Learning How to Fly

[0111narwhalz (OP)]

This is the place I will be asking all the questions.   There will be many, but for now, only one.   I'll number it anyhow for future reference. 

1: What are the principle uses for each mineral? I know Duranium is like "space steel"; it's used for everything.   Additionally, are there standardised symbols?

2: What is your tactic for entering a new system? Heavily armed brute force, or sneaky probe, or. . . ?

[Vandermeer]

Symbols? You mean symbols for the minerals maybe? If so: Low-graphic game. No fancy shiny things at this point.

Remaining resource overview:

- Neutronium: Mainly shipyard improvement. Later slowly being used more and more in armor. Also needed for maintenance facilities, mass drivers and ground force training facilities. Under bad management, this is usually the second material you will run out of, because early shipyard buildup is really costly for a fledgling empire. Once that is over, it gradually loses it importance despite its later role in armor.

Mining priority: High in the beginning (second only to Duranium), medium once you are at tech-level 6-8 maybe.


- Corbomite: Useless. Tiny amounts are needed here and there, but your demands are easily fed by incidental byproduct mining , so no need to go out and search for this.

Mining priority - "you people mined what already?"


- Tritanium: The name seems to imply it has something to do with structure and building, maybe even armor. You couldn't be farther from the truth, because it is the prime kaboom-mineral that makes up for warheads in missile costs, and goes into everything related to explosions (ordnance factories, launchers, magazines...).

Mining priority is medium.


- Boronide: Good way to remember it is calling it "Bionide" maybe, because it goes into all things terraforming or (fossil?) fuel refining. You will rarely need much of it, but there might be a moment of temporary shortcoming if you like me put up ridiculous stellar harvesting bases in one push. Also accounts for about 25% of beam weapon costs.

It isn't much though, so mining priority is still low.


- Mercassium: Most notable use is research labs, which you will feel early on, because research is the motor to winning, so you'd want a lot of them constantly. Other main uses that may rob you of this resource are cryogenic transports, which cost a surprisingly high amount for people that think they can just lift entire planet populations asky.*cough*
It is also used in every ship, since crew quarters are for some reason made out of it (life support systems?), but you won't notice this at all, since the amount is negligible.

Mining priority is medium, but personal game style for veterans usually drops it to low when you notice you have teched enough to have little challenge anymore, so further research lab frenzy is not needed.


- Vendarite: You thinking of carriers, fighter production and hangar bases? You'll be thinking of getting at least one good vendarite deposit. Otherwise it finds even less uses than near translucent Corbomite.

Mining priority is - "look, my Nimitz is built, so please throw your garbage elsewhere"


- Sorium: Obviously space fuel, but mining it on planets is really really inefficient when compared with the orbital gas giant mining (that does btw. not even require millions of workers to run it). For this reason you will be only indifferently glancing over any deposit that is not based on a jovian, and it is never a reason to settle a mining colony.
It has had minor use in jump engines if you want those, but that is again feedable by mere coincidental mining. In 7.2 it will maybe awaken, since it will be used in the limitless useful maintenance point construction, but we will have to see to how much that really adds up to. Until then:

Mining priority is "are you trying to fill my tank with crude oil or what?"


- Uridium: The electronics mineral. Moderately needed to make all things Detection, so survey, passive and active sensors, fire controls, and sensor stations. However, it has no clientele outside of this niche, and you will normally not find issue running out.(though I did one time, but it may have been me just ignoring it too much for once)

Mining priority low.


- Corundium: The "how do I get more minerals" mineral. Primary use is spamming mines and automines to the limit, which is a thing that you do for basically the entire game, and even more so in the late stages. As such, your use for this magic mineral is only limited by how fast your construction factories can digest it.(which is quickly limited considering doing so usually results in even more stuff coming in)
There is some word about it making up 75% of beam weapon costs, but I have personally never felt that compared to the needs imposed by the moloch that is Locust Mining Industry Inc. .

Mining priority is medium at the start, but becomes and stays high once you have a decent navy done and become really serious about exploiting nearby star systems. It is easily the second most demanded resource once you pass tech level 5 or 6.


- Gallicite: The "gold" of the galaxy. It goes into engines, and engines only, but wow, does it use a lot for that. Even cost efficient freighters can consume ten thousands of tons for a low-mid tech level refit, and don't get me started on the uses of higher tech. I have found myself in games where I searched system after system, ignoring all the mineral sites I found, just to get to that one that had 10+ million Gallicite with accessibility 0.6 or so. It easily outweighs by far any other mineral needs once the mid-game dawns, to the point where this is all you are out for, while the remaining 'garbage' minerals pile up to the megatons in your capital without use. You still won't be needing it that much up to ion probably though.

