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Author Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games  (Read 2838083 times)

Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6570 on: September 01, 2011, 08:59:38 am »

i found the problem, i forgot to Change "maximum amount to load" from 0 *facepalm*

You shouldn't have to, 0 should mean no max.


-edit-
The game must have a max limit on officers thats shared between empires. I had TONS of officers all over the place and none were being removed from service, a big list of top grade officers every time I went to select someone. Then I met two NPRs. Now my officers are retired and relieved from service every couple years and I have to use SM mode just to promote the ones I do have high enough to take jobs because it's relieving them from duty before it promotes them high enough to actually be assignable to my ships. It let go so many of my ground forces guys I don't even have enough commanders to go around anymore.
« Last Edit: September 01, 2011, 09:49:59 am by Paul »
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ndkid

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6571 on: September 01, 2011, 03:11:36 pm »

i found the problem, i forgot to Change "maximum amount to load" from 0 *facepalm*

You shouldn't have to, 0 should mean no max.


-edit-
The game must have a max limit on officers thats shared between empires. I had TONS of officers all over the place and none were being removed from service, a big list of top grade officers every time I went to select someone. Then I met two NPRs. Now my officers are retired and relieved from service every couple years and I have to use SM mode just to promote the ones I do have high enough to take jobs because it's relieving them from duty before it promotes them high enough to actually be assignable to my ships. It let go so many of my ground forces guys I don't even have enough commanders to go around anymore.

I do not believe there's a shared max limit, and even if there is, knowing Steve, things would just break, rather than having commanders leave the game so gracefully.

Generally, officers will leave after about 6 years of sitting idle. Accidental deaths have a small percentage chance of happening to anyone. Retirement checks start around age 60, I think, but it might be earlier.

Officers get promoted to the next rank when there are more than three times as many officers at the current rank than there are at the next rank up... thus, a promotion at the top tends to ripple down over the next several increments.

One of the side effects of all that is that, if you don't allow your bottom-tier officers to command anything, you'll end up with far fewer officers available, because your bottom tier officers will leave in droves.

I handle this a couple of different ways. I rotate non-bottom-end officers through low-priority assignments, like planetary bases. I keep a lot of useless Diplomatic/Espionage/Xeno teams sitting on planets to keep those low-end officers assigned. This keeps my pool of available officers larger without too much fiddling. If you use Auroras auto-assign feature, that removes much of the micromanagement, though you'd probably want to go back after auto-assign and put key personnel back where you want them.
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Ehndras

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6572 on: September 01, 2011, 03:17:15 pm »

Aye, auto-assign is your best friend. Its easier and faster to assign everything and then go back and micro-manage, rather than do what I used to do. Spend an hour assigning every single officer only to have deaths and retirements screw it all up in the next year. >_<
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Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6573 on: September 01, 2011, 05:03:39 pm »

Maybe the retirement due to being unused thing was bugged or something, it first happened shortly after contacting the NPRs. The game froze for like 5 minutes and suddenly not only did a bunch of my officers retire at 60+ (like 100+ different ones, all at once) but almost every single unassigned officer (some of which had been unassigned for 15+ years with no complaint) suddenly resigned. Hundreds and hundreds all at once. My history was set to 300 lines and it didn't show half of what was happened that turn.

At the end of this I didn't even have enough officers to command everything. I auto assigned and nobody was left for like two thirds of my positions. I only had a grand total of 11 ground officers remaining, with probably 100 positions left empty.

My 300 skill teams completely fell apart. I had 10 60 skill survey guys doing geo surveys in 2 separate teams, 9 of them retired and the 10th retired like a year later. And all my good backup survey guys retired. I was left with a geology team of skill 15-20 people. My best geology team after all this was 90.

And now I'm slowwwly filling ranks back in, but the few people that were left are retiring every few months and it keeps killing off my unassigned people at an alarming rate if I don't go in and immediately assign them to something. I had a new guy show up and die 10 days later in an accident. I need to make a mandate that they stop wearing red shirts or something.
« Last Edit: September 01, 2011, 05:06:17 pm by Paul »
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Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6574 on: September 02, 2011, 12:18:41 pm »

Wow, I just started a new game and surveyed Sol. I just had it set to random JPs. I've never seen so many JPs so close to the center before. Theres one RIGHT by the sun (when I first discovered it I was thinking "JP discovered? Where?", it only shows up when zooming into the sun), three between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, two more between Jupiter and Saturn, and two more between Saturn and Uranus.

