Author Topic: Some beginner's questions...  (Read 2570 times)

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celem

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Some beginner's questions...
« on: October 03, 2015, 07:13:31 AM »
Hey there folks!

Just found Aurora a few days ago and having a blast so far, but have a few questions that I havent managed to solve yet.   Im playing largely unspoiled, i've not watched videos or taken a proper look at this forum or the wiki, largely for fear of learning more than I want to.   Im playing v5. 5. 4, not sure why I didnt end up with the latest version, but this is what i'm running on for now, i'll update for my second game.

Im currently about 65 years in.   I've mapped and gated all the systems I could find for three jumps out from Sol and am currently in an industrial build-up phase, getting mines distributed and terraforming a couple of likely looking worlds.   I have met with two alien vessels during this time; the first a civilian scout of some sort who popped up on thermal, I activated my transponder, said 'Hi' and bailed out of the system while assigning a diplomatic team back on Earth.   Relations with this race are at about 5,000.   The other contact went less pleasantly, a geo-scanner found himself being active pinged by a particularly fast vessel which then appeared to nuke him with missiles.   I likewise bailed on that system and set up diplomatic channels, but after about a year of poor attempts at contact the team concluded that these aliens were just 'too alien'.

So now, the questions:

1.  The first empire I made contact with are sharing gravitational and geological data according to the diplomatic screen.   How do I actually access this?  I do not seem to have any knowledge I havent gathered myself.   Is this because I dont actually know where these aliens are?  My contact was with a scout, I have not located any of their systems.   If I find them will all that data suddenly fill itself in?

2.  "Too alien" to ever make contact.   Did I mess up this First Contact?  Perhaps the Diplomatic Team wasnt skilled enough, and the year they spent fumbling communications turned these guys against me?  If there are enemies out there that are always hostile, and this looks like that, then just say so, no need to go into detail as I'm sure they'll be back to introduce themselves.

3.  Sectors.   How do I go about declaring a new sector?  So far I'm able to keep adding systems to the Earth sector, but I want to create a new one around a habitable system a few jumps out.

4.  Galaxy Map.   I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but new systems appear stacked on top of each other and I generally cant use this window at all.   Its getting to the point where I cant remember which systems are connected to which, and it can take me 5-10 minutes to plot a course from Sol to X while I figure out where it is.   Not much helped by having half a dozen 'Gliese' or whatever.   Is there anyway I can rearrange how these are spaced?

5.  Ship Design.   This is a really deep feature and I'm loving it, but a few bits where I flail helplessly.   

Missiles: I design these from the button on the industry tab, otherwise this then behaves just like any other component I might design through the 'new tech' button in the ship design interface?  So I design a launcher from the ship interface and mount it on the ship, I design the missile in industry. . . how do I then tell my munitions factories to actually make the ammo? 

Likewise fighters and fighter factories, I design a fighter class and then theres some way to tell those factories to build some?  Still dabbling here, thus far I've just not used fighters or missiles.

Fire Control.   After much swearing, trial and error (mostly the latter) I managed to figure out how to design an FC to work with my lasers, tracking-based for point defense, range for main batteries and so on.   My question is how do I get two FC on the same ship to behave the way I want?  So I have a fire control set for range and a few long ranged lasers, then another fire control set for tracking, and a cluster of turrets.   Looking at the design specs all the weapons are slaved to the tracking FC, how do I specify which boards control which weapons?  Is this something I should be doing for every military ship that launches?  So far I just build them and park them at strategic locations, but none have ever encountered a hostile so I dont know if anyone would actually fire should the need arise.

Hope I've been clear with what I'm asking here, I've been trying to avoid tutorials and such, but if there are spoiler-free wiki pages with useful mechanics or some-such then please do link me.
 

celem

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #1 on: October 03, 2015, 07:22:07 AM »
Ahah!  Knew I was forgetting something, and as I havent registered I cant edit, so please forgive the double. . .

Retiring, refitting, upgrading, mothballing.   Theres gotta be something I can do with a ship I dont want anymore right?  Can they be upgraded to newer designs?  Is there any mechanic by which I scrap them and gain something?  Thus far I am mercilessly deleting craft which are of no concievable use (read: too slow), which I suspect is killing the officers too to be honest.
 

