Know it’s come up before, but I wanted to propose it in a slightly different form that’s hopefully not prohibitively difficult to implement:
NPR Boarding Doctrines!
I use boarding actions a lot. They’re fun, flavourful, I like the small unit stuff, don’t mind the micro. Great as is. However - I don’t think I’ve ever lost a boarding action, once I got troops aboard. As it is, enemy crews don’t put up much of a fight at all against heavy armour infantry CAP. It would be nice if there were some variance in NPR behaviour as to ship security and/or boarding doctrines, with three general baselines in addition to the default behavior of having nothing in either regard.
Ship security - include a small or very small troop transport bay (for instance), along with a heavy armour CAP, PWL, PWI formation of matching size, alongside all warships above a given tonnage. These are purely for defense from hostile boarders, and would make commandeering ships require dedicated effort rather than a single effective unit.
Universal boarding - as above, but boarding bays instead of transport bays. If within fuel range of a hostile contact going x5 slower than a given warship and already closing to/at point blank, they could attempt to board on top of existing combat logic. These would also serve as security if the above never occured.
Boarding craft - in addition to one of the above, for NPRs with carriers, include boarding squadrons alongside other fighters/smallcraft based on standard fighter designs where boarding bays replace weapon tonnage.
Spoilers: or similar in design to swarm boarders, where the logic for these already appears in the game.
The trickiest bit might be deciding what a normal NPR does with captured ships, considering the recent penalties introduced to commandeered alien craft. Scuttling is a simple option, though this is complicated by having to have (optionally) the boarding formation return to its host ship. Perhaps boarding capable units could return instantly, as if they were “boarding” their own friendly vessel? That’s a separate suggestion I suppose, but it might make the potential logic of boarding and scuttling easier.
Just kicking around some thoughts. Mostly just like boarding and wish it didn’t always go the same way.
Don’t know whether this has been suggested already.
How about adding an installation that boosts ‘sovereignty’ and makes it somewhat harder for a rival to diplomatically demand a star system that you’ve settled?
You could role-play them as embassies, or just as government buildings in general.
If each level counted as (just for example) 100 EM/thermal in the usual diplomatic calculations, they would be quite useful for small colonies near the border - which might only have a signature of a few hundred points - but they would have no major influence at fully developed colonies in your core region.
SJW: Financial centres are effectively that option as they are the best installations to raise the EM signature.
I think it could be good to access the diplomacy and race cards from right click menu on contacts in the tactical map.
Eventually, what I really try to achieve is the ability to mark the contact as Hostile/Neutral/Friendly right away there without passing through the extra menu.
Context: Multi Race games with SM diplomacy locked for full live control.
SJW: I’ve added the option to click an alien contact and jump to the Diplomacy window with the alien class selected. Then you can click the appropriate hostile/neutral, etc..
I would love it if it was possible to create a colony from the tactical map. I think there used to be an option to rightclick a body to create colony in an old version, but if that is not an option, then maybe adding a button to the Body Info window to create colony.
It’s just so much easier when you need a colony in a tactical position, like an asteroid or maybe a moon, than having to look through the system view window for that specific rock.
Various symbols for displaying ships on the Tactical map.
Now all alien ships are marked with one symbol - a circle. If we could change this symbol for a specific class to a square, diamond, 5-pointed star, etc, we could immediately determine whether there are large warships in the alien fleet or just 10 classes of scouts or freighters, without reading the text of each signal.
This would especially help in specific situations like in the screenshot, when a lot of signals turn into an illegible mess. It is quite difficult to determine the location of the most dangerous ships.
It would also be convenient to change the symbols of your own ships so that you can determine the presence of large ships in some system without looking at the composition of each fleet in this system.
New standing order - move/follow nearest Hostile ship.
In this order, the ship will move/follow the first closest hostile contact at a given distance. This probably won’t work during beam combat, as it takes time to assign orders, but it would give patrol ships some automation.
I like the suggestion.
But, IMO, you can see a specific-type icon for a NPR ship only when you have enough intelligence about that class. Until then, you can suspect it is one or another one (e.g., think about ships with cloacking).
You should perform ELINT, capture it by boarding, scrap a wreck, steal its design, or get some POWs to confess, or something else like this, to know what it is.
For your own ships, obviously OK.
Similar to autoroute to system but you pick a fleet to go to and issue a movement command to it. Game then looks at the system the ship is in and uses the same logic as Autoroute to System to easily send your fleet to where the other fleet is.
Shouldn’t a boarded military ship have a Maint clock at least 1 year or more?
In addition to the fact that the ship could have been without overhaul for years, during a boarding combat, its internal systems could receive some minor damage that would lead to an early breakdown.
So, among other problems with the captured ship, you will also need to send it to overhaul for normal long-term operation. It already should be at colony for a while, but (usually) less than at overhaul. However, overhaul is not necessary to control the ship in combat.
Shouldn’t a boarded military ship have a Maint clock at least 1 year or more?
In addition to the fact that the ship could have been without overhaul for years, during a boarding combat, its internal systems could receive some minor damage that would lead to an early breakdown.
So, among other problems with the captured ship, you will also need to send it to overhaul for normal long-term operation. It already should be at colony for a while, but (usually) less than at overhaul. However, overhaul is not necessary to control the ship in combat.
I think it would be beneficial to have some sort of way to “test” a ship’s combat systems outside of encounters with enemies. An ability to shoot weapons into space and marking your empire’s own ships as targets. Maybe, there could be some other types of targets that wouldn’t have to be your own active ships.
It would be a good addition for new players because it can take quite a long time into a campaign before encountering enemies and this would make it possible to try out the controls first.
This addition could also be useful from a RP perspective. Real world’s navy ships take part in exercises etc. before being used in actual operations.
I love the new ground template naming themes. Is there any chance we could get an option to apply the name as a suffix? I.E. getting formations named “1st Infantry Regiment Prospero Spineguard” instead of just “1st Infantry Regiment” or just “Prospero Spineguard”.
It just seems strange to me that after a boarding combat you get a ship in perfect condition (with the exception of holes in the armor and components broken by ship guns, of course).
Ideally, you’ll get a ship with one small armor hole. All you need is to train the crew to operate it.
Boarding combat does have collateral damage already, ship components can be destroyed during the combat (though I don’t know how frequently that happens in practice). If you manage to capture a ship without doing any internal or significant armor damage to it by either your guns or the boarding action, I think you deserve to be able to use it after a shore leave. Especially given how many marines you probably sacrificed to land on a ship with functional engines and weaponry.
Not to mention the “overhaul penalty” mentioned in the path notes Steve linked, which already adds a fair bit of time where the ship is near-useless on top of the required shore leave.
On the main view, money is listed in the top left area of screen. It would be nice if the $ amount were green when money is accumulating and red when depleting.
It would be very great if there were some way to automate the placement of buoys on jump points, similar to how surveying can be automated. I can see how it could be complicated by differing ranges of buoys (1 stage/0 range vs. 2 stage/potentially very large range) as well as the need to remain in system until buoy is established, but that’s why I’m not a coder. I’m around 35 systems and manually plotting buoy placement on every JP has become … tiresome. Perhaps buoy deployment could be pulled out of missile design (as an option) with some kind of standardization that would make it easier?
You can assign a buoy to a launcher (not firing) and then use a Launch Ready Ordnance move order with the jump point as the destination. One order per jump point.
NPR Boarding Doctrines! 
