Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[iceball3]

So I'm a little confused about civilian/construction/industrial buildings. Is more always better? Just a continual expansion of everything on the list?

It's worth noting that not all buildings scale in utility as well as just building more and more. For example fighter factories, fuel processing (it can outstrip your sorium production), and so forth. Worth noting that buildings also tie up civilianworkforces too, which is limited somewhat by your pop size. Construction factories are however one of the more important buildings though, for somewhat obvious reasons.

[Lord Shonus]

I got the initial release version, so maybe its different now or I missed it. But I didn't see the typical options one could do in the classic Aurora. There was no non-Sol start or any of the "cheat" things, I think space-master is what it was called. But like I said, maybe I'm blind and missed it. All the menus are quite different. Been waiting for the updates to stabilize

Spacemaster is still a thing, you press the lightbulb-y thing 2nd from the right (and it lights up). I don't know how you actually do a lot of stuff with it, but if you light it up you can definitely do some of the cheaty stuff like instant researching / instant-adding shipyards, editing the pop-size etc. I don't know what it has vs the old version though, as i didn't use it much in the old version.

Note that a lot of the stuff that used to require Spacemaster, like spending your initial research and build points, no longer does.

[Rince Wind]

Weird, in this thread I always jump to the last post, not to the newest unread one. Mobile and desktop are the same, other threads work fine.
Anyone know how I can reverse this?

[EuchreJack]

I got the initial release version, so maybe its different now or I missed it. But I didn't see the typical options one could do in the classic Aurora. There was no non-Sol start or any of the "cheat" things, I think space-master is what it was called. But like I said, maybe I'm blind and missed it. All the menus are quite different. Been waiting for the updates to stabilize

As others have mentioned, Spacemaster is still there as the lightbulb thing that lights up when Spacemaster is engaged.

As for non-Sol starts, a few tips:
1) You HAVE to start off with a normal Sol start, the game crashes if you don't.
2) But once you have your normal Sol start, you can use System View in Spacemaster mode to create a new system.  Once you have your system where you want with the other options (read the documentation under C# mechanics in the Aurora 4x forums) with a planet that will support life, there is a button in System View "Create Race".  This puts you in the initial race creation dialog, only it does not default to human.  You can change the species back to human if you wish.
3) Now that you have a working system and race, you can delete the normal Sol start

*DON'T hit the create swarm button.  It causes things to slow down.  I'm not absolutely sure why, but that button probably infests the system with a NPR.  I had pressed it with a conventional start and saw massive slowdown, most likely because they were there but my empire was too primitive to see them.  Kinda scary when I think about it...

EDIT: Possibly unrelated, metals seems to be broken.  Hopefully they'll get fixed with the next patch.  Maybe its just my game.

[Ametsala]

1.60 is here.

[EuchreJack]

1.6.2 now, bugfix

[Lord Shonus]

There's a critical bug that prevents creating shield generators. Might want to hold off until the next patch.

[Ametsala]

1.6.3 is out. Should have the shield generator bug fixed.

[EuchreJack]

So I was thinking about ship classifications, comparing them to the ones in Rule the Waves 2, another game about designing ships.
In Rule the Waves 2, the player designs ships between 1900 and around 1960.  A battleship, regardless of when built, will always be a battleship because the game defines ships by guns and armor.  Battleships have large guns and thick armor.  Larger ships with larger guns and thicker armor will be built, but that battleship will never downgrade to a cruiser (well, not unless it was a marginal battleship to begin with, then it might fall down to a heavy cruiser, although it would probably be too slow).

Classifying ships by gun caliber doesn't work in Aurora because the player only starts with the smallest of gun calibers, and researches bigger ones as the game progresses.  The difference between say a 2" gun and a 12" gun, both commonly available in early 1990s, are reflected in Aurora as the very beginning and very end of the research tree.

