Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Makir on October 08, 2016, 04:17:04 AM
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(Is this even the right place to put this in? Oh well)
Hello there, as you all could probably tell, i'm an extreme noob of Aurora, amd I wanted to tell you all my half-terrible first "serious game", that I started a few days ago, so that you all can help me out
So, to start off, i'm using version 7. 1, and when I created the save, I started off SUPER easy, with already made research, 30 starting labs, already surveyed Survey Points, a few ShipYards, and game generated Tech and Ship Design, since i'm a lazy idiot who can't make heads or tails on how to make an efficient missile
The start was pretty simple, made a geo-scanner ship and started to explore Sol, absolutely no luck with minerals in anywhere except Luna, in which I found a LOT of good suff, and so I promptly made a mining colony on it, everything up untill now has been fine and dandy, well, untill I wanted to reach out to other Systems, to do so, I created a Jump Cruiser so I could escort my Geo ship on the other systems, (By the way, the Cruiser ship started off with 0% ammo, since it used missiles I don't know if that's important or not), It all went fine with the first two systems, at the third and farthest System Point, however, on the way back, the Cruiser ran out of fuel, me, not knowing how to save that ship, I turned on SM and teleported it on Earth, where it was fueled, I then created a Survey Ship, and switched it out with the Geo-scanner ship, wanting to explore other Systems, however, again, the Cruiser ran out of fuel, not wanting to SM it again, I decided to hold off on playing untill I managed to post this.
So, all in all, please, help me out here, give me some tips and tell me where I went wrong, and what should I do to save this game, sorry if I made some veterans cringe with this post.
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Welcome to the forums Makir. We've all started at roughly the same point, so no shame.
First, I'd honestly recommend reading the wiki's entries for ship design and throwing together designs yourself. Sure, it increases the learning curve, but you'll understand what those pesky statistics mean, not get surprised by performance issues, and not have to juggle a million different logistics issues. (For example, pre-generated ships love utilizing proprietary missiles and parts, which floods related menus.)
Mineral-wise, it sounds like you've hit a pretty bad patch of luck. Generally, Sol is teeming with minerals. Depending on how attached you are, it might be worth restarting so you can get comfortable with colonizing and shipping minerals around (intra-system minerals can be shipped via mass drivers!).
Missile ships do require loaded missiles in their magazines. If you give them a default loadout in their ship design, and if you have enough of those missiles in stock at the colony you produce them, they'll load themselves up as soon as they're built. Also assuming a default loadout set in the design, there should be a "Load Ammo at Colony" order that will load them up -- otherwise you're pretty much stuck by using a "Move To [Colony]" order, opening the Ships window, selecting the ship, Ordnance management tab, and transferring missiles from "Population" to the ship. Do note launchers can only fire missiles of their size or smaller.
As to your fuel situation, I have two main tips. The first is that you can order a fleet to manually "Refuel at [Colony]", which is how you'll probably handle *most* fleets. The second tip is a combination of default orders and conditionals. For the bulk of your fleets (Honestly, it might be worthwhile to set it for all of them until you've got a feel for what needs it and what doesn't) set the conditional orders in the Fleets window to "Fuel 50%, Refuel at Colony within 4 Jumps" and "Maint Supplies 20%, Resupply at Colony within 4 Jumps". This will make your ships automatically come home to refuel and/or resupply when they get too low (Fuel 50% is an excellent setting for survey craft especially, seeing as they tend to have less hands-on work than others.) Finally, default orders are... well, default orders your ships do if there's nothing else. Survey ships work well with "Survey Next Three System Survey Points" if they have grav sensors and "Survey Next Five System Bodies" if they have geo sensors. Together, default and conditional orders can make fully automated survey ships within a chosen star system, with you only deciding which system to survey and send them back out when they refuel.
Hopefully that gets your started. Feel free to ask more questions if they come up.
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Thanks for the help, I think I will teleport the ships back to Sol and then create a Survey Ship with an actual Jump Drive, so it does not have to be escorted, i'll try to deal with the missile problem later, if i'm able
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Also, I know it's annoying to double-post, but I wanted to know, what is the easiest weapon, while at the same time efficient, to create in the game? I haven't encountered NPR's yet, but I would like to be prepared when it happens
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Railguns are probably the easiest weapon system to not mess up, but do try to do some missile experimenting sooner rather than later.