Offline Theodidactus

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #2 on: October 03, 2015, 08:03:22 AM »
Hello Celem.
I'll answer what questions I can:

1: if they're sharing this data, any systems YOU know about, that they ALSO know about, where they discover something, they'll tell you about it. You'll get an update that says how much minerals they found, where there are jump points, ect. data about systems is visible by clicking that button with a Sun Icon on it.

2: I'm not 100% sure how this works either, and I've been playing this game for a few years. Here's my understanding: a small number of alien races are flat-out uncontactable. No matter how good your teams are, they will never establish contact. These alien races are generally best avoided. You can read more in the spoilers part of the forum if you're curious.

3: Frankly: no clue. You can make sector in a button at the very top labeled "sector command" but the actual process mystifies me.

4: simple: press shift and click each system. Now you can move them around at will. When you've arranged the map to your liking, right click anywhere and click "save system positions". The ubiquity of systems like Gliese, Kuiper, GJ, ect, are an artifact of human astronomy and one of the reasons I got into the game in the first place.

5:

missiles: on the industry screen, you're seeing a list of stuff you can build right? This is actually only a small fraction of what is buildable. There is a dropdown menu at the very top which has additional options (maintainence supplies, missiles, fighters, ship components). These menus will let you build your custom-designed stuff.

fire controls: try the combat screen (the button to open it looks like a target) this will give you the ability to slave weapons to fire controls for every ship in a system. It also has options to set the configurations you apply to every ship of a particular type in your empire. I don't usually do that though but I make ships with many possible fire control configurations.
My Theodidactus, now I see that you are excessively simple of mind and more gullible than most. The Crystal Sphere you seek cannot be found in nature, look about you...wander the whole cosmos, and you will find nothing but the clear sweet breezes of the great ethereal ocean enclosed not by any bound
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #3 on: October 03, 2015, 11:09:16 AM »
Calem,

The wiki is both incomplete and out-of-date.  I think a better way to learn the game is to watch a Lets Play on youtube.  Alfapiomega has two good ones.

Don't fret about how the first LP is +150 episodes long, he's done doing new stuff by episode 12 or so.
 

Iranon

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #4 on: October 03, 2015, 03:23:29 PM »
Ahah!  Knew I was forgetting something, and as I havent registered I cant edit, so please forgive the double. . .

Retiring, refitting, upgrading, mothballing.   Theres gotta be something I can do with a ship I dont want anymore right?  Can they be upgraded to newer designs?  Is there any mechanic by which I scrap them and gain something?  Thus far I am mercilessly deleting craft which are of no concievable use (read: too slow), which I suspect is killing the officers too to be honest.

Refitting/upgrading is done from the Shipyard Tasks tab:
You can refit a ship to the currently selected class. This is frightfully expensive if this would mean a true rebuild (change in mass, change in armour, extensive internal changes) but not too bad for upgrading a few important bits.
In the same section, you can scrap ships in orbit, which recovers most components and some minerals. Scrapping and building anew is usually more economical, refitting retains a crack crew and iirc takes less time.

For mothballing, just shove it into a hangar. No time is added to the maintenance clock, no supplies or minerals are consumed. AFAIK, there are no stages of retirement between this and full scrapping.

 

Offline Rich.h

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #5 on: October 03, 2015, 05:27:07 PM »
Most of your questions have already been answered so I will just fill in the gaps.

2. As pointed out already that some species are simply impossible to contact, you have done nothing wrong yourself though so do not fret. If you want to gain more knowledge then as stated above go look in the spoilers section. The only part I would add to this which is more of a tip than a spoiler is to make extensive use of the notes section for the classes you encounter on the intel screen. You already came up dead at the hand of some missiles so slap into that class's notes that it does that sort of thing. Later if you come across them again you will at least have some background intelligence that your future captains can make use of when deciding on their tactics. This generally applies to all NPR races, but you already have found out that you can become friends with some thus reducing the danger.

3. The sectors are very useful ways of dividing up your empire, if you build a sector command installation at one of your planets it acts like an overseer to all your systems and colonies within it's range. Other than the initial tech to build a command there is no further improvements, so increasing the range is done by building more sector commands, the range goes up in a linear fashion along with the number of installations on a planet. On the summary screen you will see a Sector Command HQ with a level and range figure (both mean the same thing), this tells you how many jumps away from the system the HQ is in it can spread it's influence.

