A discussion on various Aurora topics:
How many people use armor on their ships, rather than, or in addition, to, shields? If so, at what tech level do you use armor, and how much do you use?
How many people use internal armor of any sort? Does anyone use armored engines or power plants?
Would you use other types of armored internal systems, like armored quarters, armored bridges, armored weapons mounts (aside from turrets), armored magazines, or armored fire control systems?
I do tend to use armored ships, depending on the situation, however, I have never once, to date, used armored engines as I am always trying to get the best speed possible out of my ships, and armoring the engines effectively lowers their efficiency. I have played around with the various types of internal armor currently offered, but I haven?t had a lot of combat experience with those designs so I can?t testify to their effectiveness. As noted above, I don?t like the armored engines because of the efficiency cost, but I do like the idea of armored reactors, and will quite often design such for my warships.
What about gunboats? What role do you tend to use them in? Missile boats and fast attack craft (with various types of weapons) are the obvious roles, but are there others? In the Quad-System campaign I was using gunboats armed with a fast-firing 15 cm plasma carronade as my primary planetary defense unit. I can't say how well they worked because the first battle where they were being used was also the battle where Aurora crapped out. Oh well.
Oh, which reminds me! Steve, we currently have a technology research branch for decreasing the size of a missile launcher while simultaneously increasing the reload time. How about something similar for beam weapons? Decreasing the size, while increasing the reload time would seem to make sense, and would be an interesting option on small attack craft, or on larger ships (for defense against small attackers).
Finally, a dual question. First off, what set up do you tend to use when starting a campaign (pop/tech, and so on)? Secondly, what kind of problems do you find yourself dealing with in the campaigns that you run? Are they similar from campaign to campaign?
I tend to start most campaigns with low tech and a small to medium population, as I find it interesting to build a civilization from the start. I have noticed that in a lot of my campaigns, things go the same way, at least at the start, and I?ve been wondering if that is because of how Aurora is, or how I play. At the start I tend to focus on finding and exploiting new resource deposits, particularly duranium and sorium as these are the most important and useful resources. Most of the initial phase of the game is focused on building up my ability to exploit off-planet sources of these two resources, so that my industrial and military might can continue to expand.
Once I have secured my supply of duranium, I?ve noticed that I tend to run into at least two problems ? first I usually have chronic money shortages, and second, although my supply problems relating to duranium and sorium have been solved, I now have shortages in at least one other mineral. By this time I?ve usually explored the systems around my home system, and might have begun exploitation to alleviate my original duranium problem.
While the details may vary from campaign to campaign, I?ve found a lot of consistency to what I call ?Phase I? problems, the shortage of duranium and sorium. This almost always tends to be the first thing I focus on in a new campaign, and the biggest thing limiting my economy, at least at the start.
In my campaign downtime, while I?m waiting for Steve to kick out his house guests and get back to the really important things in life, like putting out 2.5, I?ve been thinking about the general experience of playing an Aurora campaign, instead of the smaller details, as you can see <G>.
Kurt
