Hello Aurora fans
Nice to meet ya all-- so far I've got a pretty good handle on the game and recently I had my first combat encounter.
That is, I discovered a neutral NPR-- checking the diplomacy screen they were -66 against me, but they were still neutral. I sent my suvey vessel in closer for reconaissance, to see if it was just the one colony they had (so far there were about 3 systems with nothing worth colonizing, except for perhaps a few moons in wolf 359 to act as a resupply and sorium mining for the nearby gas giants, but nothing otherwise suitable)
So even though I can imagine an alien race suddenly appearing and colonizing a few of your worlds would probably piss another government off, we hadn't even reached that stage yet. My survey vessel was sitting above their homeworld with active sensors on and boom-- just before I send a JCS out to build a gate on the other side they go from blue to red (so civilian to hostile right?) and the diplomacy screen reads a whopping -477.
So my question is twofold.
First how/why the hell did they suddenly go overt hostile on me? was it the active scanners, because again I can kinda see that another race really
wouldn't want their ships scanned for weaknesses and suchlike, much less right above their homeworld.
Secondly, as it is I didn't even get much useful intelligence from the scanners anyway apart from tonnages and observed/estimated speeds. I did notice one ship class with 16 gauss cannons (about 29kt, I assume it was some kind of PD variant. Pretty sure this is the ship that ripped up my first survey probe. ) and another few classes that resembled FACs (more on those later) is there any other way to increase the intelligence gained on ships from active scanners? would that require a ship commander with intelligence or survey, for example-- and if this lone ship would be in a nearby system and the task force HQ in sol with say, a staff officer in intelligence etc?
So please enlighten me so my future attempts at diplomacy don't inadvertently cause
another interstellar war, thx
I tried to send a second ship with a diplomatic team, which managed to drop them off on their homeworld before getting blown to pieces. RIP GEV, you died well. Next thing I know I've got a hot thermal contact on my sol jump point and no military. That turns into twenty contacts as my ships get closer. My first three ships managed to get into beam range, having no decent missile tech at this point and ripped up one of their FACs, after which they had to await acknowledgement before pursuing the second one, because they were a rush job fleet and I hadn't had time to train them lol. Suprisingly I managed to do a large amount of damage to their fleet while sustaining very little myself thanks to a few tier 2 shields being able to tank their missile salvos.