Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[Thiosk]

Orbital hotels.  Set a tourist trap flag to a world and build hotels on it.  Maybe as a pdc?  Maybe as a special construction?  Appears rarely; modestly higher probability than ruins. Attracts luxury liners, and nonhostile alien liners as well.   

[jseah]

Government Policies and Stances:

Currently, wealth is something like a limit on the amount of resources you can use at any one time.  Given the 1:1 point ratio. 

Hence I would like to see some additional ways to spend wealth.  Like the ability to fund programs that affect how things work in an economy. 
Would turn wealth from a measure of total expenditure into an actual resource. 

eg.
Fiscal Stimulus (spend wealth to increase manufacturing sector % at expense of service sector, which decreases total available exports)
Childcare Schemes / Subsidized Parental Leave (spend wealth to increase population growth rate at expense of manufacturing efficiency)
Basic Income / Welfare Schemes (spend wealth to directly reduce political unrest, which returns once welfare stops)
Subsidize Immigration (pay civilian liners to move colonists to X planet.  Works like contracting facilities)
Subsidize Private Sector (spend wealth to increase total available exports at expense of manufacturing efficiency)

[Harmonica]

I wonder if it would be possible to add some more data to the Industry tab view.    I frequently find myself wanting after these kind of stats.    This is what I knocked up in Excel for the purpose:

(forum is messing up the link but I'm sure you can use it)

hxxp: i. imgur. com/TtVo1. png

Also, if it's possible, adding up and down arrows to the capacity % shown for each item in production would make adjusting the relative focuses much easier.   

[Marc420]

I know I'm new to the game, but I find the Continual Constant Expansion of shipyards to seem to be somewhat overpowered.   Maybe its the civil engineer in me, but I find it hard to picture a shipyard tripling or quadrupaling the size of ships it can handle while constantly operating and building ships.

So, one suggestion would be that this Continual Constant Expansion mode could operate at some fraction of what could otherwise be constructed, in order to reflect the difficulties of working around an open and operating shipyard slips.

Another suggestion would be to
a)  The shipyard capacity expansions that expand by a fixed amount go faster than the continual expansion.   But they also close one or more slipways while they are working.  I'd offer the player/admiral two options for doing upgrades.

1)  Full shutdown.   All the slipways of the shipyard are empty, and stay that way during the upgrade construction.   This is the fastest form
of construction as the crews aren't having to work around anyone else and have full ability to just get in and do the job.
2)  Rotating shutdown.   One slipway at a time is closed for upgrades.   Effectively, when this mode is selected, the number of slipways is
reduced by one.   It can only be begun when this number or fewer slipways have ships in them.   The time for the construction is the time to do one slipway, repeated for the number of slipways.   Ex:  a 4 slipway naval shipyard of 3,000 ton capacity wants to add 1000 tons per slipway.   The number of slipways is temporarily reduced to 3, and the expansion can only begin when there are three or fewer ships in the slips.   The time it takes is the (time to upgrade one slipway) x 4.
3)Then, you'd have the slowed down continual constant expansion from above as a still slower alternative, but one that occurs while the shipyard never misses a beat.

Adding new slipways can always be done without effecting the existing slipways.

Anyways, that's my $0. 02 on what I think shipyard expansions should look like.   This would give choices to the player.   If its peaceful, he might want to shut the whole yard down and upgrade it quickly.  If he needs to be churning out warships while upgrading, he could pick either of the two slower options.   Or, maybe risk the full shutdown, and fewer new ships in the short term, if they want to build bigger ships sooner in the longer term? 

And while providing more interesting choices, it also feels a bit more realistic to someone who's worked around construction sites all his life and knows that working around something you have to keep operating is always slower and more of a pain than when you can just go dominate the site, build the stuff as fast as possible, and then leave.

