Author Topic: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent  (Read 3911 times)

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Offline Veneke (OP)

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Been a little bit since I've played Aurora but looking to get back into it with a long playthrough. To spice things up a little I'm going to be activating the Sol disaster setting around episode 3/4. If anyone has any advice on Aurora generally or on the disaster specifically I'd love to hear it.
 
Cheers!
 
 

Offline NuclearStudent

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #1 on: May 25, 2017, 02:10:39 AM »
Don't worry about the disaster. I rarely find it too bad, as long as you move with a decent pace into space.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #2 on: May 25, 2017, 04:57:57 AM »
Boosting the civilian economy is enormously important. And you will need terraforming tech, preferably ship borne modules, but terraforming installations work just fine.

You want to colonize Luna as early as possible and start terraforming it, in order to get the civilian economy producing infrastructure.  Once the population is over 25 million, you can keep the population sloshing back and forth between Earth and Luna, (collecting wealth each time), which encourages the civilians to build more colony ships and freighters.

You will want Sorium Harvester tech (after the first couple rounds of economic techs), so you can get the civilians providing fuel for you.  Every industry that you can pawn on the civilians allows you that much more growth.

Build a Mass Driver and Civilian Shipyard as soon as you have converted your economy to TN industry, to get the civilians started on building mining colonies.  Ultimately, you want the civilians to be handling a significant portion of your mining expansion, almost all of your colonist transport needs, your fuel needs, and much of your freighter needs.

Sector Command is an underrated economic growth tech.  As your civilian administrators improve, the Sector Command provides a bonus easily greater than a mining or construction tech, and it is therefore a good idea to get it after the 10k tier of economic expansion techs.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #3 on: May 25, 2017, 05:04:27 AM »
Once you have Jump Point Theory, research the techs for basic jump engines, and research a size 2 single ship jump engine, so you can start building fighter sized pinnaces to probe Jump Points.

Scouting with small ships allows you to start scouting a lot earlier, when you don't have a warfleet, the techs or infrastructure to build it.  The longer you can delay actually NEEDING a warfleet, the better.

This also gets you building up your fighter production, and making use of it.

It takes a long time to build fighters into an offensive weapon, but you can make point defense fighters very early, with gauss turrets on fuel efficient fighters, making use of the x4 tracking speed available to fighter beam weapon fire controls.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #4 on: May 25, 2017, 05:09:01 AM »
Also, build more military academy as early as possible.  They are almost as important as research facilities because they help you recruit better officers, administrators and scientists.

A trick I do, that may be more micro that you want to do, especially on a video, is create a bunch of empty task forces, in order to train officers.  Training logistics officers boosts your load speed, communications officers boost communications, which is good for high diplomacy officers, because communications increases your odds of learning other race's languages.  Intelligence officers speed how fast you acquire info about enemy ship capabilities, operations (and communications) speed the response of your forces in combat situations.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #5 on: May 25, 2017, 05:14:24 AM »
Something you might want, just to have fun, give a friend SM control for a bit, have them place a random ruin or two somewhere in the Solar System, without telling you where.

That way, there is the fun of discovering something neat in the solar system, and learning/showing how to exploit it.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #6 on: May 25, 2017, 03:59:04 PM »
Solar heating disaster can be countered by terraforming, as both greenhouse and anti-greenhouse work as a percentage, meaning you can block 100% of the sun with 1 atmos, or double the effect of the sun with 1 atmos, (not sure of the exact numbers), so really cold planets you can't terraform, but hot ones you can.
 

Offline iceball3

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #7 on: May 26, 2017, 10:41:55 AM »
Solar heating disaster can be countered by terraforming, as both greenhouse and anti-greenhouse work as a percentage, meaning you can block 100% of the sun with 1 atmos, or double the effect of the sun with 1 atmos, (not sure of the exact numbers), so really cold planets you can't terraform, but hot ones you can.
Doesn't the math potentially add up to something like 4+ max temperature factor, or did I miss something?
Quote
Surface Temperature in Kelvin = Base Temperature in Kelvin x Greenhouse Factor x Albedo
Greenhouse Factor = 1 + (Atmospheric Pressure /10) + Greenhouse Pressure   (Maximum = 3.0)
It'll likely not go much higher though, given that max atmospheric pressure is a limit for settlement.
 

