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[MCreeper]

Turn based, but you can make "turns" with lenght ranging from 5 seconds to one month

[Madman198237]

Neither. It's incremented, which means you set actions and then choose the time increment you want played through.

The AI only reacts to actions at the beginnings of increments, though, so it's sort of turn based?

[My Name is Immaterial]

Ooooh so the only 'mods' are skins. That's fine, was just hoping some mad genius in his garage spent 30 months madly making a mod or something that'd be cool. Download keeps failing on me at around 90%... Could just be my modem periodically gapping out. I'll just give it a try in two days.

Also, one site described it as real time, another as turn based... Which is it?

I mean, the game by itself is really great, and doesn't need mods. There's lots of playstyles, and they all feel unique. There's a lot of content to explore before you feel like you'd need mods.

Have you ever played Crusader Kings II? It's a bit like that; it's realtime, broken down into time segments: you can play a 'turn' that's anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 days, depending on whether or not you're in combat. If you're in combat, you'll want to play in < 60 second segments so you can deal with incoming missiles, and returning fire.

Edit: Ninja'd. Oops.

[StagnantSoul]

Ooooh so the only 'mods' are skins. That's fine, was just hoping some mad genius in his garage spent 30 months madly making a mod or something that'd be cool. Download keeps failing on me at around 90%... Could just be my modem periodically gapping out. I'll just give it a try in two days.

Also, one site described it as real time, another as turn based... Which is it?

I mean, the game by itself is really great, and doesn't need mods. There's lots of playstyles, and they all feel unique. There's a lot of content to explore before you feel like you'd need mods.

Have you ever played Crusader Kings II? It's a bit like that; it's realtime, broken down into time segments: you can play a 'turn' that's anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 days, depending on whether or not you're in combat. If you're in combat, you'll want to play in < 60 second segments so you can deal with incoming missiles, and returning fire.

Edit: Ninja'd. Oops.

I'm likely to go for a carrier rush and missile spam, maybe some battleships once in a while... How I generally go in such games.

And yeah I have, makes more sense now though. So I could just skip a ton of time sitting there watching a mine go, but watch each tiny movement during combat.

[Rince Wind]

Ooooh so the only 'mods' are skins. That's fine, was just hoping some mad genius in his garage spent 30 months madly making a mod or something that'd be cool.

That kind of describes that game, though it would be a lot longer than 30 months.

[My Name is Immaterial]

I'm likely to go for a carrier rush and missile spam, maybe some battleships once in a while... How I generally go in such games.

And yeah I have, makes more sense now though. So I could just skip a ton of time sitting there watching a mine go, but watch each tiny movement during combat.

Carrier and missile spam? Enjoy your logistical nightmares.

That's about right. Mines will mine, researchers will research, shipyards will construct, survey ships will survey, cargo ships will ship cargo, etc.

[Damiac]

So in my game, I've got a decent empire going, actually have fuel stocks available outside the sol system, and have started building a military, although I ramped up production too hard, as usual, so I'm facing a bit of a duranium crunch at the moment.  I just need to prioritize mines, automines, and asteroid mining ships, and hold off on adding more production, or at least slowing it down a bit.

I'm running into a few issues that I was hoping maybe someone might be able to assist me with:

1. Earth has a 22m worker shortage.  Earth is my industry, shipbuilding, and research capital. It's also the main hub of my empire, so it tends to have the best mineral stockpiles.  However industry, shipbuilding, and research all use a lot of workers, and it doesn't seem feasible to have earth continue to do all that.  The easiest solution I see is to tow my shipyards to mars, which has a lot of workers to spare, but then I've got to make sure both earth and mars have enough minerals for their various production.  Currently this worker shortage is preventing my research from really getting any faster, as I just lose efficiency as I add more research facilities due to the worker shortage.

