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Posted by: Jovus
« on: April 12, 2018, 02:15:39 PM »


1) Turn Invaders off. You can turn them on later in game if you want the extra challenge.
2) Boost population to at least 500 million, preferably 1 billion.
3) Have at least 20 labs to start with.

Feel free to ignore all that of course, my anecdotal experience might be an outlier and your experience could be entirely different!

Thanks for your insight. It's appreciated, as I haven't done this before.

I haven't turned off invaders, though I might based on your feedback. If I do, I'm going to turn them back on around the 50 (plus or minus 20; I will use a die) year mark whether I'm ready or not. I fully expect I'll get stomped to bits in this playthrough since I don't yet feel like I really know what I'm doing, and I've made several recognizable mistakes already. (For example, I'm going through a sustained duranium crunch because I turned too much CI into factories and not enough into mines.)

Then again I might not, since if they descend on me five years from now I'll just wrap up and start another playthrough. We'll see.

I did end up bumping my population up to about a billion. Which meant I started with ten labs, as well. Not the twenty of your recommendation, but a good sight better than the two I started with. That was painful.

As far as NPRs, I hear you. I'll probably bump it down to 5 or even 2 percent chance for NPRs to activate one another. I figure, with 2 NPRs at game start, if I increase my own chance to activate NPRs by twice as much as I decrease theirs, it roughly evens out. (Yes, I know that's not how a binomial distribution actually works.)
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: April 12, 2018, 12:22:59 PM »

As someone who always plays conventional starts, and who has played with those exact settings before, few things before you get too far into it:

A) have more than 5 labs in the beginning. You have so many essential techs to research in a conventional start that 2 or 5 is just not going to cut it and building a respectable amount of labs will take decades. During which time those two NPRs, who already are ahead of you with a TN start, will be exploring and growing and researching.

B) Do not turn Invaders on at game start! There is nothing preventing a wormhole appearing in Sol or in the very first system you jump into. If stuff starts happening when you're at TL1, TL2 or even TL3, it's pretty much end game right there. Remember that the game gives you no mercy in that regard. Even if they do not appear right next to you, they can slow down the game updates to a crawl because they are extremely efficient in exploring, which means they can activate new NPRs faster than you or existing NPRs can.

C) Having two NPRs at launch with 10% chance of activating further NPRs seems like a logical challenge but what it means in a conventional start is that the risk of you being stuck in a 5-second loop for days and days even before leaving Sol is high. As said above, the NPRs always have a TN-start, so they will start exploring right away. When they meet each other or activate new NPRs, risk of war is high. Nothing ruins your game quicker than getting stuck in the 5-second update loop because two NPRs are duking it out somewhere you don't even know about.

So, my recommendations:

1) Turn Invaders off. You can turn them on later in game if you want the extra challenge.
2) Boost population to at least 500 million, preferably 1 billion.
3) Have at least 20 labs to start with.

Feel free to ignore all that of course, my anecdotal experience might be an outlier and your experience could be entirely different!
Posted by: Jovus
« on: April 10, 2018, 09:31:49 PM »

Went home to my desktop and started up again. The only changes are that I'm using a Roman theme instead of WH40K (40K and carrier-heavy doctrine don't mix very well to my mind) and, as a sop to impatience, I start with 5 labs, not 2.
Posted by: JacenHan
« on: April 10, 2018, 06:31:57 PM »

You can use the off-topic tag to hide items in a box.
Off-Topic: show
Like this.
Posted by: Jovus
« on: April 10, 2018, 12:56:07 PM »

I've discovered two things:

1) My laptop is not made for running Aurora. Oh well. Charge ahead anyway!

2) A conventional start with 2 labs is soooo sloooow. Probably I'm just digging myself an even deeper hole. I suppose I'll find out...
Posted by: Jovus
« on: April 10, 2018, 12:28:58 PM »

Yeah; I'm used to SMF spoiler tags creating a by-default closed box, so I could put the picture there and not clobber the baud (and eyes) of anyone who didn't care.
Posted by: Erik L
« on: April 10, 2018, 12:27:17 PM »

Apologies; it seems the spoiler tag isn't working properly.
It does not seem to spoiler the img tag. It spoilers text just fine
Posted by: Jovus
« on: April 10, 2018, 10:49:42 AM »

Apologies; it seems the spoiler tag isn't working properly.
Posted by: Jovus
« on: April 10, 2018, 10:49:20 AM »

Heya folks,

Roundabout a year ago I decided to give Aurora a rest, because it was interfering with my PhD and I wanted to wait until C# Aurora made its debut. (No rush, Steve! I'm just flattered to be sharing your personal project with you.)

However, I've decided it's time for me to come back into the fold. I'm starting a new game today:





I expect to get stomped fairly quick with these settings.

If I don't, my plan is to go whole-hog carrier doctrine. Carriers for everything. Explorer carriers, scout carriers, patrol carriers. And no missiles, except if necessary later AMMs. Why? Because I want to try it.

We'll see.