Offline Veneke (OP)

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #8 on: May 27, 2017, 06:47:41 AM »
Appreciate the replies!
 
@Michael Sandy Excellent tips, thanks! I'm really of two minds about further colonisation inside Sol. I know it would unlock the civilian economy but the mineral situation is so poor and with the idea being to leave Sol rather than stay in it I'm more inclined to wait to activate the civilian economy. Sorium harvesters, terraformers, and sector commands are going to be crucial though. Will be looking to get them as soon as we finish off most of the military research. Scouting with a pinnace is a good idea. I remember reading through Steve's old NATO vs. Soviets campaign and he used something similar for initial scouting. I think the first five systems will be with normal survey ships but after that we'll be looking at more a more stealthy approach.
 
@iceball3 & terraforming: Does anyone know how hot Earth will get, or does it not cap out at all and just keeps rising?
 
Also, episode two is out. I've got some reasonable ion-engine survey corvettes out and running now. Grav and geo sensors, plus a jump capability. They, and their upgrades, will probably form the core of my survey fleet for the next little while.
 
 

 
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #9 on: May 27, 2017, 08:47:10 PM »
I would argue that there is great value in terraforming Luna.  First, you get the civilian economy producing infrastructure.  Infrastructure is pure duranium, so ANYTHING that saves you from having to throw duranium into making infrastructure is worth it.

Second, you can very easily ship shipyards, industry, ground unit production centers to the moon, so if you have a really good Shipyard civilian administrator, you can get that to apply to your shipyards, even if the rest of their skills are junk.  And someday you will want to produce ground units, and there are very few options for increasing build rate other than having a civilian administrator with bonus to ground troop recruitment.

Third, it makes you wealth, which you REALLY need when purchasing civilian mined minerals.  Duranium crunch can be very hard to deal with.

Fourth, colony ships and the fuel for them are expensive.  The civilians may be stupid about them, so be careful as they don't check if 81 other civilian ships are heading to the same destination.
 

Offline Veneke (OP)

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #10 on: May 28, 2017, 02:24:45 PM »
Solid arguments, but the mineral situation (see update below) in Sol is such that I don't think we'll be able to utilize much of a civilian economy here anyway. I hadn't considered the duranium cost of infrastructure though, that is a very real concern even if we did luck out with that significant find of duranium on Venus.
 
Episode 3 sees us finish surveying the Sol system. The good news is that we've a decent find of duranium on Venus. The bad news is that there's not a huge amount of anything else.
 
 

Offline Veneke (OP)

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #11 on: May 31, 2017, 04:00:59 AM »
We take a peek at two nearby systems, creatively named New England and New France.
 
 

Offline Veneke (OP)

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #12 on: June 02, 2017, 06:04:53 PM »
Taking a bit of a blind jump into the unknown we explore the five nearest systems to Sol. The good news is that at least one of them is a prime candidate for terraforming and settlement. The bad news is that there's not much good news beyond that. XD
 
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #13 on: June 04, 2017, 04:09:15 AM »
When you copied your missile specs from your notes for AMMs, you reversed the fuel and agility numbers.  So you have a long ranged inaccurate warhead-1 missile, instead of a short ranged accurate warhead 1 missile.
 

Offline Veneke (OP)

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Re: Youtube playthrough: Advice welcome, disaster imminent
« Reply #14 on: June 06, 2017, 11:41:55 AM »
o.o
 
You have no idea how stupid I felt after I did that. I really should've checked the numbers more carefully. Ah well, we only produce about 1,000 of them before I realise the error. It's actually during this episode (I think) when I start designing the AMM destroyer that I figure it out.
 

Having fixed the problem, we promptly put a whole flotilla of destroyers into production. The ships involved are very much intermediary ships full of design compromises and aimed at getting a someway reasonable fleet into space and active with the technology currently available to us.