Tons of new player questions

[Wigglepuff (OP)]

So, was browsing the web, found this game, read reviews, and decided to make a forum account to ask these questions:
 - Is this game still active (Fanbase, development, forums, Etc)
 - How in-depth is the game?
 - What can i do in this game?
 - what is the difference between the portable and non portable download
 - 7. 1 was recently released as "All in one pack. " What does this mean?
 - I've heard that the interface is quite complicated, if so, is there any player created or developer created pack to manage the UI a bit better? (like Dwarf Fortress Lazy Newb Pack)
 - Is modding available?
 - Is multiplayer available?
 - Is the game level based or survive-as-long-as-you-can mode?

Thanks to everyone who answers my questions, i'm really excited to download and get into this game

[Detros]

Yes. Yes, new version is expected around 2017/2018 border. Yes, apparently.
Quite deep. To build a ship you need to create a design for it, have shipyard big enough to support it and some ores to pay for it. To get a design you need to select from the parts you have available. To get more parts you progress in various research branches. Once you complete a research you then need to set multiple settings (sensors: which type, how big, how precise and for how big ships it should be best to look for) and then research this player designed item to get it usable as a ship part.
No inherent multiplayer as the turns are player set and can change beween 30 days interval if you are just building economy and moving stuff around to 5s intervals during heated battle. There are basically just two MP options: pass-save-around and each-of-you-tell-me-what-did-your-faction-do-and-I-will-set-it-in-game.

[Rye123]

I'll just answer the unanswered ones I can answer.

What can I do in this game?

Build buildings in your colony, build customised buildings in your colony, build customised missiles, research stuff, build customised ship components, build customised ships, build customised missile launchers, shoot your customised missiles at your enemies with customised missile launchers from your customised ships, mine stuff, train ground units, attack enemy planets with aforementioned ground units, board enemy ships with aforementioned ground units...

Is modding available?

Nope, but you can change some values if you have the dev password. Also the game itself is very customisable so maybe you could see it as modding.

Is the game....?

Survive.

[Barkhorn]

" - Is this game still active (Fanbase, development, forums, Etc)"
Fairly active.  Forums are somewhat slow, you can expect 3-6 interesting posts a day.  Sometimes more if people get in a good discussion.  It'll speed up a lot once the next version launches.

" - How in-depth is the game?
 - What can i do in this game?"
Design weapons, sensors, and engines, and ships to use this equipment.  Colonize and terraform planets.  Fight aliens.

" - 7. 1 was recently released as "All in one pack. " What does this mean?"
The older versions you had to manually put stuff in the right folders.  That all-in-one pack installs everything for you.

"is there any player created or developer created pack to manage the UI a bit better?"
No.  Dwarf Fortress has stuff to manage the UI because it doesn't have mouse support.  Aurora does have mouse support.  The UI isn't exactly complicated, its just dense.  There's LOTS you can do, and until you've played a bit you don't really know what you need to do.  Just about everything has tooltips if you hover over it.

" - Is modding available?"
No.

"- Is multiplayer available?"
Technically yes.  In practice, no.  Each faction can be password protected, so you could pass your save between players and play like that.  Or you could have a game master take orders from all the players and "play" every faction himself.  But this is all really tedious, so nobody really does it.

"- Is the game level based or survive-as-long-as-you-can mode?"
It's like Dwarf Fortress.  There are no goals.  You can certainly lose, but there is no winning.  Not because its hard, but because there are no win conditions.

[Paul M]

I would suggest going to the AAR part of the forum and reading any that strike your interest.  That will give you a good feeling for what you can do and what is involved in the game.

I've been lazy about updating mine, even as I have been playing further, but the one thing they should show you is that this is a game that takes a long time to play both in terms of real time and game time.  Very few things happen quickly...or well yes you can loose a ship in seconds but replacing that ship, assuming you have sufficient resources...and a free ship yard slot can take over a year.   Reactions depending on if you assume FTL comms (I don't) can take time...and as the latest deployment of the NCN highlighted...the logisitics of the situation can often be more complex then the combat.   Getting TG3 back to Earth was harder than getting it to the combat zone.

