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[coleslaw35]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xhUGGEnJcU

So, this is a review of Aurora by one MandaloreGaming. He's pretty consistent in his quality and this is no exception.

"So, what about the missile design menu?"
*opens it*
"Oh my God..."

90% of your time learning Aurora, but replace Missile Design Menu with any menu title.

[Madman198237]

So, I was recently pretty relieved to find out that an ID for an NPR persists between systems. So I've now explored about a dozen systems, I believe, and found Precursors in two of them. I really wish that I could find a *new* Precursor race, because this one is kind of extremely low-tech, at least as I understand it.

[Paul]

Unless I'm mistaken, there is only one generated set of precursor ships per game. You may find different ships in different systems, but they'll all be similar tech.

[Flying Dice]

Precursors are all remnants of the same polity, and their tech level is effectively identical between campaigns. They're there as babby's first threat, the stuff that forces you to develop and use your military at TL0-4. Short of 500-1000% difficulty NPRs (which is what I resort to), you basically move from that until you can roll Invaders, and then you're more or less done. It's a blessing in disguise that most campaigns die to slowdown before you get much beyond TL7-8, since you start to run out of threats.

That's the real lack, the absence of polities as strong and well-managed as the player's; the sort of interactions you see in Starfire canon are centuries after the point in development typically covered in Aurora, and probably beyond the capability of it to model (fair, given that actual Starfire games were mostly just the tactical fleet combat). IIRC in Starfire canon the Terran Federation circa ISWII already had scores or hundreds of self-sufficient colony worlds, for example, and by post-ISWIII were fielding hundreds of millions of tons of military shipping.

[Damiac]

Read these tutorials http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?board=101.0 and feel free to ask a million questions.

Micro, you are a hero for staying here and asking and answering questions for 7 years.  I learned so much about this game from your questions and your ability to extract actual answers out of a quagmire of condescension.

I also wasn't born with the knowledge of what a parasite might be in the context of this game, or a box launcher.  Luckily you asked the questions first, as I'd probably already be banned from this board due to my responses if I had received some of that flak you did...

The bay 12 community is a shining jewel as internet communities go, but still, it is an internet community...

EDIT:
While I'm talking about ancient history from this thread - I too have long been confused by the phrase "Exception that proves the rule" as it is a contradiction. I figured it was just one of those stupid folksy things like "I could care less".

This explanation made sense to me, maybe it will help others, especially non-native english speakers:

"The exception [that] proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning has been interpreted or misinterpreted in various ways. Its true, or at least original, meaning is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. For example, a sign that says "parking prohibited on Sundays" (the exception) "proves" that parking is allowed on the other six days of the week (the rule). A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule."

That... actually makes sense to me.

[hostergaard]

Made some post on my ideas on the official forums, want to hear your thoughts.

----

We should be designing ship hulls rather than ships. That is, instead of designing a complete ship and tooling a shipyard for it we design a hull with various hull spaces, hard points and mounts where ship system appropriate for said spot can mounted. Have said hull be a racial research, then shipyards can tool for said hull. After that ship variants can be designed from said hull (and possibly researched), by adding different systems in the appropriate places and all variants can then be build in the shipyard tooled for said hull.

More on the idea here

----

It would make the world feel more alive and interesting if we had civilian contracts for racial tech (and possibly ships, see previous)

Instead of having your researcher do the engineering work of researching racial tech have private companies do it by the player defining system specs (kinda like we do now) and have civilian companies develop their own designs that varies somewhat in specs, features, cost and so on (partially random, partially according to each company strength and weaknesses, tough they always at minimum adhere to the given specs) that they use as a bid on said system specs. The player can then give out various contracts to said companies.

More here

[Madman198237]

Both are great ideas.

Hopefully refitting becomes more logical with Aurora C#, but if not, then the designing-hulls thing would be alright, though you should be designing a *ship* (Just like we do now) that is then assigned a *hull* that includes nothing except powerplant (Engines, not the power sources for energy/beam weapons) and thruster nozzles (Because those can't really be changed in most cases. Most modern warships with variants do not mess with the engineering areas). This hull could perhaps have a separate drop-down menu from regular ship designs, but if you choose a Hull in the ship-design menu you can only add components that work with the established hull. Meaning you can't fit a 35 cm railgun where the original hull cut out a spot for a 12 cm railgun. However, you COULD fit, at large cost, a 25cm railgun into a 35cm railgun spot, because it's smaller and thus doesn't interfere with any nearby internal structures.

