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Author Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games  (Read 2672668 times)

Grendus

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9690 on: January 26, 2012, 11:17:53 am »

So I'm back temporarily on this game, and I'm still confused by the "Racial Wealth" thing. Or rather, by keeping it up. I understand that it effects civilian shipping and such, but for the life of me I cannot keep it, you know, positive. Is there a trick to this, or should I just be constructing financial centers and research "Expand Economy" like crazy?
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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9691 on: January 26, 2012, 11:26:15 am »

I'm pretty sure "expand economy" is far more efficient. The financial centers are surprisingly expensive and slow to build and account for very little wealth individually.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9692 on: January 26, 2012, 11:27:37 am »

Basically, it is affected by two sets of things: wealth producers, and wealth consumers.

Planetary populations are your greatest source of wealth (assuming you aren't playing with a version where moneyships are possible). You also generate wealth from the activities of civilian vessels (taxes on cargo pickup, dropoff, and carrying cargo-each is a seperate, taxable activity), from civilian mining colonies, from financial centers, and from scrapping operations.

Your wealth is "used" for pretty much everything you do: installation operation, shipbuilding, shipyard expansion, supporting ground troops and ships, etc.


It can be difficult to balance wealth without cheating with moneyships, so your best bet for staying in the black is to cycle operations. In other words, don't be building factories, missiles, ships, ground troops, and fighters, while also expanding your shipyards and conducting research. Stick to two-three activities at a time, and you'll usually be able to balance things out. The Expand Civilian Economy research projects give a big boost, but have increasingly absurd RP requirements. IIRC, the later ones can get into hundreds of millions of RP required to complete. One or two is usually enough. I tend to avoid financial centers because they drain population away from important workforces for little return.

The best non-cheating way to have plenty of wealth is to do a conventional start with a high population (1-2 billion), as you will be building up massive amounts of population and wealth for decades while you slowly build up your T/N industry. Typically when I do this, I have in the neighborhood of 600,000-750,000 racial wealth by the time I start going negative on my income.
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BishopX

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9693 on: January 26, 2012, 11:58:37 am »

Basically, it is affected by two sets of things: wealth producers, and wealth consumers.

Planetary populations are your greatest source of wealth (assuming you aren't playing with a version where moneyships are possible). You also generate wealth from the activities of civilian vessels (taxes on cargo pickup, dropoff, and carrying cargo-each is a seperate, taxable activity), from civilian mining colonies, from financial centers, and from scrapping operations.

Your wealth is "used" for pretty much everything you do: installation operation, shipbuilding, shipyard expansion, supporting ground troops and ships, etc.


It can be difficult to balance wealth without cheating with moneyships, so your best bet for staying in the black is to cycle operations. In other words, don't be building factories, missiles, ships, ground troops, and fighters, while also expanding your shipyards and conducting research. Stick to two-three activities at a time, and you'll usually be able to balance things out. The Expand Civilian Economy research projects give a big boost, but have increasingly absurd RP requirements. IIRC, the later ones can get into hundreds of millions of RP required to complete. One or two is usually enough. I tend to avoid financial centers because they drain population away from important workforces for little return.

The best non-cheating way to have plenty of wealth is to do a conventional start with a high population (1-2 billion), as you will be building up massive amounts of population and wealth for decades while you slowly build up your T/N industry. Typically when I do this, I have in the neighborhood of 600,000-750,000 racial wealth by the time I start going negative on my income.

Becuase finacial centers are relativly cheap mineral wise, I'll occasionally dump several thousand minerals on an otherwise barren col cost 0 world along with the temporary loan of a dozen factories, and let them build financial sectors to their hearts content. Each financial center produces 100 times the wealth that the worker population would otherwise generate. So on a populous planet financial centers will increase your wealth by about ~25x if you include service sector and agriculture/environmental workers.
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LoSboccacc

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9694 on: January 26, 2012, 12:21:48 pm »

Isn't that functionally equivalent of building them on your own planet?

Same minerals, same factories (you said to borrow them) and you usually have workforce to spare anyway.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9695 on: January 26, 2012, 12:38:50 pm »

Basically, it is affected by two sets of things: wealth producers, and wealth consumers.

Planetary populations are your greatest source of wealth (assuming you aren't playing with a version where moneyships are possible). You also generate wealth from the activities of civilian vessels (taxes on cargo pickup, dropoff, and carrying cargo-each is a seperate, taxable activity), from civilian mining colonies, from financial centers, and from scrapping operations.

