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Posted by: obsidian_green
« on: January 18, 2019, 02:18:31 PM »

The only way to speed-up late game is the Thanos way.

Lol, I checked the start of the thread to see what Thanos said before the Avengers allusion kicked in.
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: January 17, 2019, 01:22:50 PM »

The only way to speed-up late game is the Thanos way.

1) Kill or conquer all NPRs.
2) Use SM to create a pirate faction to wipe out most of your civilian shipping lines.
3) Have enough DSTS on each system so that all ships moving in them are constantly being tracked, so you don't get interrupts for ships moving in/out of sensor range. If you don't have multiple player factions and you've dealt with NPRs already, this point is moot.

Civilian fuel is bought automatically when you order your tankers or ships to refuel from civilian fuel harvesters.

No idea about the PD final fire issue as I have never encountered it.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 17, 2019, 09:51:58 AM »

Hopefully without derailing a discussion that has gone so interestingly off-topic  :), if the original poster's suggestion isn't ideal, then what is the best way to minimize slow-down a hundred or more years in? Without hobbling NPRs, if possible. I've run my faction rather benevolently, but in hindsight I wonder if I shouldn't have wiped out every NPR I came across so their ships no longer exist to slow down turns.

And while I've got some ears, maybe someone can tell me how to avoid errors in PD final fire? Search says some few of have had this problem, but I've never seen an explanation of how to resolve it. It doesn't seem to be affecting most players, but over several versions of Aurora the bug hasn't been fixed. Thought my ships were the only source of the error, but some NPR out there is now generating the error messages ... I've clicked through it enough to become painfully aware that they have 126 PD weapons (or 126 more than whatever took out the missiles, since I'm not entirely sure if the error kicks in before or after the missiles are taken out).

Mentioned previously in the discussion, I don't remember seeing where I can buy fuel off of civie FHs in manner similar to buying the product of CMCs. I'll look again when the game isn't locked up, but I don't want to look in vain if that isn't accurate.

Outside what the OP said there are not that much you can do. The civilians and NPR will take up allot of the CPU cycles.

You get the fuels by filling up your tanks from civilian fuel harvesters... you pay for that in wealth if my memory serves me. So you don't buy it in the same way as minerals, you still need to go and get it. CMC you just have to direct the massdriver to your planet or colony in the system.
Posted by: obsidian_green
« on: January 16, 2019, 11:58:03 PM »

Hopefully without derailing a discussion that has gone so interestingly off-topic  :), if the original poster's suggestion isn't ideal, then what is the best way to minimize slow-down a hundred or more years in? Without hobbling NPRs, if possible. I've run my faction rather benevolently, but in hindsight I wonder if I shouldn't have wiped out every NPR I came across so their ships no longer exist to slow down turns.

And while I've got some ears, maybe someone can tell me how to avoid errors in PD final fire? Search says some few of have had this problem, but I've never seen an explanation of how to resolve it. It doesn't seem to be affecting most players, but over several versions of Aurora the bug hasn't been fixed. Thought my ships were the only source of the error, but some NPR out there is now generating the error messages ... I've clicked through it enough to become painfully aware that they have 126 PD weapons (or 126 more than whatever took out the missiles, since I'm not entirely sure if the error kicks in before or after the missiles are taken out).

Mentioned previously in the discussion, I don't remember seeing where I can buy fuel off of civie FHs in manner similar to buying the product of CMCs. I'll look again when the game isn't locked up, but I don't want to look in vain if that isn't accurate.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 15, 2019, 06:04:23 PM »

Kinda probably massively off topic.

Funny, cause in the real world almost no nation on earth gets to decide what happens to it's strategic resources.  .  .   and then there's HRC getting bribed to recommend no interference in the US letting go control of uranium stockpiles.  .  .  Or the invasion of Iraq, or the IAEA.  .  .  the IMF, the 'war' on OPEC.  .  .  or the Chinese campaign to foment dependency.   Not that they're the first, creating a state of economic reliance in potential enemies is an old old strategy.  .  .  which kind of relies on them relaxing their own strategy of reliance on internal resources.  .  .  or never adopting such an attitude in the first place.   So common it's the norm, a very far cry from 'no nation would.  '

I have to insist. No situation on Earth is a fitting analogy to the universe of Aurora and TN materials.