[sloanjh]

Change the rate at which grade points (per capita) are added to a crew to something like:

Code: [Select]

gradePtsPerCapita += fractionOfAYearElapsed*CommanderTrainingRate*CommanderRank^2*sqrt(100)/sqrt(CrewSize);

In absolute crew grade points (i.e. per capita points * crew size), this would be:

Code: [Select]

gradePtsTotal += fractionOfAYearElapsed*CommanderTrainingRate*CommanderRank^2*sqrt(100)*sqrt(CrewSize);

The reason for this suggestion is that I just realized that an officer with, for example, a training rating of 300 brings a crew of 6 on a fighter from -10% grade bonus to 33% grade bonus in exactly the same time as it takes the same commander to train up a crew of 3000 on a BB.  It seems like big crews should be (somewhat) harder to train to a "crack" level than small crews.  This led me down the following path of reasoning:

*  If it took 500x (the ratio of crew sizes) as long to train a BB crew as a fighter crew, then training would be broken.  (Note that by "train", I mean crew grade, not fleet training throughout this post.)
*  Then I realized that the BB would tend to have a much more senior commander than the fighter, so if senior officers were better at training than junior officers then that would cut the effect.  If we assume a typical BB commander will be 3-4 ranks above a typical fighter commander, then by squaring we get a factor of 9-16, which brings the training time ratio down to roughly 30-50x longer for the BB.
*  That's still to big a gap, so my next thought was that the difficulty in training shouldn't be linear in the crew size.  The obvious thing to do is to soften the effect by using the sqrt of the crew size.  For the BB example, sqrt(3000/6) is a bit over 20, so the training time ratio is now in the range of 1.4-2.5, which seems about right.  It's a big enough effect to be noticed, but small enough that it shouldn't break the game.
* Throwing a sqrt into the crewsize will probably mess up the current rate for typical ships, so stick in a normalization factor (sqrt(100)) so that a LCMDR on a "typical" LCMDR command sees no change in training rate.  I chose 100 crew for a typical command since that's what my 1000 ton FAC/corvettes tend to run.

In terms of effect on game mechanics, I suspect this would make it easier to train up fighter/fac squadrons, since a low-rank/training officer will train them faster.  I suspect it will also push players towards using higher ranking officers on bigger ships, since they won't want that 16x for an R4 wasted on a tiny crew.  At present there's no game mechanics pushing players in this direction.  The thing I'm not clear on is how this could interact with fleet/TF commands (to push ultra-high ranking officers into desk jobs) - maybe add a factor of (AdmiralRank/3)^2 (and a penalty for lots of ships?) to the fleet-training rate.  The other thing I like about the idea is that it gives a game-mechanics benefit to higher ranking officers.  At present, there's nothing (other than role-playing) to prevent one from setting all classes to requiring LCDR, in which case the only benefit of high ranking officers is that they can command fleets at R3.

John

[symon]

I've always thought that the training didn't really depend on crew size was because the CO wasn't training ratings down in engineering, but inspiring the senior officers, who inspired the junior officers/senior enlisted, who trained the crew with more elan!

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Currently, while there is a jump transit recovery delay on sensors and fire control, there isn't a delay on firing weapons, launching parasites or transiting a jump point.  This allows an abusive tactic of minelaying immediately after a transit followed by the minelayers retreating back through the jump point, resulting in little or no damage to the attackers while leaving the defenders vulnerable and likely destroyed.  A less abusive but still invalid tactic of a scout immediately fleeing back through the jump point once it finds defenders waiting has been seen done by NPRs as well.

Reference discussion thread 'Minelaying to Victory, or Jump Point Assaults are hard?'http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,3703.0.html

Firing of weapons, jump drives and parasites are all affected by transit in v5.50

Steve

[Thiosk]

The Invasion Button




Signals the start of an apocalypse.  Large alien fleet appears at a random end of a warp chain and begins moving with modest haste in the general direction of your homeworld. Invades and devours your populations on the way.

I'm thinking star-swarm (or tyranid-like) though I suppose any suitably large and belligerent alien fleet will do.

