Finally, I am going to have a go at creating a tutorial. My style is probably going to be conversational rather than instructional and I will no doubt digress and zip off at tangents but I will do my best to stay focused.
Firstly, I need to address a couple of system requirements
If you are living in a country which uses the comma (,) for decimal separator, then while playing Aurora you have to switch the Regional Settings of your computer over to US or UK or another country that uses the period (.) as the decimal separator. In XP this is in the Control Panel.
The minimum resolution required is 1280x1024. A higher resolution or multiple monitors will allow you to see more windows at once. If your display doesn´t support this, there are ways around it, provided your video card supports a higher resolution than your monitor/display.
1. Scrolling desktop. A program that extends the desktop beyond your screen can be found at
http://360desktop.com/2. In XP, something similar is already built in but it does carry a warning from Microsoft so you will have to decide if this is worth trying. Go to the screen where you set your resolution. Select the Advanced button and then select the Monitor tab. There is a checkbox which reads "Hide modes that this monitor cannot display". If you uncheck this box, you can set resolution to anything your graphics card can handle. If this resolution is higher than what your monitor can display, whenever your mouse pointer reaches the edge of your screen, the whole screen will scroll in that direction.
Part 1: New Game CreationWhen you start Aurora, the first thing you should see is a small window with Game Details in the title bar. Across the bottom are four buttons: New, Save, Delete Game and Select. In a moment we are going to be pressing New but a quick word on Select first. Select will choose the currently selected game and take you to the main menu bar (which is really just a window title bar and a menu in the centre of the screen). If you accidentally press Select and get to this menu bar before setting up a game, you can go back to the Game Details window by pressing Ctrl-I or choosing Game Info from the Game menu.
To start a new game, press the New button on the Game Details window, This will open a much larger window with the title "Create New Game". This may seem a little overwhelming at first but most of the standard options are already selected. I'll run through most of them so you can set up the type of game you want.
Game Name is self-explanatory. Perhaps "My First Game", or maybe "My First Rampage Through the Galaxy", depending on your style. Leave the SpaceMaster Password blank as that is really for refereed multi-player games.
Starting Year: Any number you like. Aurora keeps track of time using years, months, days and seconds. You will start at 00:00 on January 1st of whatever year you select.
Maximum Number of Systems: This isn't really the max number of systems that you can have in your universe as it can be changed at any time during the game. In effect, it is the highest system number that will be generated by the program in a random (not 'Real Stars') universe. Small numbers of systems means more chance of races being close together. So if you want a knife fight in a phone booth you can choose a low number of systems and if you want a slow leisurely build up before the carnage begins you can choose a high number. 1000 is in the middle of the range and is a reasonable number for a starting game.
Local System Generation Chance and Local System Generation Spread determines how much 'clustering' there is in a random game. This is something you don't need to worry about yet so you can skip this paragraph if you like. Still here? Well here we go then. In a 1000 system game, the program will select a number from 1-1000 when generating a new system. If the Local System Generation Chance is 50% then there is a 50% chance that instead the program will pick a number close to that of the current system. Just how close depends on the Local System Generation Spread. If your current system is number 100 and the Local System Generation Spread is 15, then if a local system is selected it will be between 85 and 115. Why does this make a difference? Well, if you pick a system that already exists when entering a jump point, you will create a link to a new system. If every system was generated randomly from 1-1000, the galactic map will probably comprise a large number of independent chains of systems stretching out form your start point. If the number range selected is small then there is a lot more chance of encountering nearby systems so you generate a far more inter-connected universe with a lot of connections between chains and loops of systems.
Construction Cycle Time: You get to build a lot of things in different things in Aurora and the actual construction takes place in what is commonly referred to as the 5-day increment. It would affect performance if Aurora updated construction times in every 5 second increment or sub-pulse so instead the game waits until an number of increments have passed that add up to about five days and then runs all the construction code after the normal movement/detection/combat phases. Because Aurora increments rarely add up to exactly five days between construction cycles, the program uses the actual amount of time that has passed, whether it is 5 days, 12 days or 6 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes and 45 seconds. This means that the amount of 'construction' carried out in each construction cycle may vary a little between cycles. You can choose to change the trigger time for a construction cycle from the standard 400,000 seconds if you want it to happen more or less often but I would suggest leaving it alone until you have a lot more experience with the game. Just for interest, here is a list of some of the things that happen during a construction cycle (jump to the next paragraph when you get bored
. So back to the New Game window
The Non-player Race Generation Chance is the chance that an alien empire will be created if an eligible world is created during system generation. Eligible worlds are not that common but 30% is probably reasonable for your first game. A world may still be eligible even if it appears to be uninhabitable to your species.
