Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => General Discussion => Topic started by: Froggiest1982 on August 15, 2021, 12:02:59 AM
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As per subject, here is a list oh house rules I am enjoying and I look forward to see others and or comments on mine.
1 - No free infrastructures. I am editing the DB recently and let colonies to produce free infrastructures only above 500m population. Sometimes it is paired to no civilians for the nice extra pain. Another thing that works well with this modification is the 10% terraforming speed, otherwise terraforming will always be cheaper and faster than use infrastructures. (it still is though)
2 - Capped mines based on body size. Self explainatory. I use a small formula and tge maximum amount of mines you can get on larger bodies it' never more than 250 anyway.
3 - Realistic pop Growth. My races have between 0.1 and 0.3 growth rate, so no more double population after 4 or 5 years on new colonies. Works well with the infrastructures rule.
4 - 5% Survey speed. This is almost a default for many players I think. For me it does really give you the feel of exploration in space at the "right" pace. In the end I've heard that the universe is...big! You can cap the number of grav/geo sensors allowed per ship for the always extra nice pain.
Another thing would be the research speed, but I am still torn between several setups so I won't mention any of them.
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My own rules are the following:
1) No stacking excessive amount of terraformers on a single planet. I don't have a hard rule here, basically I make it so it always take some years to terraform. The numbers do change according to how far my tech is. I am allowed to terraform multiple worlds at once, but I try not to go crazy with it.
2) No civilian mining complexes or civilian fuel harvesting. No sane real world nation would leave such critical, extremely limited and life ensuring materials in the hands of civilians. I sometimes keep civs around for transportation.
3) No automines except for comets (kinda necessary for the start). Automines are simply too convenient, period. So it's either infrastructure+ mines, or orbital habitats, or mining ships (not much of this). This is why I don't like the idea of limiting population growth, I kinda need the population XD
4) No mass drivers. Good old cargo ships doing rounds.
5) 10% exploration speed, 25% research speed. Not hard numbers, it's just what I currently use, still experimenting.
6) Lately I've been doing a half-tn start. Start conventional, SM research TN, SM edit the planet so I have basic tn-era facilities (mines, factories, refineries). And that's it, no other techs or starting spaceyards or extra facilities. I basically don't want to deal with the starting conversion. No starting fleet of any kind either.
7) No reduced size missiles or box launcher on normal ships, as the AI cannot deal with it. Box launchers are only allowed on fighters or FACs, and the boxed missiles MUST be short ranged. Basically, I can use them but I need to actually get close with the bombers/FACs. I also don't get crazy with them, cause that would also defeat the spirit of this house rule which is to not abuse the AI.
My fleets are mostly beam warships and carriers. Missile capital ships are reserved for stragglers/damaged ships, lone ships, civilians, bombarding or other special uses. I also use them if I discover a particular enemy has little point defense.
I personally don't like your no-free-infrastructure change, as I need all the infrastructure I can get due to my mining needs XD
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Research speed at 25%, yeah.
Also:
# No preemptive warfare buildup without some signs of menace
# Some part of CMC minerals always go to commercial sector even if I need those minerals
# No Financial Centers without powerful industry at the site
# Box launchers cannot be mounted on any heavy ship as her main armament
# No officer promotion without 3-4 years of service normally (it's tons of micro really, because I have to use "no autopromotion" checkboxes and promote everyone manually)
# No commander exchange en route
# No high post for 20-years old newbie. 3-4 years of minor colony governor experience to be trasfered at major colony governor post, etc.
# Any research to start with 1 lab, and I can double labs number for any reseach no less then 1 year after start or previous buildup. No more-then-one-lab research for small-RP projects at all.
# No use of any craft less then several mounth after it's first exemplar is built; no active operations for ships before at least 50% crew training; no combat use of captured ships before several mounths of research and training
# Never use any risky tactical trick twice againt the same AI opponent; pretend they'll be ready and catch you the next time.
