Scenarios

[theredone7 (OP)]

Steve mentioned on Reddit (iirc) that he liked the idea of implementing different scenarios for players to try out, and seeing no dedicated thread for this I figured this would be an ideal place to pool ideas.

One scenario that I always liked to try and implement is one where the Earth and Mars have been devastated by war and are no longer habitable due to the levels of radiation and atmospheric dust.   The scenario would start with a few colonies on the Gallilean moons, Titan and some Dwarf Planets and Asteroids, with the initial goal of evacuating the remaining people of Earth and Mars as quickly as possible.

Another scenario could be on a non-solar system start, where the player has control over a super-earth/jovian and its several terrestrial moons or where a federation of races rule the worlds and trade with each other.

Anyway, I figured this thread could be used to set out scenario ideas for scoping and expanding on.

Lastly, I'd also be a fan of setting up a 'Tutorial' scenario where the number of minerals in Sol are increased and which can be used as a basis for actual tutorials, as everyone (new players to the game and those writing/recording the tutorial) would be playing the same game.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I tried setting up a scenario back in the day, but I didn't feel I had enough control over setting up an NPR to do what i really wanted.

I did briefly experiment with a non-NPR foe that had ships acting on preordained order patterns with Automated Fire enabled.  There were definitely some downsides to this, though. Unfortunately, owing to the limits of the orders system, I couldn't say park a carrier 100mkm from earth and have it launch invasion dropships.

[bean]

I like the idea, but I can think of two potential problems.  First, versioning.  Because of how Aurora gets updated, we'd probably have to rebuild the scenarios with each version. 
Second, there are limits to what we can do for specific challenges in the scenarios.  You can't set up elaborate AI routines.  TheDeadlyShoe's idea about non-NPRs is very clever, but also very limited.  So you can't give a near-peer challenge out, and expect the player to have much trouble.

I can see two major uses.  First, a tutorial scenario.  Start the player off with a reasonable empire, so they can learn how to maneuver ships before they have to figure out how to build them. There's an NPR two systems out, calibrated to be manageable, but not easily. 
Second, a case where the player can face down a big NPR.  At the moment, NPRs are largely limited to single-system powers, but it should be possible to set up a multi-system NPR with the designer password.