2. Almost all of my civilian shipping is trading with aliens, but I'm making a negligible amount of wealth from it (Like 0.4% of my income).  Meanwhile I have tons of shipping contracts not being fulfilled because they're too busy shipping garbage to aliens.  I wouldn't mind if I made some wealth, but as it is, I'm making practically nothing off this, even though there seem to be about 30 ships going back and forth trading.  Is this normal? I expected trade to be a lot more lucrative.

3. I can't really figure out how to make a tonnage efficient fleet with good range, and speed.  So what I've been doing is making carriers with huge commercial engines, tons of fuel, and lots and lots of engineering spaces and maint storage, and 15000 tons of hangar storage. They travel at about 2000 km/s, so it's not horrible, but clearly they're not going to be able to keep up in battles, and they're not armed anyway.
Then I have a series of 15000 ton warships, with power boosted engines, and enough fuel storage for about 4 days of travel, going at 16000 km/s.  I figure that speed will mean they should be able to close with almost anything.

My plan is to bring my carriers to the system where I want to fight, deploy the warships, and have the carriers hang back at the jump gate, ready to scram if they get targeted.  Meanwhile the fast ships will engage the enemies.  When the battle is over, the fast ships get back into the carriers and everyone can go home.

The problem is, these carriers are like 35000 tons.  Each 15000 ton warship needs a carrier.  This means I'm building 50000 tons of ship but only getting 15000 tons of firepower, and the rest of that tonnage is just to get it to the system it needs to be at, without putting a huge dent in my fuel supply. 

My warships all have either gauss or 15cm lasers. I also have a gauss variant that drops a few cannons to hold some sensors, and another variant that's just a fast tanker to stick with the attack fleet for extended engagements.  My 4x tracking speed fire controls have 16000km/s tracking speed, so I was quite happy to get the ships to that speed, meaning I don't need turrets to take full advantage of the tracking speed, saving some tonnage. 

I noticed in the design display, it showed the tracking speed as the ship speed, rather than 16000 km/s, as I would have expected by from the fire control.  I'm apparently still a little confused on tracking speed...

I know there are 3 variables in play.
Ship speed (if not turreted) OR turret tracking speed (if turret mounted)
Base tracking speed tech
Fire control tracking speed.

The way I thought it worked was:
Weapon tracking speed = The greater of Base tracking speed tech or ship/turret speed
Firing Tracking speed = the lesser of weapon tracking speed or fire control tracking speed.

Meaning I would expect any given weapon to never be able to track faster than the linked fire control's tracking speed.  But it seems like the display is telling me that my lasers and gauss will track at the ship's speed, 16600, rather than the fire control's speed, 16000.  If that's true, I'm wasting the space of the 4x tracking speed fire controls.  Can anyone enlighten me on this?

[StagnantSoul]

(Theoretical case as this game hasn't been gotten by me yet)

1:Which planet is closer to the aliens? Move the shipyard to that, and use a slow amount of civilian ships to get to the aliens for trade faster till it evens out to what it was on earth, then use the remains to trickle resources from earth to Mars till Mars is able to survive on its own.

2: Why not have your fleet, instead of being a large unarmed carrier with sub ships, be a larger battleship with some tiny corvettes running sensor duty and a medium sized tug running fuel etc duty, with a few destroyers to back up the battleship?

[MCreeper]

My question.  How big you can build more or less properly working battleship? I didn't played past my first glance, but from what i read, military engines are a lot less efficient than commercial. And since military ships are supposed to be smaller than commercial, i suspect that at some poimt it becomes awkward contraption made almost purely from engines and fuel tanks, if you manage to upgrade your shipyards enough. And is there point to build very big battleships at all?

[Rince Wind]

Which techlevel are you at? The combination of very quick ships and small lasers seems weird.

My ships usually devote 25 to 40% of their mass to the current best engine tech without a boost. 12 months of deployment time (though they could do with less usually), at least 5 layers of armor.
All line ships have the same percentage of engines, so they go at the and speed.
The big guns get tracking speed as needed, usually 2x, and Max range while PD gets 4x tracking and 1x range. Only pd is turreted.