However, armor is an effective and lasting way to classify ships, because the armor in Aurora is reflected in mostly the same way as Rule the Waves 2 and historically.  Each level of armor is an improvement because it is less "bulky".  Armor 1 is still armor 1, and Armor 12 is still armor 12, its just how much of the ship is taken up by the armor.  So, for example the terms Destroyer (ship without/minimal armor), Cruiser (average armor), and Battleship (thick armor) are still applicable, and the Aurora versions could have a lot in common with their historical counterparts.  A destroyer might very well be a smaller ship that maximizes its offensive potential by carrying minimal armor, and trade high speed for low range/reliability.  A cruiser would probably be the most balanced craft.  A battleship would be armor and guns.
...but if the ship classifications are based upon armor, battlecruisers become just as made up as they were historically.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

That's an interesting idea, is there a max armor amount in Aurora? Because there is a speed - maintenance/weight/firepower - armor triangle(s) going on.

[Lord Shonus]

RtW2 has a lot of "This is what we define these as retroactively" built into it. This is most obvious in the B class, predreadnought battleship, but is also present in the term "light cruiser", which didn't exist until defined in the great naval reduction treaties - prior to those, they were called "protected cruisers" or even just "cruisers". RtW2 also starts at a time when you're merely introducing new concepts on a very long line of development - your battleships are replacing ironclads which replaced ships of the line which replaced galleons which replaced... where Aurora has you building the very first space-navy ships.

It makes a lot of sense to simply designate the heaviest ship you can build as either a "battleship" or "heavy cruiser" (depending on how you view roles and concepts) with tonnage and power steadily escalating as tech improves.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Is there a practical tonnage or armor limit? Or could you theoretically scale it ad infinitum?

[Lord Shonus]

In VB, you had to get into some extremely high values for tonnage before it would throw errors. The practical limit was a lot lower because of resource consumption factors (you would hit a point where you simply couldn't make enough fuel to run the thing), but I don't know what that point was.

C# is probably going to be more flexible with this, because the necessary change would be relatively straightforward.

[Salmeuk]

So I was thinking about ship classifications, comparing them to the ones in Rule the Waves 2, another game about designing ships.
In Rule the Waves 2, the player designs ships between 1900 and around 1960.  A battleship, regardless of when built, will always be a battleship because the game defines ships by guns and armor.  Battleships have large guns and thick armor.  Larger ships with larger guns and thicker armor will be built, but that battleship will never downgrade to a cruiser (well, not unless it was a marginal battleship to begin with, then it might fall down to a heavy cruiser, although it would probably be too slow).

Classifying ships by gun caliber doesn't work in Aurora because the player only starts with the smallest of gun calibers, and researches bigger ones as the game progresses.  The difference between say a 2" gun and a 12" gun, both commonly available in early 1990s, are reflected in Aurora as the very beginning and very end of the research tree.

However, armor is an effective and lasting way to classify ships, because the armor in Aurora is reflected in mostly the same way as Rule the Waves 2 and historically.  Each level of armor is an improvement because it is less "bulky".  Armor 1 is still armor 1, and Armor 12 is still armor 12, its just how much of the ship is taken up by the armor.  So, for example the terms Destroyer (ship without/minimal armor), Cruiser (average armor), and Battleship (thick armor) are still applicable, and the Aurora versions could have a lot in common with their historical counterparts.  A destroyer might very well be a smaller ship that maximizes its offensive potential by carrying minimal armor, and trade high speed for low range/reliability.  A cruiser would probably be the most balanced craft.  A battleship would be armor and guns.
...but if the ship classifications are based upon armor, battlecruisers become just as made up as they were historically.

I guess I don't see the point of locking ship classification to the design in a game as free-form as aurora. This is sci-fi, even though it seems like a majority of players live in a 'space navy' headspace, that would be extremely heavy-handed approach to signifying design capability. Perhaps as an option during race creation?

Considering you can just title the ships however you feel like, most players who subscribe to the 19th century naval warfare but in space trope could just draft a specification document and assign appropriate designations to their ships.

[coleslaw35]

Welp, fuck. Looks like I'm moving up to the latest version after all. Now everytime I launch my v1.3 campaign i get some errors and none of my ships or jump points appear. This happens every time I try to load my game. Ah well. I needed an excuse to update anyways.