Starting with pre-TNT is really for occasional interest or near-future Earth starts than for regular use. You will probably have more fun starting with a basic TN race.
Hey what can I say its fun. It gives that nice touch for playing a race to start them from scratch. In a multiplayer game, which I hope to get going if 4.1 reintroduces diplomacy, I'd do a normal TN start.
You shouldn't really be able to refit ICBM bases as they are pre-TNT tech (i'll fix that for v4.1) and can lead to one or two problems later if any pre-TNT tech remains.
Oh well it does generate an error message but no nothing outside the bridge and lifesupport remains. In the first game I left in 1 ICBM silo but in the second game they were ground down total refits.
In the game when they were being refit there was a 3102 error in daofield or something like that every update. When the refit finished there was a series of 3 errors and then the problem went away.
PDCs seem to take an aweful long time to build unless that build time is based on a particular amount of construction ability and not specific to the world. Also there is no way to tell how much build time a particular project will take.
Reading some of the fiction is a good guide to the type of systems you need, particularly the Trans-newtonian campaign as I wrote that with new players in mind. You will need entirely different types of fire control to shoot at ships and missiles as the former requires long range and reasonable resolution. The latter needs resolution zero and at least 1m range for anti-missiles
Yes I worked that out, what I didn't realize is that I need to design an active search system for missile detection. Though admittedly my systems have worked so far well enough in detecting the missiles but I'll make one up regardless.
Don't forget you can add extra fuel to your survey ships. I usually aim for two years travel. Jump Tankers do work very well. I usually have jump ships with lots of fuel and maintenance and the best available sensors.
The Diskoverrhee's have 100K-l fuel, but given the numbers that lost their jump engine I will develope and add extra maintenance. The survey fleets had 3.5 years of time on their clocks when they came back for maintenance. I usually limit them to passive sensors but I'm considering looking into this a bit more.
The game doesn't really account for pre-TNT starts at all and probably never will. Precursors can't be made low-tech or they defeat the whole object of Precursors. Any TNT race is going to smash any PreTNT race. For pre-TNT starts I suggest turning off precursors and NPRs or staying home until you have better technology. Games with AI players really need to be TN games from the start.
If the Tech and development level of the NPR is tied to the player race that finds them then it will do so automatically. I'm still not sure exactly how that works in terms of the SM...do they get some notification of an alien race so they can do the set up or what?
The first thing that comes to mind is to turn them off if they are a problem
By the time I get around to leaving the system I am not a Pre-TNT race though. I am just a starting TNT race so your statement basically also applies to any starting player or am I misunderstanding something? My ships were equiped with 1st generation systems much like a new player race would have. In the second game I had just started development of 2nd generation systems...I accidentally deleted the campaign though so its toast.
I agree about the attrition of older officers. That is on my list at the moment. You can change the command level required for each class. Perhaps making your DD class R2 or R1. The option is on the DAC / Rank / Information tab of the Class window.
At the time the DD's were the largest non-survey, non-jump tanker, non-merchant ship in my fleet. So the R3 designation makes sense. One thing I did notice in the automatic assignment is that if there is a vacancy and an unasigned officer doesn't have crew training then they won't be assigned to that ship. It means I manually have to go in and do officer assignments which is about 30-60 min of work to get all my ships (including the civillian ships) assigned commanders. My biggest complain is that the possible commands window scrolls back to the top, a "show only available commands" tick box would do wonders I use the show eligable all the time.
Towing ships and bases seems reasonable. After all we have plenty of tugboats in the world and damaged warships get towed all the time. Towing shipyards is stretching it a little more but once they became orbital installations in v4.0 (because the consensus was that was more fun and science-fictiony), towing became an obvious extension. Of course within your own game if you think it fails the giggle test, the simplest solution is not to allow tractor beams.
I don't have a problem with towing ships and to a lesser extent bases (especially since there seems no way to otherwise get bases onto a jump point) but allowing the movement of shipyards ... no that just doesn't sit well for me. From the perspective of multiplayer I think it takes away from strategic choice value. Also if you can't move the yards then it realy makes them something you are going to put a lot more thought into where you put them. It is a personal thing I guess but it makes a "Galoway's World" primary yard system that much more valuable.
It is far too easy compared to reality but this is one of those areas where gameplay and fun has overriden reality. I could have some type of conversion cost and it has been discussed in the past. However, if I had to keep track of the racial origin of every installation in the game (including presumably in those Empires comprising multiple species), it would become a micromanagement nightmare. So I decided to allow any species to use any installation. As to stripping industry from the planet causing unrest, I agree its likely but that is pretty much what the allies and the Soviet Union did to Germany after WW2 and there wasn't a great deal Germany could do about it. The average Bug in the street is probably more worried about the freezing temperature and the background radiation . There will be unrest anyway if a sufficient occupation force is not installed so I think can be assumed that said occupation force will handle the grumpy civilians.
