I read about this game recently on the General discussion forum or somewhere, and.. whoa. Endless amounts of indecipherable information. Graphics consisting of spreadsheets and one rough representation of a solar system. Gameplay as a whole resembles, to the casual eye, working on spreadsheets. Starting a new game entails hours spent designing individual ship components. Horrendously clunky interface with a healthy dose of error messages to complement the the copious amounts of micromanagement. No manual to speak of, only scattered tutorials and a lopsided wiki. I assume the normal human mind would instantly recoil in horror. As for me, all this sounded immediately promising. I can only surmise that years of DF have damaged my brain in some manner.
I found that the basics of the game were not that difficult to learn in the end, with much thanks going to the DF community for this thread (which I've read about half of) and also for filling out parts of the wiki (or so I gather from what I read in this thread). The game's quite enthralling when it gets going, with always some grand operation ready to begin or about to finish. That, and the learning curve, are what most reminds me of DF, otherwise the moniker in the topic is not all that accurate in my opinion :)
I've played my first longer game from 2025 to 2041 now. Mars has been fully terraformed for years and has a big population, although I haven't really figured out what to do with them apart from collecting taxes, as there are no minerals there. Titan has about 15 million people and is full of minerals, I'm also terraforming there but if the "maximum greenhouse pressure = 3.0" information in the terraforming tab is accurate, it's not possible to get it down to more than about colony cost 2. All the infrastructure and colonists on Titan have been transported by civilians by the way.
There are in general very few good mineral bodies in the Sol system. Charon (!) and some asteroids and comets have large quantities, and civilian mining companies are doing the mining there with the loot being sent to Earth by mass drivers. I've kept all my production etc. on Earth so far, that seems to work pretty well. I've also colonised a semi-earthlike planet in a neighbouring system, which has about 10 million colonists already and will shortly be down to colony cost 0. Other than that I haven't found within 3-4 jumps any (free) planets worth the trouble of colonising.
I've met two alien races, one right next door with a jump point in the inner asteroid belt. Both seem to be peaceful and I have trade access both ways with the neighbouring race. I built jump gates to their system years ago in the hope that my civilian traders would flood their markets with cheap human junk. Unfortunately there has been no interstellar shipping so far, I'm not sure what I should do to make it work, or if it even works in the current version.
The other alien race parked a jump-capable fleet near my off-system colony a while back, and they've been sitting there doing nothing. I got frustrated with the "new sensor contact!!!" spam and decided to test out the combat system. I had my starting fleet go there, it was Fast OOB'ed in the start and refitted for marginally better equipment later, and had about the same number of ships. I had them engage at range, and found that the alien ships were either poorly designed, technologically inferior or a decoy of some sort. They were about the same size as my ships, but only half as fast. Their sensors were much better than mine, but their missiles had a terrible range. I was able to lob all my anti-ship missiles at them without retaliation and next to no losses to PD, although only one of their ships was completely destroyed (note to self: more magazines). I then closed to finish them with my anti-missile missiles (oh the humiliation) and swatted 95% of their returning salvos on the way. In the end I had destroyed them all easily with only a few dents in my ships' armor. I have a new batch of better ships and better missiles under construction so I might just decide to go visit their home system, which has a nice 0 colony cost world if I remember correctly.
Author
Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2853047 times)