v2.0.0 Changes Discussion Thread

[Vivalas]

Having the ability to set auto assignment "classes" manually would be nice, I agree. I like to arm my survey ships sometimes for RP (currently doing a star trek run) and the auto assignment likes to put tactical officers on them.

[xenoscepter]

 --- Could we get a button like in VB6 where you could Research everything up to a certain amount of RP?

[pwhk]

About the new jump shock change, does it mean AI would no longer jump back and forth a jump point every 5 seconds, causing unwanted 5 sec interrupts?

[Gabrote42]

About the new jump shock change, does it mean AI would no longer jump back and forth a jump point every 5 seconds, causing unwanted 5 sec interrupts?

Yes, but unless it's the result of fleeing from an armed opponent, it may result in unwanted 1 minute interrupts. Depends on how the AI handles it, and if it tries to burn away. At the very least it should increase increment lenght

[nuclearslurpee]

I can't believe my scientist house rule of all things made it into an update. 

[kilo]

About the new jump shock change, does it mean AI would no longer jump back and forth a jump point every 5 seconds, causing unwanted 5 sec interrupts?

I am pretty sure, it will change that to 1 minute interrupts with you being able to engage the enemy fleet. There was simply nothing you could do before, as your ships had a reaction time and the enemy fleet would simply disappear. I wasted quite some missiles in these "engagements".


I think the changes to research administration are quite good, as I preferred the slower progression as well. This makes capturing and reverse engineering a lot more viable as well. These are instantaneous and give significant boosts in certain fields. Maybe we could get research points from captured missiles and armor as well. I am pretty sure armor could be reverse engineered in VB6 and cannot be in C#.

[alex_brunius]

Limited Research Facilities

A new game-level option called 'Limited Research Facilities' has been added for v2.0.

May be semantics and nitpicking  but wouldn't it make more sense to call it Limited Research Administration instead as it's not the Facilities that are limited but rather how many can be administered?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Limited Research Facilities

A new game-level option called 'Limited Research Facilities' has been added for v2.0.

May be semantics and nitpicking  but wouldn't it make more sense to call it Limited Research Administration instead as it's not the Facilities that are limited but rather how many can be administered?

Yes, that is a good point. I'll make the change.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I can't believe my scientist house rule of all things made it into an update. 

Yes, I thought it was a good idea when I read about it. I've tried the slower research speeds and it seemed too slow, but this seemed like a good way of slowing engine progression while maintaining overall research speed.

[ISN]

I've tried playing with the limited research admin house rule, and one thing I noticed is that it tends to discourage research specialization: I typically had many more research facilities than could be used by my best researchers, so I ended up assigning lots of mediocre researchers to work on lower-priority techs. Since I was playing with two player factions, this meant that both factions ended up with more or less the same technologies, which was somewhat boring. Of course I could've just built fewer research facilities... I think I ended up changing the house rule to (admin capacity)/3 with like 50% research speed, or something like that, which allowed the two factions to specialize a bit more.

Anyway, I'm still a fan of the new option. It would be nice if it were a bit more customizable so we could really tune the admin capacity/research speed to our liking, but I'll take what I can get.

[nuclearslurpee]

I've tried playing with the limited research admin house rule, and one thing I noticed is that it tends to discourage research specialization: I typically had many more research facilities than could be used by my best researchers, so I ended up assigning lots of mediocre researchers to work on lower-priority techs. Since I was playing with two player factions, this meant that both factions ended up with more or less the same technologies, which was somewhat boring. Of course I could've just built fewer research facilities... I think I ended up changing the house rule to (admin capacity)/3 with like 50% research speed, or something like that, which allowed the two factions to specialize a bit more.

Anyway, I'm still a fan of the new option. It would be nice if it were a bit more customizable so we could really tune the admin capacity/research speed to our liking, but I'll take what I can get.

I've had a similar experience in the early game, though once you start generating scientists you start to run up a bigger stable and they gain admin skill so the issue is mitigated a bit. However I am a big fan of Steve's "20% plus 1" implementation as it addresses this exact problem quite neatly.

[alex_brunius]

Question is if something is needed lategame to not slow down research of the last techs until forever with so few labs? I don't normally play lategame but maybe a few techs adding one or two labs capability per scientist becoming available very lategame could be a decent solution to this 100% imagined and speculative issue  .

[nuclearslurpee]

Question is if something is needed lategame to not slow down research of the last techs until forever with so few labs? I don't normally play lategame but maybe a few techs adding one or two labs capability per scientist becoming available very lategame could be a decent solution to this 100% imagined and speculative issue  .

It is not too different from what we have now, the overall research rate remains the same the only difference is that you are not able to rush techs and will be researching 4-5 times as many techs at any given time. It's true that you aren't able to rush each propulsion tech tier very easily, but once you factor in the corresponding fuel efficiency, engine size, reactor, etc. techs you will be developing in parallel rather than sequentially your overall rate of progress will not be much different. Remember particularly for engines that you can develop the reactor and engine technologies in parallel, as the reactor tech of one tier is the sole prerequisite for the engine tech of that tier and the reactor tech of the next tier.

In the other fields, once you have a large stable of scientists you will maintain persistent research efforts in that field instead of occasionally bum-rushing the next level of laser or something before going back to your regularly scheduled propulsion rushing. Still the same rate of progress, just more evenly instead of in brief spurts which fits well the long-term focus of Aurora.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Also there will may be some reduction in overall research speed as the average skill of active scientists may be lower (assuming not enough top tier scientists across all fields to use all available facilities), but it is still likely to still be a high percentage of current speed.

[alex_brunius]

It is not too different from what we have now, the overall research rate remains the same the only difference is that you are not able to rush techs and will be researching 4-5 times as many techs at any given time. It's true that you aren't able to rush each propulsion tech tier very easily, but once you factor in the corresponding fuel efficiency, engine size, reactor, etc. techs you will be developing in parallel rather than sequentially your overall rate of progress will not be much different. Remember particularly for engines that you can develop the reactor and engine technologies in parallel, as the reactor tech of one tier is the sole prerequisite for the engine tech of that tier and the reactor tech of the next tier.

In the other fields, once you have a large stable of scientists you will maintain persistent research efforts in that field instead of occasionally bum-rushing the next level of laser or something before going back to your regularly scheduled propulsion rushing. Still the same rate of progress, just more evenly instead of in brief spurts which fits well the long-term focus of Aurora.

There is a cap though when expanding labs for how many parallel projects that are possible to run at the same time before running out of projects, with max labs on all of them.

The main concern is that tech costs range from something like 1000 - 5,000,000 RP (x5000 increase) while Research Rate ranges from 200 - 1500 (x7.5 increase). With lower admin caps you should in theory hit the cap of researching every potential available tech in parallel with maximum number of labs much sooner in your lab expansion, and you should be frustrated much earlier that that by having nothing useful to put labs on.