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[martinuzz]

In the taskbar search field next to the windows button, type INTL.CPL.
Click it. This will open regional settings. Click 'additional settings'
Congrats! You have found the obscurely hidden settings screen where you can change your decimal symbol, and your digit grouping symbol.

It appears to have indeed been what caused my issue and has fixed it.

EDIT: in unrelated news, don't forget to click the 'save settings button' when changing settings. I was wondering why my civilians were still building ships after I had turned off the civilian shipping lines active option. Turns out I didn't save it.
Ah well, It's just a few dozen extra civvies, I'll live.

[Rince Wind]

I usually cull the older civilian ships once in a while. Going through them and if they are empty they get deleted.
I hate it when I realize that I don't have enough workers left in the Sol system because the civvies brought them all to that newly terraformed planet without much meaningful infrastructure.

[martinuzz]

Heh, I guess I am going to have to see if Spacemaster gives me the option to add a new jump point in a system. I just finished exploring two systems, and it's a dead end. Sol has 1 jump point to Proxima Centauri, that has one jump point to 80 Orionis, and that's it. No further jump points.

[Mathel]

Thanks, martinuzz.

[da_nang]

Big update. Version 2.2 (now 2.3.1) brings among others a massive revamp of missiles and point defense.

Links (archived to get around HSTS block)
2.3.1 Patch
2.2 Changes

[Vivalas]

Once again stuck in update hell as steve immediately creates a new version with cool features upon creating a new release.

Haven't tries it yet but overall I think the missile changes are great. Makes it less indecisive and "this battle is over before it begins" by buffing point defense considerably and also skewing it somewhat to where a few missiles will get in now and then, but not an entire volley.

Should make protecting ships like scouts more practical, among other things. Only concern is whether missiles were balanced in turn since they were already a huge logistics burden on your economy and if their power level is being "downgraded" a bit, things can get a bit sketchy.

[Rince Wind]

Haven't tried it either, but what I like is that bigger missiles are more viable now. You can pimp some big missiles and give them a decent chance to break through. AMMs might not be the most dangerous thing anymore.

Layered defenses are more important as well, if your enemy uses standoff missiles.

From what I've read it will be quite some time before the next version, unless bugs are discovered in the current one.

[Great Order]

Are any weapons aside from missiles good? Last I'd checked this game's entire weapons meta basically boiled down to missiles, anti missile missiles, anti anti missile missile missiles, etc.

[Micro102]

I've always hesitated getting far enough into this game to have actual combat because as I design ships I start to realize that the max range is dictated by the firing system, who's range is very small compared to the weapons. So it feels like all weapons are going to be the same and all battles will be fought at that max distance (bar the really close range weapon who's name I forget.)

Could someone confirm or deny this?

[Rince Wind]

Well, weapons like lasers and railguns loose damage over range, so getting closer increases their damage potential. Also firecontrols are better the closer the enemy is. At max range you will mostly miss if the target moves at a decent speed. And while you don't need to worry about ammo you have a chance to misfire a weapon which then needs supplies to repair it. Long battles or ground support can see you running out if you didn't plan ahead. Max range slugfests tend to take a long time and cost you a lot in supplies. Of course, if you are technologically superior and can fire from about 75% range without getting shot in return it is almost always worth it.
Then the speed difference comes into play. In a beam engagement one side can control the range and try to go to the one that seems to give the best balance of hitting and getting hit. If the enemy uses gauss as an anti missile weapon you might want to get closer than if they are using 10cm railguns or lasers.


In the last version I basically ignored missiles as a weapon. Just some for special occasions like spoiler AMM bases where I used 2-stage missiles, with the final stage being multiple high speed size 1 missiles to overwhelm the defence or at least force them to use a lot of their ammo.

[da_nang]

The thing about missiles is they take up a lot of space. Sure, a 6-MSP missile is just 15 tons, but you'll need a few of them for a salvo (and quite a few—or larger—missiles to get through point defense), and they all add up as you add more volleys. The new system essentially nerfs the box launcher spam so now you'll need either larger or more expensive missiles, or have other weapons onboard as well.

I've only had one battle in the new version. A single raider, I think? An approximately 7-ton ship going about 5 km/s. Sensors indicated possible cloaking and thermal reduction. Not enough data to form an opinion on the new combat.

In any case, our home system got fucked by RNGesus. The mineral deposits are shit, with little to no corundium and mercassium, and Uranus is the only gas giant with sorium (thankfully 59 million tons at 0.7 accessibility). Europa is the only colonizable body with minerals on it, all others are relegated to wealth creation. I wasn't about to try and reach the 100+ bkm asteroids to check for any wunderdeposits, so we tried to colonize other systems.

Jump points one and two are frightfully in the inner system—one is basically on the orbit of Mars. Jump point three is on the orbit of Saturn. A bit too close for comfort.

The first system we reached, Khalkfontein, looked promising as it has amongst others a single low-cost body but it also has Precursors (I think).

The second system, Kalizwali, is empty. It has two branches. One is a series of empty systems that leads to Telantha, another promising system, but it's 8.5 bkm away and we've spotted raiders there. The other branch immediately leads to Mhaladan, which immediately branches to Dynghaz and empty Wancandhu.

