Building an Interstellar Empire

[Zeebie (OP)]

I'm at a quiet point in my first real game, and I'm pondering how to strategize building a proper interstellar empire.  Right now I have major presences (million+ population, some industry) in three systems and a fleet that comfortably mops up Precursor fleets when they appear.

- One of the things I'm wondering about is how I should think about my other-system colonies.  Mine are thriving, but it's clear that they will never rival my homeworld for productivity of any kind.  What are colonies good for?  Other than mining or providing a fueling/maintenance stop, I'm wondering how I should be thinking about their future? Or should the whole galaxy just be a big mine sending resources to my home world?
- In games like MoO2, a bigger empire was objectively better.  It's not obvious to me that this is true in Aurora.  How big do you guys expand your empires? Is there a major benefit to serious expansion?
- The 4 jump limit on auto-navigation seems to put a pretty serious limit on expansion.  Are there ways to work around that? Can civilians contribute to building far-flung worlds, or are they forever limited to the four systems around my homeworld?
- This is tangential, but where are the aliens? I've explored 58 systems and found no NPRs.  I used the default settings for world generation.

Thanks for any thoughts on your empire building strategies!

[chrislocke2000]

Couple of pointers for you

- You will generally find that admin leaders start to excel in particular areas being mining or ship production or troop training etc. Consequently having specialist colonies with the correct administrator can drastically increase your overall output.

- Growth rates on smaller colonies sit in the 10% odd mark whilst your home planet will be down to just a couple of percent. As you increase your rate of growth through tech research etc most people will find themselves short of population if just restricted to the home world so again moving some production to other planets helps a lot on this pressure.

- Trade between your planets will have a huge benefit to your finances as shoudl help to make sure you can pay for all those shiny ships etc. As you gain larger colonies it will increase demand on civilian shipping and help them to increase their tax paying fleets.

- Meeting alien races can be real hit and miss, sometimes you can find several within a few jumps of your homeworld. To solve this either up the chance of an NPR on the setup page or SM a few in where you have already found habitable planets.

Hope that helps

[Redshirt]

One easy solution to the four-jump-limit is simple refueling colonies. Find a world with Sorium deposits, dump some auto-mines there, then haul on over some infrastructure and fuel refineries. It works well as a stepping stone- eventually you'll probably put some PDCs and maintenance facilities there as well, and some construction factories, and it's well on the way to becoming a colony. I try to put these, where possible, in "junction" or "nexus" systems- ones with multiple jump points. You'll want to control these systems, anyway, as it helps control the flow of NPRs through systems.

You need to build jump gates between colonies, of course, for civilian traffic.

Two other ways to jump-start colonies:
1. Invade someone's home-world. Be aware that this can take a lot of resources and troops.
2. Ruins. Once I got extremely lucky and found a Tech 5 level ruin with over 100 abandoned installations. I dumped five engineering brigades there as quickly as possible, and it quickly became my secondary research world.

[Nathan_]

Aurora is still a work in process, Steve can and will improve any areas that come up. For now though, a jump limit of 4 will potentially put more than a hundred starsystems within range of earth.

[Erik L]

Aurora is still a work in process, Steve can and will improve any areas that come up. For now though, a jump limit of 4 will potentially put more than a hundred starsystems within range of earth.

I believe the original reason for the limitation was the civilian ships got lost when there were more than four nodes on the path.

[telegraph]

Indeed, your homeworld is a real bitch. not only it usually the best-developed planet for both production and research, but it also does not violently require protection.

It really works to make your empire by the likes of British Empire - have a lot of small colonies everywhere. Strip-mine systems and keep your colonies poor and small. Move all extra population back to the homeworld. Put the best administrator on Earth.

This way you will have a market for home-produced merchandise and colonies will supply you with other extravaganza. Your taxes and production on home planet will skyrocket due to the large population and good management. You will not need to keep large military force in every system. Few cruisers will keep 25-50M colonies content. Your small colonies will be a dropoff for local mining, while your military freighters will constantly fetch minerals from the outer rim to your metropolis.

Once pretty large area around your capital is explored, exploited and terraformed/colonized - move your capital to the rim, rinse and repeat.

