend to feel like I build a 2-4 layer formation hierarchy, depending on tech level and doctrine, and then have to build repeated formations of the HQabignumbermillion + 15,285 LVH-LOG for every higher level to give my high-ranking generals a job. The current system also sucks because HQ cost scales infinitely so you have to spend several tank divisions' worth of BP for a high-level HQ to say nothing of the research costs especially for conventional/low-tech games.

Named GF Construction Factories - just like we have now for shipyards, primarily for RP purposes.

As far as the GFCFs go, I'd rather have them reworked to function like every other planetary factory in the game, i.e., building ground units with a percentage of capacity rather than one formation per facility.

Back to everyone's favorite punching bag... ground combat.

I thought perhaps Heavy Bombard units could ignore (or partly ignore) fortification, with the intent that it would make them particularly useful when assaulting homeworlds which tend to be fully fortified. The game rationale is now you have a reason to bring Heavy Bombard units, the "real-life" rationale is that heavy artillery is one of the main ways you deal with enemy's fortifications.

A few issues with this: first, it would require adding an exception to the ground combat rules, and Steve has generally trended towards eliminating exceptions to the rules in the VB6 --> C# transition; second, this assumes a specific RP for the HB component which is not necessarily reflective of how all players use it (in a WH40K setting for example, siege mortars are actually relatively short-ranged compared to field artillery - not realistic, but there you go for a popular example); third, it doesn't solve the main reason players avoid using HB which is the massive collateral damage that results compared to using lighter artillery (indeed, for some players even MB/MBL is too damaging), and v2.0 purports to solve this with an 80% reduction of collateral damage so we will have to see if that works well enough.

Also, IMO HB works fine mechanically, the main problem is that it is overkill against NPRs which use very limited ground forces templates. In a multiple-player-race setting where the player races actually use HVH and heavier classes the 6 base damage of HB (and, in v2.0 the 9 base damage of SHB) become useful against armor-heavy forces and thus is (are) a good defensive option at the very least.

As a corollary, we could then have fighters ignore (or partly ignore) evasion, making them more effective against vehicles on the attack. This would give defenders some buff to counteract the benefit to attackers of artillery, and again provide a reason to bring them to a fight, and would DEFINITELY jive with real life. Doesn't matter much how fast a ground unit is going, because relative to an aircraft with missiles (or even guns), you're still pretty dang slow.

This is sensible but would have very little impact. Usually evasion is only relevant for attacking formations and usually it is the attacker in a planetary battle who has fighter support, if anyone. Although if we took the above suggestion for make GSFs a ground unit class then defending forces would actually be able to use (aero) fighters practically - another argument in favor which I don't think came up in the last discussion (@Steve plz!).

[Migi]

QoL request... could we get a filter for the Commanders window to only show commanders who are unassigned?

I want this so much.

[ArcWolf]

Suggestion:  Additional of 'Ministers'

One problem I have in games is that I always wind up with a massive surplus of governors/civilian administrators.  I think it would be interesting if we could add in a second layer of administration to each colony and sector governor with the following positions:

Finance Minister:  Utilizes Wealth Creation or Logistics

Defense Minister:  Shipbuilding or Ground Unit Construction Speed

Industry Minister: Production or Mining

Science Minister: Terraforming and/or Population Control

A governor still remain the most important administrator to have on a colony because he contributes his full value but these other ministers contribute a fraction (25-50% sounds about right) of their bonus to the colony/sector and can be powerful multipliers.  They also have the ability to grow their skills - but JUST the skill for the ministry they hold - so that when existing governors die/retire you have qualified and experiences ministers ready to take over.

I was thinking about this the other day, and you pretty much beat me to it. One addition i would make is have a "Leader" for your entire empire also. They would apply a bonus, like colonial governor & sector command, but for everything. To use the USAs political structure to help illustrate. Leader = President, Sector Command = State Governor, and Colonial Governor = Mayors.

This could also be combined with a "bureaucratic/administrative officer" building, like sector/fleet commands, that have 5 levels (i.e. 5 max can be built on a body). Each "level" would have a population requirement (if possible, else, employ a large number of pops), 0 pops for lvl 1, 10 mil for lvl 2, 50 mil for lvl 3... or something along those lines. Each "level" would give part of the Leaders & Ministers bonus to the colony ( in 20% increments).

An example would be Earth has a lvl 5 Admin, and therefor gets the full 100% from Leader & ministers, but your new Mars colony is only lvl 2, and only gets 40% of their bonus.