Your wealth is "used" for pretty much everything you do: installation operation, shipbuilding, shipyard expansion, supporting ground troops and ships, etc.


It can be difficult to balance wealth without cheating with moneyships, so your best bet for staying in the black is to cycle operations. In other words, don't be building factories, missiles, ships, ground troops, and fighters, while also expanding your shipyards and conducting research. Stick to two-three activities at a time, and you'll usually be able to balance things out. The Expand Civilian Economy research projects give a big boost, but have increasingly absurd RP requirements. IIRC, the later ones can get into hundreds of millions of RP required to complete. One or two is usually enough. I tend to avoid financial centers because they drain population away from important workforces for little return.

The best non-cheating way to have plenty of wealth is to do a conventional start with a high population (1-2 billion), as you will be building up massive amounts of population and wealth for decades while you slowly build up your T/N industry. Typically when I do this, I have in the neighborhood of 600,000-750,000 racial wealth by the time I start going negative on my income.

Becuase finacial centers are relativly cheap mineral wise, I'll occasionally dump several thousand minerals on an otherwise barren col cost 0 world along with the temporary loan of a dozen factories, and let them build financial sectors to their hearts content. Each financial center produces 100 times the wealth that the worker population would otherwise generate. So on a populous planet financial centers will increase your wealth by about ~25x if you include service sector and agriculture/environmental workers.

That ignores the point I made: using financial centers takes population directly away from your manufacturing sector workforce, meaning that if you have an efficient pattern of growth and development (you are expanding industry, shipyard capacity, research labs, etc. at such a rate that population growth barely keeps everything fully staffed), building more than a handful of them will seriously reduce the efficiency of your entire planet. Financial centers (IIRC) do NOT increase the base wealth output per capita, as you appear to be suggesting (this is what the Civilian Economy techs do), but rather provide additional income. So yes, they are feasible for increasing wealth output on worlds which are useless for everything other than building a taxable population, but that pretty clearly doesn't apply to the situation at hand (making sure you have a decent output of wealth in the early stages of the game, so you don't end up deep in the red later). Making pure pop/wealth colony worlds isn't something you'll even be thinking about until (depending on the exact details of your start) anywhere from 15 to 50 years into your game, much less putting it into practice.
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Metalax

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9696 on: January 26, 2012, 12:57:22 pm »

Isn't that functionally equivalent of building them on your own planet?

Same minerals, same factories (you said to borrow them) and you usually have workforce to spare anyway.

It is, if you have the workforce to spare, which is usually the sticking point. Between staffing research labs, shipyards and factories there are usually insufficient workers to spare for any significant numbers of financial centers to be built on your main worlds. Coupled with the slow population growth on large population worlds, it frequently works better to set up your finacial centers on otherwise unused colonies.

However as dice has said, finance worlds are unlikley to be something you will want to concentrate on early on. The best way I've found for getting your income up in the early game is to get multiple mid size (25m+) colonies up as soon as possible. As well as the direct income from these colonies, this lets your civilian luxury liners start earning money on each direction of their journey as well as providing sources and destinations for your civ freighters to be shifting goods without having to wait for goods to accumulate/demand regrow. If you couple this with researching the first couple of economy expansions, it gives you a good base to grow from.
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Hanzoku

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9697 on: January 26, 2012, 04:55:35 pm »

Basically, it is affected by two sets of things: wealth producers, and wealth consumers.

Planetary populations are your greatest source of wealth (assuming you aren't playing with a version where moneyships are possible). You also generate wealth from the activities of civilian vessels (taxes on cargo pickup, dropoff, and carrying cargo-each is a seperate, taxable activity), from civilian mining colonies, from financial centers, and from scrapping operations.

Your wealth is "used" for pretty much everything you do: installation operation, shipbuilding, shipyard expansion, supporting ground troops and ships, etc.


It can be difficult to balance wealth without cheating with moneyships, so your best bet for staying in the black is to cycle operations. In other words, don't be building factories, missiles, ships, ground troops, and fighters, while also expanding your shipyards and conducting research. Stick to two-three activities at a time, and you'll usually be able to balance things out. The Expand Civilian Economy research projects give a big boost, but have increasingly absurd RP requirements. IIRC, the later ones can get into hundreds of millions of RP required to complete. One or two is usually enough. I tend to avoid financial centers because they drain population away from important workforces for little return.

