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[Greenbane]

Jesus M.Bison Christ, this is like some sort of mod for Microsoft excel except with an even worse, more complex and less intuitive set up.

No offense, but got anything productive to say?

[forsaken1111]

Well he's correct, it does have a feeling of playing 'spreadsheet games' but it has a real charm as well. That's probably the starfire roots, as I loved starfire.

God I'd enjoy a thematic warhammer 40k/battlefleet gothic mod of this game

[Greenbane]

Oh, something just crossed my mind. I know the Intelligence rating of the captain of a vessel which captures enemy crewmen from lifepods affects the success of the subsequent interrogations. However, would having an espionage team on said ship help things further? Or are Espionage and Intelligence stats completely different?

[forsaken1111]

I believe teams only have an effect while on a planet.

[piecewise]

Jesus M.Bison Christ, this is like some sort of mod for Microsoft excel except with an even worse, more complex and less intuitive set up.

No offense, but got anything productive to say?

That I would love to see this with something a little more graphical then dots? In comparison Dwarf fortress is HDD. I mean, here's my main gripe: Lack of feedback.

It's head crushing, small children frightening complexity is not something that bugs me, in fact that's it's strong point. What bugs me is that, well, it lacks any real feeling of accomplishment, at least for me. Let me explain with an example

In DF one of the things that keeps me going is watching my little fortress grow. Watching farm plots expand, rooms multiply and fortifications increase. There is a great feeling of feedback as all this happens, but it still lets you imagine what it would look like. The descriptive text also helps greatly.

In Aurora however you can't see anything but circles and text. There is no visualization, not even descriptive text, to let you know what's happening. All you get is numbers in a spread chart going up. With no feed back besides those numbers it basically falls on the player to imagine everything thats going on and that treads an unfortunate line. If I'm already basically imagining everything on my own then why don't I just sit back and imagine epic space battles without the inbuggerance of entering numbers in spread sheets?

It's like going to the movies and just being given a list of the props that the hypothetical movie used and being told to imagine what the movie is like.


But thats just my opinion, which is by no means fact. I'm not trying to detract from this at all, saying what I think.

[Journier]

That I would love to see this with something a little more graphical then dots?

Ive been saying the same thing about dwarf fortress for years.... except instead of colorful dots, and icons, DF has colorful.... ASCII

OH MY GOD. Let the light be upon you.

In DF one of the things that keeps me going is watching my little fortress grow. Watching farm plots expand, rooms multiply and fortifications increase. There is a great feeling of feedback as all this happens, but it still lets you imagine what it would look like. The descriptive text also helps greatly.

In Aurora one of the things that keeps me going is watching my little empire grow. Watching Mines expand, Population multiply, and Fleets increase.

There is a great feeling of feedback as all this happens but it still lets you imagine what it would look like.

Examples of this in Aurora....

My population expanding! My god we once only had 400 million on New Earth! Can you believe it?
And look at Mars! she is a burgeoning place of vacation.

Starting populations

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Current Population!

And they did this all on their own! I didnt have to carve out rooms, only Terraform new planets with likeable gravity.

It took 20+ years to get mars all set to be earth like.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Look at this burgeoning market of civilian activity. All Handled by them! I can choose not to carve out new "rooms" on planets that are already terraformed, or let the AI handle it for me (Carry Infrastructure with new population over to new planets automatically.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I better start digging deeper, Im outta resources nearly in my fortress's first few levels.... Oh I mean my first planets.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In Aurora however you can't see anything but circles and text.

In Stock DF however you cant see anything but Text

LOL this arguement is so sad, How can a DF player come in here and shit on Aurora about its graphics? Seriously?

Stock DF has nothing. has ASCII. At least in Aurora Stock you can get some form of Icons in a screen.

Would I rather have a Circle than ASCII? Not really but who cares, you are comparing circles to ASCII.... there's not much difference its all indecipherable to those that don't know.

This is why the developer refuses to come on this board , because the parts of the DF community like you. I already read this entire thread and there were plenty of people just like you making these same comments 100+ pages back.

Seriously, give the game a chance if your gonna describe DF to Aurora like that. Either you didnt give it a chance or you just came to troll, if its the first, give it another try.

[Micro102]

Journier, your the one who sounds like he is trolling.

I can see where he is coming from and he has only made 2 posts on this thread.