# No infrastructure-free major colony if any environment condition is on the edge of the racial requirements; no massive colonization less then several mounths after ice-melting or smth like this
# No nearly-endless trips even for commercial ships; use proper Intended Deployment Time for them; no sitting at orbit (harvesting, mining, terraforming, etc.) or at JP for years without colony or recreational module
# No forever-isolated garrisons (i.e. without colonies or naval bases at site); use orbital recreational module or set replacement trips with troop transports
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4 - 5% Survey speed. This is almost a default for many players I think. For me it does really give you the feel of exploration in space at the "right" pace. In the end I've heard that the universe is...big! You can cap the number of grav/geo sensors allowed per ship for the always extra nice pain.
I've found that survey speed is a bit tricky to get right, because so much of survey efficiency ends up being tied to how fast your survey ships can move between locations. Asteroid fields for example are almost only a function of travel time while surveying a terrestrial or gas giant planet gets to where you can park a survey ship for half a year per planet which is IMO more frustrating that realistic. For grav surveys it is more consistent and 5% or 10% works fine.
Another thing would be the research speed, but I am still torn between several setups so I won't mention any of them.
Personally, I find the research speed fine, but the problem in my view tends to be that you don't really need a lot of scientists. Once you have one good researcher in every specialty (granted, "good" can take a while to get, but not every specialty is critical) you're good for a long time and by the time you face retirements a bunch of new prospects are available.
From 1.13 on I have been experimenting with a house rule that the admin skill of scientists is divided by 5 (house rule only, I don't believe this can be enforced by DB changes). With this even the best scientists are commanding only a few labs (6 to 8 usually), meaning there are jobs for several scientists at once - and each project takes longer to finish even though the overall RP output is at the nice default 100% rate that I find best for gameplay. You can still rush propulsion techs but not quickly and you still need a balanced scientific portfolio.
So far I like this and have found it a relatively micro-free and simple way to limit scientific progress without feeling constrained or slow.
2) No civilian mining complexes or civilian fuel harvesting. No sane real world nation would leave such critical, extremely limited and life ensuring materials in the hands of civilians.
sobs in capitalism
3) No automines except for comets (kinda necessary for the start). Automines are simply too convenient, period. So it's either infrastructure+ mines, or orbital habitats, or mining ships (not much of this). This is why I don't like the idea of limiting population growth, I kinda need the population XD
Personally I love the balance between automines, manual mines, and orbital miners. It forces a lot of tough decisions to be made, since every automine built could have been two manual mines but sometimes you need to put mines down yesterday with population shipped out tomorrow.
As for me, personally I don't maintain a lot of house rules, rather letting RP dictate how I play which tends to introduce plenty of inefficiencies. I do vacillate between 100% and 10% survey speed depending on the kind of game I want to play, and as mentioned I'm liking the scientist house rule I've been trying. Recently I have been getting into design studies, more or less, using a lot of box launchers reminiscent of modern-day VLS-armed ships. These obviously push the already meager limits of the NPR AI, so I think in v2.0 I will have to start experimenting with player race-only campaigns and seeing how that goes. It will probably make games take a longer time but I am not in a big rush anyways.
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I though I had "hard homerules" and now I realized that I am just a child playing to be an adult in comparison with yours ;D ;D ;D
Thanks for sharing, I will try to implement some of yours in my next game. There are really nice ideas!!
EDITED: I curse you all! Now I can't play my current game knowing these homerules that you have posted and I am "forced" to start all over again. Time to choose from the list you have put up. As I'm not afraid of excessive micromanagement (I place each officer at his/her destination by hand, for example) and I like to enjoy a slow-paced game, I'm sure I'll take quite a few of the rules you've posted.
By the way, a couple of rules I usually use:
# Survey ships must always have a science department and a deployment time of 60 months (5 years). Of course they must have enough MSP to be able to stay that long.
# During 5 year survey missions, I block the promotion of the captain and science officer (and any other officers that may be on board) and they can only be promoted when they are in Overhaul period.
# Military vessels that would be considered a category above Patrol Craft (3000t and above) must carry an auxiliary bridge and an executive officer. I justify this by stating that in such a large crew, the minimum is to put a cadet fresh out of the academy as second-in-command.
