Aurora is a strategic sim rather than just tactical, logistics are by far the most important aspect of warfare.
Modern aircraft need vastly more hours of maintenance than hours spent in the air, WWII tanks were similar. And I imagine soldiers and crew have some not insignificant maintenance requirements :p.
See, I get that. I love how thorough Steve has been with all the backend stuff.
The problem is that as they currently stand the maintenance and morale systems
force you to treat everything as if it was a WWII-era submarine that's incapable of spending meaningful amounts of time on its own without the crew rebelling or everything important breaking.
It's the 24th gorram century, why can't we build ships that don't fall apart if they're out of port for three months? Why can I make a ship that's 15% engineering spaces and spare parts storage and it's still barely able to repair its active sensor once or operate independently for two years before running out of spares? Likewise, why can't we pimp the shit out of our ships so that they're
better than planetside living and the crews don't really
want to leave except for the occasional breath of fresh air or bite of totally organically grown food--needs which can be met by stopping off on a 2.0 or less cost world, perhaps?
That's what's wrong with the maintenance and morale systems. They impose extraordinary limitations on what the player is allowed to do, forcing them into a single playstyle and fluff flavor for their civilization, when by all rights they shouldn't. Remember,
even in Starfire it was apparently simple to build deep-space fortresses which operated indefinitely on their own, and fleets spent months or years on deployment with
no major mechanical failures.
Why aren't there lines of research that improve the quality of crew quarters, decrease the IFR, or reduce how many supplies are needed to repair things? Why are logistical problems still sitting in the 20th century when our fleets are zipping about at appreciable percentages of
c, when they're lobbing thousands of antimatter warheads, when we can turn Venus into a paradise in a matter of months?
--
Don't confuse my dislike of the
system with dislike of the content. I fucking love all of the little detail-work that goes into setting up functioning supply chains, building and expanding forward fleet bases, managing and protecting mining operations, &c.
That's a tremendous amount of fun.