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Thanks, good to know, but i'm afraid the damage is done, and I did a completely useless PDC, since it's at 0% ammunition, i haven't tested it yet, but it probably can't actually shoot
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That reminds me, putting railguns on a PDC on a planet with an atmosphere is one of the very few ways to mess up railgun deployment (only missiles and meson cannons can shoot through an atmosphere 1.0 or thicker).
Why don't you post your PDC design? If 0% ammunition is the only problem then that can be fixed by building missiles with ordinance factories and reloading from the planetary stockpile.
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On weapons: Railguns I agree are probably the simplest to not mess up, and double as PD weapons so you don't have to worry overmuch. Lasers aren't a huge step from there, and give you a lot of customization options. You will want to experiment with missiles sooner rather than later, as even fair missiles tend to dominate combat (due largely to range differences). I'm applying broad strokes here, though I will elaborate that regardless of your weapon choice or setup, ship speed is probably the single most important factor.
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If you use a beam-centric fleet, you will need sufficient point defence to avoid most missile damage. Many small railguns are the easiest, and often the most effective, way of doing this.
In beam v beam combat, if one side has superior range and superior speed, it wins flawless victories. So if you're happy with your anti-missile capabilities, you may want to field some lasers or particle beams with long-ranged fire controls (large railguns imo require too much research investment to be actually good).
If you don't want to do this, you could stick with railguns and give your ships the speed to close the range to a fleeing enemy and the toughness to shrug off a few hits from longer-ranged weapons.
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Missile design confused the hell out of me too. Now i love tinkering with them.
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Here's the crappy PDC that I made in 5 minutes
New Class class Planetary Defence Centre 5200 tons 106 Crew 795.2 BP TCS 104 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 5-26 Shields 0-0 Sensors 12/12/0/0 Damage Control 1 PPV 8.45
Annual Failure Rate: 916% IFR: 12.7% Maintenance Capacity 0 MSP
Troop Capacity: 1 Battalions Magazine 11 Spare Berths 6
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 0.0 billion km (0 days at full power)
Fire Control S02 24-12000 (2) Max Range: 48,000 km TS: 12000 km/s 79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Size 5 Missile Launcher (1) Missile Size 5 Rate of Fire 50
Size 3 Box Launcher (1) Missile Size 3 Hangar Reload 22.5 minutes MF Reload 3.7 hours
Size 3 Missile Launcher (1) Missile Size 3 Rate of Fire 30
Missile Fire Control FC64-R73 (1) Range 64.6m km Resolution 73
Thermal Sensor TH2-12 (1) Sensitivity 12 Detect Signature 1000: 12m km
Active Search Sensor MR236-R73 (1) GPS 33726 Range 236.8m km Resolution 73
EM Detection Sensor EM2-12 (1) Sensitivity 12 Detect Strength 1000: 12m km
This ship is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre
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Mixed batteries can be sound (different missile sizes are always different salvos, so if the missiles have the same speed it's a method to make the job harder for enemy point defence).
I can't find a good rationale for your choices though.
Why a box launcher? I'd either use full-size launchers for a decent rate, or lots and lots of box launchers and nothing else ("either I can fend off a threat without expending missiles, or it's one massive alpha strike").
why does it have fuel?
Why sensors? Especially the passive ones, Deep Space Tracking Stations do a far better job of that.
An active to paint the target is good, but I would put that into a separate tiny PDC with nothing else... keeps you from wasting resources if you want 30 missiles PDCs and a handful of sensors for some redundancy.
Why a beam fire control but no beam weapons?
Do you actually need the troop capacity?
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I'd recommend something far more simple: base-tech mesons, one beam fire control (defaults will do), enough power for the guns.
Not fancy, not actually that good... but it'll do something against missiles and make people feel safe for cheap when your fleet is away.
I'd rather build the cheapest thing that works, because the money is better spent on a fleet.
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Again, made in five minutes with nothing in mind other "Let's hope this stop the Luna stress", building this PDC was probably the most stupid thing I had done yet
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Update, since I posted this, I made a bit of progress, such as making a Jump Drive Survey Ship, and make it go around, started working on Laser research, and see where it'll lead me, my questions are, is a big numbered Fire Rate good or bad? And is a Spinal Mount any good?
