Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MarcAFK]

Start making auto mines en masse, drop them into comets with good accessibility of many minerals, particularly those you need, duranium, and corundum are very important when you're on a mining push, you should also check if any potentially habitable planet or moon has good minerals, if so consider making a colony and dumping some or eventually all of your old manned mines onto it, if there's nothing good then start converting them into auto mines.
You coukd keep them for an extra solar colony with good minerals/environment, but depending on how far in the future that will be it's probably better yo convert them for quick gains.
Also it's a good idea to put some factories into your colonies and dump a few thousand duranium on em every so often, it's very efficient for colonies to expand their own infrastructure, you save your freighters and make use of population which might otherwise be doing nothing.

[miauw62]

I currently have one mining station on a comet (with all of my automines).
I'll do my best to make some more mining colonies.

[Ivefan]

My first game, a newtonian standard start, year 2053.
I think I got a good start with my research though my combat tech is lacking because I have used most of my labs to research C/P, Research rate is soon at 720RP.
I have not yet gone out of Sol, partly because i do not want to generate any aliens and I want my miner fleet/automines to be ready before the pesky civilians hog all the comets.
Mostly because I want a fleet able to take any alien on before i do find one.
The one I've been thinking about would be missile focused with massive salvos, point defense ships and one sensor/fleet command ship.
The question I have for you guys is if it would work, ship ratio and what kind of research i should have before i bother building it.
I probably should mention that I'm at Magnetic fusion drives tech level atleast.

On a side note, did anyone read the Honor Harrington scifi books? there's a bunch of things that feels similar in this game.

[Zangi]

...(just a few automines and a mass driver)...

And by a few we mean fifty.  Like, minimum.

Don't forget to have a MD at home... well, you don't have to if you don't want to...

[Sheb]

On a side note, did anyone read the Honor Harrington scifi books? there's a bunch of things that feels similar in this game.

AFAIK, Aurora started as a campaign manager to help Steve play Ad Astra or something that is a game based on the Honorverse saga.

Also, I had fun time. I was getting low on cash and fuel (man are those new engines fuel-hungry), so I decided to attack the neighboring aliens. I use the surprise effect to dispatch their fleet, loosing only 25k tons of old PD frigates versus at least 110k tons on their side. (I was sure those very large contacts on their homeworld were civies of some sort and got pummeled by AMM and lasers after deciding to not kill them and clicking on the 5 day button by mistake.)

Then I got jumped by precursor, living in the same system. They killed my damaged sensor ships, and I escape with less than a third of my remaining tonnage, and no sensors. Luckily I managed to disable them and they cannot move.

So now I'm stuck, unable to nuke the aliens into surrender, which is an issue, since they have at least 50 land units (more than I do) and I only have one slow, brigade-capacity transport anyway.

I'm now rushing development of a long-range, 500-ton vessel with a missile sensor to serve as a stopgap until I build some more Rodney class (my command/sensors ships).

[Flying Dice]

On a side note, did anyone read the Honor Harrington scifi books? there's a bunch of things that feels similar in this game.

There's a sense of familiarity for a reason. Have you read Weber's Starfire novels? Those are derived from the same tabletop wargame as Aurora, Starfire; Aurora was originally created as a logistical tool to help keep track of data for games of Starfire, if my memory serves. Those novels have a much clearer parallel than even the Honorverse does, because the technology is virtually identical to that in Aurora (save for the fact that Aurora has a hard time with fortresses).

[Lord Shonus]

On a side note, did anyone read the Honor Harrington scifi books? there's a bunch of things that feels similar in this game.

AFAIK, Aurora started as a campaign manager to help Steve play Ad Astra or something that is a game based on the Honorverse saga.

Had nothing to do with the Honorverse. The game in question was Starfire, a 1979 tactical wargame set in its own universe (which David Weber wrote a supplement for, and it is likely that this influenced the Honorverse, which may explain the similarities). In a bit of trivia, the early editions of this game were advertised in the manual for the Star Trek game Star Fleet Battles (both games were initially created by the same lead designer, Stephen Cole, and were both published by Task Force Games) as a much simpler alternative to the (then) vastly more complicated game for players that "purchased this game, due to its subject matter, as thier first venture into tabletop wargaming."