Mining priority is "legitimate argument for alien genocide"



In a total list:
Early game
1.Duranium
2.Neutronium
3.Corundium
4.Gallicite

Interstellar game
1.Gallicite
2.Gallicite
3.Corundium
4.Even more Gallicite
5.Maybe Duranium, I guess?

[Zincat]

I will partly disagree with Vandermeer, but I need to explain why. Everything he writes is correct, the numbers and the usages are all correct.

However.... what he considers "middle tech" and "middle game" is for most players "the game was over a long time ago. Are you still playing?" The point is that aurora is a game that tends to run slower as time passes, unless you practice complete annihilation of everything that moves, civilian or not. And I know he does that, exterminating everything in the galaxy basically and he doesn't even let civilians grow. He said so in many posts    Also, keeping the galaxy shall we say, empty, he is capable of concentrating more on research, and so he probably techs up even faster

Soo... how are things different for a "more average" way of playing, one where you don't strip mine every system you run across and don't build 1 million tons ships? Basically, the priorities he lists for the beginning are the ones most people have for most of the game. Duranium, Corundium, Neutronium and Gallicite are the highest priority minerals. And a steady amount of sorium for fuel.

But you DO need some of every mineral. Be sure to have a stock of everything, for that moment when you need it. You will see that those stocks lasts you a long time. Usually the starting mining of Earth is enough for many years for the low priority minerals.


I will also beg to differ about fuel production. It is true that Sorium harvesters are much more efficient than ground based fuel production. However, sorium harvesters are big, slow, vulnerable whales (unless you are so uselessly out-teching the enemies or are so ahead in the game that you have basically already won, and can afford to build civilian superfortresses with sorium harvesters aboard).

If enemies come, they might drop like flies. If you have a lot of enemies and/or are in a precarious defensive position, you do not want to bet your entire fuel production on the survival of some slow and defenseless civilian ships. That is why, in my opinion, ground based fuel production still has a very important role. Don't discount it. It may be a lot less efficient, but it's much safer if you protect your important worlds.

[83athom]

Just a quick pip in for me.

- Uridium: The electronics mineral. Moderately needed to make all things Detection, so survey, passive and active sensors, fire controls, and sensor stations. However, it has no clientele outside of this niche, and you will normally not find issue running out.(though I did one time, but it may have been me just ignoring it too much for once)

Mining priority low.

Oh how wrong you are. Usage for Uridium ramps up quite quickly at the mid-end level. My ships are around 1/2 made of Uridium, no joke. My battleship has a mineral cost of 680,051 and the Uridium cost is ~350,000.

[Haji]

The mining priorities listed by Vandermeer are mostly correct, but they are very far from full story. Please note that a lot of it depends on personal play style, which is why you're getting so many answers. My play style is usually limited to early games (right now is the first time I've researched tier 6 engines, the magnetic confinement fusion drive technology and everything I can research costs below 100k RP) and rather low economies (starting populations around a billion people, maybe two). What does that mean for me? First and foremost it means I have frequent wealth problems making me invest heavily into financial centers which are made entirely of corbomite and uridium. In addition since I'm a big fan of manned mines (many on this forum prefer automated ones I colonize and terraform a lot. This makes me run out of boronide often, mostly because it's a mineral that seems to have little uses, but if you're building five terraforming ships at once you suddenly need a lot of it. Last but not least I build a lot of new factories which means I need venderite.
Overall as Zincat stated what you'll mine on your homeworld will last you for years with some exceptions. The thing you must understand about managing your minerals is that it is the part of the game that requires the most foresight. Check how much you're using and mining and try to make predictions.

Edit: originally my post contained more help, but thanks to the forum issues, I'm unable to post my message in full, nor can I double post. I'll try do post the second part later.

[Vandermeer]

I will partly disagree with Vandermeer, but I need to explain why. Everything he writes is correct, the numbers and the usages are all correct.

However.... what he considers "middle tech" and "middle game" is for most players "the game was over a long time ago. Are you still playing?" The point is that aurora is a game that tends to run slower as time passes, unless you practice complete annihilation of everything that moves, civilian or not. And I know he does that, exterminating everything in the galaxy basically and he doesn't even let civilians grow. He said so in many posts    

Hey, I let all the nations live in that EU game that I logged!
Yeah, my history with Aurora is that I basically lost my second game at around TL7 because two NPRs were expanding exponentially, so 5 day turns eventually took actual 5 days.(only half joking sadly) I set myself the goal to never let that happen again, so I find my reasons to deploy some serious candy shipments to their colonies, and, ohno, caries is not to be truffled with.

