C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions

[jonw]

Could we have multiple tractor units per ship?

[Steve Walmsley]

This is almost more of an idle thought than a fully-weighed suggestion, but-

At present, the only hard distinctions between ship classes are as follows: Whether a ship has military or commercial drives for the purposes of using jump drives, whether a ship is military or civilian for maintenance and morale purposes, and whether a ship is a fighter or literally anything else.

That last one sticks out to me as the most 'arbitrary' of them. Whether you're a conventional empire, a fledgling TN race, or someone with mastery of the stars strong enough to challenge the [spoilers]- a fighter factory can only produce designs up to 500 tons, across the entire span of the game. Your industrial base and shipyard tech might reach the point where you have gargantuan warships as your standard combatants, but a fighter will only ever be 500 tons or less.

So, my suggestion is to add a new tech line that determines the capacity of your fighter factories. It can be an extremely expensive tech, but I feel like allowing even a bit of wiggle room in the flexibility of those factories would jive well with overall progression.

The 500 ton limit has meaning in C# Aurora. Trans-Newtonian ships operate mainly in the Aether dimension, so larger vessels cannot get too close to any real space system bodies due to the latter's disruption of the Aether within a hundred kilometres of their surface. That is why cargo can no longer be transferred to a planet without cargo shuttles and construction factories need a spaceport in order to build space stations. Ships with a small enough mass (500 tons or less) can operate close to system bodies (in support of ground forces) and can even be produced on the surface (by fighter factories).

BTW I really should wrote a full TN technobabble post

[Steve Walmsley]

Could we have multiple tractor units per ship?

I'm trying to avoid that due to complexities of tractor chains.

[Hazard]

I'm trying to avoid that due to complexities of tractor chains.

I may fail to understand what you mean.

And wouldn't it be possible to declare a ship that is being tractored as unable to tractor something themselves?

And with that, wouldn't it be possible when 1 ship tractors multiple vessels to sum up the total tractored weight for movement calculations?

[Ranged66]

Been following this game for years but never really got active in the community, great game though!

Would it be possible to have some more overview windows? For example, a general mining report that shows just how much of every mineral all mines in your empire make per year.  Next to it projected usage per year or something.  Would really help with determining if shortages will arrive or what to focus on.  Especially once you start having mining operations on a dozen or so worlds.

[TMaekler]

Automatic Naming Patterns for Ships. Is it possible to add a function that enables to define the pattern of auto-naming fighters?

[chrislocke2000]

Improving the way you set up and edit ship formations plus attendant FACS and fighters would be great. With the sensor changes I’m expecting more us of pickets etc but at present it is quite a lot of effort to set up and then edit. Some flex on deciding which elements will detach from the main TG at any particular point in time would be helpful.

[Steve Walmsley]

Improving the way you set up and edit ship formations plus attendant FACS and fighters would be great. With the sensor changes I’m expecting more us of pickets etc but at present it is quite a lot of effort to set up and then edit. Some flex on deciding which elements will detach from the main TG at any particular point in time would be helpful.

I haven't written the formation code yet but I will make improvements on the VB6 version.

[TMaekler]

A way to edit "Plotted Moves" would be nice. Don't know how much effort it would be in C# but having to redo a whole move-chain because you missed something is quite tedious. Another idea would be some kind of automation system for repetitive jobs (moving AMs, MDs etc. from A to B when doing it yourself) and having to "handclick through all the necessary steps" could be done easier with "general templates". You select a general template and then have to select only source and target destination as well as to what should be transported. Then you select how many cycles and the "plotted moves" are then automatically generated by the program.
Also a change in cycle move might be nice - something in the line of marking several steps and define "repeat those three times" - and the once before and after are not "cycled". Just a thought...

[Tree]

I'm not sure how that'd interact with your rework on them, so it's all from VB, I'll admit.
Can you make it so a planet that isn't visited regularly by civilian colony ships slowly becomes more and more attractive to them?

