Post by Crazy Tom on Sept 2, 2016 17:35:44 GMT
So I've been playing CoaDE quite a bit, and instead of making the dev go through my play-through thread, I've decided to aggregate all my suggestions in one place.
These wishes are grouped into three categories based on how much effort I think they will take to implement.
Wishes will be moved around between these categories if the dev says they belong in another.
Wishes that have come true will be struck through and moved to the bottom of the list.
Within each category, wishes are presented in the order of most to least important.
I have included the suggestions of other players, but this is not a complete list.
The order of wishes is subject to change.
These wishes are grouped into three categories based on how much effort I think they will take to implement.
Wishes will be moved around between these categories if the dev says they belong in another.
Wishes that have come true will be struck through and moved to the bottom of the list.
Within each category, wishes are presented in the order of most to least important.
I have included the suggestions of other players, but this is not a complete list.
The order of wishes is subject to change.
MAJOR WISHES
MIDDLING WISHES
LITTLE WISHES
- Wargames: A sandbox like multiplayer mode where we can face off against other human players. To really see emergent space combat tactics and strategy, this is absolutely necessary.
- More Turrets: Conventional turret designs and alternatives to reaction wheels for turret and gimbal actuation (reaction wheels can rapidly outstrip other power and mass requirements by a LOT when simple motorized or hydraulic actuators would work).
- Automatic Ship Behaviors - I would like to be able to set up certain behaviors for my ships before a combat encounter. I'd like the ship to retract its radiators before missiles reach detonation range for starters - basically, it takes a few seconds for the radiators to retract, so the ship should automatically retract them a few seconds before it expects the enemy to get into range. Automatic decoy launching could also be good against missiles.
- Heat Sinks: Water is a great heat sink for example and I would like to be able to chill my propellant ahead of time and use them as a heat sink during combat so that I can retract my radiators.
- Formations: I'd like to be able to create custom formation for my ships to maintain. Essentially I'd like to specify certain points in 3D space and have my ships take up those points - say I wanted to put my Laser Frigate directly in front of my Escort Carrier to shelter it and have the two Orbital Defense Craft take up position ahead and to the sides.
- Spinal Weapons Module Encirclement: Right now the only option to mount a spinal weapons is to plonk it on the nose of your ship. This leaves it exposed and makes the ship slower to turn. Can spinal wepons be tweaked so that hey act like a ammo/crew/fuel/etc module? That is, so that we can place other modules around them?
- Docking/Staging: I'd like to build something with a high-efficiency/low-thrust booster, a a low-efficiency/high-thrust terminal stage without the extra mass and hassle of a launcher.
- Asymmetrical Truss and Armor - Right now if I stick lone missile launcher on the side of a crew module, the ship designer will automatically wrap it in a truss that is perfectly symmetrical about the center line, leading to lots of empty space in that area. Can the truss be convinced to 'saran wrap' around this sort of lone module? I find that it adds a lot of armor and increases the cross section as it is. Of course, asymmetry is mad for mass distribution and can lead to flatspins, but managing that could be another part of ship deign.
- Targeting Ques: Right now we have priority status and subsystem targeting. I was wondering if we could set up a ques where we can say things like: first target this subsystem on this ship, then this subsystem on this ship, all the way down the list before going to general fire. Baring that, a pause button in tactical combat to simulate the same effect without needing as much programming.
- Shooting Range: A specialized version of the Sandbox, where you can lay out a weapon and a slab of armor and shoot it to see what happens. Would allow for faster iterative design without requiring more work in explaining to the player how armor thickness, spacing, and composition affect each other. Right now armor design is very confusing, for me at lest, too many options and not enough idea of what they all mean.
- Gas Driven Auto-cannons - Right now the game requires an electrically driven loader for chemical guns. Would it be possible to switch that out for a more conventional system that uses part of the gases generated by the gun, like modern machine gun does? I ask because if we could eliminate the RTG and its attendant radiators from a drone, it would decrease it's thermal signature, cost, and mass. Or even including some sort of battery instead of an RTG to supply the energy for the current electric loader - the gun only needs to operate for a short while after all.
- Assemblies: The step between module and spaceship, an assembly would be a set of modules that you can plot down into the assembler together. 45 crew modules for example are best cooled by a 6x4 Aluminum radiator, so I'd like to be able to select that crew module assembly with the radiator already included. It would also let me develop vernier assemblies that I can just select ad plot down wherever instead of adding the thrusters and propellant individually, and making room somewhere on the fuselage.
- Limited Traverse Engines: The greater the gimbal angle for an engine, the more space needs to be between engines. I would like to place more engines closer together, and one way to do that is to limit their traverse to one place so they can be stacked side by side.