From again the perspective of multiplayer I don't think it is good for either fun or game play. As far as the soviets and allies go, no they didn't take the factories they took the people and the knowledge. I've never heard of them looting factories (though my knowledge of WW2 history is more focused on the war then the period just after it), and besides they are the same race so this is more like a civil war aspect in the game. It is a horse of a different color to alien technology. And the average bug on the street who is out of work and starving has nothing to loose by trying to take out one of the thieving aliens now so the unrest (and hence the required number of occupation troops) should increase. Personally, I would simply just not allow it but I can understand why others would look at it differently. To me it is just another form of GFFP and things which promote such gameplay I don't think are good. Not that I have anything personally against Dan for inventing GFFP but I don't think encouraging it or its derivatives is worthy.
Aurora is very different than many 4x strategy games in that you have to manage your economy or it will crash. There is no guaranteed rich-get-richer situation. However, many players have run into similar problems in the early games and it just a matter of experience in terms of avoiding it. The main thing is too watch your Recent Stockpile column on the Mining/Maintenance tab. If that is negative and your stockpile is getting low, you will need to pause or cancel some of your construction and shipbuilding tasks. Another thing to ensure is that you have plenty of mines - usually more than the number of construction factories. I am not sure in this case if you just have a zero stockpile or the planet has run out of Duranium. The former is easier to solve because you probably have reasonable annual mining production and you can halt production on existing tasks. The latter is far more serious if you don't have any automated mines. Aurora is all about shortages through - be it minerals, fuel, wealth or just shipbuilding space. Managing them and planning ahead are vital.
You should look at Squadron Strike by Ad Astra. They have an interesting economy model where it basically randomly grows and contracts so you don't get the economic nightmare that killed Starfire games...namely that the rich get richer faster and faster. Martin did his best in 4th edition but since basically no economic activity in Starfire didn't result in more money (the rate of return was the only variable) your economy was only going to ever grow. In SF4 Martin pushed the time it takes for that to happen further outwards by cutting money and increasing maintenance/construction costs but eventually the growth would hit the point where it would expand as it did in SF3R. We stress tested this locally and there was no doubt that the growth was hideous. Fleet bloat got us bad.
Back to the Duranium. I had Construction Fac: 265, Mines: 230 and Duranium reserves left but my anual production was below my use. To solve the issue I needed to do nothing for a couple of years and let the stockpile build and then build a mine or automatic mine (as the availablity on the moon was 0.8 compared to 0.48 on the homeworld) everyonce and a while during this period. I could also have shipped the mines to another moon with availabity 1 Duranium.
I think this is a factor of the pre-TNT start since you need to build a LOT more infrastructure in your home system and a lot of it is very expensive in terms of Duranium. I was also unlucky in that the other settled world had Duranium reserves of 17M but availablity of 0.1.
I will say that so far the economy looks ok. It gives your reason to expand and explore and adds a lot of strategic choices.
What I don't understand was when I paused all construction and then looked at my projected use I saw 750 per year (annual production was 1200) but when I looked at the maintenance list I should have been only using 250 per year. There seemed to be an additional use of duranium that wasn't accounted for by maintenance.
The number of immediately habitable planets in Aurora is very limited. It varies but is probably 1 in every 25-50 systems. There are quite a few more that can be terraformed and building a decent terraforming fleet is always a good idea. Better engines and faster ships will also make distances shrink considerably
I don't mind requiring infrastructure based colonies. I just had not even found things remotely interesting x4 or x5 was the best I had spotted. Survey luck is always fun.
Good! There is a lot to learn and no rulebook so I am always amazed how well new players manage to find their way. There will be some frustrations at things that are not easily understood but there will always be someone on the forum who can answer your questions. Thanks for taking the time to post your impressions.
Steve
I am hoping that we can replace our defunct Starfire campaign (based on SFA) with Aurora especially now that Alex is off in the boonies. Because I am familier with SFA and have been wargaming for well I hate to think how long most things make sense. Often what isn't clear is where the interconnections are, or if you need technology x to use weapon y effectively. As I am trying out plasma carronades and torpedos and use missiles only for planetary defence and counter missile work I had a bit of fun with things like reactors, capacitors, tracking speed etc. What a command does is also not very clear in all cases, for example:
Enter orbit: Do I need to specify a distance? Do I need to do this if I am going to refuel, resupply, load or unload, maintain?
One thing I also noted was moving research labs was a bit of a pain as you can't say pick up 0.1 reseach lab components but it will automatically pick up a full load. This meant needing to go in with SM active and manually adjust the labs if I want to move only 1 lab to the other world in 3 trips of 0.36 each.
Truthfully I don't see a lot of things to complain about at the moment. The UI works, the game system itself looks very good. I like the harpoon-esq ship design. I find that things keep busy once you have fleet moving about etc.