# I try to recreate a more realistic chain of command and naval organisation (to the best of my knowledge). That is, I don't drop Naval Adms. just below the high command, I always put several levels of intermediate command. This requires a lot of micromanagement, but besides giving it depth, the stacked bonuses are mind-blowing.
For example:
High Admiralty Command
Exploration Command - Admiral
Exploration Command - CoS (Chief of Staff)
SRV [Name of Ship] Liaison Office
- The ship itself.
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From 1.13 on I have been experimenting with a house rule that the admin skill of scientists is divided by 5 (house rule only, I don't believe this can be enforced by DB changes). With this even the best scientists are commanding only a few labs (6 to 8 usually), meaning there are jobs for several scientists at once - and each project takes longer to finish even though the overall RP output is at the nice default 100% rate that I find best for gameplay. You can still rush propulsion techs but not quickly and you still need a balanced scientific portfolio.
Oh I do that to a certain extent as well. I did not mention it since it's not a house rule per-se, but on top of the research reduction, I make sure to always have at least 2-3 research projects going. It's more realistic like this.
sobs in capitalism
;D
To be completely fair, there's literally nothing in the world even remotely as valuable as TN materials are in Aurora. The closest thing would MAYBE be something like uranium, or some other radioactives maybe, but TN materials are orders of magnitude more important. After all they are limited, they don't renew at ALL, and have NO possible substitute ever. Without them you are stuck on earth while waiting for the heat death of the Universe ;D
So I'd say my evaluation of no sane nation leaving it to the civs is quite on point. It would be the equivalent of selling ICBM missiles on ebay.
These obviously push the already meager limits of the NPR AI, so I think in v2.0 I will have to start experimenting with player race-only campaigns and seeing how that goes. It will probably make games take a longer time but I am not in a big rush anyways.
Yes, the AI cannot deal at all with massed boxed launchers, which is the main reason I don't use them except than in limited fashion.
I will also admit that it's also a matter of personal RP preferences for me. In a very-far-future tech scenario, I just personally cannot see missiles be viable as imo they should be trivial to intercept with any amount of point defense. But that's just my personal point of view, and of course Steve can code his game as he wants.
After all, I also think that in a far future scenario all military ships would 100% be unmanned drones due to higher performance and no need to accomodate humans onboard, but Aurora still uses human crews :)
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To be completely fair, there's literally nothing in the world even remotely as valuable as TN materials are in Aurora. The closest thing would MAYBE be something like uranium, or some other radioactives maybe, but TN materials are orders of magnitude more important. After all they are limited, they don't renew at ALL, and have NO possible substitute ever. Without them you are stuck on earth while waiting for the heat death of the Universe ;D
Well, we know there is no substitute ever for them; they have no more evidence about it, then we (real ones) know it about iron and rare earth metals ores, hydrocarbons and phosphates: all those are non-renewable (in quantities) and we know no way to build or support civilization without those. Yet nearly all extraction industry of those remains commercial.
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Well we can make civilization without REEs and Hydrocarbons. Just not civilization as we know it. Ferrous materials and Phosphates are a different story however...
Also we can get renewable iron in quantity from dying stars. If we ever figure out Matter transmutation the rest are easy.
Edit for my House Rules:
1: Proper OOBs and Chains of Command because micromanagement.
2: Most colonies have orbital elements too because i hate myself but love realism.
3: The Sun can be made into a Dyson sphere given enough time.
The third one might sound a little strange but Dyson Spheres are other celestial level engineering projects arent represented in Aurora so this rule represents the idea that the ultimate goal is to prove that its possible.
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In my current campaign, I'm disallowing terraforming
. . . oh also I destroyed earth and restarted from a single colony with 2 mines and 2 factories
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Well we can make civilization without REEs and Hydrocarbons. Just not civilization as we know it. Ferrous materials and Phosphates are a different story however...
Also we can get renewable iron in quantity from dying stars. If we ever figure out Matter transmutation the rest are easy.
Any element exept of hydrogen went from exploding novas, yet we have no clue how to do it inside civilizational limits of time and territory.