TN materials are:
1) Absolutely indispensable. You have to HAVE these materials, or you're planet bound. There are no alternatives. There will never be any alternatives. You cannot hope to research substitutes, you cannot hope to find anything else that you can use to fund your space nation. There is simply no way that technological improvement can make up for lack of TN materials. In the real world, technological improvement means that old materials/resources/fuel types or whatever get replaced. Think of wood-> charcoal->oil->electricity etc. In TN aurora this does not happen, you need TN materials. You have them or you die. Even spoiler races, civilizations which supposedly existed for extremely long times, found no alternatives to them. There is no resource on real-world Earth that is even remotely as important as TN materials.
2) Limited and non renewable. You have a set amount per system, you will never be able to replace them. Perhaps they do increase in millions of years... (read Steve's latest technobabble post about TN materials in the c# aurora forum) but that's a timescale not compatible with the life of a biological race. Since you keep using them, you HAVE to expand constantly in order to have more materials. Since they are limited and non-renewable, every ton you use today is a ton that will not be available for future generations. If a nations has no more TN materials, it WILL day as a spacefaring civilization. No exceptions, no possible way to circumvent this. As a matter of fact, if spacefaring civilizations keep expand they WILL die one die (as space-faring civilizations at least) because the galaxy will be empty of TN materials. And that's the end of the line. Once again, there is no equivalent to that in the real world
3) There is no way to trade them. This is due to game limitations, but it basically mean every ton you do not mine is a ton lost forever.

If you factor all of the things above, which are in part due to game-limitations of course, you can safely say there's simply nothing in the real world that is even remotely comparable to how rare and indispensable TN materials are for a spacefaring nation. Not even water, because while lack of water results in the death of a nation, there are (costly) ways to obtain water if you don't have readily available reserves. There are NO ways to obtain TN materials. The universe that Steve made is basically a grimdark reality where every spacefaring civilization is going to die one day due to lack of TN materials. Or be reduced to enclaves surviving on worlds incapable of communicating with one another.

As of such, no sane nation would ever waste such an important resource. It is literally your lifeline. If you are without, you are space dust. You can bet that any amount of TN materials would be strictly regulated and reserved by the state. And that was the point I was making before. While nations can be stupid, greedy, miopic etc. you can be assured that when presented with something as completely indispensable as TN materials, they would not squander them.

To be honest I don't get this logic at all and as others have pointed out... WHO exactly is deciding what is a good use of these materials?!?

I'm pretty sure people could dream up plenty of good uses for these materials to make their lives better, fuller and richer and then some!?!

This mindset might work in a dictatorship to some degree, but even there you have corruption and the want's and needs of the rich and powerful who like to live lavishly at others expense.

Very few people are willing to offer their lives to the common good as a core of their tenant and forgo emotions, passions and all that NONE logical crap.

Why would not the civilian part of an economy know what is best for itself... to be honest I never understood this fascination with the notion of the human state capable of pure logic on such scales... to be honest this will not happen until our brains get replaced by AI or something.

Everyone can play the game however they like... the current civilian infringement of player agency is ok. I don't think Aurora is about simulation on very detailed level, you need to invoke your own imagination for that or not if you prefer that. I think the game could need a few more interesting civilian mechanics down the road... but I think we have to be careful and not pain the game into a specific corner in terms of the narrative stories we can tell or these system must be very deep and complex to reflect all the multitude of human and alien societies out there.
Posted by: dag0net
« on: January 15, 2019, 04:46:34 PM »

 Ironically of course, it is an emotional need that we have for things to feel logical.   Not one person would bother with science but for emotions.   Emotions that are of course, logical. 


As to the resources thing I entirely agree, money is finite in practice if not in reality, time is finite to all men, there are many many things which we cannot get back again and whose misuse can spell disaster to the goals of and death to the corpus of any man or beast or machine, and yet there they go into the past and loss, with goals unfulfilled.   

 Somebody somewhere encounters a scenario every minute of every day that they believe will end their life/civilization/community/family/hope and does nothing useful about it. 