Often when I have one homeworld and say 2 colonies at col cost 0, civilian colony ships will only fly between the homeworld and the closest colony, unless I set it to "stable" for some time. (I suspect even with your change, civilians colony ships would only fly the route that gives them the most wealth/time and forget the rest exists.) So could you make it so if the second, more distant colony hasn't seen civilian colony ships in a while, the reward for civilian colony ships would slowly ramps up until eventually they find it more interesting than the closest colony? It'd slowly go back down as colonists start being unloaded there.
I think it'd be better to make un-flown routes offer more money than make the over-used ones offer less, it'd keep their and your income about constant. You'll likely get a bit more since between the time they decide on their new target that'd bring them just one more wealth and by the time they get there, the reward would have kept going up. If you make their most-used routes less rewarding though they'll go use another, make it less rewarding and keep switching, making all the trade routes less and less rewarding, spiraling down until they're not making any money anymore at all. If there's a hard cap to ensure there's always a decent-ish minimum reward, some routes would still appear less interesting than another's minimum and never be used at all.

I'm not super sure it affects freighters because I only ever get very few of them, but it seems having more trade goods to pick from than just "colonists" helps them fly more randomly and that they might not need incentives to fly to other places.

[Steve Walmsley]

I'm not sure how that'd interact with your rework on them, so it's all from VB, I'll admit.
Can you make it so a planet that isn't visited regularly by civilian colony ships slowly becomes more and more attractive to them?

Often when I have one homeworld and say 2 colonies at col cost 0, civilian colony ships will only fly between the homeworld and the closest colony, unless I set it to "stable" for some time. (I suspect even with your change, civilians colony ships would only fly the route that gives them the most wealth/time and forget the rest exists.) So could you make it so if the second, more distant colony hasn't seen civilian colony ships in a while, the reward for civilian colony ships would slowly ramps up until eventually they find it more interesting than the closest colony? It'd slowly go back down as colonists start being unloaded there.
I think it'd be better to make un-flown routes offer more money than make the over-used ones offer less, it'd keep their and your income about constant. You'll likely get a bit more since between the time they decide on their new target that'd bring them just one more wealth and by the time they get there, the reward would have kept going up. If you make their most-used routes less rewarding though they'll go use another, make it less rewarding and keep switching, making all the trade routes less and less rewarding, spiraling down until they're not making any money anymore at all. If there's a hard cap to ensure there's always a decent-ish minimum reward, some routes would still appear less interesting than another's minimum and never be used at all.

I'm not super sure it affects freighters because I only ever get very few of them, but it seems having more trade goods to pick from than just "colonists" helps them fly more randomly and that they might not need incentives to fly to other places.

In C#, colony ships will always prioritise colonies with no other colony ship inbound over closer colonies that are already colony ship destinations

[Barkhorn]

Can we have more ways to sort and/or filter things?  Mostly I'm thinking about the task group list in the task group orders window, and the class list on the class design window.

Right now, it's pretty annoying to constantly have to scroll and search through the list of task groups when I want to issue a new order.  So I suggest making the TG list more of a tree, using the hierarchy set up in the Task Force Organization window.  This way I could keep commercial TG's, survey TG's, and military TG's separate, without being forced to use goofy names to take advantage of the alphabetical order.

I also suggest something similar for any list of ship classes.  Give us a better way to manage them than a single, linear list.

[Steve Walmsley]

Can we have more ways to sort and/or filter things?  Mostly I'm thinking about the task group list in the task group orders window, and the class list on the class design window.

Right now, it's pretty annoying to constantly have to scroll and search through the list of task groups when I want to issue a new order.  So I suggest making the TG list more of a tree, using the hierarchy set up in the Task Force Organization window.  This way I could keep commercial TG's, survey TG's, and military TG's separate, without being forced to use goofy names to take advantage of the alphabetical order.

I also suggest something similar for any list of ship classes.  Give us a better way to manage them than a single, linear list.

You should have a read through the changes thread and the screenshots thread. All of the above is already in C# Aurora

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8455.0
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.0

As an example:

[Lazerus]

http:aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9846.0

Linking my thread for proposed changes to officers in relation to the upcoming C# model, especially in relation to the changes to admin commands and the new billets on ships.

[EDIT BY JOHN: Fixed link that was mangled due to too few posts by poster]

[SpaceCowboy]

I'll repost a possible change I suggested in the C# discussion thread: that real star systems with known planets in real life generate with those planets.  That is, something like Proxima Centauri will always have a 1. 25 Earth-mass planet orbiting 7. 2 MKm away from it.  All the known planets would exist in a database, and the existing system generation code would be modified to generate other planets and asteroids around the real planets.  So we have Prox Cen b, and then maybe some Jupiter-mass companion and asteroid belts out at 2 AU (or something).

Steve, I'm an exoplanet astronomer by day, and I'd be happy to help compile the planet information for you, suggest modifications to the system generation code, or even help modify it myself.