And without REEs and Hydrocarbons there can be some civilization, yet no modern level one - no more then early XIX century level. It's possible that some hiden way to do it exists, yet what we cannot know - we cannot know indeed, the same way as any Aurora population we can imagine cannot know if there is a way to build spacefaring civilization without TNs.
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My House Rules:
#1: Research at 15%. I find this gives me a good pace forward - it speeds up greatly once you start researching the RP techs and doesn't put me in a position where I have to cap research lab usage.
#2: Scientists can only research their specialty. Can only change a Scientist specialty at game start.
#3: Survey Speed 5%. I prefer a slower paced exploration game. I usually build long range/high endurance explorers for jump point exploration. I then build shorter range/endurance survey craft accompanied by tenders for celestial body survey.
#4: Reduce gravity tolerance to 0.4. It reduces the number of colonizable candidates in Sol System at game start.
#5. No military build up or military vessel design over 5,000 tons until another race encountered.
#6. No Box Launchers on anything over 1,000 tons.
#7. No Mass Drivers on Habitable/Colonized Planets.
#8. Reduce Terraforming Speed to 10%.
#9: No JP Stabilization until the next system down the Chain is fully explored.
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#4: Reduce gravity tolerance to 0.4. It reduces the number of colonizable candidates in Sol System at game start.
Yeah, that's what I do the same: to enable Martian major colony, yet not Lunar one.
Also I tend to reduce Atm Density tolerance from x4 to x2 and set Translation at nearly-minimal value.
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Well we can make civilization without REEs and Hydrocarbons. Just not civilization as we know it. Ferrous materials and Phosphates are a different story however...
Also we can get renewable iron in quantity from dying stars. If we ever figure out Matter transmutation the rest are easy.
Any element exept of hydrogen went from exploding novas, yet we have no clue how to do it inside civilizational limits of time and territory.
And without REEs and Hydrocarbons there can be some civilization, yet no modern level one - no more then early XIX century level. It's possible that some hiden way to do it exists, yet what we cannot know - we cannot know indeed, the same way as any Aurora population we can imagine cannot know if there is a way to build spacefaring civilization without TNs.
As i said, it would be civilization. Just not as a we know it.
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House rules of my latest game:
1, No space weapons. Ground troops only.
2, No diplomacy or neutrality.
3, Swarm must grow. New lesser hive (20m orbital habitat) should be built every year past 40.
4, Colonise all planets below col cost 5 in my sphere of influence, no matter the minerals.
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1. Research down to 50%.
2. Terraforming and Survey down to 25%.
3. ALWAYS start as a conventional.
4. Terraforming only allowed from towed stations after 10 facilities - no constructing enough planet side terraformers to cover the world.
5. No energy weapons allowed until I fight one. I can only research the basic level after encountering, higher after killing/capturing.
6. There must always be a standing military on all worlds of 250m or more - not just a basic policing force but a properly supplied force built into the greater hierarchy.
7. Start with 500m pop, 5 labs, 1600 CI, and one civilian shipyard named the ISS Cargo Dock.
8. 0 starting NPRs, but manually do percentage rolls based on the same factors as normal with increasing percent success based on jumps away form Sol.
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personally I play the 20%/20%/20% rules as standard but i have a few house rules on top of that.
1) No Box launcher on anything Over 5k tons with the exception if "special" ships. (think ICBM Subs)
2) After the first 9 Research Labs, Labs have to be equally distributed amongst all fields. I can still target/fast track techs, but i can only do so with 9 labs. Once a field is out of useable tech (Bio) they labs have to equally redistributed.
Edit: just realized i said "under 5k" instead of 'Over 5k"... you all probably know what i meant though
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The one that worked extremely well for me was to pre-stabilise every jump point and require every interstellar thing to either have its own jump drive or be docked at something that has one. That way I avoid all the jump tenders and mess I just don't really like to be fair, both from gameplay and lore perspective, getting more classic sci-fi approach to FTL travel and the all jump points stable option made nprs surprisingly more dangreous, because they could find me much quicker not wasting time to stabilise jump points and now I can't even detect them unless I really detect them - everything is stable, not just stuff nprs had visited already.
