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[foarl]

After having diddled around in two games for ~150 years total, decided to restart and try to have a working military running and exploring in 50 years. At the 25 year mark I've got fighters/carriers designed and producing, another 10 or so to get some PD ships up. In particular the meson cannon attracted me because of how little research it takes to get to full power. For fighters especially, since it lets them deal direct damage instead of sandblasting the enemy armour down.

However there's a kicker...? My carriers aren't showing up for maintenance. They're sitting around earth, they were made in a shipyard there, but they're accruing maintenance time and I don't know why. They don't even show up for military upkeep on the minerals list.

Anyone have any clue why that might be?

[RulerOfNothing]

What's your maintenance capacity?

[Flying Dice]

Most likely you don't have enough maintenance facilities.

[foarl]

Ayup, correct y'all are. I thought maintenance was based out of shipyards for some weird reason. Having read up on the rules, I see that these ships have to last 2-3 years before I can possibly maintain them.

God speed little guys. Best of luck.

Edit: While we're on the subject. Is there any way to autoassign fighters such that they don't start accruing maintenance time? I can't see any way to auto force them into a hangar bay, and that seems to be the only way to stop the maint clocks on em.

Edit2: If you set the carrier class to have a preferred strike group of the fighter being produced, and choose the carrier's fleet as the production destination from fighter factories it does auto load it into the fight bay. I'd think it still gets a little confusing when you try to assign them to actual fighter squadrons, but it at least lets me sit back and wait for all 75 to be done before assigning them.

[Iosyn]

1100m Citizens and a 20m worker shortage.
Lazy bastards, people are dying from overcrowding on mars--
get to work before you're deported.

I'm going to just lift off all my installations from earth, create my mars penal colony as my new capital.
Then those lazy buggers will be up the creek without a mass driver, or so to speak.

[Flying Dice]

Most of them are employed in service industries and agriculture, if you check your economics window. The workers you use for all your processes is the manufacturing subset of the workforce.

[foarl]

It's also worth noting that you can manually disable certain industries if you don't need them. Fuel production being a good example. Building a tonne of research labs will slaughter your available workers pretty quick, and financial centers take 5mil/100. It's likely your research labs though, they take a huge amount of labour.

RIP New game with carriers. Misclicked and shut the game down mid turn, and now the NPC's are lacking something in their planet planning database. 20+ error messages per turn, and NPC races are invisible to the SM :/

[Iosyn]

Or Maybe Not.

Holy Crap. I was just exploring a few nearby systems during a new game and I've just encounted... two unknown wrecks. o_o
a thousand tonner and a nine thousand tonner... I'll have to salvage these ASAP, hopefully I can get some decent weapons technology so that whatever did make those wrecks can't make wrecks of me.
No suitable colony sites in Bernard or wolf 359, however...

I've just encountered my first alien race. picked their colony up on passive and I'm moving in to investigate.
DOUBLE CRAP. There's more ships here than my entire fleet, from all over the rainbow too. Thankfully they haven't blown my unarmed, unarmoured prospector out of space yet, however I've just picked up a presumed hostile sensor contact. Let's see how this goes. I'm not expecting my dutiful little syria-class survey ship to survive, but if they do go down I'll make sure to put the information gleaned from their sensors to good use.

Speeds, tonnages... and it looks like their planetary sensors only picked me up at 78m/km... kehehe...

Edit: and yeah, on the worker population I had to disable my fighter and ordinance factories at first, Now? I don't have a single missile, let alone a military in this run. lol. first missiles to come out in six months I guess. >.>

Edit: Okay, so I think I pissed them off somehow. Good news is, they've only used gauss cannons so far.

[Kaje]

I'm going to give this another go, despite being completely stumped by it the first time around.

Does anybody have any basic tips (I know there's an FAQ/Wiki but looking for something a bit more condensed) to get me started?

[Flying Dice]

I'm going to give this another go, despite being completely stumped by it the first time around.

Does anybody have any basic tips (I know there's an FAQ/Wiki but looking for something a bit more condensed) to get me started?