8 JPs all within the orbit of Uranus. Crazy. Usually I get like 3-5 JPs and one or two are always out past Neptune near Pluto.

Guess Sol gets to be a bit of an intergalactic hub in this game.
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Dutchling

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6575 on: September 02, 2011, 12:39:07 pm »

I decided to play this game again.
Theme: Teutonic Order with German names and TO titles (Hochmeister>Marschall>Landmeister>Komtur>Kavalier)*
I used latin names for ships though.

I was improving my Jump drive tech (read: spamming '30 days') so I can design one for my first grav ship when I saw that time wasn't increasing for some reason. Turns out that some NPR is using a lot of 25 seconds intervals so I guess he is shooting missiles at another NPR or at a precursor. 
I tried the auto turns for the first time and it seemed to work well until it started to continue when the game already advanced 1 hour (I chose an interval of 1 hour).
Does the feature not work? I assumed that when I click on '1 hour', the game will advance 1 hour and than stop.

*historical accuracy not guaranteed...
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Akigagak

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6576 on: September 02, 2011, 12:54:17 pm »

My current games Sol JPs are spread pretty thin. There's one in the Asteroid Belt (Dead with nothing in it), one a bit further out (Dead with some JPs in it), and one waaaaay over there, near the orbit of Pluto (Wrecks all over the place, including one of my ships that went "I wonder what awaits us in this syst-.)
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Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6577 on: September 02, 2011, 01:03:35 pm »

Heh, one of my JPs led to a quick death too. Not sure exactly how to handle it, the geo survey group I sent through (team of three 750 ton ships) were massacred in 10 seconds by 2 ships firing missiles point blank. I have a small fleet of military ships, but they're set up with AMMs for PD - which would be useless at point blank range. The ships might wipe my military fleet out before they even get operational again after the jump. If I could get them through at range I could probably handle them, but popping in right beside them is going to hurt. Maybe I'll design a heavy armor decoy ship with an active sensor and send a couple through 5 seconds ahead of the rest of the fleet, that way maybe they'll focus on shooting them and buy me the time for my other ships to get their weapons firing.
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Ehndras

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6578 on: September 02, 2011, 01:05:47 pm »

My Sol usually has exactly 4 JPs, last game had 6 and this is my first with only 2 JPs. They converge into each other at one point, but beside that connection, I've got 2 entire sectors.

Currently I'm planning on organizing my sectors into bundles, as I've started to find dead-ends and 2-JP systems. I found Precursors in 2 systems in the Western Sector, with ridiculous missile range and ECM/ECCMs, though I outmatch them in speed. Took me ages to reach just one ship, and I killed it fairly quickly with one ship firing size 6 anti-ship missiles, after I used up a few hundred anti-missiles and the enemy ship ran out of ammo. Glad I didn't run into the 15 ships that pulverized my geo survey ship into galactic dust...

The one looping JP really scares the shit out of me. I hate having backdoors into Sol, and this means I have to be doubly careful about invasions...

One odd thing is a number of wrecked ships on a far-off star system orbiting the star where I found the Precursors. I have a feeling there was an NPR there and they all fought... I'm curious to know if the NPR is still alive, or if there's nothing left but ruins. Could also be that, since I've got JGs on all JPs from startup, the Precursors had a skirmish with NPRs through a JP... Who knows.

So far, the Precursors seem to stick to their side of that system, as the JP leading to Sol is pretty far away. I've yet to find one spawned NPR... I'm getting bored of Precursors who vastly outrange and outgun me... Thankfully I can outrun them or I'd be screwed.
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Trorbes

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6579 on: September 02, 2011, 01:43:47 pm »

I decided to play this game again.
Theme: Teutonic Order with German names and TO titles (Hochmeister>Marschall>Landmeister>Komtur>Kavalier)*
I used latin names for ships though.