/bans self from thread :)
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: January 15, 2019, 04:20:55 PM »

Ah, but then your earlier argument relies on everyone in this hypothetical scenario to agree what is squandering and what is useful. And that's something where human history has ample examples of people disagreeing vehemently. We've wasted millions of barrels of oil on making plastic, and not only for genuinely critical products that would be difficult or impossible to make otherwise, but also for completely wasteful stuff like putting a few fruits in a plastic wrap. And we waste aluminium on making cans and furniture instead of reserving it for aircraft. Perhaps they aren't quite the same because as you said, in Aurora there is nothing that can replace TN-minerals, but the principle is the same:

humans waste important stuff if the scarcity isn't immediately obvious to everyone, and especially if that waste provides profits and/or quality/ease of life improvements. We are not purely logical or rational beings.

Also, this is pretty massively off-topic. Thanks OP for making this, I'll give it a try since C# seems to be at least few months away and my Aurora fever is rising.
Posted by: Zincat
« on: January 15, 2019, 03:56:28 PM »

Kinda probably massively off topic.

Funny, cause in the real world almost no nation on earth gets to decide what happens to it's strategic resources.  .  .   and then there's HRC getting bribed to recommend no interference in the US letting go control of uranium stockpiles.  .  .  Or the invasion of Iraq, or the IAEA.  .  .  the IMF, the 'war' on OPEC.  .  .  or the Chinese campaign to foment dependency.   Not that they're the first, creating a state of economic reliance in potential enemies is an old old strategy.  .  .  which kind of relies on them relaxing their own strategy of reliance on internal resources.  .  .  or never adopting such an attitude in the first place.   So common it's the norm, a very far cry from 'no nation would.  '

I have to insist. No situation on Earth is a fitting analogy to the universe of Aurora and TN materials.

TN materials are:
1) Absolutely indispensable. You have to HAVE these materials, or you're planet bound. There are no alternatives. There will never be any alternatives. You cannot hope to research substitutes, you cannot hope to find anything else that you can use to fund your space nation. There is simply no way that technological improvement can make up for lack of TN materials. In the real world, technological improvement means that old materials/resources/fuel types or whatever get replaced. Think of wood-> charcoal->oil->electricity etc. In TN aurora this does not happen, you need TN materials. You have them or you die. Even spoiler races, civilizations which supposedly existed for extremely long times, found no alternatives to them. There is no resource on real-world Earth that is even remotely as important as TN materials.
2) Limited and non renewable. You have a set amount per system, you will never be able to replace them. Perhaps they do increase in millions of years... (read Steve's latest technobabble post about TN materials in the c# aurora forum) but that's a timescale not compatible with the life of a biological race. Since you keep using them, you HAVE to expand constantly in order to have more materials. Since they are limited and non-renewable, every ton you use today is a ton that will not be available for future generations. If a nations has no more TN materials, it WILL day as a spacefaring civilization. No exceptions, no possible way to circumvent this. As a matter of fact, if spacefaring civilizations keep expand they WILL die one die (as space-faring civilizations at least) because the galaxy will be empty of TN materials. And that's the end of the line. Once again, there is no equivalent to that in the real world
3) There is no way to trade them. This is due to game limitations, but it basically mean every ton you do not mine is a ton lost forever.

If you factor all of the things above, which are in part due to game-limitations of course, you can safely say there's simply nothing in the real world that is even remotely comparable to how rare and indispensable TN materials are for a spacefaring nation. Not even water, because while lack of water results in the death of a nation, there are (costly) ways to obtain water if you don't have readily available reserves. There are NO ways to obtain TN materials. The universe that Steve made is basically a grimdark reality where every spacefaring civilization is going to die one day due to lack of TN materials. Or be reduced to enclaves surviving on worlds incapable of communicating with one another.

As of such, no sane nation would ever waste such an important resource. It is literally your lifeline. If you are without, you are space dust. You can bet that any amount of TN materials would be strictly regulated and reserved by the state. And that was the point I was making before. While nations can be stupid, greedy, miopic etc. you can be assured that when presented with something as completely indispensable as TN materials, they would not squander them.
Posted by: dag0net
« on: January 15, 2019, 09:36:02 AM »

Quote from: Zincat link=topic=10237.  msg112125#msg112125 date=1547422399
I have to agree with the fact that I would be against civilians creating diplomatic challenges.   Because the only solution for me would be to remove civilians completely.   As in: murder them.   There is a limit to what I am willing to tolerate regarding civilians

I already completely hate both CMC and civilian sorium harvesters. 
Who gave civilians the right to steal strategic resources?