But right, for the sake of spoilers I probably shouldn't talk about what exactly is mid-game after my definition, but if you lack in what I euphemistically paraphrase as "the efficient gaming style" department, then my mid-game is very far ahead for most, and to be honest I have yet to witness any game story written down here that went to TL6 and beyond.
It is still weird to me though that so few out of many aspire to reach this game stage, because just now I am again in a game where I already reached TL5-6 easily, and yet without exterminating anyone too.(except my own "traitor" civilians  )

But when you go multi-nation start, or you push too far out in exploring despite technically having more riches than you can spend already, then you will probably face some very slow turn processing, - not much because of Aurora actually running slow, but because of you having to organize all that conflict. In that case said mid-game will have to wait.(yet I still reached TL7 in the enemy loaded game that eventually froze)



The thing about fuel - My experience with ground based refining has only been short after it crashed me disastrously in my first 3 games every time, well, and also recently in the logged EU game. It seems that whenever you start building an efficient navy with powerfactor 1.2-1.5 + maybe even fighters, that is the point where you get robbed of fuel, and no amount of refineries seems to be enough.(in the EU game I could have had as many refineries as I had construction factories and mines, and it would still not have been enough to fuel those mere 13 fighting 6.25kt ships for their TF training...)
Once I changed my playstyle to gas mining all that had suddenly vanished, and the only time I ever got into problems again was when I built freighters of truly ridiculous size (1000 holds), and thought I could fly them unscathed like with the others.
I get though that it takes time to set this up, so dense action games have problems getting this done. Especially in games where your home system might be easily endangered, it is probably not a good idea to have any infrastructure there outside the range of your superior pdcs. I however don't see the reason to overlook a chance for a remote interstellar fuel mining colony, because they seem to get ignored if you don't have population close. (at least I never had one endangered)

For me, resolving the direct momentary endangerment of Sol is indeed not the end of the game, so while I search for new threats, it makes sense at this point to switch to that "mid-game" tactic with orbital fuel, and massive mining spam.
(I don't literally strip-mine btw. . Nobody can do that, because there is simply too much stuff to even realistically do that on really high tech range.)

Just a quick pip in for me. Oh how wrong you are. Usage for Uridium ramps up quite quickly at the mid-end level. My ships are around 1/2 made of Uridium, no joke. My battleship has a mineral cost of 680,051 and the Uridium cost is ~350,000.

Nonsense. I have been there multiple times, so unless you design them as such that they only sport expensive sensors without much else, this just isn't happening.
Well, I guess I haven't been up there as of 7.x, so for the benefit of the doubt: Things might have changed.
Looking up my older files however:
Goa'uld Ha'tak with 2 max size passive sensors and 3 max size active ones costs only 68k Uridium, while Corundium is 240k, Duranium 180k, 145k Boronide, and Gallicite as always tries to be funny at 660k. So Uridium is nothing here, and expanding beyond 5 maximum size sensors isn't too viable, so it cannot become much more important, unless 7.x really changed that.
(in my current game, the sensor costs also don't seem to indicate anything fishy with even a dedicated primarily sensor loaded 80kt design link still not costing anything noteworthy in Uridium, so what is happening there in yours? I call: Pic or didn't happen. )

Overall as Zincat stated what you'll mine on your homeworld will last you for years with some exceptions. The thing you must understand about managing your minerals is that it is the part of the game that requires the most foresight. Check how much you're using and mining and try to make predictions.

Yes, since it's a sandbox game, the only way to really know how to do things in Aurora your way is playing and figuring the stuff out as you see problems emerge. A general "what for what" might help you in orientation, but the end needs really depend on what style of sci-fi basically you prefer. Not to mention that your true needs are heavily influenced by what you actually find, so they vary from game to game.
That being said, there are lower and higher used minerals still - No one will take the constant supply spot of Duranium, Gallicite, or Gallicite away, but I have often found other minerals becoming temporarily really demanded whenever I changed my playstyle from one game to another.(as I think I hinted here and there the first post)

[83athom]

Its all the 4x boost fire control of the various kinds.

[Vandermeer]

I had 4x4 boost fire controls in the end game ships too (and didn't even bother to also make some smaller ones like you had on the Colossus recently), and no problem.

I can only assume that your design here is that Colossus from the other post with the 2.5% engine tonnage, which cuts the Gallicite cost here to artificially low amounts. ...Which is half surreal already, because it would not be practical in real competitive game, so calling that one as an example is like designing a military ship with terraformers and then demanding that you'd need Boronide "more than you think".
The 300kt Colossus had like 50+ fire controls, so it is kind of the same issue, because no one would really need that nor have space for it (as normal ships use 30-40% or even more for engine+fuel, not just 6...). Shame on you for trying to paint some wrong demand picture with a high fantasy inefficient RP design.

It is true that Uridium is not entirely useless later on, and you can fall short if you lose eye-contact. But it certainly isn't demanding 50% of design costs. 5%, yes, and maybe more on scout ship designs. But never this much.

