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[Micro102]

I RP it to the point that I make stereotypical ships and decisions. But that's about it. What are you going to RP? Some immortal person secrelty making the desicions for the entire race?

[RedKing]

I think most do, because...well....there's no "win" condition. Unless you hit the max number of systems, so that there was no more space left to explore, and you'd exterminated or enslaved every other form of sentient life in the galaxy. And the database is far more likely to have derped itself to death before that.

ninjaedit: There's plenty to RP. Take a look at the small handful of Aurora fics I've done up for one of my games. (I really need to get around to writing the next several bits...)

[Flying Dice]

Without sufficient wealth, you can't run your industry, shipyards, anything. It is the only limit that can't be SMed away, and is a pain to keep up with early on unless you use a trick like this.

Well that is odd. I must have been lucky in every game I have played because I have never had problems running any industry or shipyards and I never made any luxury ships.

Ditto. Economy almost seems to be superfluous in my games, as I regularly wind up with hundreds of thousands of 'credits' piling up in the first few decades. Maybe it's because I tend to expand pretty slow? My labs are in constant full use, and if I have the Mercassium, I'm constantly adding more. I even buy the mineral output of every CMC that pops up. 

Yeah, if you aren't a really aggressive expansionist, you generally won't run into problems. But if you're like me and constantly using all industrial, research, and ordinance points while also keeping up a steady stream of ground forces, ships, and upgrading all of your shipyards at the same time, for your entire game, you will usually be running on a deficit until you have a lot of civilian ships generating income, which can take upwards of a decade without exploit ships.

So you're complaining that it can't be SMed away because you don't want to SM it away? :p

Seriously, just RP it as you switching to a war economy, or your government printing money.

When I still was playing around with SM to make things easier, I had a bit of a thing about "I'm going to make it easier, but not autowin", so I would do things like adding minerals to planets and giving myself a bit of extra research and ships beyond the recommended limits, but wouldn't do things like adding dozens of dreadnaughts to my fleet, or SMing in hundreds of installations, or adding minerals directly to my stockpiles. I was trying to learn how to play properly with a bit of help to give me a boost, rather than teaching myself how to have fun with autowin. Sort of like the difference between giving myself a few thousand extra starting resources in AoE II as opposed to making my units invincible, my structures instabuild, and giving myself an army of machine gun cobras. So basically me being obsessive over how much I cheated.

[Metalax]

Yes you are more likely to hit money problems if you intensively research the improved construction/mining/shipbuilding/research/terraforming rates early as the costs are per unit of research/production/etc and as each installation will be producing more units your expenditure shoots up.

Playing with maintainance on and extensively using maintainance facilities can also result in a fairly large expenditure that you may not be anticipating if you have previously played with it off.

Also PCWorld just did a review of aurora - PCWorld review. Go take a look as the reviewer(who has also reviewed DF -linky) has commented over on the aurora forums that the more people that look at these types of reviews, the more likely they are to be assigned to review other similar games rather than defrag tool 9002.

[Flying Dice]

I just designed another challenge for my civilian shipping lines:

Code: [Select]

Atlas class Superfreighter    1,250,000 tons     10465 Crew     24873.2 BP      TCS 25000  TH 30000  EM 0
1200 km/s     Armour 1-1033     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 20     PPV 0
MSP 249    Max Repair 50 MSP
Cargo 1000000    Cargo Handling Multiplier 5000   

Magneto-plasma Drive E0.6 (150)    Power 200    Fuel Use 6%    Signature 200    Armour 0    Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 5,000,000 Litres    Range 120.0 billion km   (1157 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

Any bets on how many weeks it takes them to get the first one out of the yards?

[Tarran]

My guess is at least 5 years.

[Flying Dice]

It took them all of 12 days to get a 170,000 ton freighter built when I first designed it for them years ago, and my main line has around 500,000 wealth at the moment. Based on that standard, it should take around 12.6 weeks for them to complete this, but since civilian shipyards aren't observable, I'm going to guess closer to 6 months to give them time to decide to build it.

