I've got this setup from my early days in VB6 and I just modified it accounting for C# changes.
People Management
Establish all your Admin Commands from the beginning, even the ones that are going to be empty. Setup automated assignments on both admins and colonies, along with officers, and load up your medals. Don't even push the first advance until you did that. After this, decide what level of training you would like to have, there are 5. The higher the less trained personnel will be produced each year but with higher training grade. There are several reasons for this, but you'll have to just trust me on this one rather than delve into it.
Production (focus in order)
1 - Production Capability: Make sure you are always building enough Construction Factories to increase your output.
2 - Economy: Build enough Financial Centres to avoid the first inevitable money issues.
3 - Mass Drivers: Build Mass drivers the earliest possible, 5 to 10 should suffice.
4 - Infrastructures: Build a good amount of infrastructures right away to support your early colonization efforts needed to kick start your civilian operations. 1,000 should suffice as a start.
5 - Minerals: Build manned Mines only. Start thinking about Automated Mines only when off Earth mining is a reality. To help, establish an off planet colony ASAP to kickstart civilians which will help with mining via Civilian Mining Colonies. Remember to buy the minerals and set the mass driver package to Earth. Should be affordable if enough Financial Centres have been built.
6 - Fuel: Don't build too many refineries on Earth, soon the Sorium sources will end and operations will have to be moved either off Earth or in Space. An alternative source of Sorium must be found ASAP and should have the priorities over any other minerals in the early game when Earth is the main supply.
7 - Maintenance Facilities: Required to build MSP and maintain your fleet.
8 - Research Facilities: This is controversial, as many would tell you to start building these early, in reality, research is only as good as your economy, so I would leave it for last. You are relative safe in Sol and you would be required to leave only when your established economy and mineral output is threatened by the lack of minerals and space to expand in Sol.
9 - Academies: To be honest, this could be also be number 1. At some point you are going to need to more of everything, and people is one of them. However, especially in the early game, a Terraforming Officer/Administrator with 50% terraforming or mining bonus, will make a huge difference. Same goes with Scientists. My advice is to ramp up your operations from the beginning and don't forget to establish academies also on newly created colonies. There is nothing more satisfying that having little silly rules such as this administrator cannot administrate Earth because was born on Mars and make your life a living hell. Remember that this is one of the main reasons Steve created Aurora, even if he'll never admit it.
Jokes aside, with automated assignments, you can potentially have administrators and officers everywhere, so better have good ones on hand at all times.
A good idea is to have your factories run perpetual and setup % production based on the priorities. You don't want to put unrealistic goals as you want to know if the mineral output suffice your needs. Generally you can have cycles of anything setup or use a simple % goal. So for instance if you want to increase your research rate by 50% and you have 10 Research Facilities you will put another 5 in line of production. Unless something is really important, you never have 1 element and 100% of the construction factories working on it. Your production line will most likely look like the below:
Mines 100 10%
Infrastructure 1,000 15%
Research Facilities 10 5%
Construction Factories 300 25%
Financial Centres 50 10%
And so on until you reach 100%. Of course, you can modify % as you see fit even during production to better fit your needs. Rather than:
Mines 100 100%
Infrastructure 1,000 100% Queue
Research Facilities 10 100% Queue
Construction Factories 300 100% Queue
Financial Centres 50 100% Queue
TIP: When building Shipyards, do not use 2 or 3, but just build one at the time and set the other in queue with same % value. The reason is simple: You don't get an alert and the game does not stop once one Shipyard is complete and you will be alerted only when the whole production line is completed. In this way, you won't waste precious time that could have been used to either increase shipyard's tonnage or bays. So if we were to take the first line of production as an example you will end up like this:
Mines 100 10%
Infrastructure 1,000 15%
Research Facilities 10 5%
Construction Factories 300 25%
Financial Centres 50 10%
Naval Shipyard 1 10%
Commercial Shipyard 1 10%
Naval Shipyard 1 10% Queue
Commercial Shipyard 1 10% Queue
Naval Shipyard 1 10% Queue
Commercial Shipyard 1 10% Queue
Minerals (focus in order)
1 - Sorium: Fuel
2 - Corundium: You need it to build more mines amongst others
3 - Mercassium: Necessary to carry on with research and to build research facilities
4 - Neutronium: Needed to start increasing your Shipyards capabilities
When you are thinking to build your first fleet, out of the other minerals you will soon need Gallicite mostly to build engines, missiles, and weapons. All minerals are important, but at the start you should have no problem with the most common such as Duranium and the Civvies will help you with that as they are coded in a way that their colonies will be valuable to your mining efforts.
It is always a good idea to focus on Minerals considering the accessibility (from 0.1 to 1.0 where 1.0 is the max). The more accessible a mineral is the most you can get in a single extraction cycle. So to get 1 ton of mineral from 1.0 accessibility you will need 1 mine, while to get 1 ton from a 0.5 accessibility in the same amount of time you will require 2 mines.
