Continuing the discussion from Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: As a new player I watch a lot of Defran and Count Cristo. I have noticed that on their survey ships they don’t include a science department. Why are they leaving this out? I think there are obvious reasons to include it, so why would they be overlooking that?
Science Department is 100 ton, 10 crew.
Geological or Gravitational Survey Sensors are 250 ton, 10 crew.
Most players run with default settings, which means not much sense in stacking more then 1 or 2 Survey Sensors per ship (surveying small bodies and survey points of small systems is too quick, you lose much more in moving the additional modules then you save by surveying faster). Most players also use cheap dispensable surveyours just to keep them at semi-automated mode, so they need an absolute minimal set of components. With so few sensor modules Science Department doesn’t pay for itself.
But what does it do?
It seems to be a way to add some more bonus? If I understand the wording correctly: Science Department
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Here is the rules post for the Science Department.
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Thanks Steve - presumably when auto selecting the officer it picks the guy with the highest survey score and works its way down
Yes, that’s correct.
One oddity about this:
When a survey ship has a commander vacancy, autopromotion will promote and assign the eligible officer with the highest survey bonus.
If your survey ships use science modules, then usually that officer was assigned as a science officer prior to this promotion.
Which means that now, as ship commander, that officer is applying half their survey bonus to their ship, instead of all of it.
I don’t know if it’s worth fixing. It just feels awkward to have your best survey officers yanked up a rank to be put in a position they are doing less good for you.
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So like real life then
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The problem here is that too few of the Commander Bonuses are relevant, especially for the one-function ships like surveyours, so instead of being a Jack-of-all-Trades commanding a ship in it entirety, surveyour CO is always just a half-time surveyour, because all other skills are just nearly irrelevant.
Fixing this needs several adjustments:
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making all the primary operations (not only targetting, ideally not only military ones) boosted by the crew training level, to make the primary commander skill actually relevant for all;
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making crew training level degrading with time (before Crew Training procedure in the sequence, yet not instatly to the base level, like it’s implemented currently for GF) to let this skill remain relevant during all the ship’s life cycle without driving the player into quite weird micromanagement and even more weird division of Navy commanders into training ones and post-training ones;
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making at least one another skill relevant for military COs - the most natural candidate is Engineering, which can be made more important by either implementing additional mechanics with checks against both Crew Training and Engineering (like, for exapmle, time-and-efforts-consuming procedure of changing status from mainteinance operations to readiness) or just generally increasing either failure probabilities or effectiveness of Engineering bonus in lowering failure rates.
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I tend to play my games with reduced survey speed to 10/25% so something like a science department does make sense for my ships mechanics wise. That being said, there are alot of things I do in A4X that are suboptimal but satisfy my head canon for whatever setting I am playing. I don’t disagree with anyone here about relooking some of the officer/crew mechanics for some of the reasons listed above, but otherwise, I tend to use the department components generously on my ships.
I’m playing at 1% survey speed and didn’t lower it further just because I’m not sure if fractional values are safe there, and with 1% value Science Department is entirely well: I do build my primary survey ships with it, while leaving barebone cutters for surveying asteroids and comets.
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So in Game settings you’re lowering survey speed to 1% and you find that justifies incorporating a Science Department/officer? I’ll try that. I would be eager to include main engineering and Auxiliary Control. I Am assuming from these comments that the only thing these really add are RP immersiveness, which is what this game is all about and maybe why the tutorial videos don’t include them. The only vessels I would exclude them from are things like freighters that don’t need maintenance and engineering modules. I’m only weeks into this fantastic game, so excuse my basic beginner questions.
Yeah, with lowered Survey Speed parameter Science Department is worth installing at Survey Ships, even reatively small ones with 2 or 3 Survey Sensor modules. Actually, it’s possible to make it worthy even at default parameters, yet it needs more micromanagement - you need to target large surveyour ships at large bodies only, which is possible only manually currently.
Main Engineering is currently worth installing on large long-enduranvce ships only, the limit of usefullness is somewhere between 2 and 4Kt depending on the tech level and doctrine. Some players like to build large armed surveyours, where it is definitely worth installing.
Auxiliary Control is worth installing at even smaller ships to let you train the crew faster and so reduce failure rates, yet with the automated Commander Assignment and lazy survey doctrine the usefullness is weak and unstable. Usually I use Auxiliary Control as a temporary design feature for light ships (e.g. less then 10Kt) - I do build then with it, assign drill officers (those with max Crew Training skills), place the ship into Training Command (under the most powerful drill flag officer available) until her Crew Training Grade nearly reaches it’s max level, then return the ship to the Acceptance command and place it on Shipyard refit into a mod 1 with deinstalled Auxiliary Control, and only then owerhaul it before sending into it’s 1st non-training mission. It’s ok from RP perspective, as for me, because temporary additional auxiliary posts for maiden voyages are actually a real thing.
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We have Standing Orders “SV: Planet”, “SV: Planet or Moon” and “SV: Asteroid”. Planets are usually quite large.
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“SV:Planet” works good for large surveyours in terms of nearly-never wasting much time, yet it has a hiden flaw: most large planets have moons, and the moons are diverse, you cannot sort them out with Standing Orders. And both “SV: Moon” and “SV: Planet or Moon” are one-at-a-time targetters, which means a large surveyour will stand idle periods on a heap of small moons at long increments. You can just skip the moons, yet it’s a pure waste - you got a ship there already, so why to skip?
Also, “SV:Planet” is often targetting on small distant dwarf planets before descending to the inner system, while the most important targets are nearly always near the star.
So, either significantly ineffective or manually targetted and a bit tedious.
All of these inefficiencies are actually not that significant for the lazy doctrine with slow, cheap, expendable surveyours - they are wasting much more time just mid-journey. Mine are fast and expensive as I hate sending crews to death, so in my case the waste in targetting spoils me a sense of history.
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