Merry Xmas everyone, friends!
I am starting to plan around my empire layout. AFAIK there is no point in trying to develop other planets: Earth should have all research and building facilities, the other planets should be used only for mining, apart for the very best worlds that should be tformed and used as population sinks and to generate commerce. Am I right?
Other than systems that are perhaps a month or more travel from Earth, yes you are perhaps correct. However doing that sort of play will quickly get you to the point of making all your choices on a statistic based method. This quickly then ends up becoming a spreadsheet game with zero soul to it. I find Aurora to be a game that takes so long to progress that what keeps things interesting are the RPG elements you can apply to everything, I have found there is never that classic "one more turn" with this game. Instead what keeps me playing is things like "ok we now have finally moved our shipyards to x planet for x reasons" all of which are based on my own personal RPG story choices.
You may find you are happy playing the game with a min/max ethos, but I tried it to begin with and quickly got bored until I changed my view on things.
Talking about that, I've found a planet with a real mineral bounty, too bad it has some "interesting" characteristics, like a surface temp of 1600 C, 2. 77 g of gravity and a delightful atmosphere. That planet is way worse than Venus. . .
Do you think that a new race could colonize this little gem? BTW, can somebody explain the procedure to create a new race and to ship the mutated colonists onsite, since there is no way it could be tformed?
The gravity aspect of that planet is the likely cause of the high mineral count, though it probably had awful accessibility scores too. General planets with a high gravity have larger amounts of minerals that are hard to get to, and low gravity works visa versa. As for colonising the planet it depends again on location and your RPG elements. It may well be a world that is best to dump a lot of auto mines on and leave them working away for the next 1000 years or so, or you might like the idea of hulking power lifters scraping out the ores there, and just work it with the less desirables of society.
As for the process of making a new species here is how I do it, though as you say there is no proper tutorial or wiki on the subject so others may have a better method.
1. Design your species on the tech screen, specify the gravity/oxygen/temperature needs of this new species and name it. Then complete the research project for this species.
2. Get some of this new species to exist, this involves having some genetic centers on a planet with an existing level of your base human population. On the environment tab of the F2 screen you will see options for tinkering with the populations genetics. Use the drop down menu to select your new species and they will start to be converted at a rate listed by your genetic modification rate on the summary page. (This kind of works like terrafoming, you just swap say 2 mil humans for 2 mil martians each year)
3. Make sure to properly refresh the F2 screen and after a few months you will find you have a new colony of martians on Earth (assuming you started to convert there). Now you also need to ensure you have some infrastructure there as they will likely not survive in Earths environment without protection. This population will now grow as standard and also with new additions from the genetic centers.
4. When you add new colonies to a body on the F9 screen there is a drop down at the top right, this allows you to select what species you are using. So you can select your martians and you will see all of the system bodies change slightly. For example Earth would no longer be a 0 cost world but Mars would now be 0 cost, this can be handy when looking at prospective new colonies. You can flick between your different species and instantly spot 0 cost worlds that would of otherwise cost you years in time and lots of infrastructure to colonise with humans.
5. Once you have a colony set up on Mars for martians you can either start shipping them there yourself with standard colony orders (just select the martian colony at Earth to load from), or just allow your civilians to do the work with the use of source/destination orders from the F2 screen.
Once that is done you are up and away with a new species. The only limitation are you can only change a species once, if you found a new world like Mars but slightly out of the 0 cost range for martians, you cannot make a new species and start changing any martians. You would have to start the process from step 2 back at Earth as you require base humans to modify from. The only real thing left to do if breed face dancers control the spice.
