Background is for all windows. Fonts is for the maps.
Font colours is something I am considering, but I’ll probably wait until after v2.8 as I want to see if there are any issues with the background and new fonts first.
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Quick suggestion: add Control-F search option in Commander Window. So we can search and find quickly the commander by name 
Otherwise, make possible to sort names of Navy, Ground officer, Scientist and Administrator in alphabetic order
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Don’t know if already asked.
In “GU/Stockpiles” tab, a component recovered from an alien ship, it is shown in azure if still not researched. When we decide to research it, would it be possible to mark it somehow, to show it is in the queue? just to avoid to assign it to research multiple times.
@Pedroig, about the Glossary.
For new players, some acronyms aren’t always immediately clear.
E.g., for an active sensor of resolution = 1, MCR stands for?
For all the active sensors, EH is Electronic Hardening, I presume; but, isn’t it already indicated in the codename of the sensor, inside the brackets?
In the old forum, there was a chat with a list of acronyms, where it seemed that GPS was Grav Pulse Strength: can it be added in the glossary?
Then: the new CDE is missing; MU1 and MU5 are present, but in the ship description they are named as 1YR and 5YR; there is Damage Control Rating, but not its acronym.
I think a new window, dedicated to a glossary for all the game, would be a great QoL addiction.
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There is a bane of the Galactic Map, a little over sight that irks me! The ‘contact systems’ circle colour is black, and you can barely see it, yet it is obviously such a useful one. Can we maybe get that colour changed?
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There are several Command and Control components that add additional officers to ships for more crew bonuses but not for every bonus category. To extend that theme I’d suggest:
- Commercially-oriented modules to add secondary bonuses to Production, Mining, Logistics, etc. I’d love to have commercial ships with mining foremen, production managers, quartermasters, etc assisting their CO’s. As commercial modules they could be much larger than military modules are. This would also add a path to increase commercial ship CO’s into ranks higher than +1
- Orbital Assault module that assigns a Ground Forces Commander to a ship (if code even allows for that?) to increase the ship’s accuracy against ground targets.
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Every time this comes up (so, about twice a week), the issue that gets raised is that this offers next to no decision-making. If we had a “Terraforming Officer’s Station” module, it would get slapped into every Terraforming ship or platform without a second thought. The net effect from a gameplay perspective would be a buff to terraforming with no other changes.
The reason combat vessel officer modules work is that they introduce decisions to the ship design process. Sure, on a really big vessel you want all the modules and it’s a no-brainer, and on a really small vessel you won’t have the space, but for vessels in that intermediate size range which and how many officer modules to add is a legitimate question.
In order for this kind of suggestion to go somewhere, there needs to be a real decision-making process involved without doing something silly like making the " Terraforming Officer’s Station" 25,000 tons and 1,000 BP or something silly like that.
Orbital Assault module that assigns a Ground Forces Commander to a ship (if code even allows for that?) to increase the ship’s accuracy against ground targets.
This would be really interesting and I think I’d like to see it.
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Perhaps I should clarify my thinking here. First, I specifically didn’t mention terraforming because those tend to be very large anyway and yes that would be a no-brainer. But I offered the suggestion precisely to add gameplay complexity, decision points, and design complexity to a category of ships that already have almost no design complexity to them. The design decision for most commercial ships is barely more than “how big do I want to make this thing?” Freighters get cargo space, shuttles, engine… done. Colony ships get cyro, shuttles, engine… done. Several commercial ship designs are nearly identical from one game to another.
My suggestion was to add questions to that process. “Small and cheap? Large and efficient? Is it better to add another shuttle bay or a quartermaster?”
The bigger reason behind my suggestion is the introduction of meaningful ship CO rank increases. Currently, its VERY easy to create an entire fleet of commercial ships that covers all your empire needs, all commanded by officers right out of their academies. 40-kiloton harvester that keeps a little fuel on an outpost? Minimum rank CO. 2 million ton harvester base feeding your homeworld fleet? Also a minimum rank CO. For commercial ships you have to go out of your way to increase the required rank. I already add Main Engineering and Aux bridges to large salvagers. They do nothing for the ship, but thematically is adds flavor and it gives me a small fleet of officers 1 step beneath flag ranks to create a promotion path for the automated promotion system. In any campaign light on military ships, you will have to go out of your way to manually promote, or create designs that artificially add rank in ways that have no effect on gameplay outside of flavor text. I put Primary Flight on superfreighters because it makes sense to me that anything with 10+ shuttle bays would have a dedicated traffic control staff. It has no effect on gameplay, but it does mean my million ton freighters are commanded by seasoned flag officers, not fresh academy graduates. And it means automated promotions happen immediately when positions are created, even all the way up to the top flag ranks.
Also, adding mass and resource cost is the balance factor to many other modules as the trade-off, so I’m not sure why that would be a “silly” idea for these.