[Flying Dice]

It's actually sort of sad that Weber is so caught up in his author tract bullshit. If he spent less time writing political propaganda into his space opera (or writing those shitty series that all seem to magically revolve around Thirty Years War-tech societies with Catholic Church proxies full of good people but run by evil masterminds being crossed with Sues from high tech civilizations) it'd be a lot of fun to read.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Hell, the Multiverse series he started with Linda Evans had amazing potential, but they published the first two in 2008 and have apparently not touched them ever again. FWIW those are still worth checking out; the premise is that two alt-universe human societies have both been exploring and settling new universes through naturally occurring portals. One is a WWI-level tech (with really absurdly up-scaled locomotives, widespread use of Gatling gun style weapons, and as of the end of the second book experimental steam-powered APCs) alt-Earth where around a quarter of the population has psychic powers and the two foremost nations are pseudo-Mongolia and the remnant core of an old empire based out of alt-Ireland. The other is a magictek society with things like hovertrains and dragons-as-airforce, magical fire-support weapons, but mundane tech stagnated at things like crossbows. Fairly stereotypical socio-political breakdown; Free Republic of Freedom, Proud Warrior Meritocracy, Oppressive Magic-Obsessed Caste System.

A military scouting party from the latter encounters a corporate survey team from the former, a series of misunderstandings turn into a series of back-and-forth onesided slaughters, war commences, war crimes commence, plot threads are laid for crippling internal conspiracies in both worlds, and then they stopped writing. :I

[Willfor]

For a second I thought you were talking about the 1632 series. Then I realized you're probably not.

Generally, I think Weber's a pretty good idea guy, and has the willingness to put the hours in on writing things down -- something that puts him in front of other idea guys. His prose, and his characters are never going to win awards though.

[Flying Dice]

For a second I thought you were talking about the 1632 series. Then I realized you're probably not.

Generally, I think Weber's a pretty good idea guy, and has the willingness to put the hours in on writing things down -- something that puts him in front of other idea guys. His prose, and his characters are never going to win awards though.

Amusingly enough, that was one of the few times where he didn't fall into those habits. Though it probably helped that a lot of them were written by other people, even if the milsf circlejerk writers all tend to be quite similar. But no, I was more referencing Safehold and Dahak. Also the Prince Roger novels, though those mostly lacked the religious stuff and just focused on the moderate-conservative Übermensch human soliders rah rah &c.

[Culise]

For a second I thought you were talking about the 1632 series. Then I realized you're probably not.

Generally, I think Weber's a pretty good idea guy, and has the willingness to put the hours in on writing things down -- something that puts him in front of other idea guys. His prose, and his characters are never going to win awards though.

Amusingly enough, that was one of the few times where he didn't fall into those habits. Though it probably helped that a lot of them were written by other people, even if the milsf circlejerk writers all tend to be quite similar. But no, I was more referencing Safehold and Dahak. Also the Prince Roger novels, though those mostly lacked the religious stuff and just focused on the moderate-conservative Übermensch human soliders rah rah &c.

Not just other people.  His work on 1632 was cowritten with an avowed Trotskyist, which is all sorts of amusing to me because of a particular article that person (Eric Flint) subsequently wrote for the Free Library, and probably helped reduce the amount of politics from either side that got included.  I don't mind David Weber's works as such, but I definitely agree that it's become something of a guilty pleasure, and I always quietly skim over the chapters where he starts going into politics.  I definitely agree that his Hell's Gate series was among his best work, though I suspect that would change if/when he returns to it given that politics are almost certain to take on a greater role in subsequent books. 

That said, he's better than John Ringo.  When it comes to mixing personal politics into one's books at Baen, that author takes the cake.  Honestly, instead of a guilty pleasure, I can't even read his books anymore.  It's kind of a shame, since he does seem to be a fairly decent person otherwise.

[Flying Dice]

It's really sort of sad; I like space opera as a concept, but it's damned hard to find it without the author tracts. I vaguely recall one series that did it well, with a multi-species empire (which included humanity) falling into civil war after the species that enslaved all of the others went extinct, but I can't remember the name of it. Lots of antimatter missile spam, a touch of adrenaline-junkie fighter pilots in the flavor of scouts that help see around the clouds of radiation when opposing waves of missiles and countermissiles detonate, some street-fighting guerrilla work, and lots of character drama.

[Willfor]

It's really sort of sad; I like space opera as a concept, but it's damned hard to find it without the author tracts. I vaguely recall one series that did it well, with a multi-species empire (which included humanity) falling into civil war after the species that enslaved all of the others went extinct, but I can't remember the name of it. Lots of antimatter missile spam, a touch of adrenaline-junkie fighter pilots in the flavor of scouts that help see around the clouds of radiation when opposing waves of missiles and countermissiles detonate, some street-fighting guerrilla work, and lots of character drama.

What if I were to write something like this only without author tracts? (he says, having spent the better part of the past two days outlining something sort of space opera-ish ...)

[Sheb]

Look like my salvagers will have a field day... Once I actually get salvagers.

[Dutchling]

You could say they have an...

...alacritous mission ahead of them.