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[Micro102]

None of this seems buggy to me. Annoyingly limited sure, but not broken.

Well my conditional order of "If less than 20% supplies then resupply at colony " doesn't trigger, so if it's not a bug, then what is it checking for?

Also, so many build points, what do you guys spend it on? It feels like I can make a hundred ships or thousands of army formations, which will quickly become obsolete and unneeded.

EDIT: I've come across a new challenge. My colonies with no minerals want protection, which requires ships, which requires maintenance facilities, which requires certain resources on said planet. Is there a way to say "keep 1000 of mineral X on this colony via mass drivers", or is it best to just make a big commercial maintenance ship and have it resupply when needed?

[AlStar]

Also, so many build points, what do you guys spend it on? It feels like I can make a hundred ships or thousands of army formations, which will quickly become obsolete and unneeded.

Generally I don't spend my points (tech or build) on anything - start as a TN civ (spending decades upgrading conventional industry doesn't appeal to me), but otherwise slowly build up from there.

It's good to know they're there if I want to catapult a start, but otherwise I don't think they're needed.

I know you can set a reserve, but I think that only helps if you're taking minerals off the planet. Protection is per-system, however, so you can protect Mars by building ships around Earth.

[Micro102]

Seems like those maintenance ships I was talking about for some reason are the only things that can transfer maintenance supplies. Odd, but ok, solves my problem.

Anyone know if civilian companies will build maintenance ships and transport supplies on their own?

EDIT: F my life, now my problem is that my military vessels are breaking down while in orbit of my lunar colony. I have 50 maintenance facilities on Luna and the ships are only 9,000 tons each. I have supplies. Why are the ships still breaking down?!?!

[Karlito]

EDIT: F my life, now my problem is that my military vessels are breaking down while in orbit of my lunar colony. I have 50 maintenance facilities on Luna and the ships are only 9,000 tons each. I have supplies. Why are the ships still breaking down?!?!

But how many ships do you have? A change in C# is that maintenance facilities support a total tonnage of ships, rather than every single ship (regardless of number) that's under a weight threshold. The total supported tonnage is shown on the colony summary screen.
Also you need maintenance supplies or minerals on the colony (the facilities can make their own supplies).

[Micro102]

EDIT: F my life, now my problem is that my military vessels are breaking down while in orbit of my lunar colony. I have 50 maintenance facilities on Luna and the ships are only 9,000 tons each. I have supplies. Why are the ships still breaking down?!?!

But how many ships do you have? A change in C# is that maintenance facilities support a total tonnage of ships, rather than every single ship (regardless of number) that's under a weight threshold. The total supported tonnage is shown on the colony summary screen.
Also you need maintenance supplies or minerals on the colony (the facilities can make their own supplies).

That would explain it. Didn't realize that was a change. Would be nice to have a full list of changes I could ctrl+f search keywords for. Steve's multi-page forum thread makes it hard to find certain changes.

[coleslaw35]

Would be nice to have a full list of changes I could ctrl+f search keywords for. Steve's multi-page forum thread makes it hard to find certain changes.

100% agreed. The wiki has yet to be updated, so I'm often forced to ctrl+F page by page on Steve's update thread in an effort to find what I'm looking for... assuming I'm even ctrl+Fing the right term.

[AlStar]

While not perfect, this post: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10666.0 has a table of contents of all the changes... you still need to know what you're looking for, but it's better than browsing all the individual posts.

[coleslaw35]

While not perfect, this post: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10666.0 has a table of contents of all the changes... you still need to know what you're looking for, but it's better than browsing all the individual posts.

This is infinitely better. Thank you for showing us this.

[Micro102]

That table of contents is so nice, and I also just thought of something that could be a big help. Under your forum accoung settings, Modify profile > Look and Layout, there is an option to increase the messages shown on one page from the default 15 to 50. It cuts the pages you have to go through in Steve's change list down to 5.

On another note, has anyone tried intelligence ships yet? I tried designing one to be a stealthy "detect the enemy with the intelligence device, stay within max range for a few days, and then leave" type of ship, but it just got too big to both stay undetected and be fast enough to follow enemies. I haven't researched cloaking yet nor have I ever used it though so maybe that will drastically change things.

[Culise]

That table of contents is so nice, and I also just thought of something that could be a big help. Under your forum accoung settings, Modify profile > Look and Layout, there is an option to increase the messages shown on one page from the default 15 to 50. It cuts the pages you have to go through in Steve's change list down to 5.

On another note, has anyone tried intelligence ships yet? I tried designing one to be a stealthy "detect the enemy with the intelligence device, stay within max range for a few days, and then leave" type of ship, but it just got too big to both stay undetected and be fast enough to follow enemies. I haven't researched cloaking yet nor have I ever used it though so maybe that will drastically change things.

I've just been putting ELINT modules on my diplomacy ships, and though I haven't run into too many enemies on an equal footing yet, I haven't had much trouble yet.  Diplomatic ships have their tonnage reduced for the purposes of trespassing penalties, so as long as they don't have other military systems (prominently engines and weapons) or any active sensors (even commercial sizes), I think it should work well.

Plus, diplomacy as a cover for espionage is a time-honored tradition going back to the first diplomats.

EDIT: I did forget to add one caveat. ELINTs are themselves military systems, so this will mean you need to design for a long endurance and cycle your embassy ships back for regular refit.