- Rotating Engine Mounts: I have found that Tumbler deigns can take on much larger and better armed ships because they can dodge much better as they close, but if they need to roll they tend to lose a lot of effectiveness. I would like to be able to put the engines on a large bearing so they can rotate around the ship. Rotating two engines is a lot faster than rotating the whole ship, and it doesn't tie up thrust that could otherwise be used to dodge.
- Different Missile Launch Systems - Right now all loaders and launchers in game are electromagnetic. I would like to see more options such as: Mechanical spring launched missiles, cold gas launched missiles that use compressed gas, and hot launched missiles that fire up their main engines or use pancake boosters. All of these consume no power, and might be lighter to boot.
- In Mission Saves: Would help tremendously with iterative design and save a lot of hassle in terms of setting up the same maneuvers again and again.
- Crew Effects: Losing all crew when a module is hit seems a bit weird considering all the ways this could be avoided: partial pressure suits for the crew in case of spontaneous decompression, airtight bulkheads, self sealing hull materials, and combinations thereof. Maybe make crew survival a part of the high score formulation? Or heave a system here some of the crew die immediately, then you have to decide which systems to keep fully functional because you don't have enough crew. After battle, the crew can do damage control and seal the breaches. Huh, there's another idea: hibernaculums. Special modules that allows a ship to rotate a portion of its crew through cold sleep (where they consume less life support). That way they have a bit more than they need, and can replace losses in combat without the full environmental load of having always awake extras.
- Stock Ship Descriptions - Some words of wisdom about what different stock ships are meant to do would be good to help players get started.
- Spacecraft Construction Tutorial - Pick some sort of basic ship and walk the player through its construction, it would help tremendously.
- Different Types of Homing for Missiles: Laser and radar guidance would be great. Right now they're very much brute force weapons.
- ECM and ECCM: For the missiles.
- Sensors: Because burning out all of the target's sensors with nukes and lasers from long range should be a viable way to soften them up. Have it so there's tons of sensors on the hull, but only a few of them are open at time, so when they get destroyed others can take over. Possibility of disposable sensor drones.
Roll Thrusters - We have verniers for pitch and yaw, but I haven't been able to set up roll verniers yet. These would be very important to 'barbeque roll' maneuvers.Ship thrusters can be gimballed up to 90 degrees as of 0.6.0More Aggressive AI: Vesta and Ceres are in my opinion examples of good enemy AI, it was aggressive enough to make me react to it. Most other missions, the AI is a limp noodle. Solar Ties is especially annoying in that the enemy launches one set of drones and then does nothing but split their fleet.Done for 0.6.0
MIDDLING WISHES
- Multiple Types of Orders - This ties in with what I wrote above. I think there should be three 'types' of orders, where one of each type is active at any one time. Translations Orders would cover things like close/maintain distance/increase distance between you and the enemy. Orient Orders would cover things like present broadside/present glacis that govern how your ship is pointed with respect to the enemy. Finally Miscellaneous Orders would let you choose if the ship is doing a BBQ roll, ore retracting all radiators at once, etc. And each level is at a lower priority that the one below, so if you have a traditional style craft, and the orientation order conflicts with the translation order, the translation order takes priority.
- Main Engine/RCS Orientation - I would like an option to prevent main engines from participating in orientation changes under a certain limit. For example, if a tumbler ship's keel gun is one or two degrees off target, the main engines should not fire to re-orient it, but should leave it up to the smaller thrusters. The quick and easy way to implement this is to have an 'RCS' button that can be checked when designing engines that will tell the computer.
- DeltaV Estimates for Enemy: It would be helpfully to know how much an enemy has left in terms of dV. IIRC,based on the heat of the engine(which is an indicator of exhaust velocity), its emission spectrum (indicating the type, and thus mass of hte propellant), and the acceleration of the craft, it should be possible to calculate how much dV an enemy craft has left in its tanks. That's the rationale at least, we can simply have the enemy tell us how much it has in the tank to reduce the difficulty of coding the feature.
- Salvo Fire: Building on the above point, could missiles be programmed with the option to only light their main drives once a full disk of missiles has launched?
- Drag Maneuver Node: Being able to drag a burn along a trajectory would also be nice, like how you can drag maneuver nodes in KSP, it would make Hoffman Transfers a lot easier.
- Thrust Handle Orientation - Right now the thrust handles stay in one orientation no matter what your course looks like. I was wondering if it would be possible to have it so they turn with the ship's trajectory? ie: "pro-grade" always points along the ship's trajectory, normal always points normal to the current orbit, etc?
- Standard View Buttons: Also recommend a series of 'view' buttons, say top/bottom and side according to the plane of the ecliptic of the body you've selected as the frame of reference. It's a small thing that would make setting up trajectories less of a chore.
