The input text in the System Search textbox must exactly match the searched name, including upper-case letters.
IMO it would be more helpful if it could search also fragments of text, or only lower-case letters names. Possibly cycling the systems, if more than one matches the search.
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I like the 50kt ground based Terraforming installations in 2.7.1. They are much more manageable than the huge things in 2.1.1.
I just wanted to suggest, since they take time and trouble to transport and they use 125k population unlike the orbital terraformers, they could justifiably be a bit better than orbitals.
I was thinking they take up two factory spaces so they could provide more terraform value per installation.
Venturing down this rabbit hole, it struck me a tech could improve terraforming output for ground based terraformers, perhaps with racial terraforming rate as a dependency. Like engines depend on reactors, terraform count per building could depend on racial terraforming rate and require its own research either in Biology / Genetics or Construction / Production.
Other techs it might credibly depend on include racial fuel refining rate and racial construction rate. e.g. in the full fat scenario, they would start with a terraforming value of 1 and you would need terraforming 0.0032 + construction rate 12 + fuel production 48k to enable a tech for ground terraforming value 2 at the same tech cost 3k at this level, cost scaling to match the dependeny costs 5k, 10k, 20k etc, adding +1 terraform per tech level.
It feels like it would make sense this only applies to ground based terraforming buildings because being on the planet they are in amongst the atmosphere so can process it more effectively than orbital terraformers which are above it, of necessity. This would create a fundamental difference between the two terraforming methods. Ground installation scaling with tech as well as construction of installations and population commitment while orbital scales with building of terraforming materiel as stations and ships.
Just struck me as a possibility.
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They are a bit better than orbitals. They are 40% cheaper.
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So thats where all my boronide went!
Thatās not better, itās just cheaper. The population requirement makes the installations a lot less useful overall (what good is having more if there arenāt enough people to run them?). Couple that with being twice the size of a an orbital for transport, and the ātransport efficiencyā of towing vs freightering, and installations look even less desirable. Their only other benefit is that civilians can move them, which is a pretty minor convenience overall. You could argue that being cheaper means you can build them faster, but you can also build orbitals in shipyards which leaves your industry free to build other stuff.
I think installations could stand to go down to half-cost compared to orbitals, and probably fewer workers (10 per million instead of the current 8?), to make them properly competitive with orbitals and not just an also-ran thatās mostly useful for cleaning up already well-established colonies.
I personally find the balance between orbital and planetside terraformers to be good and I use both.
I think how a player perceives the balance is dependent on their playstyle, though. I am usually fine with deploying infrastructure and moving population to operate terraforming installations, because once the planet is terraformed the population will remain and the infrastructure can be redeployed towards the frontier. However, I know some players almost refuse to colonize anything that hasnāt been terraformed because they think infrastructure is a waste of duranium. In that case, orbital modules are obviously quite attractive.
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I play with Terraforming Speed at 10%.
Surface TFIs are absolutely essential. I simply canāt mine enough BOR to use only orbital modules.
I typically use orbitals for phase 1 of terraformingā¦getting the temperature col cost down to 2.
Phase 2 (making the atmo breathable) usually takes a lot longer. Meanwhile, the colony is growing, and usually becomes self-sufficient (can build infra and confacs fast enough to keep up with pop growth) before phase 2 is done.
Then, as production pulls ahead of what is needed for new confacs and infra, I use the extra production to build TFIs in place of new confacs.
I can usually start to move the orbitals on to the next project around the time phase 2 completes, because when the col cost starts to drop during phase 3 (temperature and hydro), it doesnāt take long before the continuous drop in col cost increases the pop supported by present infra faster than the population is actually growing. Meaning I no longer need to build new infra, and I can reduce the total terraforming output more and more as time goes on, because the marginal gain in pop supported per infra increases as col cost gets lower (faster than the rate of increase of new population growth) , so it takes less and less terraforming work to keep infra capacity ahead of total pop.
It takes many, many decades for a large world to finish terraforming. I can start moving the surface TFIs elsewhere well before all the work is completed.
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It is a fair point nuclearslurpee that how you see things is often infuenced by what you want from them. I will describe my own situation as an example.
I was enticed to thinking about how to speed up terraforming because I am playing the Sol destruction scenario and have a finite time to evacuate Earth or say goodbye to its digital citizenry.
I decided it required habitable planets because building infra for 1.8bn colonists takes too long and uses mercassium at 1800x whatever colony cost is, at best 160 = 288,000 which I estimate costs more mercassium than I have had in the whole playthrough thus far and also competes with both research facilities and cryo modules, which both require a lot of mercassium.
So it makes sense to solve this by reducing colony cost to nil, which shifts the material burden onto boronide for terraforming.
Two close planets required terraforming. One was possible to make breathable before adapting temperature which meant its max population rose gradually (and satisfyingly) as temperatures normalised and colony cost fell, meaning transport could begin. The other required methane removal which moved temperatures into the green zone, then oxygen addition, all at reduced terraforming x0.6. This is all or nothing, as discussed in another suggestion post I read but cannot find now, possibly on Discord, and it did not improve gradually before it was suddenly but happily done, consequentially mass transport could not commence until it was done.
One difficulty with ground based terraformers is they are chicken and egg as you need a lot of population in place to run them which requires infra if terraforming is required, meaning they have hidden costs and I saw them as not a practical method under time and materials constraint. Even though RP is another consideration, in this scenario efficiency is paramount even in RP.
