"I don't see a 'save game' button anywhere - how do I save my game so I can recover from catastrophes?"
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Aurora is a very database-centric program, which means that by the end of every increment the entire state of the game is saved in stevefire.mdb ("the DB"). This is a good thing, since saving the DB saves the state of the game at that time. There is not an explicit save button, however.
To save the state of the game, simply copy the DB from the Aurora directory into another directory. A useful directory structure is the following (notice that the filename is always "stevefire.mdb":
AuroraSaves:
--Campaign1_v47
----save000
------stevefire.mdb
----save001
------stevefire.mdb
----save002
------stevefire.mdb
--Campaign2_v49
----save000
------stevefire.mdb
----save001
------stevefire.mdb
etc.
"AuroraSaves" is a collector directory for all of your save games; it contains a subdirectory ("Campaign1_v47", "Campaign2_v49" (although you'll probably use better names) ) for each campaign. The version numbers are included in the campaign names in order to be able to remember which version of the executable the databases are matched with. Within each campaign subdirectory, the "saveNNN" directories correspond to a sequence of save games. The reason for adding directories here is so you don't have to change the name of the "stevefire.mdb" file. To save a game, simply copy stevefire.mdb into a save directory (either a new one, or you can overwrite an existing one). To restore a game, copy a stevefire.mdb back into the Aurora directory.
IMPORTANT: Note that you do NOT seem to have to stop aurora in order to copy the DB into a save directory. This means that you can make very frequent saves, simply by keeping the same save directory open and overwriting the stevefire.mdb in it by pasting in a copy of the current stevefire.mdb in the Aurora directory.
One more note: there will be a lot of duplication of the data within the stevefire.mdb. You can save a lot of disk space by compressing multiple (old) save directories together (or just deleting them, of course).