Terraforming was the first example that came to my mind, but the same is true for orbital mining and fuel harvesting ships/stations.
I do see the logic in such a module for logistics ships that load/unload or similar tasks, though I do wonder if the gameplay impact might be too small to bother for non-roleplay reasons. In principle it could work, though I’m not sure if there’s a reasonable cost balance that works for a wide range of tech levels and the size of commercial ships is rarely an issue.
Also, adding mass and resource cost is the balance factor to many other modules as the trade-off, so I’m not sure why that would be a “silly” idea for these.
To clarify, my point wasn’t that these are silly as abstract balance factors but rather the magnitudes involved. No one will convince me that a “Terraforming Officer’s Station” (or Mining/Harvesting/Stabilization Officer, etc.) would realistically be even 10% of the size and cost I described, especially compared to the existing officer modules, but that kind of scale is what it would take to make those kinds of modules a decision instead of an automatic click.
As an aside, you can bump up the required command level of a commercial ship by +1 if you give it a jump drive, which combined with the Senior Officer checkbox can give you three ranks to play with. I find that more than sufficient for most non-military ships, your mileage may vary.
A quick reminder that for mechanics suggestions to be accepted, they should add interesting player decisions, that have a meaningful impact, without there being a ‘correct’ decision. Any added work on the part of the player to manage the extra mechanics should be outweighed by a positive gameplay impact in terms of those meaningful decisions.
In this case, creating a component that everyone would add to every ship of that type isn’t adding a decision - its adding a little more micromanagement and increasing the overall rate of terraforming , salvaging, mining, etc.
With regard to the officer helping to hit ground targets, the tactical officer already performs that role, so that would effectively split an existing role/module into two separate roles/modules. I guess it could add some flavour if you were designing ships that were intended for a pure ground support role, but that is a niche application. In any event, it would be considerably easier (with no mechanics difference) to split the Tactical bonus and use a new naval commander bonus, than add a ground commander.
We already have 2, it is what FFD units do. And if one thinks about it, there is very little one could add to a ship to help it “improve aim” on relatively stationary targets which it would not be using against relativistic targets.
As far as 1. Why? Non-Miltary ships, Fighters, and “Dummy Admin Nodes” are already the billets to try using up the lowest command rank staff-pool and still end up with retirements from there. Putting more pressure on the higher ranks does nothing to solve that problem.
The captain of the ship is that expert, that’s how it works in fishing fleets, offshore oil production, dredging operations, tug/pilot boat operations. Many of those have “navigators/helmsmen” who do all the “boat driving”, but aren’t making the decisions which are determining the actual job of the vessel.
1.Construction module for ships orbital BP
2.Sci fi loves hollowed out asteroids for ships and secret bases, perhaps some kind of a “planetoid designer” limited in size by tech. When work is done(by some kind of ship type?) the asteroid is removed from game and the ship is spawned.
They would have to be very small asteroids. Even a 1 km spherical asteroid is about 524m cubic metres, or 38m tons in Aurora volume terms if hollowed out. That would be a huge project.
What might be possible is finding something like that (like an ancient ship). In effect a huge, very slow ship with ‘asteroid armour’, with a special rule that ‘asteroid armour’ can’t be repaired.
A 250m asteroid is about 600,000 Aurora tons, so that is more do-able, but nothing like that exists in the game. There would have to be special ‘tiny’ asteroids and even then you would need some reason to build on vs a ship.
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After spending a bit of both Aurora time with not-forgetting to transmit some Fleets onto another Naval Command after moving them into it’s operational zone, and real world time with moving squads between different unit’s, I’d suggest two additons:
- Mark orange in the list the Fleets that are out of their parent Naval Command operational range.
- Add either a button or a tab named smth like “Commands”, suitable to tranfer “orange” Fleets to any other Naval Command, with Commands list showing whether this Fleet (or, optionally, it’s destination point) is inside this Command’s control radius.
P.S. I miss the old “Task Force” term. Fleets are the largest naval formations, Task Forces can be different in their size.
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I’m sure it’s been requested here before but some way to upgrade existing ground units to use the latest tech would be really awesome.
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Adding some more conditions for medals. For instance: 50 years of service
Could we get a conditional order that triggers at over 90% fuel? That would allow triggering a transfer fuel and return without getting repeated harvester capacity messages.
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In the Naval Organization window, would it be possible to have a colour of the contacts different from the one of our ships?
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Hello everyone. Steve, can you please add “maintance storage minimal” like “fuel storage minimal”, 0.01 HS. This will help me balance my different type of fighters by it. Or make more granular miscellaneous modules. Thanks for great game!
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Im pretty sure someone suggested it but automatic versions of other production buildings could be cool - Ordnance, Fuel, Supplies etc.