In fact not a single ground based terraformer was built by humans, as I genuinely considered them not worth the candle though did import some from excavations along with infra and ended up with 24 ground vs 145 orbital terraformers on a 0.6x terraforming rate planet, such was the need for speed but those 24 required 3m pop = 600 infra to run them, so much more expensive than they look. To do the whole lot 169 terraformers with ground would require 21m pop and over 4000 infra which is 4k Mercassium and 4k Duranium. So 40% boronide saving pales in comparison to be honest unless you are prticularly squeezed for boronide and have a surplus of mercassium and duranium, which was not the case for the reasons mentioned.
So this idea sprang from wondering what would make ground based terraformers worthwhile because in this scenario they were an afterthought, whereas if each installation had an improvable terraforming value then OK they could be a more serious consideration and worth investing research and pop and infra and transport space into organising.
I did use existing techs to improve terraforming rate and decrease colonisation cost, which had the lower priority because under those circumstances you just want to get the planet habitable and start transporting.
On completing terraforming I just kind of took a geshtalt impression away from the experience that ground based terraformers are underpowered and the above explains why. 2c
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Donāt forget ground terraformers + orbital habitats. Thatās how I do a lot of my terraforming, especially for high CC worlds.
A QOL suggestion.
Add a layer of shipments automation, Iād call it Task Route or something like this.
Task Route consists of:
- Cycled template order with a starting point where the necessary cargoes, fuel and supplies loaded (there may or may not be other loading points, yet one of them must be a starting one).
- A list of Fleets (Task Groups) that are placed on Task Routes.
A player can drop any Fleet (Task Group) at a Route at any time. The automation checks if a fleet can move, and if there is a path from the fleet position to the starting point. If passed, it clears the standing orders and makes autoroute to the starting point. For any fleet currently on this task route standing free at itās starting point automation loads the task route cycled template order.
Player can edit a route, yet not to change the starting point (to not make too much mess with checking old and new starting points).
The rationale.
Currently itās quite tedious to check which fleets do some task you are sure somebody must do and balance the routes. Even with scurpulous notes itās necessary to check regularly if itās ok with the tasks, and with large empires itās a mess. Personally, I like to do this, yet the problem for me is that the story breaks with some kinds of player mistakes or bugs. Living people do make mistakes and lazy sags, yet there are limits of stupidity - for example, no living captain would let itās own trade ship stop in the middle of the route doing nothing for years, somebody would just ask what we are doing here, where are my expected payments and leaves, so when some fleet do this kind of thing in Aurora - itās hard for me to continue the story.
This suggestion makes much easier to handle this kind of planning and control. Instead of checking through all the list of fleets, you can check throught the much shorter list of tasks (routes) if these are functioning correctly, if there some problems, empty routes, or too much ships for a task, or doubling tasks that have to be merged, then itās easy to redeploy some ships to balance the shipments without adding an unbeleavable mess in your other plans.
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Currently, we can only assign order templates to a fleet based on the system the fleet is in, and when we assign a template, the orders replace the fleetās existing orders.
Suggestion: give us a way to append an order template to the end of the current orders.
We would need a way to switch modes between the current mode (replace) and the new mode (append).
When using the append mode, the available templates are based on the system the fleet will be in after the final order in the current order list, rather than based on the system the fleet is in presently.
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Presently inexperienced fleets take time to change targets, and the timer starts when you attempt to open fire. I propose that the timer should start when you assign the target. This would allow even an inexperienced crew to be prepared to attack the first target in an engagement if you knew going into it (e.g. you were advancing toward it) that you wanted to target ship B, but preserve the benefit of having a well-trained crew that can quickly switch to a new target.
Right now you have to start trying to shoot while out of range in order to āprepareā the crew for firing on a target, which is tedious (target out of range messages) and unrealistic. If you tell a crew who theyāll be shooting at well in advance of commanding them to open fire, they should be prepared.
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Not sure if this is possible given the UI constraints, but would it be possible be able to select items on the tactical map? E.g. select a fleet on the tactical map and it selects it in the Naval Organization window, select a colony and it selects it in the Economics window, etc. This would add a lot of capability to the tactical map, similar to how you can right click on jump gates to navigate. Bonus points for double clicking to open said windows if theyāre not currently open, with the item selected for you.
Iām confused. You can already right-click the tactical map to select fleets and colonies, which opens the appropriate window with details for the selected thing
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Auto-generate supply/demand orders based on that bodyās min/max targets for each mineral. Min/max targets would replace reserve level.
E.g. if Alpha Centauri II has duranium min/max targets of 1000/5000, whenever the stock of duranium went below 1000 it would generate demand for civilian shipping to bring in durainum, and when it went above 5000, it would auto-update supply of duranium available to be moved somewhere else to fulfill demand.
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Derp, youāre right, it does. Learned something new today, the few times Iāve tried that, I left clicked to select, or double clicked, instead of trying to right click.
That said, right now it opens a NEW naval org window, instead of doing it inside the one thatās already open. So modification to my suggestion: not open a new window unless thereās not a window open.
On the tactical map, currently you can check a box to indicate which bodies are colonies. Unfortunately, that just puts a very thin, translucent grey ring around the body. Very difficult to see if thereās much map clutter.
Suggestion is to make it much more noticeable. Maybe bigger, thicker ring, a glow that fades outward in a bright color, etc.
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I prefer it opening a new window, rather than changing the selected fleet in a window I already have open.
Weād need a method for doing it one way or the other. Hold shift down to get new window, for example.
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I think it would be very convenient to have somewhere in the Ship Design window a list of shipyards currently capable of building this ship class, and ideally an option of opening window with this shipyard by doubleclicking on it in this list.
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I would also want this to also indicate the populations that the shipyards are at
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