I was improving my Jump drive tech (read: spamming '30 days') so I can design one for my first grav ship when I saw that time wasn't increasing for some reason. Turns out that some NPR is using a lot of 25 seconds intervals so I guess he is shooting missiles at another NPR or at a precursor. 
I tried the auto turns for the first time and it seemed to work well until it started to continue when the game already advanced 1 hour (I chose an interval of 1 hour).
Does the feature not work? I assumed that when I click on '1 hour', the game will advance 1 hour and than stop.

*historical accuracy not guaranteed...

Autoturn just keeps going until you hit an interruption, it's useful if you've got nothing going on but don't want to keep hitting the turns button.  What you want is the minimum interval feature - that I have no idea how to work, but it will ignore events.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6580 on: September 02, 2011, 02:18:04 pm »

I decided to play this game again.
Theme: Teutonic Order with German names and TO titles (Hochmeister>Marschall>Landmeister>Komtur>Kavalier)*
I used latin names for ships though.

I was improving my Jump drive tech (read: spamming '30 days') so I can design one for my first grav ship when I saw that time wasn't increasing for some reason. Turns out that some NPR is using a lot of 25 seconds intervals so I guess he is shooting missiles at another NPR or at a precursor. 
I tried the auto turns for the first time and it seemed to work well until it started to continue when the game already advanced 1 hour (I chose an interval of 1 hour).
Does the feature not work? I assumed that when I click on '1 hour', the game will advance 1 hour and than stop.

*historical accuracy not guaranteed...

Autoturn just keeps going until you hit an interruption, it's useful if you've got nothing going on but don't want to keep hitting the turns button.  What you want is the minimum interval feature - that I have no idea how to work, but it will ignore events.

If I remember correctly, it dictates the maximum number of turns to be taken, so if you set it to 5 and click 1 Day, it will keep going until you get an interrupt or 5 days have passed, whichever comes first.
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Aurora on small monitors:
1. Game Parameters -> Reduced Height Windows.
2. Lock taskbar to the right side of your desktop.
3. Run Resize Enable

Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6581 on: September 02, 2011, 06:44:27 pm »

Okay, I honestly can't remember: Do you need to keep xeno teams on worlds with ruins after they've been completely mapped out to find technology, or do the engineers find that along with recovering installations?
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Aurora on small monitors:
1. Game Parameters -> Reduced Height Windows.
2. Lock taskbar to the right side of your desktop.
3. Run Resize Enable

Paul

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6582 on: September 02, 2011, 07:33:20 pm »

Okay, I honestly can't remember: Do you need to keep xeno teams on worlds with ruins after they've been completely mapped out to find technology, or do the engineers find that along with recovering installations?

The engineers find it. Assign commanders with xenology bonuses to the engineers to give them a better chance.


If I remember correctly, it dictates the maximum number of turns to be taken, so if you set it to 5 and click 1 Day, it will keep going until you get an interrupt or 5 days have passed, whichever comes first.

Actually it's the minimum number of turns, not maximum. What it does it completely ignore all interrupts for the specified time. There isn't a way to specify a number of auto turns as far as I know, but you can just turn it on and turn it off again when you're ready. Auto turns will stop when an interrupt happens.

Bit of an AAR (minor spoilers in the description of the ship I guess, but it was just precursors):

I just battled it out with four 7550 ton precursor ships packing lots of fast anti-ship missiles. 7500 speed, 40 ECM, and their missiles were going over 40,000km/s. My ships were starting tech (all tech on them from a 500 mil pop start, roughly 105000 tech points went into them). 3000 km/s speed, basic size 4 wh 4 missiles with 60km range. My AMMs were 1.2m range. I went in with 20 ships: fifteen 4000 ton 3000km/s destroyers armed with 5 size 4 launchers each with a loadout of 49 missiles, and five 4000 ton 3000 km/s point defense ships armed with 12 size 1 launchers with a loadout of 204 1.2m km range anti missiles. I'm 3 years in and the 20 ships was me building military ships constantly the entire time, and with only 20 labs I didn't get any significant tech done so they were all still top of the line.

I managed to approach them to within my missile range of 60m km (I had a wp where they were when I saw them as they killed my survey vessel) before activating my sensors. They turned out to be 55m km away, and I was able to shoot through their ECM thanks to my over ranged 2.25 size 94.6km fire control. I fired off two full 75 missile volleys at each target, leaving me with 9 missiles in reserve on each ship.