Sector Commands give the benefit of allowing you to have a governor with a lot of high level skills apply them to all colonies inside all the systems within the area of influence of the SC (I believe they only give 25% of their skill levels). This can really add up once you start getting lots of colonies, a mining colony could get a 15% bonus from it's own governor and then get given a free 5% extra for the sector governor for example. If you get to the stage where you have a larger empire then building multiple SC's in different systems can be a good way of getting the most value out of high ranking well skilled civillians.

If you delve into all the possible tabs and drop downs in the galaxy map screen you can find an option there that allows to not only set certain colours for sectors, but also display then in text for so you can quickly identify parts of your empire and see where they belong to.
 

calem

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #6 on: October 04, 2015, 07:27:32 AM »
 (i had to tweak the guest username a bit because i've now reg'd the one i used before but its still awaiting approval. . . still me)
Great stuff folks, thanks!

Busy scrapping 90% of my military now.   I had realised very late on that weapons need reactors to fire, thus I had several generations of warship designs with no reactors, some without fire controls, quite a sizable fleet of pointless hardware sitting in LEO.   I just couldnt face outright deleting them and all the work that went into them since there are certain minerals I am really strapped for (duranium, gods i just cant get hold of the stuff) and replacing them from scratch would take decades.

I had already found that if I designed a class only subtly different from another that a shipyard could turn it out even while tooled for the first version, i'ts excellent to know that such design changes are ones i can actually refit.

I'll also make sure to setup my second sector, cheers Rich. h.   The Earth sector is maxed and has a good governor, but I'm terraforming a lot of worlds out past Alpha Centauri and wanted a seperate governor out there, I do have a colony that might be able to put up a sector command building out there, it has at least modest production capabilities.

There are still plenty of fuzzy areas, mainly in ship design but im going to trawl the shipbuilding forum a bit and deduce the logic from other's designs.

The one last issue that is somewhat pressing is getting the logic of my defenses down.  I can now set up the fire controls, and have found what i believe to be the point-defense fire settings (final fire would work?), but I want to make sure im carrying the right bits of equipment for target acquisition and engagement. .

Im trying to come up with an understanding of anti-missile systems for my new generations of craft.   A couple I mounted with CIWS, these need no power, no FC, no magazine?  Just the unit?  I've also got a couple with laser turrets, those Im a bit more certain of, they draw power and get a tracking-based FC.   The final variant I want is an anti-missile missile.   The ship gets a missile FC, with active sensor resolution of 1 for spotting missiles.   It then gets a launcher of the right size for the warhead.   The warhead itself. . . doesnt need its own sensor, does damage 1, fuel tuned to range of missile FCs sensor, speed and agility high?  They keep coming out around size 3, does that sound reasonable?  When would I use a sensor on the missile itself?  Would that enable a fire and forget behaviour where i can bail after launch?
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #7 on: October 04, 2015, 08:09:51 AM »
Anti missile missiles are generally designed as size 1, using as much warhead as nessicary for one damage, a little agility and fuel and all the rest as a single engine of maximum power multiplier.
You need a resolution 1 fire sensor to detect the missiles you want to target, and then A resolution 1 fire control of equal range to target it. The logic behind using size 1 AMMs is that they will reload very fast and you'll get more in your magazine.
Putting sensors on missiles is good for larger anti shipping missiles.
When you fire a missile it's target needs to stay in range of the launching ships fire control otherwise it'll lose contact and self destruct when it runs out if fuel. If you add sensors to the missile then it will keep following the same path until running out if fuel, or it detects something in which case it will go after that contact. They won't des dominate but the way sensors work means your best chance if requiring a target is if it's quite large.
Forget about AMMs that can require missiles until you're very high tech level, however a small sensor would still be useful if you use them for sandpaper attacks against ships.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2015, 08:29:59 AM by MarcAFK »
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #8 on: October 04, 2015, 08:28:33 AM »
The main advantage of sensors is that any that miss can retarget the ship and try again, just make sure the sensor is powerful enough to detect the size of contact you expect to be fighting at the range of your missiles turnaround distance.
If your missile goes 20Kkms, and your target goes 10Kkms then when it misses it'll be 30Kkms away from the target per second, and since sensor updates are at a 5 second minimum then you need to multiply by 5.
So 150,000 kilometers.
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