- Custom Default Orders for Missiles: Right now missiles come out of the launcher with the 'Controlled Homing' order. If you happen to be in the tactical view, this will mean that they will immediately streak off towards the enemy. I would like to be able to tell them to not do anything for default, so I can switch them to homing once a full disk has been built up, otherwise the enemy just shoots them down one at a time.
- Hill Sphere Visibility Toggle: An option to make the Hill Sphere of a body visible would also be useful.
Apoapsis and Periapsis - A minor thing, but some missions would benefit from apoapsis and periapsis markers being added to the trajectory.Done as of 0.6.0Armor for all Direct Fire Weapons: As of 0.5.0 coil-guns can be armored so a spinal mount doesn't get picked off too easily, can we extend this to railguns and cannons as well in case I want to make one a spinal weapon?Done as of 0.5.1Manual Time Steps: I would love to be able to set a specific time step for the 10min/1hr/6hr/etc.' buttons. For example, I would like to launch nuclear gyrojets at the last second, because they don't have much dV and I need to burn all the way in to set up a fly-by.One minute button exists as of 0.6.0- Manual Disk Size and Separation: In the launcher module design screen, could there be a manual input where we can specify how many missile launched from that launcher will group in one disk, and what the separation between disks should be? I ask because disks of nuclear missiles need much larger separation than flak missiles so that the leading disk doesn't disable the warheads of the trailing disks when it detonates.(As of 0.6.0 missiles disks separate out according to warhead effects)
LITTLE WISHES
- Defensive Victory Conditions - Right now, the victory conditions for defense missions require you to destroy all enemy craft. This is especially weird on Vesta: After harassing the enemy fleet with missiles, it breaks up into individual units on courses that take them out into the solar system. The enemy ships have not been disabled, and they still have some dV, but they either chose not to return, or they did not have enough dV left to enter Vesta orbit again. So despite the enemy all flying off into deep space, the computer still tells me I lost. I think in a case like this, it's the enemy forces that should be under some sort of time limit. Or perhaps a further victory condition that if the enemy is on a hyperbolic orbit with insufficient dV to close their orbit, it counts as a mission kill.
- Interplanetary Mission Start: Could there be an option to have a level begin not when the enemy has inserted into your defensive area, but when they're just leaving theirs? I want to see if I can cause them to expend too much deltaV dodging remote controlled missiles.
- ORDER: Maintain Closing Velocity - After a lot of trial and error with missiles, I have come to the conclusion that missiles are not necessarily the best fly-by weapons, and that they in fact have an optimum closing velocity. I have found that when I do a retrograde fly-by, missiles tend to miss because the enemy dodges and they don't have enough time to enact a course correction. To that end I would like an order that allows me tell a missile to not go beyond it's current closing velocity - even to apply retro thrust to slow down if necessary.
ORDER: Maintain Orientation - A big issue for spinal guns and ships with directional armor is that they can turn and expose their vulnerable areas or slew the gun off target to maneuver. It's most noticeable in Tumbler designs. I would like an order that will keep the ship pointing towards a selected enemy no matter what. I would like to be able to order a ship to close/maintains separation/retreat from an enemy while maintaining this orientation. - - Fleet UI Additions: Tell us what enemy fleet evaded which of our fleet, add option to attempt to auto-correct. Have a list of intercepts and time until (top right?), optionally a list of broken intercepts since the last turn was run. List of fleets so we don't have to hunt through a stack of them (bottom left?)
- Perpendicular Homing Order: My missiles tend to expend quite a lot of dV thrusting towards the enemy as they maneuver. Often times they have more than enough closing velocity, and I want them to conserve their propellant to simply make sure they hit instead of adding any more closing velocity. Could we have an order that's a combination of present 'broadside' and 'full homing' that turns a missile perpendicular to its trajectory and has it thrust only to place itself on a collision course?
- Laser Turret-Generator Separation: I would like to be able to have several laser turrets per laser generator in case one gets shot off. Essentially turn the laser generator into an 'ammo module' that I can cluster mirror turrets around.
- Maintain Separation Order: Now and again I have a weapon that vastly out-ranges the enemy and I would like my ships to maintain a certain separation so that I can keep pummeling them from a distance without worrying about being hit in turn.
- Weapons not firing in full homing? I have a set of stinger drones equipped with turreted 33mm cannons an they don't seem to fire when under homing orders - does the AI think of them as missiles?
BBQ Roll Order: An order that tells the ship to rotate to make it harder to damage with lasers. Done as of 0.6.0Mobility and Mission Kills: My biggest issue so far is the fact that the game considers an enemy ship a threat despite the fact that it's not no mobility (engine or reaction mass knocked out), and/or no weapons working. I think the game should have a 'mission kill' category for ships like that.Done as of 0.6.0
