Is there a basic or common build / research order?

[Antmf (OP)]

That I as a noob should follow? I get overwhelmed and not sure what each research does so I’m not sure what to do aside from the bare basics. Can anybody be point me to an AAR or video that would show me or  plain?

[Barkhorn]

There is no real set build/research order.

A few important techs:
Engine and reactor types.  These let you build much faster ships.

Construction speed, both shipyard speed techs, sorium harvester, orbital habitats, all fuel tank sizes, and at least one level of civilian economy.  These really boost how fast you get things done.  Also, orbital habitats and sorium harvesters let you build sorium harvesting stations around gas giants, for practically-free fuel.

Terraforming module and a few levels of terraforming speed.  This will let you terraform planets.  Good candidates in Sol are Mercury, Luna, and Mars.  None of the gas giant moons are able to be completely terraformed.

Get a few levels of armor tech.  This will help you save weight, as higher-tech armor weighs less for the same protection.

Sensor tech is VERY important.  You need active, passive, and fire controls.  Passive EM sensor tech also makes your active sensors better.  Passive sensors are how you will know someone is there at all, active sensors tell you how big it is, and are required to get a fire control lock.  Fire controls are how you aim your weapons.

Last, you need some weapons.  There's two main kinds; beam weapons and missiles.  Missiles vastly outrange beam weapons, but you can run out of them.  Most players only ever make railguns, lasers, and gauss cannons.  The other beam weapons are only good for specific niches, and you can easily get away with not using them.  Of the main 3, lasers have the best range and armor penetration, but worst rate of fire.  Railguns do more damage than lasers, but it is spread out more meaning worse penetration.  Railguns have less range than lasers, and cannot be put in turrets.  Railguns always have better rate of fire than lasers, and at low tech even better than gauss cannons.  Gauss cannons have the worst range, and lowest damage.  Before the Gauss Rate of Fire is at level 5, they also have worse rate of fire than railguns.  Gauss cannons can be put in turrets.  All beam weapons except gauss cannons require reactors and have their rate of fire affected by your capacitor tech level.

[Michael Sandy]

From a conventional start, I recommend prioritizing the construction, mining and research rate techs.  Early on, you are working on converting your economy to Transnewtonian.  If I start with a power and propulsion scientist, I will put them to researching with 1 lab even before researching transnewtonian tech, because I want them to start improving their rate.

If I have a sensor scientist, I generally set 1 lab for them to start geo survey tech, because it isn't much of an investment to get the surveying started early.  You can survey the inner system quite well with conventional engines, but past Saturn you will want at least Nuclear Thermal.

Depending on the resources in the system, that determines how far in the Construction and Production trees I go before working on Jump Theory.  I have had games where I was so limited in Mercassium that I couldn't mass produce research labs, and had to get out of the system early.

You should definitely have at least Nuclear Pulse drive tech before Jump Theory.  Unless you have scouting as a religion, you probably shouldn't leave your solar system without Ion Tech, at least the first tier in missile tech, and active sensors.

As far as weapons, that can depend on what kind of scientists you have, and therefore how easy it is to get the techs up.

[Michael Sandy]

Before Transnewtonian tech is researched, I suggest building military academies.  This will help produce more civilian administrators and scientists to help boost your economy.  Getting the right scientists can basically double your research or more.  A good administrator on Earth is equivalent to having a tech level in mining, construction and perhaps shipyard techs.

Especially if you have a good logistics scientist, you should get Improved Command and Control in order to research Sector Control.  It is definitely worth it after you have gotten the 10,000 level Construction techs, as a good Sector Command civilian administrator provides almost as much improvement as a single Construction tech level, at a lower research cost at that point.

After Transnewtonian tech is research, your highest priority is converting the economy.  Start with construction factories until your duranium starts going down.  It is okay to really dip in duranium in order to speed the conversion, and then starting switching to converting industry to mines.

Because ground troops take so long to build, you may want to also keep building up infantry, in order to convert them to cadre to build Construction Brigades later.  It doesn't take that many minerals, and you have the facility.

I waffle back and forth on whether it is worth having the shipyard expanded early.  It takes more resources to expand shipyards, and when you are watching every duranium to get the fastest economic expansion, spending that duranium elsewhere slows your conversion.  My target is to get the Naval Shipyard to about 4000 tons to build my geosurvey ships, which are basically a size 50 commercial conventional engine, a geosurvey sensor and a couple of fuel tanks.

I can then speed the building of geosurvey ships by using industry to build the engines and the sensor ship components.  Overcommitting to building or expanding shipyards, adding new slips, can be a mistake.  It takes longer and costs more to refit a shipyard that has multiple slips.