Also I do care about my exploration ships and try to avoid getting them killed whenever possible, giving them armor, sometimes gauss and all that or trying to get them fast enough to have a chance at running away.
Oh, and I play without civilians, too. Painful at the start, but so satisfying knowing I transported it all by myself and am rewarded with less lag sources.
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The one that worked extremely well for me was to pre-stabilise every jump point and require every interstellar thing to either have its own jump drive or be docked at something that has one. That way I avoid all the jump tenders and mess I just don't really like to be fair, both from gameplay and lore perspective, getting more classic sci-fi approach to FTL travel and the all jump points stable option made nprs surprisingly more dangreous, because they could find me much quicker not wasting time to stabilise jump points and now I can't even detect them unless I really detect them - everything is stable, not just stuff nprs had visited already.
Also I do care about my exploration ships and try to avoid getting them killed whenever possible, giving them armor, sometimes gauss and all that or trying to get them fast enough to have a chance at running away.
Oh, and I play without civilians, too. Painful at the start, but so satisfying knowing I transported it all by myself and am rewarded with less lag sources.
While I like a lot the way that stabilization/jump works, I would agree that jump could be ship related and not tonnage.
1 module 1 ship and to create tenders 2 modules or more 2 ships or more.
Eventually, the commercial/military option is already enough to avoid tender exploit and keep a decent layer of strategy/managing.
Therefore, you could have 1 military jump device and 1 commercial jump device (larger).
I have also considered a new slider related to jump engine option could be added into the design engine component at the expenses of a little extra tonnage and RP + minerals. Just if we want to keep things consistent witb the actual design and UI.
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Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.
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Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.
Try 5-10%. That may sound weird but it actually makes exploration match the expansion rate of productions + engine speed very nicely to the point I think it should be default. Most surveying is more dependent on engine speed because you spend most of exploration in transit anyways.
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Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.
Try 5-10%. That may sound weird but it actually makes exploration match the expansion rate of productions + engine speed very nicely to the point I think it should be default. Most surveying is more dependent on engine speed because you spend most of exploration in transit anyways.
Agh, the agony of knowing 1.14 is probably relatively close but wanting to start anew...
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Agh, the agony of knowing 1.14 is probably relatively close but wanting to start anew...
From experience, the next update is rarely close enough that you won't restart abandon finish a game before it comes out...
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For me it isn’t that I don’t have time to finish a new game before the next version. It is a combination of A) I always have another game lined up to keep me occupied and B) the next version has a feature that once I hear about I decide I can’t do without - in this case the new spoilers are a big draw.
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To be completely fair, there's literally nothing in the world even remotely as valuable as TN materials are in Aurora. The closest thing would MAYBE be something like uranium, or some other radioactives maybe, but TN materials are orders of magnitude more important. After all they are limited, they don't renew at ALL, and have NO possible substitute ever. Without them you are stuck on earth while waiting for the heat death of the Universe ;D
Well, we know there is no substitute ever for them; they have no more evidence about it, then we (real ones) know it about iron and rare earth metals ores, hydrocarbons and phosphates: all those are non-renewable (in quantities) and we know no way to build or support civilization without those. Yet nearly all extraction industry of those remains commercial.
And that is... a bit of a gripe for me - the only way to feasibly acquire more of TN elements is to expand - more solar systems are generated, more TNEs to acquire... (salvaging civilian ship wrecks is... so odd, that I consider this as a too perverted way to acquire TN elements).
Even in our world, no element in the periodic table is truly non-renewable: you can bombard any element with sufficient energy to convert it into any other element, provided you have sufficient power to do so - our nuclear power plants pretty much opened this new capability... Of course, the amount acquired this way is quite low, it will hardly be enough to satisfy the full demand, but at least it is a way to get the rare elements if you are desperate enough.
And this got me thinking - say folks, what do you think of synthetic Trans-Newtonian element plants? These can be extremely expensive to operate in terms of wealth, cheaper if you convert existing TN element into other TN element, but... we do have some equivalents in our real world - there were synthetic oil plants and fuel substitutes in world war 2...