The best non-cheating way to have plenty of wealth is to do a conventional start with a high population (1-2 billion), as you will be building up massive amounts of population and wealth for decades while you slowly build up your T/N industry. Typically when I do this, I have in the neighborhood of 600,000-750,000 racial wealth by the time I start going negative on my income.

Becuase finacial centers are relativly cheap mineral wise, I'll occasionally dump several thousand minerals on an otherwise barren col cost 0 world along with the temporary loan of a dozen factories, and let them build financial sectors to their hearts content. Each financial center produces 100 times the wealth that the worker population would otherwise generate. So on a populous planet financial centers will increase your wealth by about ~25x if you include service sector and agriculture/environmental workers.

That ignores the point I made: using financial centers takes population directly away from your manufacturing sector workforce, meaning that if you have an efficient pattern of growth and development (you are expanding industry, shipyard capacity, research labs, etc. at such a rate that population growth barely keeps everything fully staffed), building more than a handful of them will seriously reduce the efficiency of your entire planet. Financial centers (IIRC) do NOT increase the base wealth output per capita, as you appear to be suggesting (this is what the Civilian Economy techs do), but rather provide additional income. So yes, they are feasible for increasing wealth output on worlds which are useless for everything other than building a taxable population, but that pretty clearly doesn't apply to the situation at hand (making sure you have a decent output of wealth in the early stages of the game, so you don't end up deep in the red later). Making pure pop/wealth colony worlds isn't something you'll even be thinking about until (depending on the exact details of your start) anywhere from 15 to 50 years into your game, much less putting it into practice.

Not entirely true. There are a few caveats to this - if you're doing a conventional start game AND Mars is lacking in Trans-Newtonian minerals, it does make sense to use Mars as a money/population generator, as it helps get your civilian economy up and running to have a colony in-system with Earth, and Mars is easiest to terraform for that purpose.

By a Trans-Newtonian start game, I agree that if Mars is a no go, it's probably easier to explore and found an out-system colony if you strike a mother-lode nearby.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9698 on: January 26, 2012, 05:06:51 pm »

Basically, it is affected by two sets of things: wealth producers, and wealth consumers.

Planetary populations are your greatest source of wealth (assuming you aren't playing with a version where moneyships are possible). You also generate wealth from the activities of civilian vessels (taxes on cargo pickup, dropoff, and carrying cargo-each is a seperate, taxable activity), from civilian mining colonies, from financial centers, and from scrapping operations.

Your wealth is "used" for pretty much everything you do: installation operation, shipbuilding, shipyard expansion, supporting ground troops and ships, etc.


It can be difficult to balance wealth without cheating with moneyships, so your best bet for staying in the black is to cycle operations. In other words, don't be building factories, missiles, ships, ground troops, and fighters, while also expanding your shipyards and conducting research. Stick to two-three activities at a time, and you'll usually be able to balance things out. The Expand Civilian Economy research projects give a big boost, but have increasingly absurd RP requirements. IIRC, the later ones can get into hundreds of millions of RP required to complete. One or two is usually enough. I tend to avoid financial centers because they drain population away from important workforces for little return.

The best non-cheating way to have plenty of wealth is to do a conventional start with a high population (1-2 billion), as you will be building up massive amounts of population and wealth for decades while you slowly build up your T/N industry. Typically when I do this, I have in the neighborhood of 600,000-750,000 racial wealth by the time I start going negative on my income.

Becuase finacial centers are relativly cheap mineral wise, I'll occasionally dump several thousand minerals on an otherwise barren col cost 0 world along with the temporary loan of a dozen factories, and let them build financial sectors to their hearts content. Each financial center produces 100 times the wealth that the worker population would otherwise generate. So on a populous planet financial centers will increase your wealth by about ~25x if you include service sector and agriculture/environmental workers.