As for civilian contracts, would the civilians be building the ships as well? It would make sense. Of course, it would also make more sense, strictly speaking, if civilians were able to handle most freight and transport requirements that you have.

[Rince Wind]

I...didn't remember the Swarm to be this tough. Fired 300 WH9 missiles on the 200kt ship, they all hit. Didn't even break through the armor. Some minor damage seems to be the result of shock damage - 3900km/s insteat of 4000 and the shield is weaker. 1494 instead of 1500. Yay?

There are also at least 4 1000km/s ships running around which have 18000 shields? :eek: They seem to be unarmed, but I fear I lead them into a system with about 250 asteroids.

But now I have to see if I survive the 80 FACs without taking too much damage. I have no missiles left to thin them out, and they are twice as fast as my fleet. 8 escorts with quad 10cm turrets that fire all the time and five destroyers with a 31cm spinal and 5 20cm lasers each, firing once every 35 and 20 seconds. Oh, and the 2 command ships have one triple 10cm turret each, not much, but every little bit helps, i guess.

Didn't the 200kt ship used to have around 600 shields?

And now I misclicked on 20min instead of five and gave them a free shot and can only start returning the fire now that they have mitigated my not very impressive range advantage completely.


Edit: Only lost a single ship, they concentrated on the missile ships first so I didn't loose any firepower.
I will have to abandon the damaged ship though. Is the destroy ship button in the individual unit window the correct one? I do want to pick up the lifepod, the crew enabled the other ships to survive.

[Crashmaster]

Lost some exploration/ survey ships to precursors but one gravsurvey ship was far enough away to avoid detection and I left it to continue it's work. Not long after I get notified the hostiles' actives are back on but they are now on the opposite side of the system and the interrupts start. First time I've had any sensors in a system when other races were fighting. Got to glimpse a bit of half the battle; the precursors charged with seven ships of two types (960 thermal and 5300km/s is all the intel I have on them) and lost them all to what appears to be swarm as all wrecks disappeared shortly after. Marked that system on the galactic map for sure.

[Kruniac]

I wonder if I create a custom race, give it a homeworld and spend it's tech points, could I turn it into an NPR and have a low-space tech NPR?

I get annoyed when NPRs are always higher tech - I'd love to have some low-tech battles, just for a change.

[Lord Shonus]

I usually create a few around the Sol system, generating them as NPRs. Four or five years in they annoy me and I kill them all.

[Flying Dice]

On generation they're typically going to be low-TN. What I like to do is set difficulty up to 500-1000% and gen chance up high before I explore a batch of systems. Ones that spawn that way will of course have an arseload of ships and such while being lowish tech. Obviously not a full empire, you'd need to hand-tailor NPRs for that.

[Damiac]

I've been playing my first real game of Aurora over the past few weeks.  Previously, the need for reduced height windows, along with a slow PC and abysmal instructions kept me from really getting far into it, but finally I seem to have broken through, and I feel like I 'get it'.

For some reason (I guess I'm just a hipster that way) I refused to use missiles, as they seem to be wildly dominant, and I like to mix things up. 

I used auto tech assignment so I would have some designs when I started the game (This was a big help, by the way) but quickly made my own designs once I understood how it works.  I decided I was going to focus on short range combat, so I spent a good amount of research time getting gauss cannon range and fire rate. 

I got into my first combat in this game, first with the random precursors, which hilariously first destroyed my survey ship, then my very first combat squadron, then my second combat squadron.  But the third! The third stayed up!  The third squadron was carriers, dedicated PD ships, and some fighters.  They weathered the missile swarm, and sandpapered the enemies to death, except the one that chose to ram my jump tender...


I am certainly enjoying the reduced logistic load of not having to manage missile production and distribution.  My economy has struggled throughout the game, first duranium, then wealth, then duranium again, then sorium, wealth again, and finally I seem to be on decent footing.

I think maybe I focused too much on research early on, as that's my biggest expense by far where wealth and workers are concerned.  By researching faster production rates and research rates across the board, without expanding the civilian economy to match, I was able to spend wealth at a much faster rate than I could earn it.

Still, I eventually stabilized, and even met my first NPRs! In fact, I met my first two NPRs at the same time! They were shooting missiles at eachother from the moment I entered the system, and slowed my game to a crawl for an in game hour of 5 second turns.  Oof...  But still, the battle ended, and the game was playable again.