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Even in our world, no element in the periodic table is truly non-renewable: you can bombard any element with sufficient energy to convert it into any other element, provided you have sufficient power to do so - our nuclear power plants pretty much opened this new capability... Of course, the amount acquired this way is quite low, it will hardly be enough to satisfy the full demand, but at least it is a way to get the rare elements if you are desperate enough.
The problem here is one of scale. Aurora works at a scale where TNEs are measured in tons. There are obviously individual unit or component costs in the fractions of a TNE but these generally need to be built at scale anyways. Nuclear fabrication really doesn't work at that scale, and the set of elements for which it is practical is really a very small subset of those needed to run a modern technological society.
And this got me thinking - say folks, what do you think of synthetic Trans-Newtonian element plants? These can be extremely expensive to operate in terms of wealth, cheaper if you convert existing TN element into other TN element, but... we do have some equivalents in our real world - there were synthetic oil plants and fuel substitutes in world war 2...
Not personally a fan, and more importantly Steve has flatly denied this possibility many times so it will not happen either way.
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The problem here is one of scale. Aurora works at a scale where TNEs are measured in tons. There are obviously individual unit or component costs in the fractions of a TNE but these generally need to be built at scale anyways. Nuclear fabrication really doesn't work at that scale, and the set of elements for which it is practical is really a very small subset of those needed to run a modern technological society.
Given enough time, miligram after miligram or ounce after ounce and You'll eventually make it to ton...
It can be an interesting thing to have TNE purifying facilities, whose efficiency is limited by the size of the body they are on - which could give an extra emphasis on territory control, and even if a player ever goes on a limited expansion, or even stays only in the starting system, it still gives him/her/it an option to acquire more resources. Of course, it shouldn't surpass the regular mining techniques.
Alas...
Not personally a fan, and more importantly Steve has flatly denied this possibility many times so it will not happen either way.
That basically settles it. Steve hasn't changed his mind about that?
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Nope. Something like that gets suggested every now and then but Steve has always said the same thing: acquiring more TN minerals is one of the core tenets of the game and he does not want it to be circumvented even at a limited scale.
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Given enough time, miligram after miligram or ounce after ounce and You'll eventually make it to ton...
This is technically true but "time" is not an infinite resource.
For a current analogue, Mo-99/Tc-99m production which is used for most medical diagnostic imaging procedures worldwide is fabricated at a rate of roughly a kilogram per year, and generally the state of world supply can be characterized as a shortage - in other words, we need more capacity than we have, so the low rate of production is not due to low demand. This is to be frank pretty typical of nuclear fabrication. Even with the famous TN handwaving of Aurora we are still talking about essentially scaling up to an entire planet's population of workers and the necessary hundreds if not thousands of advanced reactors employing them just to produce a few tons of a TNE per year - a nice, comfy CC=0.00 planet with 500m pop can perhaps match the output of one mine at base tech, if we are generous.
Even leaving aside Steve's distaste for the idea (which is based on very sound gameplay reasons IMO) it's simply not a feasible approach and strains credulity at best.
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This is technically true but "time" is not an infinite resource.
For a current analogue, Mo-99/Tc-99m production which is used for most medical diagnostic imaging procedures worldwide is fabricated at a rate of roughly a kilogram per year, and generally the state of world supply can be characterized as a shortage - in other words, we need more capacity than we have, so the low rate of production is not due to low demand. This is to be frank pretty typical of nuclear fabrication. Even with the famous TN handwaving of Aurora we are still talking about essentially scaling up to an entire planet's population of workers and the necessary hundreds if not thousands of advanced reactors employing them just to produce a few tons of a TNE per year - a nice, comfy CC=0.00 planet with 500m pop can perhaps match the output of one mine at base tech, if we are generous.
Even leaving aside Steve's distaste for the idea (which is based on very sound gameplay reasons IMO) it's simply not a feasible approach and strains credulity at best.
