Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Chat => Topic started by: DaMachinator on July 19, 2016, 10:29:26 PM
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Impending gallicite shortage. Ancient and slow freighters. Hostiles next door to Sol.
None of the Sol gas giants have sorium deposits worth mining. Titan is my best supply of that until I get some intersystem tankers. Need more survey ships - have 3 geosurvey and 2 gravisurvey, all outdated and rather expensive. Need more labs. Need more conyards to make said labs. Need more mass drivers. Wish I hadn't spent time refitting my survey craft with useless size-1 passive thermals instead of making dedicated scout craft.
Also I'm rather low on Uridium.
What should I do?
Good news: I found a dead end system with a good sorium gas giant and made jump gates.
I have decided scout craft.
There's an asteroid close enough to the hostile's JP so I put DSTS's on it.
I have two big naval yards with 800+ mod rate and 10 kiloton+ capacity.
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Have you started mining Venus yet?
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I'm mining all of the inner planets except Mars and it's moons. Luna too. Mercury is a pretty good source of minerals in this playthrough. I dropped off a geo team there in hopes of getting better accessibility on some minerals.
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Are you going out of your way to limit expenditure of Gallicite and Sorium?
Large, low-powered engines taking up about half of your craft is very economical on both... and I'm fond of that design practice for other reasons.
Note that build cost of engines scales quadratically below 1.0 power multiplier... half as powerful, a quarter the cost.
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Are you going out of your way to limit expenditure of Gallicite and Sorium?
Large, low-powered engines taking up about half of your craft is very economical on both... and I'm fond of that design practice for other reasons.
Note that build cost of engines scales quadratically below 1.0 power multiplier... half as powerful, a quarter the cost.
Aside from the scout craft where space constraints were a thing because I wanted to reuse an already researched jump drive design, the only engine ANYTHING has is the max size min power engine. (A really big ion engine.) Some things use two or three.
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Seems you're doing a lot of things right under current circumstances.
What's the lowest power multiplier available to you though?
I still find 0.5 excessive for most civilian and even some military applications, I typically reserch down to 0.3 before I build any ships in a standard TN start. When short on Sorium and Gallicite specificially, I might drop lower.
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I learned to love building a whole classes (generally I call them corvettes) using commercial engines as they are dirty cheap to make and are useful for filling out your fleets. It sounds like you have a good grasp of the game - so good job!
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Seems you're doing a lot of things right under current circumstances.
What's the lowest power multiplier available to you though?
I still find 0.5 excessive for most civilian and even some military applications, I typically reserch down to 0.3 before I build any ships in a standard TN start. When short on Sorium and Gallicite specificially, I might drop lower.
I haven't researched down or up any, although I might research up for missile engines. I think I have .3 or .2 minimum power. I did make one ship that used a 100% power engine, because GOTTA GO FAST and space constraints imposed by a preexisting jump drive design I wanted to reuse.
I learned to love building a whole classes (generally I call them corvettes) using commercial engines as they are dirty cheap to make and are useful for filling out your fleets. It sounds like you have a good grasp of the game - so good job!
Everything I've built so far (no warships yet) aside from two scout craft uses one or more of the same 50HS .3 or .2 power multiplier commercial engine. I'd like to have Fuel Efficiency .7, but I don't (yet).
I also just realized that I'm short of Uridium too, which I need even more of. However, I did finally finish an asteroid mining module.
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you can also put auto mines on asteroids.
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you can also put auto mines on asteroids.
I know, but my survey ships are preoccupied elsewhere. Might as well build a redesign of my salvager class to use miners instead of salvaging modules.
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Don't forget to add a colony on them or the minerals will just delete themselves.
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Don't forget to add a colony on them or the minerals will just delete themselves.
Um, what? I guess it's a good thing I haven't surveyed any of them yet.
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Don't forget to add a colony on them or the minerals will just delete themselves.
Um, what? I guess it's a good thing I haven't surveyed any of them yet.
Your asteroid mining ship needs to be orbiting a colony (not just the rock itself), or the minerals produced will evaporate forever. Speaking of which, I vaguely remember this bug may have been fixed?, but for a long while it was necessary with these (and similar types of ships, like sorium harvesters) to make sure every ship Moved to the destination before it did anything like merging with a Task Group already there.
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I think it's still the case with terraformers.
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That's the case with asteroid miners, terraformers, sodium harvesters, and orbital habitats, Basically the database won't update properly unless the ship goes to the body which will then trigger the production calculation.
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Now I'm working on battle fleet design. Ideally I'd like one PD ship with short-range laser PD and long-range AMM PD.
Tactics advice wanted: Since there is a known hostile presence in the system, should I activate size-1 missile detection actives immediately after jump, or design a thermal sensor strong enough to pick up missiles before it's too late?
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Active sensors are useless after jumping due to Jump Blindness, and you can't use passive sensors to shoot down targets (like missiles). However, CWIS and shields work after jumping so I would recommend some of those (like one or two at least) on most ships)
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Are early tech shields (next level available to me is gamma level) still useful? Also, should I use absorption shields or regular ones?
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If you have Absorption Shields available, praise the RNGods and build them - you need to uncover 2 separate techs from ruins, which takes a lot of luck or a lot of installations to sift through.
Shields are an optional tech... like Cloaking, Turrets, Gauss (railgun PD requires pretty much no research), ECM and a second anti-ship beam line. Can be good if they fit your needs, and investing into one or two won't hold you back too much because of the way research costs scale. I wouldn't go for all of them, and I'd wait until I have the basics covered to the point where the next tech seems painfully expensive.
How you should split shields and armour is up to debate. Minimal shielding is fine (just to protect the paintjob from the occasional leaker, or avoid shock damage in case of single big hits), so is all shields and minimal armour on larger ships that invest a lot into protection (can take moderate damage almost indefinitely). I don't particularly like an even split, seems unfocused.
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I just assumed I had them since they're an option in the systems design menu. I'll see if I can actually build them now.
I would kill for a weapons specialist about now.
What do I do with a xenology team? I have one, but I need to remember where I found ruins.
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I just assumed I had them since they're an option in the systems design menu. I'll see if I can actually build them now.
I would kill for a weapons specialist about now.
What do I do with a xenology team? I have one, but I need to remember where I found ruins.
Just drop them off at the colony where the ruins are, and they will eventually determine what's there. Once they have, you'll need to drop off a Construction Brigade (or several), and they will begin to recover installations. If you go to the Display 2 tab on the left of the System Map screen, there's a section called "Known Ruins."