It appears that you have not registered with Aurora 4x. To register, please click here...
Scenarios > Aurora
Possibilities of a Nomadic Race
sluissa:
I notice this board isn't used much, sorry if this is the wrong place to put this, but I was wondering if anyone had considered a race of nomads among the stars. Not so much an exodus, like in Steve's storyline, but a race that has no real home, or doesn't want a home or perhaps lost their home with no immediate hope of finding a new one. I'm thinking something akin to the Colonial Fleet in Battlestar Galactica, or perhaps more closely to the Quarians in Mass Effect, or the way the player's fleet is in Homeworld, simply hopping from one area to the next, harvesting what they need, creating from the harvest, fighting if necessary and moving on.
I've found it incredibly difficult, if not impossible to make a viable race that does this, even cheating tremendously with the research.
My method was to create a very low population race. I started at 100 million, simply because any lower left me with practically no capacity to do anything. I chose to bump my mining and production up by giving myself all of the research related to those areas. Even with that we were talking about a small fraction of what a normal race mines or produces even without any additional research. Even with this low population, I was unable to fine a reasonable way to transport them all at once, or even in relatively few trips. The best I could do, was a 250,000 person colony ship. With 4 of those I was able to reasonably carry a million people at a time, but that would still mean a good 100 trips to carry everyone, not even counting population growth. From scratch, these ships took decades to mine the minerals for and build and they were very slow and incredibly vulnerable. It was at this point, with an entire fleet mostly SM created and still unable to do what I wanted that I gave up. (I'm not even getting into the cargo problems of carrying significant amounts of research labs and mining equipment among other things.)
I'm curious if anyone has any ideas on how to adapt this. My original plan which would have been to simply drop the population on a planet along with mining equipment, let it strip-mine a planet and then turn the minerals into useful products, and then take off again, with more to work with for the next destination. I highly doubt this plan is possible, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd like to hear them. This is an idea that I'd like to try. I'm not saying it'd be competitive against a more traditional empire, but I'd like it to have a chance, no matter how slim, of working and possibly creating interesting stories to write about.
Ideas I haven't had a chance to try with this plan yet:
Bumping up the racial tolerances for planets to their max and creating numerous smaller colonies. No real homeworld, so to speak, but lessens the problem of population storage and provides more opportunity to use installations.
Ignoring the efficiencies of scale and trying a large number of small cargo and colony ships rather than the massive ones. Perhaps even cargo and colony barges.
sloanjh:
--- Quote from: "sluissa" ---Not so much an exodus, like in Steve's storyline, but a race that has no real home,
--- End quote ---
If by "exodus" here you mean the book Exodus by Steve White, please be aware that Steve White (the collaborator with David Weber on the Starfire novels) and Steve Walmsley (the author of Aurora) are not the same person. It's very confusing and coincidental, since they're both Steve W.s and they're both intimately involved in Starfire (Aurora's predecessor was Starfire Assistant, a program for doing bookkeeping in Starfire campaigns), but that just proves out the Perversity of the Universe Principle.
Apologies if I'm confused in my perception of confusion.
EDIT: Oops, I forgot that Steve's latest storyline is called Exodus. Guess I was confused
John
Steve Walmsley:
For a Battlestar Galactica type scenario, the easiest thing would be to generate a game normally, so you can create a species based on your homeworld tolerances, then when you are finished creating the 'rag tag fleet', just delete the starting population. There are several types of ships you will need to include within your fleet, such as colony ships, freighters, fuel harvesters, asteroid mining ships, survey ships, tankers, colliers, ships with maintenance modules (so can establish a temporary maintenance facility) and perhaps even tugs towing shipyards, plus Warships obviously. It might be worth including freighters carrying fighter and ordnance factories so you can setup a temporary colony when you need to manufacture new ordnance. Because of a lot these functions are automated, you wouldn't need a large population.
Steve
TrueZuluwiz:
And if this was a Machine race, it would be a lot easier yet. No planets needed, except for minerals. Think of the Berserkers. Move into a system, exterminate the populace if any, build a base, harvest all the minerals, build what ships and ordnance you need, construct some new Machines, then pack everything up and move on to the next system (which your scouts have already located.) This sounds a lot like the Bugs, except they came to stay.
sluissa:
Thanks for the ideas Steve. I'll try those out, it's not exactly what I was looking for, but still sounds like it could be fun. At the very least, it'll give me something to try while 5.0 bugs are still being worked out.
TrueZuluwiz: I've done a search on the forums, and I've tried myself, but I've been unable to figure out how to designate a race as a "machine race" That sounds closer to what I wanted to try, but I'm lost as to how to do it. All I found was some vague reference to the feature coming at some point in the future in a post from 2008.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version