After accessibility there is distance, and, finally, quantity, and then location. For instance:
Mars Duranium 1,000,000 0.5
Titan Duranium 250,000 1.0
You are better setting up on Mars.
Mars
Accessibility 0.5 Not really good
Distance Close to Earth
Quantity 1,000,000 Life Supply and 4x times than Titan at 0.5 vs 1.0 operations will last for the double of the time avoiding early relocations.
Location 2.0 Colonization planet with prospecting for Terraforming. Will help your mineral output, population, economy, and once minerals are over the colony will still have use.
Titan
Accessibility 1.0 Very Good
Distance far from Earth. Long round trip times and high fuel consumption at start.
Quantity 250,000 is a very good supply
Location 6.59 Colonization planet with prospecting for moderate Terraforming. Will help your mineral output, population, economy, and once minerals are over the colony will still have use. Harder than Mars with less population capabilities.
Remember, this is only for priority, in reality you would end up with Colonies on Both Mars and Titan at some point. In this case, if Mars had no minerals, I would have probably setup my first colony to kick start Civilians on the Moon, and then focused on getting Titan even before Mars, since it would have longer to make it operational but the reward would have been higher. Once the Civvies are up I would have dropped just a few infrastructure on Mars and had them do the heavy lifting. You will find the criteria valuable more when you are dealing with multiple systems and your reach, at least at the beginning, is limited by your logistic capabilities. So that closer and tight Systems will get the priority over wider or farer ones. So it's never about if and or, but only when.
Research
This is very complicated as there are so many things to consider. All aspects are important so I would go with what it's more of a progression than a must have.
Generally speaking, you want to save fuel, so in the beginning Fuel Consumption tech is very valuable as it goes in hand with your mining and production capabilities. Because of this, valuable techs are also the ones that will allow you to smooth things up with your Economic table, therefore the first few steps of mineral output and wealth production techs are good ones to research.
After this, I would say that it goes with milestones, for instance Ion tech. This is the minimum required before you leave Sol. Any other engine tech will leave you at disadvantage with most spoilers. The more you play, the more milestones you'll find. sometimes these are determined by RP goals and needs or simply by your playstyle. I, for instance, don't mind to flight in blind in new systems, and use the DTS as main detection in Sol in the early game. I usually start ramping up Sensors when I want to go to war. I don't entirely leave the tech alone, as it will be silly, but perhaps I prioritize tracking and fire control over the general strength.
One good thing is to use the Research techs as a tool to make things easier for you. Taking too long to build more mines? Then use the construction bonus to help you out and build more mines, or use the mining bonus to increase your output in the short run and focus on build something else more useful if the problem is not the number of mines but the actual amount of minerals generated.
Another important one is to make sure you are always using your most gifted scientists. If you have 10 labs and 2 scientists with 50% bonus in different fields, don't go with 10 labs for one, but try to balance and advance in both fields at the same time unless it's something you really do not care. You don't know when another one will come around.
Ships
My only advice here is that you may want to see what Steve does in his campaigns. There are many other examples on the forum, but I work on the assumption he knows best. There are some general rules that you can find for optimization as well, so I would encourage you to read these. It is true that Steve does many RP decisions when creating ships but by looking closer at them now and also the past ones, I noticed some consistency in many of his designs.
However, as a start, you are going to need only this advice. Build a good Colony ships, then copy the design, remove the colonist modules and replace it with the cargo one. This will allow you to build the ships in the same shipyard without the need of retooling it. There are windows that will allow you to see if you one the right track with that. Never forget the cargo shuttle module or both the colony ship and freighter will be useless.
After this, RP, experimenting, or simple force of majeure are big factors in how your Navy shapes in the early game. In my latest campaign still in progress, ships are true rubbish. Some have only first strike capabilities, others have no secondary weapons. treaties in place did not allow for any energy weapons so there are no STOs and only missiles. Each faction has a certain limit in engines, so some can use maximum 6 others 3, therefore different sizes are required to reach the desired outcome. the more you'll play the more you will be feeling the needs of these little house rules and digress further and further away from winning the game but just deal with the RNG gods and use them to have fun. There must be a reason if you got given only 1 1,000 tons military shipyard at the start right?
Ground Troops
Here you'll have to do your own research, as in C# you'll get so many opinions and so many different ways to do things. I could only find 2 or 3 good tips for you: build STO not too early or they will be obsolete but definitely prior leaving Sol. Supplies are never enough, tech won't matter, so you may want to build these early as well. I use Light Vehicles and call it Supply Truck, but you can get more creative if you wish. Larger companies/battalions are preferred than smaller. Some say that 15,000 tons are a good way to go, especially at the start. Personally, since the largest Troop Transport module is 25,000 tons, I would say stick with that and take it from there. Again, often RP is a major factor in this matter.
Once Started
Colour Code your events, this will help you in stopping when you need to stop or generally know what is going one without reading every line when automated turns are on.
Please Note: There is not a standard WAY to play Aurora. I am just trying to spoil or perhaps helping you to avoid some obvious choices and problems you will face at some point.