Which ironically makes the renewable resources, not renewable to begin with. ::) ;D
So, thanks for, indirectly, supporting my idea. ;)
Since time is limited anyway, these regenerating resources are not renewable. They are only renewable, if we take time out of the equation.
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You can make it practically renewable by DIM_SystemAbundance table modding, with a cost of no bugreporting.
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New house rule regarding box launchers for my current playthrough.
Since cruisers and pre-dreadnaughts often carried torpedos (and for the most part they were not reloadable) during the age of Steam & Steel, i'm going with a rule that ships are only allowed 10 MPS worth of Box launchers per 5K Tons.
A 10K tons ship can have 20 MSP, so 4x Size 5 launchers or 2x size 10 etc. But a 12k Ton ship is still limited to 20 MSP, only once you pass the next 5K threshold can you add more MSP worth of launchers.
This allows all ships to have the option of some missiles but avoids the Box spam where one 10K Ton ship can launch 50 missiles at once.
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This is a bit of thread Necro - but most of these are house rules around 1-13. Now that we've moved to 2-5-1 I'm curious if people's house rules have changed any.
My configuration settings and house rules tend to be an effort to try and even the playing field between me and NPRs as much as possible in order to increase the difficulty level of the game (and ruin my own life and enjoy it). As a result I tend to:
- Difficulty modifier: 200+
- Hostility modifier: at least 25, often 50 or 100.
- limited research admin ON
- no terraforming OR terraforming only with facilities discovered on ancient ruins. they may not be constructed (including orbital ones)
- no automines - except those discovered on ancient ruins. they may not be constructed.
- either: no mass drivers OR mass drivers only if a certain technology unlocks them (or ancient ruins). If I permit MDs they may only have an unpopulated colony as the destination.
- no box launchers on anything over 1000 tons.
On terraforming, I don't think NPRs can terraform - so that means they have a reduced ability to colonize. I feel like having a key capability that NPRs can't use dramatically affects the balance of power in a game. So I ditch it. While I could argue that NPRs can take over my colonies that I terraform, I feel like terraforming makes it possible for me to expand faster / with greater ease than NPRs.
Automines and MDs are more about just making my life harder for pain and enjoyment. I waffle on whether or not to not use automines, because at some level there's balance built into the game already and realistically building dozens of ark modules is sometimes more pain than I want to put up with. For MDs - I mostly don't feel like governments would happily fling life-ending masses of dense materials into the orbit of inhabited colonies on a regular basis. One single mistake seems like it carries way too much risk.
The box launcher thing is because of a (perhaps outdated) perspective that NPRs don't handle them well in volumes. So it feels like an unbalanced option for larger vessels.
Lastly, I've been experimenting with picking 1-2 weapons at the start (e. g. carronades, gauss) and then using SM to remove all other weapon technology. When I do that, I make a house rule that I can't research those initial levels - I must get them from NPR wrecks. Once I have the basic technologies, then it's open game. Sometimes I lock MDs behind railgun technology as a result. This means I have to stick to a military doctrine/capability longer.
Re-reading this thread, I'm likely to:
- reduce survey speed significantly (looks like there's a sweet spot of 5-15%).
- change low gravity tolerance for humans to 4/10ths of a g
- consider ArcWolf's 9/28/2021 update to his box launcher rule. :)
(note not using decimals because of built-in anti-newbie code that makes all my decimals have spaces, alas)
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In my current game, (shameless self-promotion: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13426.0) I have not reduced survey or research speeds, though limited research admin is on. However, the nations in play cannot research shields, jump theory or any TN-engines yet, nor can they build shipyards. These will all be story breakthroughs that will revolutionise the geopolitical and technological landscape of the campaign. Similarly, nobody is using automines or mass drivers or terraforming installations - yet. Their introduction will also be a 'story event'.
Of course, this is only feasible because I am playing multiple Earth factions against each other - house rules like these would make little sense in a normal game.
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Weapon types other than the ones I picked at start need to be "discovered" or rather observed to be feasible.
Stated personality of leaders influences decisions -an impatient fleet commander might rush in, for example.