Developing a colony requires having an existing government freighter system, having colonists, having infrastructure, having terraformers, having colony installations, finding a good world (whatever that may mean), surveying it, building jump gates to it, and a few more steps.   Then there is paying for this in terms of a deplatable material stockpile, fueling the ships, building the defenses, building the ground forces, getting them there...selecting your leader for the colony.  Juggling often enough the population and production against each other and against the colony limitation.  Fighting the annoying civillian shipping which likes to dump more people on the colony than can be supported.   Lastly bringing the colony along till it is a part of your growing web of resource production to feed your homeworld which is or soon will be depleted of resourses.

Throw in advanced aliens, other NPRs and so on....add in local homeworld factions and such for added excitment.

[Jovus]

So, was browsing the web, found this game, read reviews, and decided to make a forum account to ask these questions:
 - Is this game still active (Fanbase, development, forums, Etc)
 - How in-depth is the game?
 - What can i do in this game?
 - what is the difference between the portable and non portable download
 - 7. 1 was recently released as "All in one pack. " What does this mean?
 - I've heard that the interface is quite complicated, if so, is there any player created or developer created pack to manage the UI a bit better? (like Dwarf Fortress Lazy Newb Pack)
 - Is modding available?
 - Is multiplayer available?
 - Is the game level based or survive-as-long-as-you-can mode?

Thanks to everyone who answers my questions, i'm really excited to download and get into this game

From another newbie who found this game this month:

- Yes, it's still active. Steve is currently in the process of porting to C#; it's unknown when he'll be done, but he's fairly close (as these things go). Maaaaybe end of this year/early next? Don't expect the forums to hop too much, though.

- Pretty in-depth? That depends on what you mean. Most of the fiddly complexity is in ship-and-ship-component design. The 4x portion of the game truly exists; you can conquer and exterminate or enslave other races, or you can (if you're lucky) forge alliances and have them help you in war. But expect to have to navigate a terrible UI and micromanage a lot of stuff to do it.

(That's not a dig against the game; it's actually one of the things I like. In other games, doing things is easy; in Aurora, doing things is hard, which means that if I've managed to accomplish something in Aurora, I've truly conquered something. Weird, I know.)

- Pretty much anything you could do in any 4x game, and a bunch of fiddly design customization to boot. Maybe a lot of the previous answer belongs here.

- The main difference is that the portable download is already nicely wrapped up for you to download and play out of the box, with some nice background pictures and music to boot. The non-portable download still works just fine (in fact, I'm using it myself), but you have to go configure some stuff to make sure it runs.

- Means you don't have to download previous versions and then update/patch them to 7.1

- Not that I know of. But it's better than Dwarf Fortress, actually; DF can't be played without Dwarf Manager; this can.

- Unfortunately, it seems not. Maybe this will change with the C# migration?

- Yes, though only technically. It's a kind of hot-seat or client-server multiplayer, where one player (the SpaceMaster) manages interface between the players. There are a few boards with previously-running multiplayer games if you want to check out how that works, or (I think) some people in the Aurora Chat board were/are trying to put something together.

- Survive-as-long-as-you-can, given those options. But that doesn't really make much sense as a question for this game, which is a 4x game.

Just in case: a 4x game is a sort of empire-management game. The 4 X's stand for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Civilization and its descendents are the classic examples of 4x. Aurora has some significant differences from Cvilization, but it's still a turn-based empire-management game all about exploring the galaxy, expanding your empire, exploiting the resources (and sometimes people) you find, and exterminating threats.

I'd say give it a go. Frankly, you'll probably wander away again; this game caters to a very, very narrow interest band, but you never know if you're one of them until you try! Don't let the interface scare you away until you actually grapple with it. The learning curve (like Dwarf Fortress) is more a learning wall, with various eccentric design and mechanical choices that fit Steve's particular desires, rather than any broad-based design principles.

If you're the sort who learns by watching, I'd recommend Quill18's Let's Play from 2015, and I've attached the first video below. Watching him play, pausing the videos and doing things myself along with him, was a good way for me to get used to things. (Be warned, though: as a Let's Play it's somewhat disappointing; he sets up the universe not to bother him until he's ready, then turtles really hard, and finally loses interest before anything really happens.)

 And once you've gotten used to things, even stuff you haven't tried starts to make sense with helping doses of the wiki and the reddit.

Here's hoping you like it! This place could use a few more bodies to liven it up, from time to time.

