Which feature(s) would you most look forward to? q4x

[Ektor]

I'm all for option C. Good AI would make the experience much, much more fun.

[joansam]

For me, player automation/AI and invaders + Swarm would be my picks as next steps, but multiplayer is the dream long-term. A well-executed multiplayer Quasar would be the 8th Wonder of the World.

[Warer]

My greatest desire is for there to be thosuands of aurora/quasar 4x fans and tens of semi consistent fiction authors, lacking that easy/easier moding, automation, good ai, and naming themes for ground units maybe?

[Triato]

Some times id like to send fleets with certain mission parameters have them perform as well as they can and retirn. I would only learn what happened when they return to an habitated system. One can onlu dream

[amram]

Some times id like to send fleets with certain mission parameters have them perform as well as they can and retirn. I would only learn what happened when they return to an habitated system. One can onlu dream

That would be impressive.

I'm going to spitball on how that might be done inside the off-topic:

Off-Topic: show

Taskforces that are on deployment would need to stop belonging to you.  Not belonging to you would allow for them not sharing intel, and not giving you their event log entries as they occur.  Perhaps by a dummy race that takes ownership of all ships not currently parked at a population?

Additionally they player cannot be receiving the regular event log updates for this to work, but we do still want to have those entries when they come home, so use a separate event log table for task forces.  The player never sees this during increments in the main log - you'd have to access the task force or ship history to see it - each ship keeping its own history, task forces simply merging all the contained ship's event logs into one.

So by this point, if we had all that.  The ships stop belonging to you when they leave a population, so you can only know what happened to them when they return somewhere, if they come return.  So your last order, or a conditional order, had either be to have them come home.  Or for a population to go to them — sending a guard force ahead of a colony ship for example.

We need to two more things.

 - a diplomacy flag allowing access to that ship history for task forces that aren't yours. 
 - a diplomacy flag allowing giving orders to ships that aren't yours.

We'd need these so the dummy race can prevent us instantly knowing what those ships know as they learn it, yet still allow us to control those ships and give them orders as if they were ours (....which they are....) when we have contact with them.

Neither flag used by regular NPR's/civvies and are always set to no, the dummy race automatically and permanently sets the two flags to yes with you.

Now they do not have to dock to learn what happened, or give them new orders.  But they do have to be in a populated system with transponders on to announce themselves to you, or inside your sensor coverage and identified.

The place this gets really weird and I lack a working concept is diplomacy/intel.  The dummy race should probably be seen as you for diplomacy/intel purposes.  Should the pseudo race controlling your ships be left to handle your diplomacy(via AI scripting) in such case, and what your "military" decides to do, you the civilian leader are stuck dealing with the results of?

Could you imagine functional multiplayer, with this?

If this sort of modification ends up possible to achieve, or already is, I am going to lose ungodly amounts of time to messing with q4x.....I am so screwed.

[Triato]

I wanted to do a comunity game in such format but realized real life makes it impossible. I also thod it could lead to functional multiplayer, the game would just pause when meaningfull decisions are available for a player.

[Warer]

Could somebody explain tracking speed to me?

[TheTalkingMeowth]

Could somebody explain tracking speed to me?

I think you might be in the wrong board .

But tracking speed acts to modify beam weapon hit chance. A fire control has a tracking speed rating, and a beam weapon ALSO has a tracking speed.

If the beam weapon is not turreted, the weapon tracking speed is the larger of the ship's speed (whcih may decrease due to destroyed engines) and the racial tracking speed (which is just the highest level of beam fire control tracking speed tech you have researched).

If the weapon is turreted, the tracking speed is the turret tracking speed.

When you shoot at something, the smaller of the weapon tracking speed and the tracking speed of the fire control is used. This tracking speed is compared to the current speed of the target. If the target is slower than the tracking speed, you shoot with full accuracy. If the target is FASTER than the tracking speed, your accuracy is reduced by the ratio of target speed to tracking speed.

An example:

A 4000 km/s tracking speed beam fire control is mounted on a ship that goes 2500km/s. The ship has a hull-mounted laser, a turreted laser with a turret speed of 4000km/s, and a turreted laser with a turret speed of 8000km/s. The race has a 2000km/s racial tracking speed.

The hull-mounted laser will get a tracking speed of 2500km/s, because the ship moves that fast. Thus, the BFC has "excess" tracking speed. However, if the ship loses an engine and drops to 1250 km/s, the tracking speed will drop only to 2000km/s because the racial tracking speed acts as a floor. It would have full accuracy against anything going slower than 2500km/s. When the engine is lost, this drops to only 2000km/s. Its accuracy would be halved against a 5000km/s target (or a 4000km/s target once the engine goes).

The 4000km/s turret gets a tracking speed of 4000km/s, regardless of how fast the ship moves. Full accuracy against 4000km/s or less. Half accuracy against 8000km/s, 1/4 against 16000, etc.

The 8000 km/s turret ALSO gets a tracking speed of 4000km/s, because the fire control only goes so fast. Same accuracy pattern as the 4000km/s turret.

One last wrinkle: there is a tech for "missile tracking bonus." What this does is provide a bonus to the tracking speed of beam weapons (I'm not sure if this affects the fire control value, the weapon value, or the final tracking speed value that is normally the minimum of the fire control and weapon values). The bonus increases the longer the missile has been detected on active sensors. I've never used this and I'm not sure if it's actually implemented.

EDIT: literally unplayable typos

[joansam]

“I think you’re in the wrong board.”

