TN or Conentional start for a complete noob?

[Hydrofoil]

I think I did the tutorial from the forums as a TN start in my first game, then did a conventional start for my second.  The first tutorial game let me try out most of the main features right away.  The conventional start game helped me fill in a lot of the gaps of my game knowledge, but a conventional start is pretty darn slow, so be careful.

One thing I would do with a conventional start is give yourself extra research labs.  At least 20 is a good start.

I personaly like the pace of an un buffed Conventional game it allowed me following Alfa's lets play to get the main gyst of the game (still havnt got ship design down yet ;P) but yeh I find that unbuffed conventional starts are pretty good to help you learn the fundamentals especially in terms of what you need to research for what.

[Theodidactus]

I started out as a n00b or whatever the kids are calling it these days but I'm something of a veteran now, at least I'd like to think so.

The most important things to consider are
#1: The first 10 games you play will be total disasters. You'll have ships running out of fuel and engaging enemies without and missiles armed and stuff
#2: the 11th game you play will be awesome but crash due to some unforseen error, so back it up.
#3: even when you get to game #30, weird things will still happen, like you'll forget to direct a single wing of a battle fleet to attack, or an allied alien race will spontaneously attack you. Or you'll accidentally blow up 1 million people on your own planet because you didn't realize that's what missiles did...RP these moments and you will have fun.

I would reccommend you do what I did: conventional start for a while until you understand economics: when you know how to create a research project, get minerals from other worlds, design ship components, and build a basic spaceship, start experimenting with ridiculously accelerated transnewtonian starts...just to make cool ships. Make some Supercruisers from teh year 2300 that have 20 particle beams and suites of antimatter torpedoes...this gives you something to work toward.

Aurora is unique in that you can get a really good, deep history going, so in general when its time to start playing your first "really serious game", I think it's best to do conventional start. Otherwise your fiction or whatever is going to start with "In the year 2020, humanity was pretty much like now, but within a decade we had shields and lepton cannons and stuff, it was awesome." Plus it makes finding aliens cooler: "For a century, we had plumed the nighted depths of space alone, and then, we saw it...a single pulse of heat in the cold...an unmistakeable sign of intelligence."


Course this is all just my opinion.