Awesome. The Rigellians make a return.
Having read the initial diaries more than once I wonder how much the more limiting structure of Aurora vs tabletop will alter the general course of events and if database slowdown/corruption will prematurely end the expansion of their empire?
Not sure how much of the history of Aurora you know here. For those who aren't in on the backstory: The core code for Aurora was originally called "Starfire Assistant" (SA) - it was a book-keeping program Steve wrote (in VB 6
) to keep track of all that stuff for his Starfire campaigns. The Rigellian campaign was played using SA, and as the campaign grew so did SA (I remember at some point Steve did a lot of work to put amalgamation of empires into SA, 'cuz he had a big merger between the Rigellians and another empire coming up).
In the end, you could say that "slowdown" killed the Rigellian campaign (that and Steve moved on to Aurora) - near the end the campaign was so huge that (IIRC) it was taking him months to play through a single turn. You can see this in the page count for the turns in the Diaries - the last few turns take up a significant fraction of the write-up. If anything, I suspect the Aurora engine would make the game more manageable - SA didn't have tactical movement, so battle management was a lot more labor-intensive.
At this point I think almost all of the actual game mechanics/rules in Aurora are completely different from SA/Starfire, but the underlying core application is a direct descendant of SA. So the upshot is that I don't think Aurora has a "more limiting structure" vs. the Starfire of the Rigellian campaign (since it wasn't really a tabletop campaign), especially since the limitations don't matter nearly as much when you're the one writing the program
John