It is usually economical to refit the early conventional engined survey ships to size 50 commercial nuclear thermal engines.  However, once you refit that shipyard to building grav sensor ships, you generally want a civilian yard for refitting and updating the geosurvey ships.

A major decision that you will want to make early on is whether you build survey ships with their own single ship jump drives, which makes individual survey ships slower, more expensive, less efficient, but has less idle time and less micromanagement required, or build commercial jump tenders, (at least 15,000 tons), which act as mobile jump gates, providing strategic mobility for your early combat fleet.

My feeling is that until you have higher efficiency jump engines, x6 or x8, you really don't want them on every ship because of performance issues.

[Iranon]

Engine concept (Nuclear Pulse, Ion, Magneto-Plasma...) is a huge priority for me, and engine power multiplier down to 0.3.
Many other techs, especially higher power techs and fuel production, can fall behind. If your new engine concept has a 25% increase in performance and you don't need a speed increase, you can halve your fuel consumption (while also making the engine cheaper to build at power multipliers <1.0). That's quite a lot, fuel economy from 0.8 to 0.4 would be quite the research effort.
The drive to lower fuel consumption is going to become even more pronounced in C# Aurora, with yet another fuel-related logistics issue.

The priority military tech for me is Beam Fire Control Speed Rating. Most of my early warships will be slow flak barges (they'll be obsolete quickly enough. Cheap, fuel-efficient ships remain useful when obsolete).

Many techs do very little but saving weight, most that aren't armour are junk techs that should only be picked up when very cheap compared to the techs you actually want. Reactor-related techs are the obvious example, but this also applies to Active Grav Pulse Strength: it'll make your sensors more compact, but won't make them cheaper or stealthier for the same performance. EM Sensitivity otoh does both.

Many techs are optional, here my approach is "don't bother unless you're willing to commit". ECCM for example needs to be quite advanced before I consider it, otherwise I'll just overengineer my fire control. Shields need to be fairly good before I consider using them heavily (note: more armour isn't the only alternative to shields. If I wanted heavy shields but my tech sucks, I'll distribute the tonnage between armour and beam PD). Gauss cannons are also something that I find useful for a relatively narrow set of requirements (dedicated point defence ships of moderate speed) that requires heavy investment before I get any real edge over 10cm railguns.

Lasers are generally the most rewarding beam tech line to invest heavily in, because they're flexible and long-ranged (10cm railguns being perfectly fine at short ranges and final fire point defence). Almost everything has a niche, but with other lines it's easy to waste a lot of RP on inferior weapons.

For missiles, engine power multiplier is actually worth something and you want some warhead tech too, Missile Agility tech is much less important. Because of the way accuracy scales, you want some agility... but using very little and making your missile faster instead is reasaonable - you lose some accuracy but make it harder to shoot down and increase the range for point-blank attacks (sadly, on its way out in C#).

If there are no pressing military needs, I usually focus on economy techs. Especially those that conserve manpower: As I outlined early I prefer limiting fuel consumption anyway, and what I need can be had with Harvesters that don't tie up valuable population. Similarly, I can build automines, asteroid miners and terraformers. I can't satisfy my construction needs with construction brigades though, and if I need to build Financial centers civilian economy tech also free up considerable manpower in addition to production costs.

[Michael Sandy]

I don't have fuel shortages, because I build up the civilian economy early, and they build my fuel harvesters for me.  However, researching .4 engine power is worth it for the cheaper engines for freighters and survey ships.

Actually, I DO use .3 power engines in sensor drones and geo survey drones.

[Father Tim]

I let my scientists determine where I concentrate, because I have played enough Aurora to make it a bit boring to do the same thing every time.

Since Aurora tech basically doubles in cost each level, researching the next level costs the same as gaining a brand new tech line up to the current level (neglecting bonuses).  This means it's never "too late" to start a new tech line.

Personally, I concentrate on the civilian production techs until my empire discovers evidence of alien life, then I hastily start building up my military.  It means I generally have an amusing collection of oddball ships that are doomed to die, but provides lovely roleplaying justification for where to go next.  (i.e.  "Their ships are faster than ours, we need speed!"  "Their guns outrange ours, we need LR fire controls!"  "Their ships are tougher than ours, we need bigger guns!"  Etc.)

To succeed at Aurora you probably need engines, sensors, fire con, Const/Prod, one beam weapon, gound troops, and any tech that costs 1% or less of your next level of engines/guns/fire control.

And if all else fails, you can't go too far wrong by researching the cheapest/quickest to complete techs available.

[Garfunkel]

This.

I first decide on what kind of campaign I want to run, then decide on research priorities based on that. As I do conventional starts only, the basics are always the same but once those are researched, the rest depends on my scientists, the nation/race/faction and the overall theme of the campaign. I would recommend doing something like that once you learn the mechanics.