Just recently got into playing Aurora, and I've been delighted so far. True, the learning curve is steep and the interface could be more friendly, but ohmigod the DEPTH....
It's also nice to recognize elements of some of my favorite game systems. It's sort of Renegade Legion meets Traveller meets Harpoon. IN SPACE.
I'm on my 12th game or so, but this is the first one that's really made it to a sustainable point (i.e. haven't made any n00b errors yet). Most minerals on Earth have been exhausted, so I have a small batch of asteroid miners making their way through the asteroid belt, while Mars is being steadily terraformed and settled by bioengineered colonists (nothing drastic, just a few tweaks to make them more acclimated to a colder, lower oxygen, lower gravity world). There's civilian mining colonies on Venus and Rhea, and I've expanded surveys out to six systems. Gliese 96, the only one more than a jump away from Sol, had a couple of promising candidates for colonization. But it turned out to be inhabited. Love the way that Aurora handles first contact situations, with all the uncertainty and tension as you try to make sense of sensor readings and actions while you try to establish communication.
First race turned out to be peaceful and diplomatic relations were established. Sent a jump survey team back to Proxima Centauri, which I had already scouted briefly earlier. Contacted a second race, whose ships were much faster and more aggressive than the first race. My survey team couldn't outrun them and got blown to bits. Attempts at communication ultimately failed. Now the only thing left to do is arm ourselves and fight. We don't know why the Centauri attacked us, and we may never know. What we do know is that they're one jump away from our home, they're fast and they're mean. And two decades of peaceful exploration have left us woefully unprepared for war. A crash program has been initiated to develop small, agile fighters that can outrun the attack ships we've seen. We know they use missiles, so CIWS systems are being developed to protect our larger vessels. And we'll need advance warning, so development has begun on sensor buoys that we can deploy in-system near their jump point. Maybe, just maybe, if we can see them first we can give those alien sons-of-bitches a taste of payback.