I'm being serious here.   No nation, no matter what its government (except maybs megacorp nation, but that's another story) would let civilians hog strategic, extremely limited resources.   We are not talking of semi-rare stuff here.   We're talking of extremely limited resources of military and strategic significance.   No nation would let a random Joe mine and sell these resource to the highest bidder. 

Kinda probably massively off topic.


Funny, cause in the real world almost no nation on earth gets to decide what happens to it's strategic resources.  .  .   and then there's HRC getting bribed to recommend no interference in the US letting go control of uranium stockpiles.  .  .  Or the invasion of Iraq, or the IAEA.  .  .  the IMF, the 'war' on OPEC.  .  .  or the Chinese campaign to foment dependency.   Not that they're the first, creating a state of economic reliance in potential enemies is an old old strategy.  .  .  which kind of relies on them relaxing their own strategy of reliance on internal resources.  .  .  or never adopting such an attitude in the first place.   So common it's the norm, a very far cry from 'no nation would.  '
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 15, 2019, 08:58:24 AM »

Hi Jorgen_CAB

Well, first off, patience is not equal to turtling.    Hence why I used the word patience.    English is not my native tounge, but I will try to explain anyways.   
Rather with patience I mean that I spend 25-30% of the time in excel documents.    I make long plans and form my strategies according to my situation.    Just as I do when I run my company in RL.   

However, danger lurks at every step of the way, that doesn't mean that your grand strategies are invalid.    Your foremost weapon against anything is the economy and the logistics around it.   
The economy will setup your boundaries.    Hence you need to pay attention to population growth, minerals, fuel and wealth.    And not waste anything.    A surplus of population at any colony might be useful somewhere else.    Minerals sitting idle is no good, and think about where the best investment is, ship or planet components.    Fuel dictates your reach and endurance.    Wealth will decide how hard you can push your economy.    Everything needs to be balanced like a clock.    Hence why I spend so much time making formulas in Excel and forecast my Empires situation 5 - 10 years onwards.    The gain is no less in the details.   

Patience also means, how you go about exploring and how you engage your enemies.    Do you use the old WW2 style of attacking from behind AS distance or do you head straight in guns blazing, both are valid tactics.    But what will be the consequences of either of those? Where and what do I stand to gain or lose? How much minerals and fuel is a net loss in a missile battle?
You also need patience when designing all your techs and ships, by taking things step by step and make economically sound decisions.   

Patience also means, plan your logistics.    Maybe take a couple of hours and paus the game and setup a solid logistic system that can be scaled.    How much emtpy cargo space am I burning fuel for? But it is also necessary to make a solid military decision in this regard as well.   
You could even timetable your moving of assets, every day an automine sits idle is a netloss of X amount of minerals that can be mined elsewhere.    But that is perhaps taking it too far.    :-)

But what would be more sensible would perhaps let´s say, make a calculation how long it will take an asteroid miner with 10 vs 30 asteroid mining modules to pay its own cost back to the empire vs automines that are twice as expensive.   

All these things does not necessary mean Turtling per se.   

That set aside, I was honoring the topic and focused on "increment time" improvment.    People who have a hardtime playing 100 years in, might benefit from NOT starting with NPRs.   
I will set another testgame with a couple of NPRs and see how much this improves the game, just for the kicks of it.   

On a last note, indeed overcoming a tough challenge is much more worth than winning an easy game.   
But in as far as exploiting a game mechanic is as bad as making bad decisions.    So that was what I ment with patience is KEY.
Take your time and think things trough, but not as an insult but as a tip from the coach.   

Anyways, have a good day Sir :-)

Well... this is pretty much how I approach the game as well to understand the mechanic and know what is the most optimal thing to do.

But where we differ is in the role-play area... I don't do what is best for me. People do what is best for them and from their point of view in the game... I think that is the major difference in play-style.

People in large masses are not rational and decisions are made with lots of bias, lack of information, egotism and just stupidity (or brilliance depending on the outcome ;)  )

I full understand what you come from, but that is not really the way I play Aurora... I, most of the time, play up to ten factions at the same time as one example, trying my best for each to have a unique personality and culture.