Their missiles arrived first and my anti missiles proved woefully ineffective, only managing to hit about 17% of their missiles. Firing 4 per missile with a second volley for some of them managed to keep most of them off, with only a few leaking through - but I quickly ran out of anti-missiles and started losing ships. Each ship meant 40 less missiles headed at the target, since they didn't have active sensors and without guidance they self destructed. I lost 4 ships before my missiles even started making contact, with a fifth crippled but still in possession of its fire control - leaving me with 110 missiles going for each target. The first two waves hit and managed to barely destroy ship #1, then more of theirs hit outright destroyed two of my ships. Ship #2 was disabled by the two waves that hit it, then I lost a 7th ship to more enemy missiles before my 5th and 6th volleys made it to target #3 - heavily damaging it, but still leaving it effective. I immediately fired another volley at this one, hoping to survive long enough for them to make their targets. An eighth ship of mine was heavily battered by their next wave, but with two ships disabled half their missiles seem to have self destructed and weren't quite so lethal anymore.

My last missile launches managed to mostly cripple #4 due to a secondary explosion, but shortly after I lost another ship that was already damaged by earlier leakage through my PD. The third enemy ship then turned and started running, but my last volley fired managed to reach it and finish it off.

I then had 5 of my missile destroyers with 20 missiles between them, 5 escorts with empty magazines, and two crippled ships with no ability to continue fighting. One of the damaged ships was limping away at 500km/s, so I fired 12 at it and 8 at the other and went to get the life pods. My last missiles barely destroyed both the remaining ships.

The aftermath has 8 of my ships as wrecks, 1 of them crippled to the point that it can't move but it's doing damage control on an engine so hopefully that works, another damaged down to 1 remaining engine slowly limping home, 2 with minor internal damage, and 3 with just armor damage from a few missiles getting through. My five PD ships are completely untouched, I guess the enemy must target the ships with bigger active sensors (they only have missile sensors). Total casualties were about 2600 crewmen and 7 of the commanding officers (two made it to escape pods out of the 8 wrecks, the badly crippled one died to a bridge hit).

That was a pretty epic battle. If I had known they would kick my ass so much with only 4 ships I would have waited a few years and brought 40 instead of 20. After the PD ships ran out of missiles each volley of theirs was wiping out a ship, and they were steadily coming in 4 packs of 8 every 30 seconds. I think they just targeted my destroyers from top to bottom of the TG and fired a volley at each, then repeated. My AMMs kept them at bay for a good many volleys, and when they ran out it was the ships right in the middle of my TG that started going down. I lost ships 6-13, and 14-15 were the crippled ones. Ships 1-2 have slight internal damage, and 3-5 are the ones with only armor hits. Without the point defense it would have just ended with all of my ships dropping one by one before any of my missiles even reached them.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2011, 07:35:58 pm by Paul »
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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6583 on: September 02, 2011, 09:16:46 pm »

When you start a new game, where do you like to focus your research?
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #6584 on: September 02, 2011, 09:35:15 pm »

I tend to turtle in Sol (mainly to avoid situations like Paul's), putting my efforts into improved research rate, terraforming, industry (mining, construction, etc.), and financial centers. Then I crank out a bunch of research labs and terraforming ships, start building up weapons tech while terraforming Mars. When I'm about a year from finishing Mars, I start building my colony ships. At about the same time that my colonists are starting work on Mars, my survey ships make the jump over and start working on those systems. If there are any terraforming targets, I send the TR fleet to those each in turn. By the time those surveys are complete, I usually have enough miltech to lay down a destroyer design that can stand up to Precursors, and I start laying those down. From that point on, I blow through the miltech as fast as I can, with a few dedicated Con/Log/GF teams working on those things.

For me, the most important part is upping the research rate early and churning out more labs. More research means you're going to be better prepared for things down the line. The Invaders might show up thirty years in the future; they might show up next week. I like to be as ready as I can be.
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Aurora on small monitors:
1. Game Parameters -> Reduced Height Windows.
2. Lock taskbar to the right side of your desktop.
3. Run Resize Enable
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