The Non-player race Population Modifier is a difficulty modifier. The size of a new alien homeworld population is generated on a bell curve with the midpoint being equal to the average player race total population. If you change this value to less than 100 the midpoint of the bell curve will move below the average player race population. If you increase, the midpoint will be higher than the average player race population. This method of alien race generation also means that you can choose any starting population size and the game will scale appropriately
If you really like comets, you can set a minimum number per system. Comets are good in the sense that they usually have accessible mineral deposits, often in the ten of thousands of tons range, but bad in the sense they may disappear into the Oort cloud with your mining colony and come back in a few thousand years
The next section is Setting Empire Parameters. Empire Title, Species Name and Homeworld Name are just text entry fields so you can be as imaginative as you like, or just leave the standard 'Terran Federation', 'Human' and 'Earth' entries.
Government Type includes some modifiers for Empire characteristics, such as Xenophobia, Militancy, Determination, etc. and affects the amount of industry and how it is divided at game start. For now, just leave it as a player race.
Main Empire Theme adds flavour to your race. Your starting ranks, random system names and auto-generated names for ship classes will be based on the theme. So for example if you chose United States for the theme, the ranks would be US Naval and Army ranks, the system names would be US cities and the class names would be Essex, Lexington, Spruance, Ticonderoga, etc.. All names can be overridden during the games if you prefer something else and you can change theme mod-game. There are currently over sixty different themes including such varieties as Canadian, Deutschland, Demonic Realm, Ancient Egypt, Knights Templar, Welsh, Barsoom, Swedish, ASEAN, etc.
Commander Theme affects the naming of your Commanders. For the US theme I imported the latest US Census data into the Aurora database. When you generate a Commander it will pick a random first name from 2000 possibles and a random surname from over 50,000. That provides about one hundred million names for the US theme alone. Different name themes will vary in how the names are generated are displayed. For example, the Roman name theme uses praenomen (given name), nomen and cognomen. The German theme will put the occasional 'von' in for flavour, etc. There are currently thirty-four name themes, including Russian, Japanese, Ancient Greek, Polish, Jewish, Arabic, Hobbit, Zulu, Norse, Indian, etc. Any name theme you need should in there somewhere. If you want to see more themes, I am always open to players creating themes and sending them to me for the next version. Let me know if you want more details.
The final part of this section is an option between a Trans-Newtonian Empire and a Conventional Empire. Stick with Trans-Newtonian for now, which is a standard Aurora Empire. A Conventional Empire starts with no space-age tech and you have to pretty much start from scratch, converting your conventional industry and researching all of the normal basic starting tech. This would be frustrating for a new player and this tutorial will assume a standard start.
Next is the Species Tolerance section. Each species in Aurora has environmental tolerances with their midpoint being their homeworld. The habitability of planets will vary considerably depending on the species tolerances so a world that is ideal for humans may be uninhabitable for some other species and vice versa. Even humans can be set with varying tolerances that can affect the difficulty of the game. For now, set the maximum deviation in oxygen pressure to 50%, the max deviation in gravity to 70%, the max deviation in temperature to 22 and the max atmospheric pressure to 4.
These settings will mean that an ideal habitable world will have a temperature between 0 and 44C, an oxygen pressure between 0.1 and 0.3 atm, a gravity between 0.3G and 0.7G and a maximum atmospheric pressure of 4.0 atm. In addition to the individual species tolerances, the ideal habitable world will also need to have no dangerous gases such as Chlorine and will need the oxygen to be no more than 30% of the total atmospheric pressure. A planet that doesn't meet those criteria may be uninhabitable (if it falls outside the gravity range) or may require infrastructure to support the population. Note that you can put ground bases, troops, sensors etc. on any world except a gas giant, regardless of the habitability. If you want an actual population though, which you will need to run shipyards, factories, etc,, then the planet has to be habitable or at least have enough infrastructure for the inhabitants.
Next is Starting Population. This lays out the parameters for your initial population on Earth. Somewhere between 500m and 1000m is a good amount for a new player. Lets leave it at 500m for now. The other boxes can be left alone as they are mainly for specialized scenarios. For example, you might set the Wealth Creation Rate and Industrial Percentage fields to be very low (perhaps 15-20%) to simulate a country like China that has a lot of population but a much lower per capita industrial output and per capita income than the USA. In games that feature multiple starting Empires on Earth this can be an important balancing factor for the SpaceMaster.
Moving swiftly on to the Starting System section. Set the number of Sol Jump Points to 6. and leave the other boxes unchecked, This will give us plenty of avenues for exploration
In the Starting Tech system, uncheck the Assign Starting tech points box so we can allocate our own tech at the start of the game. If the box is left checked, the game will randomly assign our starting tech points to background technologies. That can be fun if you want to create a more challenging start where you have to cope with whatever tech you are given. As we are learning at the moment, it's much more educational to choose them ourselves
If you have any questions on the tutorial, please post them in a separate thread so I can maintain this one just for the tutorial text.
Steve