I also made a Mass Driver and put it on Luna, to make you understand how without knowledge I am, I ddin't even know how Mass Driver worked up untill now
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Rate of fire is measured in seconds between shots, so a high number is bad.
A spinal mount is bigger than lasers you could normally build, but a ship may have only one and it can't be turretet.
I rarely use them as I normally prefer midsized fast-firing lasers to slower-firing large ones, but they have their uses and can be quite impressive.
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Okay, got it, however I have one last question before I dissapear for a while, Lasers need a Beam Fire Control, correct? And nothing else other than the laser itself and the BFC?
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Power plants, or they'll only fire a single shot.
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Quick update for anyone who still cares about this, I made a new ship design that is Laser-based, I will post the design right here, i still think I am missing something, and no, I didn't actually create the ship, I wanted to post this so I could improve the design
Raggio (WIP) class Cruiser 5,200 tons 168 Crew 855.4 BP TCS 104 TH 216 EM 0
2076 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 1-26 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 18
Maint Life 0.87 Years MSP 103 AFR 216% IFR 3% 1YR 118 5YR 1766 Max Repair 216 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 30 months Spare Berths 0
J7500(3-50) Military Jump Drive Max Ship Size 7500 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
108 EP Ion Drive (2) Power 108 Fuel Use 72.8% Signature 108 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 560,000 Litres Range 26.6 billion km (148 days at full power)
10cm C3 Ultraviolet Laser (2) Range 120,000km TS: 3000 km/s Power 3-3 RM 4 ROF 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
Calì & Candido 20cm Ultraviolet Laser (2) Range 192,000km TS: 3000 km/s Power 10-3 RM 4 ROF 20 10 10 10 10 8 6 5 5 4 4
Fire Control S02 96-3000 (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 3000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Stellator Corporation Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology (1) Total Power Output 72 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 (2) Total Power Output 9 Armour 0 Exp 5%
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
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Not too bad for an early attempt!
1) Excessive deployment time, maintenance life is going to be the limiting factor. You may want to add engineering spaces, see 3).
2) Thin-skinned. Not necessarily wrong, it seems you're hoping to snipe things that can't fire back... but then, I'd prefer more speed to control the range.
3) not enough MSP to repair the bigger component if something malfunctions.
4) Does it need a jump drive? Generally, I prefer to put those on Commercial support vessels.
5) Inefficient propulsion configuration. Engines too small and too stressed, too much fuel. You could get slightly better performance and much lower running costs on the same tonnage.
6) Excessive power plant output that goes to waste.
The offensive setup looks quite good. I'd probably prefer 15cm lasers over 20cm with your capacitor tech (twice the fire rate).
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My suggestions;
1) Increase it so engines(+ fuel) are between 25% and 40% of the ship mass (view-able in the component window).
2) MSP should be at minimum the largest repair cost + 50% (about 300 in this case).
3)Armor should be improved to at least 4 layers thick.
4)There is a "power required" box on the left hand side of the window, match that number with several smaller reactors.
5 (Optional))Add some sensors. I like to put some on every military ships, even if I have dedicated sensor ships elsewhere.
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Raggio (WIP) class Cruiser 5,050 tons 169 Crew 751.4 BP TCS 101 TH 416 EM 0
4118 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 1-26 Shields 0-0 Sensors 6/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 2 PPV 18
Maint Life 2.13 Years MSP 186 AFR 102% IFR 1.4% 1YR 55 5YR 823 Max Repair 104 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 10 months Spare Berths 0
J7500(3-50) Military Jump Drive Max Ship Size 7500 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
208 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (2) Power 208 Fuel Use 52.2% Signature 208 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 420,000 Litres Range 28.7 billion km (80 days at full power)
10cm C3 Ultraviolet Laser (2) Range 120,000km TS: 4118 km/s Power 3-3 RM 4 ROF 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
Calì & Candido 20cm Ultraviolet Laser (2) Range 192,000km TS: 4118 km/s Power 10-3 RM 4 ROF 20 10 10 10 10 8 6 5 5 4 4
Fire Control S02 96-3000 (1) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 3000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 (7) Total Power Output 31.5 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Thermal Sensor TH1-6 (1) Sensitivity 6 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 6m km
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Some small changes