In dwarf fortress you can take joy in watching your single hammer dwarf take out 100 goblins and sending them and their body parts in all directions. In aurora you see your ship which is a dot on the screen make another dot on the screen disappear. Yeah you can look at your ship and it's status and then look up the other ship(s) status then read all the events and try to imaging a space battle in your head but that is a lot of work for such insignificant visual entertainment.

[Journier]

Journier, your the one who sounds like he is trolling.

I can see where he is coming from and he has only made 2 posts on this thread.

then read all the events and try to imagining a space battle in your head but that is a lot of work for such insignificant visual entertainment.

Dont you do that in DF as well? I mean really? when you see your hammer dwarf come all out and smash a goblin or elf and everything is broken or pierced and the goblin goes flying in a mass of gore.

Wait a second... You dont see your hammer dwarf do anything in DF, he warps from one position to the next on the map, gets near an enemy then the enemy takes some kind of damage (which you really dont know unless you read the events, just like in Aurora). So you may see some blood cover the local land but that's about it or he blows into multiple pieces.

In Aurora the same amount of information is available. Its quite the same.

When my missile hits an enemy ship it can show me (via text on screen) f3 system screen the same kind of information. If a ship had secondary explosions from something getting hit on the internals... I can see that without events window, I can deduce (sorta like blood) that I hit something and damaged it.

So the difference between DF and Aurora is the ship breaking into pieces and flying across the map in a red colored letter.

Your imagination can visualize this but not if the ship has text above it stating what kind of explosions occurred and if it has become wreckage. Wreckage would be the heap of gore in DF.

How I am a troll Micro is amazing thank you for that.

[Micro102]

DF has enough signals that your brain can do it automatically.

In aurora it is manually and you have to read a large amount of events before you can think it through smoothly. It's simply not on the same level as DF imaginative-wise

[Empty]

Here's some advice I always give my little sister.

If you don't like a game. Or the game is giving you a hard time and you get pissy from it. Then do not play it.

Play something which will give you fun instead.

[AussieGuy]

Guys don't flame each other. Who cares if one game is a little tiny better graphical wise. Its all about he gameplay!

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Just to note, Aurora and Dwarf Fortress are two very different types of similar games. They both represent you building an empire but in DF its on a more personal level and while yes the game is all in text you can get a lot more information out of that text then you can out of the galaxy map in Aurora, after all the biggest difference in the end between most roguelike games and Diablo is that Diablo has shiny graphics and is not turn based. Aurora is a 4x game where you in general have less data on the main screen then almost any other game type. Going from DF to Aurora is like going from Diablo to Angband display wise. If you want to make a story you have to go in the direction all of the Aurora story's I have read so far go, that is to tell it from a government's stand point and not a persons point of view like every DF story does. It is simply amazing how expressive those dwarfs can be.

[Greenbane]

Going from DF to Aurora is like going from Diablo to Angband display wise.

That's a wild exaggeration. There's really not that much of a graphical difference between Dwarf Fortress and Aurora. And both games' reliance on text instead of images to convey information is very similar.

Aurora may have you delve into a particular screen or two to provide detailed information about a specific contact or planet, but intuitively DF shows nothing either: you must go through a similar method to find out g represents a goblin and + a tile of smoothed floor. And even when you know what each symbol means, you still have to examine tiles the same way manually to get deeper, often crucial information.

[ThtblovesDF]

While the gameplay is fun (and I don't care about graphics), the forced interrupts make it unplayable on a longer or serious timescale. Until a way is found to just force time to pass at a decent rate (No, I don't want to play 3 days in 5 sec steps, thankyouverymuch), this will remain on the cool games with bad bugs list. Personal opinion.

[Greenbane]

While I have run into a bunch of such occasions, I haven't stumbled upon anything so severe as having to wade through 72 hours in 5-second steps. Very short combat skips are usually dealt with enabling auto-turns and hitting the 5-minute increment button. Things return to normal before long.

I did experience quite some time of 60-second skips, though, and that was immensely annoying. Definitely a bug, and eventually I had to use SM mode to teleport some warships into firing range so to eliminate the enemy contact which I had determined was the cause of the problem. I don't know if it was just that particular ship or its entire class (specimens of which I usually vaporize shortly after they jump in). The future will tell, but I've done my best to alert Steve of this glaring issue.

However, overall, forced interrupts haven't been a huge problem in the 45 years of my current game.