I also have MANY game mechanic restrictions and rules addition to the game to make it very different from just straight up playing the game. Most of this in order to provide real challenges that comes with it... to provoke situations to be solved not only with brute force etc... some factions value human life and well being more than others which provide for very different focus and philosophies between factions. In one game I had a faction that valued wealth and social power as the most important thing and used it to get what it wanted through corruption and playing other factions against each other. They could not give a rats ass about missiles and troops and was among the strongest faction in my game. If you opposed them too much they could crash your economy or rally everyone else against you.

We all play the game in our own way, no way is the wrong way... ;) ...I just think that gaming the system to play optimally is no real challenge and not very fun so I just don't do that and incorporate real world politics, cultures and ethics. This impact how you can develop an economy and to what degree you are allowed to divert resources for military and how you conduct exploration. In the real world this is as much (if not mostly) politics than economics and so is wars.
Posted by: MJOne
« on: January 15, 2019, 06:17:12 AM »

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB link=topic=10237.    msg112085#msg112085 date=1547302287
Quote from: MJOne link=topic=10237.    msg112070#msg112070 date=1547252083
Hi Jorgen_CAB

I agree, thats why I didn’t stated one scenario and talked about another, that is just confusing for everyone.       

Still, I do not have those issue, even with NPRs generated from the beginning.       
But at the same time, I have +1000 of hours of experience playing Aurora 4x.     

I never proclaimed that this would be anything else than a fix for certain particular scenario.     
Just to be clear.       Otherwise I would have stated that.     

Also it depends on your mineral and fuel resources generated in Sol.     

Speed is only ”relevant” if you are weaker than your opponent and have less weapon range.       The main goal is to invade anyways.       So just stay the course and wear it out.       Its rare for me to get armor damage from the ai.       I have spread out the whole flak/gauss umbrella on all the platforms in the fleet(30 ships or more per fleet, 500-1000kt total) other than that, they are very specialized in their role.       And bring many colliers.       Also think of all the different situations you might bump into when designing your fleet so you can handle all types of scenarios.       A huge, well stocked, fighter-bomber group can handle many types of scenarios.       Heavy super fast ASMs can also be to some use against certain enemies.       

Carrier warfare neglects the speed gap, and I am heavy into carrier fleets + boarding.     
Why destroy a ship when you can steal it(tugs can be useful sometimes) and refit/reverse engineer or scrap it?
That saves you resources.     

Never designs something generic, give it a specific purpose.     
In Aurora 4x, patience is KEY.       
And respect the economy.       
Do not ignore the cost of anything.     

Anyways.      .      .      .       yeah I really really really am looking forward to Aurora C#  :)

If you play in, say, a conventional start and you spend the majority of the research on exploration and explore as much as possible you will quite often meet some nasty aliens long before you are ready to deal with them.     At least if you play such campaigns with no previous hindsight that there are precursors or other potential aliens out there that might be hostile.     I usually end up facing hostile aliens with very rudimentary patrol ships to guard Earth and colonies as a result.     This is not bad play, it is intentional.    .    .       ;)

In multi-faction campaigns you don't have time to make ship designs perfect or homogeneously designed.    .    .     you always need ships yesterday and it's better to have a decent fleet now than an optimized fleet tomorrow, the same goes for conventional starts where you explore allot and meet aliens before you are ready for them.     Also.    .    .     from a math perspective it is better to disperse regular beams around a fleet even it it means you have a few fewer beams overall, the reason is that you can't be focused fired and you have way more HP where it counts.     There are also a good case to be made regarding ASM and AMM missile ships, having both systems on a ship means you have greater flexibility of overloading in one or the other direction for an overall slightly lower ability in any one balanced load out.   

In almost all of my multi-faction games (6+ earth factions) no faction can ever have a fleet that is not in some state of flux, mixed with many different technology levels and age of the ships and ships in different experience and training levels etc.    .    .     generalist ships is often mandatory in such environments to some degree since it is usually the fastest and more easy way to get a decent fleet out the door to make the opponent think twice of attacking you.     

The problem I have had with many single earth starts is that I had no real external pressures and could practically make my economy perfect and keep a minimal fleet in comparison to the economy.     I could practically dictate when I needed to do what and engage a potential enemy with little to no real thought.     I usually abandoned those campaign rather quickly because they just felt it was me playing alone with no real challenge, this was why I pretty much have abandoned playing single earth faction games entirely in the last few years.   