calem

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #9 on: October 05, 2015, 05:36:13 AM »
Huzzah, the AMMs functioned.   It wasn't a complete success, my designs were destroyed and the entire empire fell, but missiles were shot down so the logic was sound, I was just too far behind the curve.   I managed to get the missiles down to size 1 by tweaking the numbers to allow for background techs, hadn't appreciated how much you can game the granularity there.   Some turrets also disposed of inbound missiles, though im uncertain whether the CIWSs did much.   Can they really be useful?  With a range of 1000km it feels doubtful, most ASM are going to cross that in 1/12th of a second or less.

I'd been avoiding JumpDrives entirely, every time I found a new system I gated it both ways to let my geo surveyors and haulers in and exploit the new resources.   Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to keep a buffer of jump point only systems between the frontier and my holdings.   I encountered another NPR 4 hops from Sol and lost a gate builder and grav surveyor.   I started diplomacy, but they were already mobilizing and a hostile task-force just rolled through the gates to Earth.   I had a number of PD designs hanging around gates who engaged with limited success, hopelessly outnumbered though they were.

The fight at Earth at least I put up some resistance.   I had a lot of PD here too as they came out of refits, along with some longer range anti-shipping missile boats, but their range advantage won them the day, by the time my laser turreted destroyers were engaging they were heavily damaged by long range missile fire.   Still, once the fight closed within 120kkm I was putting on a better performance.

Upgraded to latest 6. x and started a new empire, hopefully lessons learned from this first run will save me decades.  (For instance it was 80 years before I realised my sorium harvester designs needed to be flagged as tankers to function, otherwise they are incapable of unloading fuel. )  This time around I have the chance to set up some lower tech designs that I can tweak over time and am making much more use of jump drives to find the aliens without giving them approach lights to Earth.

One new question: How does one spend the "Starting Tech" points?  Thats something I neglected last time, that would have helped bootstrap the empire.   Do I just go into SM and instant some stuff to the tune of the starting tech budget?
 

Offline Mastik

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #10 on: October 05, 2015, 06:07:54 AM »
I let the game spend the extra tech point for me.  Gives some random? tech advances.  Dont forget to train your combat ships, (task groups, special orders/Organization tab, start task force training). 
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #11 on: October 05, 2015, 06:38:36 AM »
Yes you use SM Mode to spend starting tech points, there should be a number showing available points left on the research screen.
CIWS will always engage missiles before they hit, all other firms of final defensive fire require a minimum range of 10000 or something. Other Manually targeted point defence requires a range long enough to reach the missile before it hits in 5 seconds.
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

Offline Rich.h

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Re: Some beginner's questions...
« Reply #12 on: October 05, 2015, 06:45:20 AM »
Sounds like your just beginning to realise how deep this game can be, I had pretty much all of these issues when I first started playing. For me what worked best was to break down the game somewhat so I was only dealing with a small amount of aspects at a time. So for example I plain threw out the notion of NPR's to start with by having zero at the start of the game and then also reducing their generation chance to zero along with turning off all the spolers. This meant I was able to just learn all the rest of the game without the overload of combat designs and the pressures of an encroaching NPR and diplomacy/espionage etc. Once I was happy with all the basic mechanics I started a new game but this time immediately added an NPR to a system next door to me and started to learn how the military side of things worked. Personally Aurora was just too vast a game for me to be able to learn all the parts of it in a full game without frustration due to things not working and such as I hadn't yet understood them.

To answer your question about the research, there are two ways you can do it. In the main game setup screen I believe down at your started RP box there is a check box that allows you to auto assign the points. This should simply have the game give you random techs up to the value you set. The other way is as you say to use the SM mode and instant the techs to the value you want.

With regards to the CIWS they are very useful. I think I am right in saying that they always get a chance to fire no matter how fast the missile travels, yes the 10K range means they only get one shot. But they have the advantage of needing zero power or FC and so not only do you save some space but I find that they will generally out perform any turret at the same tech level on a value for tonnage ratio. You can also put them on commercial designs.