Print

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

[Shooer]

Anyone picked up from escape pods will go into any spare cryo-berths first and overflow will be counted against your crew space.  Anyone picked up in a ship without excess cryo or crew space will behave the same as if there were more crew than crew quarters.  This means potential life-support failures if you go over your crew space.

Honestly it's fine to pick up a small number of escape pods with your regular military ships, as long as they are heading right towards a friendly port right after.  I usually add 100-300 person worth of cryo to my salvage or tug ship and use it as a hospital ship.

[Micro102]

I really liked this game when I first tried it years ago, but was turned off by the many 5 second pauses when enemies fought in another part of the galaxy and how your initial expansion could go on for a very long time without you having a grasp on how much of everything you need. For example, I've got 3 solar systems being mined. Should I have 200,000 tons of ships on standby? Is the enemy upon finding me going to appear with 500,000 tons of ships???

Has anything changed to dilute these problems?

[Dorsidwarf]

There’s the fact that tonnage is largely irrelevant, as small high-tech (or in some cases, just well-designed) fleets can easily dismantle huge crude armadas, but I’ve always found that since NPRs aren’t particularly aggressive, learning to fight against the local precursor guardian fleets is a fairly safe intro, and if you’re new then stumbling over a crisis will end your game anyway

[LoSboccacc]

I really liked this game when I first tried it years ago, but was turned off by the many 5 second pauses when enemies fought in another part of the galaxy and how your initial expansion could go on for a very long time without you having a grasp on how much of everything you need. For example, I've got 3 solar systems being mined. Should I have 200,000 tons of ships on standby? Is the enemy upon finding me going to appear with 500,000 tons of ships???

Has anything changed to dilute these problems?

not really, mostly is a miscommunication of the game concept itself: aurora is more of a storytelling tool than a proper game. it kinda works as a game, but those issue you mention remains valid especially if you don't want to sm your way out of trouble.

[Retropunch]

I really liked this game when I first tried it years ago, but was turned off by the many 5 second pauses when enemies fought in another part of the galaxy and how your initial expansion could go on for a very long time without you having a grasp on how much of everything you need. For example, I've got 3 solar systems being mined. Should I have 200,000 tons of ships on standby? Is the enemy upon finding me going to appear with 500,000 tons of ships???

Has anything changed to dilute these problems?

There's a C# version coming out soon^tm which should fix your issues (gets rid of the pauses, much better control/visibility etc.) and make it into a proper game without all the limitations currently there. From the forums it seems to be coming along really well, and most of the major bits are done. The dev has run tests with situations which would have normally have given 2 minute pauses at each turn and  now don't pause at all.

When that version releases, it'll definitely move from storytelling tool/sort-of-a-game to being a proper 4X, especially now that games don't have a limited life time.

[Blood_Librarian]

How is the C# going along? I understood it was a semi-glacial pace since its inception some years ago, but apparently its in its final lap? How exciting.

[Retropunch]

How is the C# going along? I understood it was a semi-glacial pace since its inception some years ago, but apparently its in its final lap? How exciting.

Yeah for a while the dev (Steve) was going along with developing both and the C# was a *maybe* as it'd be such a lot of work. However, he got some free time and started porting across (which apparently wasn't as difficult as originally thought) and he made really good progress.

There was a second lull due to life issues, but C# development has picked up a lot recently and I believe all development time going forward is going to go into the C# version. It's apparently in a sort of playable state now, and he's hoping for a release by the end of the year or early next year.

In terms of changes you can view them all here: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.75

Although there are a lot of other planned changes that have been talked about in other areas of the forum - it seems like a lot is going into making it more of a 'game' by making a lot of the more convoluted stuff more transparent and straight forward. Whilst I usually get a bit worried about any talk of 'simplifying' games, I think Aurora is one of the few cases where it's needed. Stuff like automating component/weapon assignment, much easier ship/fleet commands and condensed reports will all make it easier to play whilst still keeping the complexity there.



 

[Culise]

How is the C# going along? I understood it was a semi-glacial pace since its inception some years ago, but apparently its in its final lap? How exciting.

Aye. There's no real estimate, but the going date right now is 2019 or so.  I'm rather looking forward to it when it comes out. 

Also, there is one feature that helps a bit with endless 5-second increments.  In the game settings, there's a new Detection setting that can be used to alter how sensors are handled in systems without a player presence.  By setting it to always active or never active, the increment issues can be reduced to actual combat engagements, which avoids the situation where two non-combatant or disarmed fleets end up flying around pinging each other for eternity.  It's not going to solve every issue with it, but it will reduce some of the worst. 

[Detros]

For desperate measures there is also that space bubble setting which literally makes all other systems than the one selected to freeze. Good for big battles where you don't want to spend computation resources on distant corners of galaxy while this one system is so hot just now.

[Blood_Librarian]

That sounds neat. I also like the fact that they set up trade ships in a massively optimized way instead of the ugly way they are now.

[iceball3]

Another way to mitigate other-spacial contacts is to drastically reduce the amount of opposing threats you can meet. For instance, making sure that NPR count is at most 1.
There's also a setting that makes other empires either automatically succeed (without calculation) or automatically fail sensor contacts when they're in systems that the player has no presence in. The former option is so that enemies conduct warfare per normal, but they get it over with, skipping sensor envelope detection turns and going straight for the kill.
The other option skips sensor contact entirely, which should basically stop detection from occurring in systems that the player cannot witness anything. This means that you can have many threats in the galaxy without being bogged down by constant unseen wars. However, if you go several decades before entering a particular system, you might find that several alien races have made it their home, will rapidly tank their mutual standing due to the co-presence of military vessels suddenly being detected, and a massive galactic knife-fight of a war breaking out. This has some very interesting AAR report potential due to the sheer amount of military action being carried out by third parties, with the player only able to bear witness where their sensors can see (though laser and missile impacts on ships are reported system-wide, regardless of whether a ship you have in the system has sensors in the first place).

[Dorsidwarf]

Presumably the free built-in ship sensors can detect energy bursts of that magnitude with unlimited range

[iceball3]

Presumably the free built-in ship sensors can detect energy bursts of that magnitude with unlimited range

Agreed! At least, within the starsystem

[StagnantSoul]

Odd, found a star system only one jump from Sol, twenty wrecks ranging from 4k-25.5k size... Sensors aren't picking up any active ships, just wrecks, and the planets are all uninhabited. Currently have a ship sifting through the mess, it's all tier 1 tech.

[Flying Dice]

Finally got around to reading the newer C# changelog posts. The ground forces overhaul is going to be gorram amazing.