I've been thinking about writing an AAR for a while and the mapless challenge post from Caplin (
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9797.0) inspired me to start this. Being a mapless challenge means that I'll be playing this without the system map (F3) and without the galactic map(F11). I'm expecting the biggest drawback of playing without a map to be the lack of auto-turns because that checkbox is on the system map.
I'll be playing as the monarch of The Kingdom of Light, a nation on Earth that has taken the "make no graven image" commandment
way to seriously. We have a divine mandate to spread The Light to other stars. All of our warships will have lasers.
In addition to the mapless challenge, I'll be playing with some more self-imposed restrictions:
- Every ship must be in the same system as its parent task force commander
- Flag bridges will only be on warships, not survey ships
- The minimum deployment time for ship designs that aren’t intended to stay in a single system is 60 months
- Research projects can only have a scientist with that speciality assigned
- Research labs can't be removed from a research project once they've been assigned to it
- Only automated mining colonies will be allowed in the Sol system (we must take The Light to other stars)
I've made several tweaks to the default options in setting up this game. The biggest change is that I created The Kingdom of Light with the Contemplative government type. This means that I will start with just one shipyard and half the normal amount of mines, factories and research labs. To offset this a little bit, I have boosted the military academy to a level three facility so we'll be getting 15 officer graduates a year.