Here and here. Though most of it is out of date, but the window purposes/locations should still be more or less the same. Feel free to ask here about anything, but jumping straight in tends to be the most effective way to learn.

[Iosyn]

Nope. They certainly don't want to be friends. seriously though a 19800 ton craft with only gauss cannons? Dohohoho.
I've noticed some 9,900 ton craft that can hit a fair speed, but I've not seen any weapons on them yet.

[foarl]

There's three stages to aurora far as I can see.

Researching/Building/Mining

If you lack a CP and/or PP scientist, immediately build 3-4 Military Academies. I just quit a game because I had dink all for scientists in the first 25 years. (Although this isn't a game killer, the longer you play the bigger NPRs get, and the longer each turn takes to process)

Get your Research rate up, mining rate up, and train (give them a project and a lab) 1 scientist in every area except perhaps logistics, biology and energy weapons (if you're not intending to use them). Geosurvey sol, find what minerals you have and start mining/mass drivering them back to earth. Start working on engine efficiency. Ion drive + 0.5L/hr is plenty to aim for when it comes to commercial ships

Minerals of importance: Corundium (mines), Mercassium (research labs), Sorium (processed into fuel, but you need raw Sorium to make jump engines/gate builders), and Neutronium (primarily used to build shipyards/increase their capacity). Depending on your luck Duranium may be an issue (this is used in everything, so you'll need it in bulk). Claim comets/asteroids that get surveyed with 10k+ of these minerals (excluding duranium unless you're desperate), and claim all colonizable/mineable planets/moons to stop civvies from mining it away from you. The economy boost is small, and the minerals are gone for good.
 
Ships: Geosurvey (design and build this right away with whatever engines you can make), Cargo ship

Colonization/Expansion (Be ready for military demands from colonies at this point. Easy to handle, but annoying if you're not expecting it)

Research to get a military setup running. Pick and choose your weapons so you're not behind the tech curve when you find an enemy. Luna and Mars are easy to colonize for the extra wealth you'll need to run your research. Expansion into other solar systems directly linked to earth is easy and unlikely to run you into nasties, but the chance still exists.

Ships: Colony ship, grav survey ship, jump gate ship, geosurvey self jumping ship, tankers to harvest fuel from gas giants, token defense ship to shut those colonists up.

Conquest/Combat

Your tech + minerals should be coming together to form your fleet. Missile cruisers + point defense? Laser fleet? Up to you really, they all have benefits and problems. Missiles are very powerful though.

Ideally (In my mind) this stage should be ~50 years after start. Namely because the longer you leave NPRs, the more NPRs they spawn and the slower your game plays as a result. NPRs fighting will cause 30 second timelapses that take longer than 30 days did at the start of the game. If there's fighting going down, it's much more fun to be involved rather than sitting and knowing shit is blowing up but you're not involved.

Many minerals gain new value in the end game. Duranium obviously never changes from being needed in bulk. All military ships require an upkeep of the mineral types that went into building them.

Everyone needs

Gallicite(engines)
Tritanium (engines)
Uridium (sensor clusters)
Corbomite (shields)

Depending on your weaponry you may need:

Gallicite (missiles/launchers)
Tritanium (missiles/launchers)
Processed Sorium (missiles use fuel as well)
Vendarite (gauss cannon)
Corundium (Laser style weapons)
Boronide (Laser style weapons & railguns)
Neutronium (railguns)





If you're having trouble with step one, honestly aurora might not be for you. The game is for people who love complexity and there's really no "quick and easy howto" that can exist because of that. If you're having trouble with combat and where to go with military, there's a great (albeit slightly outdated) post here http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/48620?page=13

It really helped me clear up the strengths/weaknesses for weapons and decide on what to aim for with military.

[Kaje]

I have installed the game, and fancied adding one of the graphics packs...but there's no graphics folder in my install directory.

Have I done something wrong?

EDIT: Meh, made a newb error - found it all.

[Iosyn]

Oh shit.

Hostile contact sol.

[FritzPL]