[Sheb]

I don't think civies got shipyards. They just pop their ships out of nowhere.

[ndkid]

Yes you are more likely to hit money problems if you intensively research the improved construction/mining/shipbuilding/research/terraforming rates early as the costs are per unit of research/production/etc and as each installation will be producing more units your expenditure shoots up.

Of course, researching the wealth increase technologies and building financial centers can help to mitigate these problems... as is often the case with expanding empires, either you have to work to keep a solid financial base at home, or you soon find yourself unable to support your empire. :-)

[Flying Dice]

I don't think civies got shipyards. They just pop their ships out of nowhere.

Actually, IIRC, Steve mentioned on the official forums that they have shipyards, but that they are completely invisible to the player, so for all practical intents and purposes, their ships do appear from nowhere. CBA to find the post, though.

[Metalax]

Yes you are more likely to hit money problems if you intensively research the improved construction/mining/shipbuilding/research/terraforming rates early as the costs are per unit of research/production/etc and as each installation will be producing more units your expenditure shoots up.

Of course, researching the wealth increase technologies and building financial centers can help to mitigate these problems... as is often the case with expanding empires, either you have to work to keep a solid financial base at home, or you soon find yourself unable to support your empire. :-)

Indeed, the most frequent time for you to get hit by a cash shortage is as you have just about mined out earth/sol and are starting to build finance centers to take advantage of the freed up population.

I don't think civies got shipyards. They just pop their ships out of nowhere.

Actually, IIRC, Steve mentioned on the official forums that they have shipyards, but that they are completely invisible to the player, so for all practical intents and purposes, their ships do appear from nowhere. CBA to find the post, though.

I seem to recall that as well, however that was the justification for why they are not taking up space in your shipyards to build their ships and it wasn't clear that mechanically they have actual shipyards that they are built in rather than being popped out at random as long as the shipping company has funds/sees a need for them.

[Sowelu]

I hit financial problems EARLY compared to you guys.  My solution was to stop spending my starting RP on *any* increased build speed except for research, and buy ridiculous amounts of expensive +economy with it.  Considering I always end up short on minerals if I beef up my construction anyway...  (Mining's still good.  Yeah, still good.)

[RedKing]

Huh. Yeah, I usually have have a good bit of excess population too. Obviously I am not exploiting the masses sufficiently.

Actually, I've thought that that would be a good impetus to force you to expand...once unemployment hits a certain level, it begins to generate unrest. So you either have to expand to get the resources necessary to build massive industries to keep everybody working, or you find new places for them to work (and/or die gasping and freezing on alien shores). After all, one of the biggest drivers of migration and frontier settlement in human history is overpopulation.

[Flying Dice]

Yes you are more likely to hit money problems if you intensively research the improved construction/mining/shipbuilding/research/terraforming rates early as the costs are per unit of research/production/etc and as each installation will be producing more units your expenditure shoots up.

Of course, researching the wealth increase technologies and building financial centers can help to mitigate these problems... as is often the case with expanding empires, either you have to work to keep a solid financial base at home, or you soon find yourself unable to support your empire. :-)

I'll be honest: I build a few dozen FCs early on, and then never use them again, because they are utterly insignificant when compared to pretty much every other source of revenue, unless you're building so many that they compose a majority of your mineral use and workforce division.

Indeed, the most frequent time for you to get hit by a cash shortage is as you have just about mined out earth/sol and are starting to build finance centers to take advantage of the freed up population.

[Detonate]

I've finally traveled to another solar system. I managed to get to that solar system and back to Sol, but when I sent a colony ship (one of the planets had a colony cost less than Mars, at a mere 1.2601) I can't seem to get back to it without the game spewing out error messages and crashing on me. Any way to change solar systems without the errorspam and crashing every five seconds?