[AL]

Turns out those 4x boosted fc's really do punch up the uridium costs; with this funny little area defense frigate I'm using in my current game:

Code: [Select]

ADF-1 class Frigate    5 000 tons     122 Crew     1260.4 BP      TCS 100  TH 400  EM 0
4000 km/s     Armour 1-26     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 22
Maint Life 0.48 Years     MSP 158    AFR 200%    IFR 2.8%    1YR 326    5YR 4893    Max Repair 576 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 2   

C50-S50 Magneto-plasma Drive (1)    Power 400    Fuel Use 6.19%    Signature 400    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 255 000 Litres    Range 148.3 billion km   (429 days at full power)

T4-20 PL-6 (1x4)    Range 300 000km     TS: 20850 km/s     Power 24-24     RM 5    ROF 5        6 6 6 6 6 5 4 3 3 3
FC-384/20 (1)    Max Range: 384 000 km   TS: 20000 km/s     97 95 92 90 87 84 82 79 77 74
SFR Power Cell (8)     Total Power Output 24    Armour 0    Exp 5%

AS-R1-S2 (1)     GPS 56     Range 7.8m km    MCR 854k km    Resolution 1

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

I have the following mineral costs:


Although again you could argue it's because of my fondness for very efficient engines, this (heretically small) design has already proven its worth on the battlefield so don't start on impracticalities or whatever.

[0111narwhalz (OP)]

Thanks for all the help.  By "symbol" I meant chemical symbol, like "H" for hydrogen or "O" for oxygen.

Interesting to know how extreme the differences in mineral costs between various design styles is.  I'll keep all that in mind.

New question:
What is your tactic to enter new, undiscovered systems? Is it with a heavily armed vessel that brute-forces its way past anything on the other side, or a sneaky probe, or. . . ?

[Bryan Swartz]

I vote for sneaky probe.  You can't lose what you don't expose to danger.  Scouts by definition ought to be disposable IMO. 

[Zincat]

New question:
What is your tactic to enter new, undiscovered systems? Is it with a heavily armed vessel that brute-forces its way past anything on the other side, or a sneaky probe, or. . . ?

Here once again, it really depends on how you play. It's a sandbox game, so many "roleplay it". Some absolutely can't stand losing ships, so they either send a warship or a pumped up survey ship with some defenses. Other prefer dingy little cheap ships. If they get shot down, well they didn't cost much.

To be honest it doesn't matter that much. If you disturb something, you disturb something. The completely sneaky approach, not being seen at all in case there is someone who can see you, is difficult at low tech level. So you will generally end up disturbing something

My personal preference is one of these 2, depends on the "main theme" of my game.

1) The "capitalistic" approach. Tiny, cheap ships, 6000-5000 tons or less. 2 sensors (grav or geo), one big but fuel-efficient engine, one jump drive. The end. They're cheap, small, decently fast. Brave scouts who pave the wave to the stars with their wrecks

2) The "paranoid approach". Usually justified in my roleplaying by finding trace of the "Alien Threat!" A sensor ship with big passives, em and thermal. One big engine, which gets stealthy as technology allows. New jump point? Send the scout in, as quietly as possible (lowering the maximum speed of the task force lowers the thermal signature of the ship. So it gets more difficult to detect it). If there are life-capable planets, approach those at low speed for the aforementioned reasons. If some alien presence is noticed, get the hell out.  Nice and very much roleplay-oriented, but takes a lot more time than simply spamming cheap survey ships

There are obviously many other ways. Some use carriers ships with survey "drones" who return to the hangar after surveying. But that requires more resources to start with so not for a fledging economy.

[MarcAFK]

The cheap option is throwing together something that fits on a fighter, no refit nessicary.
However if you have a dedicated FAC yard that's a better option.

[Iranon]

Uridium use depends heavily on personal preferences.
Oversized beam fire controls are expensive, but they are a tonnage-efficient way to increase effective firepower even when the weapons can't shoot to their maximum range.
Of course, bigger fire controls are also more likely to be hit while still getting destroyed when something sneezes on them. So when you go down that route, you might want redundancy too, further increasing Uridium usage.

Some don't leave home without a massively capable control ship while still giving every ship enough sensors to be tactically self-suffcient, and that's after some scouts with huge passives have checked things out.
Others use the bare minimum, and only on flotilla leaders or capital ships.

[0111narwhalz (OP)]

Interesting to see the variety of possible playstyles.  So, if something sees you, it doesn't matter if you're armed to the teeth, or a scrap of tissue upon the window? It doesn't affect diplomacy?

Secondly, I'd like to repeat my request regarding chemical symbols for the TN elements.  Things like H for hydrogen, and so on.  If such a thing exists, I'd like to know about it.  Otherwise, it's fine.

Lastly, a bug-or-WAI question.  When a taskgroup including a ship is deleted, the ship appears to be deleted.  It becomes invisible in both the Ships and Task Groups screens.  No error message appears.  Is this intended?