Weapon types other than the ones I picked at start need to be "discovered" or rather observed to be feasible.

Stated personality of leaders influences decisions -an impatient fleet commander might rush in, for example.

This is a bit of thread Necro - but most of these are house rules around 1-13.   Now that we've moved to 2-5-1 I'm curious if people's house rules have changed any.

My configuration settings and house rules tend to be an effort to try and even the playing field between me and NPRs as much as possible in order to increase the difficulty level of the game (and ruin my own life and enjoy it).   As a result I tend to:


- Difficulty modifier: 200+
- Hostility modifier: at least 25, often 50 or 100.
- limited research admin ON
- no terraforming OR terraforming only with facilities discovered on ancient ruins.  they may not be constructed (including orbital ones)
- no automines - except those discovered on ancient ruins.   they may not be constructed.
- either: no mass drivers OR mass drivers only if a certain technology unlocks them (or ancient ruins).  If I permit MDs they may only have an unpopulated colony as the destination.
- no box launchers on anything over 1000 tons. 

On terraforming, I don't think NPRs can terraform - so that means they have a reduced ability to colonize.   I feel like having a key capability that NPRs can't use dramatically affects the balance of power in a game.   So I ditch it.   While I could argue that NPRs can take over my colonies that I terraform, I feel like terraforming makes it possible for me to expand faster / with greater ease than NPRs.

Automines and MDs are more about just making my life harder for pain and enjoyment.   I waffle on whether or not to not use automines, because at some level there's balance built into the game already and realistically building dozens of ark modules is sometimes more pain than I want to put up with.   For MDs - I mostly don't feel like governments would happily fling life-ending masses of dense materials into the orbit of inhabited colonies on a regular basis.   One single mistake seems like it carries way too much risk.

The box launcher thing is because of a (perhaps outdated) perspective that NPRs don't handle them well in volumes.   So it feels like an unbalanced option for larger vessels.

Lastly, I've been experimenting with picking 1-2 weapons at the start (e. g.  carronades, gauss) and then using SM to remove all other weapon technology.   When I do that, I make a house rule that I can't research those initial levels - I must get them from NPR wrecks.   Once I have the basic technologies, then it's open game.   Sometimes I lock MDs behind railgun technology as a result.   This means I have to stick to a military doctrine/capability longer.   

Re-reading this thread, I'm likely to:

- reduce survey speed significantly (looks like there's a sweet spot of 5-15%).
- change low gravity tolerance for humans to 4/10ths of a g
- consider ArcWolf's 9/28/2021 update to his box launcher rule.  :)

(note not using decimals because of built-in anti-newbie code that makes all my decimals have spaces, alas)

You can make it practically renewable by DIM_SystemAbundance table modding, with a cost of no bugreporting.

Given enough time, miligram after miligram or ounce after ounce and You'll eventually make it to ton...

This is technically true but "time" is not an infinite resource.

For a current analogue, Mo-99/Tc-99m production which is used for most medical diagnostic imaging procedures worldwide is fabricated at a rate of roughly a kilogram per year, and generally the state of world supply can be characterized as a shortage - in other words, we need more capacity than we have, so the low rate of production is not due to low demand. This is to be frank pretty typical of nuclear fabrication. Even with the famous TN handwaving of Aurora we are still talking about essentially scaling up to an entire planet's population of workers and the necessary hundreds if not thousands of advanced reactors employing them just to produce a few tons of a TNE per year - a nice, comfy CC=0.00 planet with 500m pop can perhaps match the output of one mine at base tech, if we are generous.

Even leaving aside Steve's distaste for the idea (which is based on very sound gameplay reasons IMO) it's simply not a feasible approach and strains credulity at best.

The problem here is one of scale. Aurora works at a scale where TNEs are measured in tons. There are obviously individual unit or component costs in the fractions of a TNE but these generally need to be built at scale anyways. Nuclear fabrication really doesn't work at that scale, and the set of elements for which it is practical is really a very small subset of those needed to run a modern technological society.

Given enough time, miligram after miligram or ounce after ounce and You'll eventually make it to ton...
It can be an interesting thing to have TNE purifying facilities, whose efficiency is limited by the size of the body they are on - which could give an extra emphasis on territory control, and even if a player ever goes on a limited expansion, or even stays only in the starting system, it still gives him/her/it an option to acquire more resources. Of course, it shouldn't surpass the regular mining techniques.
Alas...

Not personally a fan, and more importantly Steve has flatly denied this possibility many times so it will not happen either way.

That basically settles it. Steve hasn't changed his mind about that?

Quote from: Zincat on August 16, 2021, 07:41:34 AM

To be completely fair, there's literally nothing in the world even remotely as valuable as TN materials are in Aurora. The closest thing would MAYBE be something like uranium, or some other radioactives maybe, but TN materials are orders of magnitude more important. After all they are limited, they don't renew at ALL, and have NO  possible substitute ever. Without them you are stuck on earth while waiting for the heat death of the Universe 

Well, we know there is no substitute ever for them; they have no more evidence about it, then we (real ones) know it about iron and rare earth metals ores, hydrocarbons and phosphates: all those are non-renewable (in quantities) and we know no way to build or support civilization without those. Yet nearly all extraction industry of those remains commercial.

And that is... a bit of a gripe for me - the only way to feasibly acquire more of TN elements is to expand - more solar systems are generated, more TNEs to acquire... (salvaging civilian ship wrecks is... so odd, that I consider this as a too perverted way to acquire TN elements).
Even in our world, no element in the periodic table is truly non-renewable: you can bombard any element with sufficient energy to convert it into any other element, provided you have sufficient power to do so - our nuclear power plants pretty much opened this new capability... Of course, the amount acquired this way is quite low, it will hardly be enough to satisfy the full demand, but at least it is a way to get the rare elements if you are desperate enough.
And this got me thinking - say folks, what do you think of synthetic Trans-Newtonian element plants? These can be extremely expensive to operate in terms of wealth, cheaper if you convert existing TN element into other TN element, but... we do have some equivalents in our real world - there were synthetic oil plants and fuel substitutes in world war 2...

Agh, the agony of knowing 1.14 is probably relatively close but wanting to start anew...

From experience, the next update is rarely close enough that you won't restart abandon finish a game before it comes out...

Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.

Try 5-10%.  That may sound weird but it actually makes exploration match the expansion rate of productions + engine speed very nicely to the point I think it should be default.  Most surveying is more dependent on engine speed because you spend most of exploration in transit anyways.