>Writes 10-paragraph in-depth explainer

Gotta love the Aurora community - people are often just unusually helpful for no reason 

[Agm-114]

Ok this is a bit of an extensive list, however a lot aren't radical gameplay changes. Just some SM mode tools useful for running the game.

The ability to manually set ruins level without continually rerolling.
The ability to spawn wrecks or defenders without spawning ruins.
The ability to remove ruins, Anomalies, and wrecks.
The ability to roll Anomalies.
A DB table with all of the anomalies and their properties so they can be modded.
An SM menu to add a Lagrange Point or body.
An SM option to add body with no properties in deep space.
The ability to delete bodies, JPs, and LPs.
When connecting a JP, it'd be nice if the list of options contained the JP's number and not just its position.
The ability to teleport fleets to waypoints.
The ability to move & construct ground troops using SM mode.
The ability to create empires on planets that cannot support life (can already do this by terraforming then un terraforming bodies).
A way to force communications between two races that have not encountered each other yet.
A dummy component with adjustable mass.
A way to un research tech.
When comparing techs a way to transfer all instead of manually transferring over dozens of techs.
A order to wait for N amount of time.
An option for system names to always be fixed.
An option for body names to always be fixed
The ability to force fleets to move faster than they actually can using SM mode.
A SM tool that terraforms to the indicated colony cost.
A SM mode screen for editing a planets parameters.
If the PD modes table had a adjustable percentage modifier to accuracy  and a count of the number of missiles launched at a target.
[VERY IMPORTANT] Backup DB once  button.

The holy grail of features though would be to save / load ship & component designs from a file.
However I can see how that'd get a bit complicated.

[Agm-114]

Wish you could edit form posts lol
The ability to adjust precursor, star swarm, and ruin spawnrate.

[Kyle (OP)]

Ok this is a bit of an extensive list, however a lot aren't radical gameplay changes. Just some SM mode tools useful for running the game.

The ability to manually set ruins level without continually rerolling.
The ability to spawn wrecks or defenders without spawning ruins.
The ability to remove ruins, Anomalies, and wrecks.
The ability to roll Anomalies.
A DB table with all of the anomalies and their properties so they can be modded.
An SM menu to add a Lagrange Point or body.
An SM option to add body with no properties in deep space.
The ability to delete bodies, JPs, and LPs.
When connecting a JP, it'd be nice if the list of options contained the JP's number and not just its position.
The ability to teleport fleets to waypoints.
The ability to move & construct ground troops using SM mode.
The ability to create empires on planets that cannot support life (can already do this by terraforming then un terraforming bodies).
A way to force communications between two races that have not encountered each other yet.
A dummy component with adjustable mass.
A way to un research tech.
When comparing techs a way to transfer all instead of manually transferring over dozens of techs.
A order to wait for N amount of time.
An option for system names to always be fixed.
An option for body names to always be fixed
The ability to force fleets to move faster than they actually can using SM mode.
A SM tool that terraforms to the indicated colony cost.
A SM mode screen for editing a planets parameters.
If the PD modes table had a adjustable percentage modifier to accuracy  and a count of the number of missiles launched at a target.
The ability to adjust precursor, star swarm, and ruin spawnrate.
[VERY IMPORTANT] Backup DB once  button.

The holy grail of features though would be to save / load ship & component designs from a file.
However I can see how that'd get a bit complicated.

Thanks for the suggestions   I may do some of these if more interest is shown or I run into the need myself.

I will add a Backup DB item to the Quasar4x menu now, for the next version.

"The holy grail of features though would be to save / load ship & component designs from a file."  I agree!  I've already started some work on this.  It wont be available in the next version(s), but I want to get it done eventually. 

Rather than reply to all of the suggestions I'll just list the ones that definitely wont be happening, mainly because they are nowhere near as simple to implement as the other suggestions:  A way to un-research tech,  The ability to force fleets to move faster than they actually can using SM mode, and an SM tool that terraforms to the indicated colony cost.

[Stormtrooper]

Black holes and water being a thing in terraforming. Also less restrictions over what can or can not host life. Ideally all configurable, so if I want a chlorine-breathers on a world with 10G and -200C, I can have them.

[Agm-114]

I have a suggestion for a QoL improvement that doesn't even exist in C# aurora.

Mineral shipping civilian contracts. Bonus points if you could set the demand to use reserve levels.

As an aside it would also be nice to have the new "load minerals until full" order which is actually in C#.

I'd say this would be more useful that most of the stuff I've suggested so far.
Also the ability to move transfers ships in and out of civ control might be good.

[iceball3]

Is this a good place to recommend UI/UX improvements?
One recommendation I have is some manner of taskbar. Back in VB6, all the extra windows were selectable on the taskbar, so even if you had a tangle of windows overneath the one you wanted to select, you could select it on the windows taskbar. Now, integration with the window shell seems like it'd be non-trivial, given as it looks like you're using Control nodes for all of the in-app windows, but some in-window solution at the bottom of the primary window would be entirely adequate. Not super high priority though, as I suppose you could use the game window in a similar way i suppose.
Another option that might be mildly more useful is if the main game window was treated as a viewport, was internally expandable, and had vertical and horizontal scrollbars on the top layer. A particular benefit of this as a feature is that it'd allow people stuck with really small resolutions to use the full sized windows without way too much trouble. I have a high resolution monitor these days, but I can imagine it'll be of some use to those who don't. I can see it being useful for certain arrangements of windows too.