I see it not unlike setting off disasters in your sim city games.

[sidew]

If is possible, please add pre-transnewtonian weapons, like old fashioned artillery, autocannons and gatling guns. . .

I like to see a early star frigate with some 402mm turrets scrapped from WWII Iowa-class BB and conventional engines 

[mikew]

If is possible, please add pre-transnewtonian weapons, like old fashioned artillery, autocannons and gatling guns. . .

I like to see a early star frigate with some 402mm turrets scrapped from WWII Iowa-class BB and conventional engines 

Your early star frigate is going to be very heavy- each 16" gun (not turret) weighed in at over 120 tons.  The turret assembly to include the guns would be well over 1000 tons.

Mike

[Hawkeye]

And with a muzzle velocity of some 820 m/s (16 in/50), the range of those 16 inchers would be abysimal (remember, 5 seconds max. flying time)

Even the Rheinmetall 120mm L55 gun only reaches a shell-speed of about 1.75 km/s, or an Aurora-Range of a bit less than 9 km.

[UnLimiTeD]

Well, keep in mind there is no Atmosphere to slow them down, + their damage would likely be contributed largely by explosive payload.
Given that a Gauss Rifle would reach a shell speed close enough to light speed to calculate it as such, we can simplify this a little.
Still, it is problematic with the aurora distances, I mean, I don't think theres a calculation for being closer than 10k?
On the other hand, you could calculate them as mass drivers, and fire very slow projectiles that hit a distant planet a half year later.
For propulsion, in space it would likely be case-less shells with a rocket component, and thus reach a lot higher speeds.
Still not enough to matter.
If we ever get the option to develop and specify equipment for ground troops, this might do a bit, though.

[Hawkeye]

Oh I agree, the damage a 16 incher would deal would be nothing to sneeze at. Hitting anything in space (aside from a rock that isn´t manouvering in any way) would be pretty much impossible, however.

I just went over to Atomic Rocket and according to that site, an Iowa´s 16 inch shell delivers a energy of 5.3 x 10^8 Jouls or the equivalelt of 127 kg of TNT (including 54kg of high explosive).
Just for comparison, 1 gramm at 75% C will deliver 11 Kilo-Tons of TNT.
Damage for the 16 inch gun sure doesn´t look as good as before now.


As I was talking about muzzle velocity, atmospheric drag doesn´t come into play by a large margin (yes, there won´t be air in the barrel, but I don´t think that air will slow the shell down by a lot)

Rocket assisted shells are a good point, though.
Even then, lets assume it doubles the velocity, we just hit 3500 m/s (for the 120mm) , then we just hit a 5-second-range of 17.5 km and the more mass we dedicate to the rocket, the less mass is left for the actual shell.
To get at 10.000km range, the shell would have to go at 2.000 km/s, which is a factor of 1.000 compared to what we have today. I have a hard time imagining this kind of performance without actual Trans-Newton technology

As a weapon for planetary bombardement, they might be viable

[jseah]

Deception ECM (from David Weber's Starfire novels):

Fools sensors at 100-ECM % range into increasing the Cross-Section, Thermal and EM signature of the ship. 
 - Makes shield and engine readings unreliable
 - Can change the "apparent" class of a ship to a design you have (only for ships that have higher or equal TH/EM signatures)

Meant to be used to "cloak" ships by hiding them among similar classes. 
Eg. concealing a jump ship by making everything else appear as big (or bigger) than it.  Make ships have false active sensors to hide command ships. 

[forgottenlord]

I'd love for the ability to disable/enable specific types of interrupts.   The one that I really would love to be able to toggle is the "out of fuel" interrupt - it's very important when it's about to happen, but once it has happened and I've already scheduled some ship to go and give him a boost, it annoys the heck out of me.   Particularly annoying when my geo survey vessel found himself some 26Gm away from anything.   Forced minimum update and had a ship blow up elsewhere.   *sighs*

Another one I'd love to disable is "found a jump point" interrupt.