Mhaladan (9.5 bkm away) has three colonizable planets, all of which have a colony cost greater than ten. Mhaladan I has one low gravity moon, and Mhaladan III is a Venusian hothouse and is the only body with any minerals, mostly Neutronium, but with geosurvey potential.

Dynghaz (15.4 bkm away) has three planets, all high cost, and many low gravity asteroids. Dynghaz I is Venusian, naturally. Dynghaz II is a sorium gas giant, with many moons, six of which have acceptable gravity. The 19th moon has over a million tons of 0.9-accessible corundium and has acceptable gravity, so that's nice, though there's some frozen methane that will need to be removed. Dynghaz III is an unsurveyed gas giant with many moons as well, three of which have acceptable gravity.

The third system, Rigel, has a single gas giant with some sorium, yay. Beyond it lies Andaloa and Lhadalan (and empty Zayanofar beyond that), both of which are claimed by the NPR.

It looks like early colonization of Mhaladan and Dynghaz is on the books, as is an early war with the Precursors in Khalkfontein.

In other news, I've finally re-researched the ground units. Gotta get those specializations in. The unit series system is still a mess. I don't know why Steve doesn't let us reorder the series. It's going to look chaotic if you don't plan ahead for all the unit series you will possibly have. May you be granted mercy if you have OCD.

I had a go at the new missile design. I actually have a 3.2-MSP AMM now, with four 0.6-strength warheads and retargeting capability. It should take out a 12-MSP missile and not have to worry too much about decoys. I have a 2-MSP 4-strength anti-fighter missile with terminal guidance; a 6-MSP 9-strength mainline ASM with ECCM, terminal guidance, and two decoys; and a 12-MSP 25-strength anti-capital ship missile with the same package as previous. The anti-fighter missiles, while standard, worked well against the lone raider.

I've also tried to design a cruiser, both regular and jump variants. The same problem persists: it's a 40-kton rust bucket that's breaking at the seams. I don't even think it's feature creep. The jump cruiser is so barebones it ought to be a light jump cruiser. It doesn't even have a medium range weapon like a laser. Even if I removed the shield, that's still only a thousand tons shaved. I could also maybe shave another thousand tons or so by not using box launchers for the ASMs at the cost of reduced salvo size. I can only conclude that cruisers in Aurora are just behemoths by nature, at least in the early game.

[Rince Wind]

40kt would be a very large ship for me.

Especially early on ships are better when they are specialized. If you want both beam weapons and missiles on a ship both will suffer. The classic cruiser that can basically operate alone is hard to pull of and you need a very large ship indeed.

[AlStar]

We met our first Raider ship the other day, and it nearly kicked humanity back into the stone age.

Humanity's combat-capable ships were limited to their exploration ships (which were out-of-system at the time) and a single, brand-new destroyer - 6,000 tons of ion-powered lasers - four 10cm mounts (firing every 5 seconds) and two 12cm mounts (firing every 10 seconds). When the Raider showed up on Terra's deep space network, the destroyer was dispatched to intercept.

By sheer coincidence, the destroyer was marginally faster than the raider - by about 200 km/s - allowing it to close to engagement range. What followed was a bloody point-blank knife fight, as our destroyer's weapons repeatedly punched through the raider's hull - to absolutely no effect. Our ship had three layers of armor protecting it, which were enough to soften the mass driver blows coming in, but all too soon they buckled, and - unlike the raider - when they did, internal systems started failing.

The destroyer exploded, and the raider, despite taking upwards of a dozen penetrating hits, had not been reduced in either speed or rate of fire. It proceeded to waltz over to Terra and blow-up hundreds of thousands of tons of commercial shipping.

When it started taking pot shots at my shipyards, I had enough, and ruled that the second destroyer that was under construction was put into emergency service (read: I SM'd in a ship). That destroyer was able to take out the raider in just a couple volleys, suffering only minor armor damage in the exchange.

Terra now has a full flight of fighters as well as STO units guarding it, so hopefully will not see a repeat performance.

As a final FU from the Raiders, their shenanigans in Sol caused the automatic refueling / resupplying conditionals for all my exploration ships to freak out, so until the danger level clears itself, I need to manually guide them back, while they spam me with "unable to find a route" messages every couple days.

[AlStar]

The latest bane to my empire is the new missile mechanics.

The Precursor force that guards a system I want fires 30 size 8 missiles at me every 5 minutes. These missiles fly at 30,000 km/s, and they've got some ungodly number of decoys.

I've been steadily improving my tech, but even my latest ships, which have a ~20% hit chance (much improved from gen 1's ~7%), with dozens of lasers firing, I'm averaging 6 missiles slamming into my ships per volley.

Currently, it appears that my strategy is to run them out of missiles by burning my armor, crew, officers, and ships. I would not recommend this strategy, generally speaking.

[EuchreJack]

That isn't anything new. And the strategy is sound. Remember, you are the low tech barbarians invading in this scenario. You gotta swarm all over them.