[madmarcus]

If I find a world or system that is a resource bonanza I will often create a mini-capital by shipping in loads of population and construction factories as well as mines from the homeworld. Then use construction brigades and the factories to assemble PDCs (shipped in as sections) to meet the defense requirement. On the other hand I'm generally a fairly slow expanding empire so it doesn't bug me to wait 10 years or more to go from poor mining outpost to practically self sufficient world.

[nafaho7]

- The 4 jump limit on auto-navigation seems to put a pretty serious limit on expansion.  Are there ways to work around that? Can civilians contribute to building far-flung worlds, or are they forever limited to the four systems around my homeworld?

Civilians can contribute quite substantially to the growth of your empire.  There are several points to keep in mind.

• The 4 jump point limit on auto-navigation is not applied as a leash, holding ships within a certain radius of their origins.  Instead, whenever a civilian vessel calculates its next port of call, it must have a port of call within 4 jumps of its present location.
• The best way to keep civilian ships from getting stuck in a cul-de-sac, with no trade to call them out of their corner, is to have numerous colonies, wherever possible.  Even on worlds where you will never be able to fully terraform the planet's surface to Earth norms.  The more worlds you have, the more separate trade and colony runs your empire will have available to occupy your civilian shipping.
• The best way to encourage the growth of your civilian shipping, and the best way to make full use of it as it appears, is to run 8-hour time increments.  As I recall, a civilian ship only calculates trade runs of any kind once per time interval, or every 8 hours, whichever is larger.  This means that running 30-day time increments only allows civilian shipping to make a single trade run, even if the ships in question were capable of reaching their destinations in a matter of hours.  8-hour increments make the best use of civilian shipping, and will allow them to take up the slack whenever you want to move hundreds of installations in a single week.  Additionally, tax revenues from civilian shipping are calculated on a per run basis.  So, again, setting things up to allow more runs will allow for you to be even happier with the civilian sector.  If you pursue this avenue of optimization, the Auto-Turns feature will be your friend.

[Thiosk]

Its my sandbox, so to beat the 4 turn limit, I can and do create hub stars- I create or locate planetless stars, and hook them in between the various major sectors, enabling sector trade to go through the hub systems.

Massively simplifies dealing with vast trading networks, as you can have a two jump run from sol to each of your major hubs.

If you feel this makes it too easy, simply do not guide your navy through the hubs, and just keep them for civvies only.

[Havear]

I'm typically late to the colonization show. In my mind, there's very little reason to expand when it's much more efficient to mine the crap out of the home system (to a certain extent, this stops at .5 accessibility and below) and mass driver it then to ship it in. My current 6.0 game had the first interstellar colony setup in 2062 for three reasons: provide a self-sufficient fleet base (LOTS of minerals, low accessibility, and it's around a binary companion offering a bit more time to react), expand the tax base, and provide a place for some of my humods to grow their population (minority unrest is exceedingly annoying). A second system I'm even now working on turning into possibly a new capital has more minerals than Sol did and an enormous amount of habitable real estate -- pretty sure even more than Epsilon Eridani from the NATO campain.

[madpraxis]

It really works to make your empire by the likes of British Empire - have a lot of small colonies everywhere. Strip-mine systems and keep your colonies poor and small. Move all extra population back to the homeworld. Put the best administrator on Earth...Once pretty large area around your capital is explored, exploited and terraformed/colonized - move your capital to the rim, rinse and repeat.

I read that and all that runs through my mind is an image of everybody on the coast of england grabbing a paddle and paddling away trying to move GB...

And yes, I usually do that too Havear, or close to it. I expand rather slowly myself, and try to plop down a colony a system or two away early on in whatever the richest system mineral wise I have come across so as to act like a hub for mineral collection, plus it gets the civilian shipping going quicker so I can be a lazy slacker. Later on I do end up dropping a 0 pop colony in each system, just for mineral collection and usually save the real colonies for systems a couple jumps away so that way again, I get more shipping and I also have bases to stage military fleets through.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

i like to play without terraforming, which creates an incentive to expand. Habitable territory is in short supply.

Playing with multiple earth factions also encourages expansion, since earth orbit is extremely insecure.

Finally of course there are the alien ruins... and alien conquests ^___^