Guzzling engines is important so you can have more mission tonnage per ship and still maintain a speed advantage or at least on par with the opposition.    .    .     in tight games this is sort of an engine power race even at roughly the same tech levels.     If you can pump up enough fuel to support it then having faster and/or more mission tonnage per ship it is worth it.   

Also.    .    .     if you don't feel enough pressure from NPRs just crank up their difficulty to three, four or even five times so they always have more technologies than you when you meet them.   

One benefit with using no or in some cases only one NPR is that the game will take longer to slow down to a crawl.    .    .     most of my recent campaigns have only had some precursors in them other than my own factions.     That certainly speed things up.    .    .   

I don't want to tell anybody how they should play their games but.    .    .     in "my opinion".    .    .     if there are no real pressure I would get bored building up an economy in pretty much isolation.     This is one reason I think C# will be more interesting.     The AI in C# seem to be allot more capable and so a real option even in multi-faction games as additional external pressures.     The change to maintenance, sensors and missile ranges will also have a great impact on ship design and deployment in a way that will force fleets to become more dispersed and less reliant on one speed setting, you can't now place an unlimited number of 6000t ships at an outpost anymore.     You will want smaller scout ships and escorts to be faster than capital ships to avoid them if you encounter them and this will make the dynamic of ship design more interesting.     The fact that bigger ships now just will be more efficient than smaller ships is great as well and will make ship designs so much more engaging and difficult, it will be much harder to know what an "optimized" design actually is.   


Hi Jorgen_CAB

Well, first off, patience is not equal to turtling.     Hence why I used the word patience.     English is not my native tounge, but I will try to explain anyways.   
Rather with patience I mean that I spend 25-30% of the time in excel documents.     I make long plans and form my strategies according to my situation.     Just as I do when I run my company in RL.   

However, danger lurks at every step of the way, that doesn't mean that your grand strategies are invalid.     Your foremost weapon against anything is the economy and the logistics around it.   
The economy will setup your boundaries.     Hence you need to pay attention to population growth, minerals, fuel and wealth.     And not waste anything.     A surplus of population at any colony might be useful somewhere else.     Minerals sitting idle is no good, and think about where the best investment is, ship or planet components.     Fuel dictates your reach and endurance.     Wealth will decide how hard you can push your economy.     Everything needs to be balanced like a clock.     Hence why I spend so much time making formulas in Excel and forecast my Empires situation 5 - 10 years onwards.     The gain is no less in the details.   

Patience also means, how you go about exploring and how you engage your enemies.     Do you use the old WW2 style of attacking from behind AS distance or do you head straight in guns blazing, both are valid tactics.     But what will be the consequences of either of those? Where and what do I stand to gain or lose? How much minerals and fuel is a net loss in a missile battle?
You also need patience when designing all your techs and ships, by taking things step by step and make economically sound decisions.     

Patience also means, plan your logistics.     Maybe take a couple of hours and paus the game and setup a solid logistic system that can be scaled.     How much emtpy cargo space am I burning fuel for? But it is also necessary to make a solid military decision in this regard as well.   
You could even timetable your moving of assets, every day an automine sits idle is a netloss of X amount of minerals that can be mined elsewhere.     But that is perhaps taking it too far.     :-)

But what would be more sensible would perhaps let´s say, make a calculation how long it will take an asteroid miner with 10 vs 30 asteroid mining modules to pay its own cost back to the empire vs automines that are twice as expensive.     

All these things does not necessary mean Turtling per se.   

That set aside, I was honoring the topic and focused on "increment time" improvment.     People who have a hardtime playing 100 years in, might benefit from NOT starting with NPRs.   
I will set another testgame with a couple of NPRs and see how much this improves the game, just for the kicks of it.   

On a last note, indeed overcoming a tough challenge is much more worth than winning an easy game.   
But in as far as exploiting a game mechanic, is as bad as making poor decisions.     So that was what I ment with patience is KEY. 
Take your time and think things through, but not as an insult but as a tip from the coach.     

Anyways, have a good day Sir :-)
Posted by: Father Tim
« on: January 14, 2019, 05:43:22 PM »

The best part with Aurora is that you can do whatever you want with it... Steve is a great guy for sharing his tool with us.