[Madman198237]

Don't run those high-power engines, they're too inefficient on fuel.

1000 tons or less can use the high-power engines. We call those FACs. Anything larger should have standard efficiency or greater efficiency engines.

I like missile ships, in fact. If you build a full-system-scanning long-range-missile ship firing relatively slow but fuel efficient missiles that MIRV at the end of the flight path, you can get away with relatively small hulls that move fairly slowly on extremely efficient engines.

Anyway, anything above 1000 tons should never be a carrier-born vessel.

[Shooer]

My question.  How big you can build more or less properly working battleship? I didn't played past my first glance, but from what i read, military engines are a lot less efficient than commercial. And since military ships are supposed to be smaller than commercial, i suspect that at some poimt it becomes awkward contraption made almost purely from engines and fuel tanks, if you manage to upgrade your shipyards enough. And is there point to build very big battleships at all?

The carriers I run are in the 100k ton range.  The main warships I run are 8k to 15k. 

I've done a game with 200k ton main line warships, but that one I cheated a bit and I had only 2 and couldn't fix or replace them.  I eventually was able to get a shipyard up that could maintain them but they had been mothballed into massive pdcs to store them (ships in hangers don't cost maint to upkeep) because of damages and prohibitive costs.  Each one at Mag Fusion tech were more than enough to work their way through several precursor systems without resupply or support.  Fuel wasn't the main issue, it was the wealth costs of running them and the maint supplies they ate(as I had planned). 

Fuel wasn't that big of an issue for them with 30% efficient max sized engines.  If you are making large ships you give them large engines.  After a certain point a ships size is it's defense.  It can just tank any thing that gets through PD to do what ever it needs to do.
Given another 100 in game years and I probably could have started replacing them with newer higher tech versions and been able to afford them.

I set up a game with 600k ships as a potential nomad game.  Never got past setup for that one though.

[Flying Dice]

My question.  How big you can build more or less properly working battleship? I didn't played past my first glance, but from what i read, military engines are a lot less efficient than commercial. And since military ships are supposed to be smaller than commercial, i suspect that at some poimt it becomes awkward contraption made almost purely from engines and fuel tanks, if you manage to upgrade your shipyards enough. And is there point to build very big battleships at all?

Depends entirely on your tech. A "big" capship at TL3-4ish might be 20k tons. One at TL8-9 might be 70k+.

Big ships are advantageous because they're a lot harder to kill. The depth of a ship's armor belt is determined by how many points of armor you allot to the design. The length of it is determined by how large the ship is. Larger ship = longer armor belt (i.e. more surface area) = more potential hit locations = lower likelihood of two hits overlapping. They also tend to have more staying power because if you're already building a fuckoff huge ship, slapping on more maintenance/magazine/fuel storage is less difficult than on a design where you have to pinch every HS possible to make it work. You can also freely toss in enough shields that a lot of enemies won't even scratch the armor, in part because of how much extra fuel you can carry.

Downsides, obviously, are that they're a bitch to build, maintain, repair, upgrade, and support. Aurora logistics are really damn punishing for large vessels. It's why jump point fortresses a la Starfire just flat out weren't possible for a long time unless you played with maintenance off: you'd need an entire system's industry to support them, and you'd have to tow them back to a shipyard for overhauls in a constant cycle. Even now big warships aren't really economical in the way that carrier groups supported by cruisers and frigates are, the superdreadnaught/monitor paradigm doesn't really translate to Aurora.

[StagnantSoul]

Hmm... But how would say a big battleship and an average carrier with destroyer and corvette support do versus a group of multiple carriers and cruisers? On average. I know it'd come down to tech, design, etc.

[Madman198237]

It depends so heavily on stats and weapons that nobody can answer that question.

If you give more detail, we might be able to give you an answer.