Print

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

[MarcAFK]

I usually put sensors on jump points so I know when to get the fleet out, it's not really efficient to split your resources up putting overwhelming power at every jump point. Though if you know the enemy likes using that jump point by all means put stuff there.
I'm fan of abusing 1000 ton ships, so it's not unusual for me to have small sensor or box pod swarms with low speed but high maintenance life at strategic points.

[Girlinhat]

Really, a sensor probe on a gate and a PDC with hangars is a better defense.  Don't pay maintenance on PDC, and don't maintain ships stored in hangars, so you can stock a few warships until an enemy arrives.  Bonus points, you don't even really need the sensor probe, as you can build a huge thermal sensor on the PDC, or use deep space telescopes on the planet the PDC is built on.  And for that matter a PDC can equip box launchers, which would be reloaded at horribly slow rate by planetary maintenance, allowing you to simply have a silo of missiles prepared as a first strike option before you even deploy the ships.

[RadtheCad]

I really hope Steve adds in self-sustainable ships at some point:  a design screen option, or a recycling/self-maintenance/efficiency/renewable engineering module, to represent building a more expensive but more efficient ship that uses up fewer maintenance points per amount of time total.  Maybe there could be a tech line related to it:  the last tech gives you the ability to make 100% military ships without maintenance cost?

It just seems silly that you can have a permanent, completely sustainable space station, but the instant you add on a gravitational sensor the whole thing starts falling apart and you start vomiting mass out the side.

[Bremen]

You could always play with maintenance off.

[RadtheCad]

Ehh, it's not like I have a problem with maintenance as a gameplay concept and design limitation, though:  it's just the fact that there's no way to overcome it in the current game without, as you said, turning it off entirely.

On that note, is Pulsar 4X still being developed?  Has anyone here played it?

[Flying Dice]

Playing with maintenance off doesn't really work as well ever since morale was introduced, since that's always-on, so even if the ships don't arbitrarily explode every year or two the crews still stop working even if you give them a gym, casino, rec-room, and four meter cubed private bedrooms.

Re: Pulsar 4X: As far as I'm aware they're still on track to release a feature-complete build sometime around the time we discover T/N minerals in real life.

[Sheb]

Well, you have to recs ships.

[MarcAFK]

Aurora is a strategic sim rather than just tactical, logistics are by far the most important aspect of warfare.
Modern aircraft need vastly more hours of maintenance than hours spent in the air, WWII tanks were similar. And I imagine soldiers and crew have some not insignificant maintenance requirements :p.

[Girlinhat]

This is what a lot of people don't get about Aurora.  The logistics are astounding.  The ammo, the fuel, the retrofits, the crew... It's all terribly important.  There's a reason that the battles are done in 5 second increments, but down time is in 30 days.

[Bremen]

That's why I'm really excited about the new version. Lowering the average number of jump points will result is a more spread out map, making military bases and ammo depots more worthwhile as well as reducing the strategy of just putting every ship in one fleet and flying it into the enemy.

Now I'm just waiting for 7.1 with all its nice bugfixes to start my new game

Edit: Bwuh, 7.1 is out already? Why didn't anyone tell me? Oh, because apparently it came out about two hours ago.

[Alastar]

It's possible to avoid most of the logistic issues: shove anything breakable into hangar pods, use tugboats to move those.
"We don't need a navy, Amazon can deliver our ordnance with less fuss".

Aurora offers many interesting challenges, but one may need to hold back to enjoy them.

[Bremen]

It's possible to avoid most of the logistic issues: shove anything breakable into hangar pods, use tugboats to move those.
"We don't need a navy, Amazon can deliver our ordnance with less fuss".

Aurora offers many interesting challenges, but one may need to hold back to enjoy them.

The hangars still need maintenance, though.

And actually, that's similar to the tactic I'm planning on using for my new game; my plan is long range carriers using short range parasite craft (not necessarily fighters or even FACs, potentially 10,000 tons or more). That way I can have long deployment times without having to compromise on performance.

[MarcAFK]

7.1 is out but there still some annoying outstanding bugs that weren't fixed, also there's a one where you can't select for NPRs to activate spoilers. But most of us want that disabled anyway.

[Zangi]

7.1 is out but there still some annoying outstanding bugs that weren't fixed, also there's a one where you can't select for NPRs to activate spoilers. But most of us want that disabled anyway.

Damn, I want my same planet start 'comrades' to help me fight em.... well, actually, they'll at least be around for the 3rd one I guess. That is probably better in the long run anyways.

[Flying Dice]

Aurora is a strategic sim rather than just tactical, logistics are by far the most important aspect of warfare.
Modern aircraft need vastly more hours of maintenance than hours spent in the air, WWII tanks were similar. And I imagine soldiers and crew have some not insignificant maintenance requirements :p.

See, I get that. I love how thorough Steve has been with all the backend stuff.

The problem is that as they currently stand the maintenance and morale systems force you to treat everything as if it was a WWII-era submarine that's incapable of spending meaningful amounts of time on its own without the crew rebelling or everything important breaking.

It's the 24th gorram century, why can't we build ships that don't fall apart if they're out of port for three months? Why can I make a ship that's 15% engineering spaces and spare parts storage and it's still barely able to repair its active sensor once or operate independently for two years before running out of spares? Likewise, why can't we pimp the shit out of our ships so that they're better than planetside living and the crews don't really want to leave except for the occasional breath of fresh air or bite of totally organically grown food--needs which can be met by stopping off on a 2.0 or less cost world, perhaps?

That's what's wrong with the maintenance and morale systems. They impose extraordinary limitations on what the player is allowed to do, forcing them into a single playstyle and fluff flavor for their civilization, when by all rights they shouldn't. Remember, even in Starfire it was apparently simple to build deep-space fortresses which operated indefinitely on their own, and fleets spent months or years on deployment with no major mechanical failures.

Why aren't there lines of research that improve the quality of crew quarters, decrease the IFR, or reduce how many supplies are needed to repair things? Why are logistical problems still sitting in the 20th century when our fleets are zipping about at appreciable percentages of c, when they're lobbing thousands of antimatter warheads, when we can turn Venus into a paradise in a matter  of months?

--

Don't confuse my dislike of the system with dislike of the content. I fucking love all of the little detail-work that goes into setting up functioning supply chains, building and expanding forward fleet bases, managing and protecting mining operations, &c. That's a tremendous amount of fun.