That ignores the point I made: using financial centers takes population directly away from your manufacturing sector workforce, meaning that if you have an efficient pattern of growth and development (you are expanding industry, shipyard capacity, research labs, etc. at such a rate that population growth barely keeps everything fully staffed), building more than a handful of them will seriously reduce the efficiency of your entire planet. Financial centers (IIRC) do NOT increase the base wealth output per capita, as you appear to be suggesting (this is what the Civilian Economy techs do), but rather provide additional income. So yes, they are feasible for increasing wealth output on worlds which are useless for everything other than building a taxable population, but that pretty clearly doesn't apply to the situation at hand (making sure you have a decent output of wealth in the early stages of the game, so you don't end up deep in the red later). Making pure pop/wealth colony worlds isn't something you'll even be thinking about until (depending on the exact details of your start) anywhere from 15 to 50 years into your game, much less putting it into practice.

Not entirely true. There are a few caveats to this - if you're doing a conventional start game AND Mars is lacking in Trans-Newtonian minerals, it does make sense to use Mars as a money/population generator, as it helps get your civilian economy up and running to have a colony in-system with Earth, and Mars is easiest to terraform for that purpose.

By a Trans-Newtonian start game, I agree that if Mars is a no go, it's probably easier to explore and found an out-system colony if you strike a mother-lode nearby.

True, but I always drop a small seed colony on Mars, regardless of conditions there or starting tech. The thing is, you still need to build up a substantial population and set of financial centers on Mars for it to be an effective wealth generator, and to do that, you have to take population away from Earth where they could be doing something more useful, as well as dedicating the construction factory and freighter time to move the FCs over. I rarely move more than ~1-2 million colonists over, and do the same for most out-system colonies, and then let them grow in their own time. Actually, more than as a wealth planet, I like to use Mars as a source of colonists, as you can plant a small group early on, and by the time you're colonizing outside Sol, there are enough people on Mars for it to act as a good source of colonists, so you don't have to take them away from Earth. So yeah, Mars is a good early investment, especially in conventional starts, so long as you don't put too much into it that it won't be able to provide returns for in the foreseeable future.
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Bremen

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9699 on: January 26, 2012, 08:10:52 pm »

I am convinced some part of the fabric of the universe instinctively hates LPs and tries to kill them. This is why LPers computers are always dying, or they lose internet, or games just go wrong in strange ways



I've played Aurora for years and I've barely even seen the Star Swarm. So it of course figures that two queens come to eat the Sol system 6 years into a conventional start LP :P

This is exactly the situation that made me pre-emptively ask for the designer mode password, so time to do a little pre-emptive retconning.
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SirAaronIII

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9700 on: January 26, 2012, 08:25:01 pm »

You should at least try to fight them, it might be funny and it'd definitely be really awesome if you win.

Yeah that's probably not going to happen.
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Bremen

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9701 on: January 26, 2012, 08:39:46 pm »

The sum total of Earth's armed vessels was two of these:

Code: [Select]
Napoleon class Patrol Ship    2,250 tons     200 Crew     341.4 BP      TCS 45  TH 180  EM 0
4000 km/s     Armour 2-15     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 3     PPV 18
Maint Life 12.42 Years     MSP 285    AFR 13%    IFR 0.2%    1YR 3    5YR 51    Max Repair 36 MSP

Military Ion Drive (3)    Power 60    Fuel Use 60%    Signature 60    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 60,000 Litres    Range 80.0 billion km   (231 days at full power)

Advanced Coil Gun (3x3)    Range 30,000km     TS: 4000 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 100%     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Patrol Ship Targeting Computer (1)    Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 4000 km/s     84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0

Short Range Targeting Sensor (1)     GPS 21     Range 2.3m km    Resolution 1

It wouldn't have even been a fight worth writing down :P

I ended up deleting them and then immediately regretted it. Might have been fun to have a swarm infested system next to Sol as long as I kept deleting the queens they sent through. Oh well!

I'll probably let the humans expand at least a little before I start throwing surprises at them :P
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Sheb

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9702 on: January 27, 2012, 11:39:38 am »

I'm still sad. You should've left one of them alive, wait for it to discharge the Soldiers and then leave only 2-3 of them. Thay would've killed our ships and shipyards, then moved away. (Because you would delete them). Would make for great fun.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9703 on: January 27, 2012, 11:41:25 am »

Or you could have let them flood the Earth with radiation in a doomsday scenario, forcing you to escape with whatever you could. (Obviously you would delete the soldiers)
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Sheb

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Re: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games
« Reply #9704 on: January 27, 2012, 11:44:02 am »

That would not be much. Did we even have colony ships?

Still, playing a few tens of thousands of Martian colonists, living in constant fear of the Swarm would be FUN if it could be done.
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