Superluminal Communication

[Steve Walmsley]

I role play instant communications if the parties involved are in the same system, or in systems that are both part of the stabilised network. Otherwise no contact.

However, that is only one of many options and I would rather leave it to the player to decide how communications work than enforce a system upon them. It's more a question of personal taste than a hard mechanic.

[TMaekler]

I agree. Though it is fun to role-play it at times, depending on how far out certain ships are. And it is not that hard to set up an excel sheet where you input the distance to the next "relay station" that can give you a time frame when your emergency message arrives at a point of interest. Only advantage of having such a system inside of aurora would be that you could just select sender and receiver and would get a hyper correct time frame, rather than having to calculate it for yourself.

[Garfunkel]

A major obstacle, from my perspective, for any 4x game, is reconciling the roles of ship commander, fleet admiral, colony governor, and imperial leader. Each of these roles is inheritly separated spatially, yet each has independent agency. To simultaneously control all four in different spatial locations is fundamentally unrealistic, as any realistic method of communication can propagate at most at light speed. If fiction is permissable, then FTL communication may have a place.

You've hit the nail in the head here and this is also why your suggestion is doomed to fail with Aurora. If you want a 4X game that handles all four aspects that you listed above, then the mechanics (and the AI to support those mechanics) have to be built from the ground up. Master of Orion 3 tried really hard there, with somewhat competent fleet admiral and ship captain AI's as well as a decent colony governor AI, leaving the player to handle the empire level which was mostly fiddling with sliders. Realistic in a sense, perhaps even immersive to some but a critical and a commercial failure that only saw a minor renaissance after extensive modding. And that was a fairly sizable commercial studio with loads of experts with years of experience.

While I'm all for Aurora to grow more detailed outside the fleet combat simulation that it began as, as it has already grown tremendously, I suspect that this separation of different command levels alongside with adding communication lag is something that will never be included. In a sense, it would be an even bigger project than turning Aurora into using Newtonian/Einsteinian physics.