Cool game. I started playing it a few days ago. The first time I went out and explored the galaxy as soon as I could get a jump drive, met a really nasty NPR really early (before I had good enough tech to deal with it), and fought a bitter losing war for several years until they started nuking earth and I gave up. Its ships were slower than mine, but their missiles were DEADLY and heavily armored. I used my industry to build tons of ship components and cranked out ships like crazy (ran out of crew, even though I had 10 military academies). But even with my best fleet during the war (lots of PD ships escorting my heavy beam ships, I didn't go for missile tech yet) my lasers only shot about 90% of their missiles down before they reached my fleet, and the other 10% devastated pretty much everything. They just punched right through my armor. Close in I could tear them up, I just never got enough ships past their missiles to overcome them. I might have done better if I knew what I was doing, though - none of my ships performed very well.
Now I'm roleplaying a race with no jump technology, expanding locally until the NPRs (started with 2) come to me to "inspire" the jump tech. Or at least that was the idea - it's now year 2063 (started 2025) and they still haven't showed, I'm starting to wonder if the NPRs are programmed to eventually invade Sol. It's fun to see what you can do with the Sol system, though - I have huge colonies on Mercury, Mars, Callisto (it randomly gave me .8 gravity tolerance, so I could settle Callisto on this game), and a good sized one on Titan (limited by infrastructure, but my thriving commercial sector seems to be supplying it with as much as it needs).
I got lucky on minerals I think. Just about everything in the sector is loaded with minerals. Venus had like 100 million of assorted minerals, mostly in a huge 50 million duranium deposit with 1 accessibility. Mercury had about 24 million all total in a variety of things, mostly above 0.5 accessibility. Even Luna had 5.5 million minerals, mostly Duranium. Titan and Callisto also had a few million each, but not much variety and low accessibility. A far cry from the duranium shortages I faced in my first game.
I was surprised how easy it was to terraform Mercury. It started at like 25 colony cost, but it was 0 colony cost before I even got it to 1 atmosphere - the anti-greenhouse gas is quite efficient. Titan proved far more difficult - it started at 8, but even after several atmospheres and apparently maxing it out on greenhouse gas it's still at a temperature penalty of 2.0 (22 temp deviation on the race). Now I'm working on a 100 year project to terraform Venus (1 atm per year). I'll probably never finish that one, though - as soon as I start exploring I'll find planets without a 100 density atmosphere to remove. It would be cool to have the entire inner solar system colonized, though.
Any year now I'm expecting a massive NPR invasion to come in, or at least a little scout ship to say Hi, although if it hasn't arrived by 2075 or so I'm going to cave and just research jump tech and go looking for them.
The game takes a little bit to get used to, since it's just so complex. I'm still learning the interface, but it's a strangely satisfying game, even when not much is happening - just building up colonies, researching, and maintaining a combat fleet for an invasion that may never come is entertaining enough for me to keep playing this crazy no-jump-ships game of mine.
Author
Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2854637 times)