I one hundred percent agree with you.

I agree with you, but my problem comes when people suggest 'improvements' that interfere with my ability to "do whatever I want with Aurora."  I understand that people want, for example, speed-of-light comm lag in their games because they never RP a campaign without it and it would really help them if the software took care of the fiddly details instead of them having to manually measure the distance and divide by 300,000 km/s to figure out when the rest of their fleet is allowed to start moving towards the alien ambush. . . but for my sake please implement it with an 'off' switch so I can RP an empire with FTL coms to match the FTL sensors the game already gives me.

I'm thrilled that C# Aurora is going to let me put 12 Marines on every Sloop-of-War that I build, but annoyed that said Sloop will have to land them via jollyboat instead of letting me 'dock' at the 'pier' of Planet Jamestown.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 14, 2019, 03:43:48 PM »

Civilian and state operations in Aurora is a fine line of what the player want to do with his or her role-playing. In some factions I basically view more or less all "state" or player controlled industry as actually being civilian and role-play the problem it can bring as much as the benefits it also bring.

This usually mean that the more dictatorial government get severe efficiency penalties but have a greater way to impact how resources is used... the more open the industry is for the civilian part of the economy to dictate the direction the more efficient that industry is but I then role-play problems to compensate in other ways.

One "problem" with allowing the civilian part to take a more prominent role in the game is that you will have to make it suit all kinds of government types and species out there. A democracy will not function in the same way as an Imperial Roman type faction.

The current system give a relatively good middle ground to do whatever you like with the economy. I often just view the "civilian" economy of POP to be the part you really can't do anything about... you simply need that part to function normally. The part that is left is where you the player can do your role-playing deciding whet the people living in your imagined world are doing. I never view things from "my" perspective I always try to view things from the people in powers (which can be politicians, corporation or just very influenced and wealthy people) do or want to do.

As one example I often leave a big part of dictatorial regimes populations as part of the neutral population in an Earth start. I only imagine the real POP to be the educated and wealthy enough to count. There are many ways to imagine how things can be used in Aurora. If I started a campaign of the current Earth then for example I would need to reduce India's and China's population to a much smaller number and leave the majority part of it as neutral population. Current GDP and other economic factors would have to guide me into some good starting conditions. I would probably look at the wealth as an indicator at roughly where I would need to end up in terms of GDP or something.

The best part with Aurora is that you can do whatever you want with it... Steve is a great guy for sharing his tool with us.
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: January 14, 2019, 12:29:05 PM »

The lack of market is not because Steve doesn't want it, it's because it hasn't been added to the game yet, because civilian shipping lines conjure their ships out of thin air, only paying a wealth cost. You CAN buy every ton of minerals they mine and you CAN buy every liter of fuel they harvest. It's not like that stuff is gone for good the moment a CMC or FH pops up. And even with multiple races starting in Sol, there is generally enough minerals to go around - it's only Earth that runs out fast. I guess it's possible to be really unlucky and have most of Sol system be barren, but that's why you have SM, so you can fix things later if necessary. I've run multiple multi-faction Earth starts and neither the CMCs nor the civilian FHs have been an issue, though once I needed to SM a bit more Duranium on Earth so that all factions could actually get into space - but once they have that initial geo-survey and freighter capability, the problems are all solvable.

Now, I'm not saying that your experience is invalid, but that the issue is not as prevalent or as catastrophic as you make it sound. And yeah, commercial entities do all mining in reality, even "strategic" resources like uranium and crude oil, and that's the way things have generally been in human history, with the occasional national "corporation", largely temporal exceptions.
Posted by: Zincat
« on: January 13, 2019, 05:42:14 PM »

They're not limited, there's millions tonnes of those minerals of them all over the galaxy.

If you are playing in an empty galaxy maybe.
If you play a multiple races start, or with multiple NPR, or both, you will be fighting over every single ton of duranium. Assuming you can actually defend the systems where the minerals are.

It's just like civilian iron mining.
That's completely untrue. Because in Aurora, there is the SMALL logistical problem of having such minerals in other systems which you have to reach and control in order to exploit. Also, there is NOT something like a global market like we have on Earth. You either mine the stuff yourself, or you do without the TN minerals.

I reiterate, no sane nation would let civilians mine something like this.