[Akura]

Started planning my first extra-solar colony. Two jumps away from Earth is Epsilon Indi. It's still being surveyed, but so far the resources found have been significant. Probably more than Sol.

Right now there's two potential candidates for being the "capital" and main population center of the system. Epsilon Indi-A III would be Earth-like if it more of an atmosphere than 1/4 of Earth's(it's also not breathable), but a few years of terraforming would fix that right up. The downside is, no minerals. Epsilon Indi-A II is twice the size(thus higher total population limit) than III, and has every mineral in the tens of millions except Boronide("just" 2.6m). The downsides are that minerals have poor accessibility, and more importantly the planet is a Venusian hellscape. It's actually worse of a Venusian hellscape than Venus is(colony cost 27.00, Venus is 25.00). Earth-like terraforming would take decades at least.

Whichever I choose, building terraforming stations isn't really a problem. Just getting them there is, since I really need to upgrade my tugboats. It takes years, for example, to drag a habitat station over to the distant asteroid mining colonies. They're getting a bit pissy about overcrowding, too.


Oh, and I just noticed one of my scientists is named "George George".

[Damiac]

None of this seems buggy to me. Annoyingly limited sure, but not broken.

Well my conditional order of "If less than 20% supplies then resupply at colony " doesn't trigger, so if it's not a bug, then what is it checking for?

Also, so many build points, what do you guys spend it on? It feels like I can make a hundred ships or thousands of army formations, which will quickly become obsolete and unneeded.

EDIT: I've come across a new challenge. My colonies with no minerals want protection, which requires ships, which requires maintenance facilities, which requires certain resources on said planet. Is there a way to say "keep 1000 of mineral X on this colony via mass drivers", or is it best to just make a big commercial maintenance ship and have it resupply when needed?

Obviously that's a bug, I think Steve says it's fixed in the version he's working on.

I spend build points early on a fleet of mining ships and a couple terraformers, my starting geo/grav scanners, jump gate constructors, and defense. I keep a lot for if I need something suddenly, no reason you have to spend it all right away.

Are these colonies in Sol? I know at least my earth forces provide protection for luna and mars. You can't mass drive through jump gates, unless something major has changed, so you'd have to ship the maint facilities, or like you said use a maint ship, and resupply every so often.

[Micro102]

I do feel I have to spend the instant points right away. They should be for deciding what your race researched and built before the game begins. It's not like 200 years later your guys can suddenly go "huh, we didn't build those ships 200 years ago, so let's just conjure into reality this new ship with all this new tech". It's a realism thing to me.

[Salmeuk]

I do feel I have to spend the instant points right away. They should be for deciding what your race researched and built before the game begins. It's not like 200 years later your guys can suddenly go "huh, we didn't build those ships 200 years ago, so let's just conjure into reality this new ship with all this new tech". It's a realism thing to me.

Aurora is a a lot like DF in that players get the most enjoyment from the game through the use of self-ascribed rules to define a potential narrative. I am of the opinion that if a particular mechanic feels like cheating, then it probably is! At that point it's up to the player to hold back. Hell, Aurora's spacemaster mode is a perfect example of why the game takes some self-control. If you play tabletop rpgs, you could say it's a dungeon master's game.

Started planning my first extra-solar colony. Two jumps away from Earth is Epsilon Indi. It's still being surveyed, but so far the resources found have been significant. Probably more than Sol.

Right now there's two potential candidates for being the "capital" and main population center of the system. Epsilon Indi-A III would be Earth-like if it more of an atmosphere than 1/4 of Earth's(it's also not breathable), but a few years of terraforming would fix that right up. The downside is, no minerals. Epsilon Indi-A II is twice the size(thus higher total population limit) than III, and has every mineral in the tens of millions except Boronide("just" 2.6m). The downsides are that minerals have poor accessibility, and more importantly the planet is a Venusian hellscape. It's actually worse of a Venusian hellscape than Venus is(colony cost 27.00, Venus is 25.00). Earth-like terraforming would take decades at least.

Whichever I choose, building terraforming stations isn't really a problem. Just getting them there is, since I really need to upgrade my tugboats. It takes years, for example, to drag a habitat station over to the distant asteroid mining colonies. They're getting a bit pissy about overcrowding, too.


Oh, and I just noticed one of my scientists is named "George George".

George George, didn't he engineer the first trans-newtonian cargo shuttle? What a guy.

RE: your conundrum, terraforming a venusian would be a century long project unless you have a couple hundred terraformers good to go. You should colonize the almost-earth like, use it as a production base, and mass driver all the automined minerals from Epsilon Indi-A II. However I am fairly inexperienced w/ Aurora so take this advice with a grain of salt.

I only recently discovered that, due to the mechanic that populations living on high-colony cost worlds need larger percentages of their workforce in the service and agricultural sectors, paired with the mechanic that higher populations need overall larger service and agricultural sectors, it becomes almost impossible to raise a workforce suitably large enough to run the hundred or so terraforming installations needed to make the world habitable. Since every million you add just increases the service sector percentage, there seems to be no way to 'start' a terraform with simply installations. That was a very painful way to waste an hour of fleet management.

[Micro102]

Just noticed something. My laser's tracking speed should be based on my ship's speed, but it doesn't seem to go under 4000 km/s. Even at a speed of 1, the tracking speed is 4000, at a speed of above 4000, the tracking speed matches that. Is this a bug? A feature? Does it translate into combat?