[Jovus]

Sorry for the double-post, but there's one more thing I wanted to say, and I didn't want it buried in the above logorrhea.

One other thing I really like about this game, now that I'm coming around to it: resources are limited. You can and will run out, unlike in Civilization and it's ilk, where you can just keep exploiting the same tile in perpetuity. This adds a sense of urgency to the game, forcing you to expand and come into conflict with other factions. At the same time, a lot of this urgency, while real, isn't as urgent as it pretends to be; resources are abundant, and there are numerous distributions of huge amounts of stuff that's just difficult to get to, so in practice you should have plenty even all the way through the late game (where you'll have the resources to dedicate to mining huge deposits with low accessibility).

[obsidian_green]

Regarding the comparison to Dwarf Fortress: I think the nature of the complexities are quite different. In DF you really have to develop an understanding of systems by which you can get dwarves to do what you want; it's about HOW to do things since the basic aim is straight-forward: feeding, clothing, sheltering, and protecting dwarves so they don't all go crazy.

In Aurora your units will certainly obey your commands---they won't lose their minds if you don't make sure there's booze and new clothes for them---so it's complexity is more about WHAT to do. I think any difficulty in the how-to department boils down to less documentation in the Aurora wiki than the DF wiki.

[lennson]

Probably the most intimidating part in Aurora is designing reasonable combat ships. Sure a badly designed ship wont self destruct but when faced with any serious threat there's a reasonable chance it will get blown up without being able to retaliate and in some case not even see what hit it.

[obsidian_green]

Probably the most intimidating part in Aurora is designing reasonable combat ships. Sure a badly designed ship wont self destruct but when faced with any serious threat there's a reasonable chance it will get blown up without being able to retaliate and in some case not even see what hit it.

Might depend on personality quirks. I'm over 75 years into my first play and the only thing I think I did right, after studying up on the wiki, was ship design. (Very involved, that's true, but very rewarding!) I didn't know to build the numbers of auto-mines, troops, etc. I needed in advance. I spent years only researching propulsion tech because that was the only good scientist I had ... didn't know to build more academies until well after I should have. I probably spent 20 early years where I forgot to have my construction factories building the things I'd need later, lol.

[smoelf]

I've been lazy about updating mine, even as I have been playing further, but the one thing they should show you is that this is a game that takes a long time to play both in terms of real time and game time.  Very few things happen quickly...or well yes you can loose a ship in seconds but replacing that ship, assuming you have sufficient resources...and a free ship yard slot can take over a year.   Reactions depending on if you assume FTL comms (I don't) can take time...and as the latest deployment of the NCN highlighted...the logisitics of the situation can often be more complex then the combat.   Getting TG3 back to Earth was harder than getting it to the combat zone.

With the risk of bringing the thread off track, I was really curious about this. How do you, in practice, role play the delay of information?

[Paul M]

I delay any action I take until such a time as the information would get there.  So I calculate roughtly how long the communications would take and then only issue the orders after that time.  I also will send a ship (a courier now that I have them) and then again only respond when that ship reaches a point where the information can be sent to HQ.

I also have fairly high level COs who have the ability to make changes to their orders.

In the latest (and I should write this up) incident no reaction from 1st fleet occured until the ships from the survey force arrived back in Sol (in this case they sent a courier ahead of them).  Then TF3 was dispached after a delay to reflect all the operational planning and so on.  Then when the next incident showed up, it wasn't until 1st Carrier Squadron was back in system that the colony could tell them what happened, at which point they sent a courier back to TF3 to say what was going on.  Once TF3 arrived they made a decision based on their information and so forth.

Reaction times for this incident were as fast as I've ever had but it still took weeks for things to happen.

I also delay things like refueling and remunitioning when I am in combat time.

Does this answer your question?

[Garfunkel]

Quite a number of us Aurora players RP that to some extent. The easiest method is to consider the gate network as a sort of an Internet - but anything outside the gate network cannot immediately communicate with Earth - unless there is a string of ships working as relays. This makes it useful to create courier ships and it also brings in a little drama to the writing. A survey ship can be lost in a system but nobody will know it until weeks or months later - kinda like during the Age of Sail it was possible for ships to just vanish.

The more advanced method is what Paul M described, factoring in light speed delay.