Hi Jorgen_CAB
I agree, thats why I didn’t stated one scenario and talked about another, that is just confusing for everyone.
Still, I do not have those issue, even with NPRs generated from the beginning.
But at the same time, I have +1000 of hours of experience playing Aurora 4x.
I never proclaimed that this would be anything else than a fix for certain particular scenario.
Just to be clear. Otherwise I would have stated that.
Also it depends on your mineral and fuel resources generated in Sol.
Speed is only ”relevant” if you are weaker than your opponent and have less weapon range. The main goal is to invade anyways. So just stay the course and wear it out. Its rare for me to get armor damage from the ai. I have spread out the whole flak/gauss umbrella on all the platforms in the fleet(30 ships or more per fleet, 500-1000kt total) other than that, they are very specialized in their role. And bring many colliers. Also think of all the different situations you might bump into when designing your fleet so you can handle all types of scenarios. A huge, well stocked, fighter-bomber group can handle many types of scenarios. Heavy super fast ASMs can also be to some use against certain enemies.
Carrier warfare neglects the speed gap, and I am heavy into carrier fleets + boarding.
Why destroy a ship when you can steal it(tugs can be useful sometimes) and refit/reverse engineer or scrap it?
That saves you resources.
Never designs something generic, give it a specific purpose.
In Aurora 4x, patience is KEY.
And respect the economy.
Do not ignore the cost of anything.
Anyways. . . . yeah I really really really am looking forward to Aurora C#
If you play in, say, a conventional start and you spend the majority of the research on exploration and explore as much as possible you will quite often meet some nasty aliens long before you are ready to deal with them. At least if you play such campaigns with no previous hindsight that there are precursors or other potential aliens out there that might be hostile. I usually end up facing hostile aliens with very rudimentary patrol ships to guard Earth and colonies as a result. This is not bad play, it is intentional. . .
In multi-faction campaigns you don't have time to make ship designs perfect or homogeneously designed. . . you always need ships yesterday and it's better to have a decent fleet now than an optimized fleet tomorrow, the same goes for conventional starts where you explore allot and meet aliens before you are ready for them. Also. . . from a math perspective it is better to disperse regular beams around a fleet even it it means you have a few fewer beams overall, the reason is that you can't be focused fired and you have way more HP where it counts. There are also a good case to be made regarding ASM and AMM missile ships, having both systems on a ship means you have greater flexibility of overloading in one or the other direction for an overall slightly lower ability in any one balanced load out.
In almost all of my multi-faction games (6+ earth factions) no faction can ever have a fleet that is not in some state of flux, mixed with many different technology levels and age of the ships and ships in different experience and training levels etc. . . generalist ships is often mandatory in such environments to some degree since it is usually the fastest and more easy way to get a decent fleet out the door to make the opponent think twice of attacking you.
The problem I have had with many single earth starts is that I had no real external pressures and could practically make my economy perfect and keep a minimal fleet in comparison to the economy. I could practically dictate when I needed to do what and engage a potential enemy with little to no real thought. I usually abandoned those campaign rather quickly because they just felt it was me playing alone with no real challenge, this was why I pretty much have abandoned playing single earth faction games entirely in the last few years.
Guzzling engines is important so you can have more mission tonnage per ship and still maintain a speed advantage or at least on par with the opposition. . . in tight games this is sort of an engine power race even at roughly the same tech levels. If you can pump up enough fuel to support it then having faster and/or more mission tonnage per ship it is worth it.
Also. . . if you don't feel enough pressure from NPRs just crank up their difficulty to three, four or even five times so they always have more technologies than you when you meet them.
One benefit with using no or in some cases only one NPR is that the game will take longer to slow down to a crawl. . . most of my recent campaigns have only had some precursors in them other than my own factions. That certainly speed things up. . .
I don't want to tell anybody how they should play their games but. . . in "my opinion". . . if there are no real pressure I would get bored building up an economy in pretty much isolation. This is one reason I think C# will be more interesting. The AI in C# seem to be allot more capable and so a real option even in multi-faction games as additional external pressures. The change to maintenance, sensors and missile ranges will also have a great impact on ship design and deployment in a way that will force fleets to become more dispersed and less reliant on one speed setting, you can't now place an unlimited number of 6000t ships at an outpost anymore. You will want smaller scout ships and escorts to be faster than capital ships to avoid them if you encounter them and this will make the dynamic of ship design more interesting. The fact that bigger ships now just will be more efficient than smaller ships is great as well and will make ship designs so much more engaging and difficult, it will be much harder to know what an "optimized" design actually is.
Hi Jorgen_CAB
Well, first off, patience is not equal to turtling. Hence why I used the word patience. English is not my native tounge, but I will try to explain anyways.
Rather with patience I mean that I spend 25-30% of the time in excel documents. I make long plans and form my strategies according to my situation. Just as I do when I run my company in RL.
However, danger lurks at every step of the way, that doesn't mean that your grand strategies are invalid. Your foremost weapon against anything is the economy and the logistics around it.
The economy will setup your boundaries. Hence you need to pay attention to population growth, minerals, fuel and wealth. And not waste anything. A surplus of population at any colony might be useful somewhere else. Minerals sitting idle is no good, and think about where the best investment is, ship or planet components. Fuel dictates your reach and endurance. Wealth will decide how hard you can push your economy. Everything needs to be balanced like a clock. Hence why I spend so much time making formulas in Excel and forecast my Empires situation 5 - 10 years onwards. The gain is no less in the details.
Patience also means, how you go about exploring and how you engage your enemies. Do you use the old WW2 style of attacking from behind AS distance or do you head straight in guns blazing, both are valid tactics. But what will be the consequences of either of those? Where and what do I stand to gain or lose? How much minerals and fuel is a net loss in a missile battle?
You also need patience when designing all your techs and ships, by taking things step by step and make economically sound decisions.
Patience also means, plan your logistics. Maybe take a couple of hours and paus the game and setup a solid logistic system that can be scaled. How much emtpy cargo space am I burning fuel for? But it is also necessary to make a solid military decision in this regard as well.
You could even timetable your moving of assets, every day an automine sits idle is a netloss of X amount of minerals that can be mined elsewhere. But that is perhaps taking it too far. :-)
But what would be more sensible would perhaps let´s say, make a calculation how long it will take an asteroid miner with 10 vs 30 asteroid mining modules to pay its own cost back to the empire vs automines that are twice as expensive.
All these things does not necessary mean Turtling per se.
That set aside, I was honoring the topic and focused on "increment time" improvment. People who have a hardtime playing 100 years in, might benefit from NOT starting with NPRs.
I will set another testgame with a couple of NPRs and see how much this improves the game, just for the kicks of it.
On a last note, indeed overcoming a tough challenge is much more worth than winning an easy game.
But in as far as exploiting a game mechanic, is as bad as making poor decisions. So that was what I ment with patience is KEY.
Take your time and think things through, but not as an insult but as a tip from the coach.
Anyways, have a good day Sir :-)