Now I am finally at the stage where I destroyed the fleet and shipyards of the NPRs in that system, and wish to take the planet. However, although bombing the ground forces was easy, taking the planet seems to require a ridiculous amount of troops.  My units have a defense value of 6, and I need something like 400 to take the planet... I guess I should have been building troops since the beginning... and I also haven't spent a moment of research on them...

Now, I know I can bomb them into dust (although it seems like it would take a lot of bombing), but I remember reading something from a while back about surrender mechanics, and something about offering various surrender terms, and I cannot find where I would do such a thing.  Does that exist, or was it removed/never there/a fever dream?

[Rince Wind]

Diplomacy is restricted to what little you can see on the intelligence screen. They might surrender if you put enough force on them and then they might give you stuff like ships that are still around, or mining colonies.

As for the troops: Did you research the troop strength techs?
Once I have them I try to build whole divisions for conquering, with at least one defensive one for 2 attack ones. Defensive meaning garrison and mobile infantry. Some of the latter are also mixed into the attack divisions, which might have 1 heavy assault, two assault and one mobile defense brigade. One replacement battailon for every brigade as well, but not organized into they proper fighting units.

One thing for wealth creation is colonies with people, so they pay tax. And the smaller the colony the faster the pop growth is (you would think they'd have other things on their minds when the domes are crowded and people die because there is just not enough space under them...). So you can get to reasonable levels of population quite quickly. Earth also produces enough people to keep some colonizing fleets busy, and later they can pick up their "passengers" from Mars or Luna maybe.
For Sol you can also build a couple terraforming installations to terraform, your freighters will probably sit still a lot anyway, so they can ferry them around. To terraform in other systems it is usually better to build terraforming ships or orbital habitats, because once the next target planet is 4 systems over it is a pain to transfer the stations.

In my game I actually had the problem that there was a workers shortage on Earth, because I have more than 100 labs there now and a huge amount of construction complexes. Mining is shut down (no minerals anyway, but at the moment I am producing them quicker than I get them off planet as some transport fleets have other things to do.), as ist fighter production. And after a while I was able to build new labs.

[Damiac]

Ah ok, I couldn't find any other sort of controls as far as offering surrender terms, but I could have sworn once upon a time I read something about various surrender options.  Probably just an idea being floated around, or just something my imagination made up...

So my wealth situation is in hand now, I had been colonizing from early on, and have a fleet of terraformers (0.5 atm a year at the moment).  I also have about 15 terraforming installations, although I'm quickly seeing your point about them being too much bulk to be worth shipping around.  I have earth, luna, mars, alpha centuri a1, and some wolf planet terraformed and well colonized, and one other just about to finish terraforming. 

I'm not sure how many research facilities I have, but I don't have enough workers on earth for them, even after shipping my refineries, mines, fighter production, and shipyards all to luna.  I do have a number of financial districts on earth, which do use a lot of workers.  I needed them for a while, shut them off when my wealth recovered, then eventually needed to turn them back on. I may be on stable enough footing to turn them back off, although it's a shame they're a waste now.  I have been building some financial districts on my more developed colonies, especially the ones with nothing to mine.

I haven't researched anything to do with troops except the brigade transport module, and engineering brigade (I found some ruins). However I started with my RP pre-allocated, so the computer may have researched some beginning troop strength techs for me.  Are those retroactive, or only for newly trained units?

At the moment I've got altogether 150 defensive strength worth of troops, at 12 defense each.   6 mobile infantry, the rest garrisons.  I took out the defending troops via bombing, I figured I'd just get the planet once I eliminated all resistance.  Stupid alien civilians, why can't I order my troops to shoot them until they are less than 150 strength!?!  I do expect that planet to be a large boon for me, and that same alien civ has at least one more planet, with similar defense values.  I think I may have found my starting NPR, although since I have NPRs unable to activate other NPRs, that doesn't explain the other aliens that they were fighting...  And I established communication with both races, so they're not any kind of spoilers.  Although one did hate me right away, and the other hated me as soon as I started blowing up his ships.  He started it by causing an hour of 5 second turns 

The worker shortage on earth is bad enough that I set it to stable population instead of feeding other colonies.  I'm trying to shift more stuff off earth, to allow it to just be the research planet, but there's an awful lot of industry there...

Luna is at capacity, or even a little over, so I can't send my construction there. 

Also, is there anything special about troops, for example, each troop brigade has an associated personnel, but is there a way to set up another position over the individual brigades that would add another bonus? Sort of like planet govs and sector govs?