--- Kickass work, I'm loving the "warts & all" approach. Just got done playing some of this and it's a very faithful adaptation of VB6. Thanks for all of your hard work, Kyle it's very much appreciated.
Thanks, this means a lot
Progress update 2021-08-12:
I played my first ever "for real" campaign in Quasar4x ..... and I lost.
Only 15 years have passed. I've lost virtually all my ships, and so have the shipping companies. The attackers finally ran out of ammunition and jumped out of the system to get more. But more waves are already trickling in. At this point I'm tipping over my King.
You're probably wondering how I got here.
It all started when some unarmed NPR exploration ships wandered into my system, then froze in terror at the sight of my civilians' transponders. They didn't know what to do.. should they leave? They decided it would be best to stick around and keep an eye on the aliens for now.
I was a little panicked myself. It had only been a little over 10 years? Uhh.. heh heh, hey guys. Wanna be friends? I began working on diplomatic relations. Thankfully the diplomatic team I had in training for the past 10 years had spent their time wondering what language aliens would speak, so when finally assigned to communicate with actual aliens, they discovered their guesswork wasn't that far off and communications were established with the Chimbia Commonwealth in short order. The Chimbia were pleased by this, at first. But then, the terran federation continued to.. *exist*, and that annoyed them. As the years passed, Chimbia exploration remained stunted as they refused to leave Sol, and still the terrans didn't disappear, and this angered them. It soon became hopeless that I would ever be able to make friends with the Chimbia.
Out of character, I did some checking and it looked like I wasn't the only one who had this problem. It seems other people have had issues in VB6 with NPR exploration ships just sitting there, forever, getting angry, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Well, I got annoyed by their presence too. I finally decided to send my still-very-low-tech military squad and blow them up. At first, I couldn't, because they were faster than me. But then I realized they aren't warships, I should be able to disable my sensors and go dark. Sure enough, that allowed me to get close enough to fire on their thermal signatures. It took all my ammo (my ships were BAD), but I got one of them.
I sent my slightly faster and otherwise useless laser ships to go capture their survivors while my missile ships went for more ammo.
But before I was ready to go after their next ship, the Chimbia's Away Team arrived to investigate the battle site.
Thankfully, I saw them before they saw me, so I kept my warfleets at home out of sight. My Civilians had their transponders turned off as well. So for a few years, the Chimbia continued to watch over the battle site, not knowing where I had gone.
Unfortunately, they eventually found me. Earth and Mars orbited around the sun, and the change in shipping lanes caused one of my civilians to fly too close to them. They began booking it toward Earth, and Luna, and blowing up everything in sight, ships, shipyards, and so on. My PDC's and warfleet were laughably inadequate.
--
I did a little post mortem investigation. Why did I lose so fast? Obviously I should have just left the civ ships alone, but why did they find me so fast, and why was I so outmatched?
Fortunately I have a backup of every turn I took in the game. I went back to the beginning, at Jan 11, 2025, and compared my tech with the Chimbia.
Yikes. They started with 218k tech points, meanwhile I had declined the standard 120k starting points of my own and chose to start with 0. I prefer to research early techs than get points for free. But even 120k points gets overwhelmed by a 218k start. This amount is a function of how many labs an NPR starts with.. so the NPR started with... 36 labs? Yep, close, 35. Which is not unusual depending on the possible government types and possible starting pop sizes. No bugs that I can see.
Also, I tend to like slower than average research in games. So this game, I chose to start with 15 labs instead of 20. Ha. That was a bad idea.
So how did they find me so fast? Is there a bug that causes them to follow the pregenerated path between me and them, the path that guarantees they spawn within 40 - 80 AU as the ship flies? They're supposed to expand in a circle around their homeworld, not linearly outward. I checked their galaxy map from when they discovered me:
In this screenshot, Chimbia of course is their homeworld, and Hawk's Hollow happens to be mine. (Sol). Nope, doesn't look like a bug. I got really unlucky. 4 of the 5 jumps from their homeworld were deadends, and the 5th jump (toward me) (the Tulan system) had only one jump that took them even closer to me. From the Natal system it is feasible they would discover me without "cheating". Just bad luck.
They were also the most advanced of the 3 NPR's I started with. They had Jump Gate Construction ships on day one. (I verified this can happen in VB6 too). I never even got started on JP Theory.
--
So what changes, if any, need to happen for my next game?
A. NPR Exploration Ships never leaving SolI think this is pretty obviously the biggest issue. They either need to
1. Get out of my system and go on their way - Except what exact rules do I want to give them? NPR rules are actually pretty simple and effective. Make things too complicated and they will become exploitable. I don't know if there's any answer in VB6 to give me guidance. I believe C# solves the problem with it's overhauled diplomacy system and new concept of territory ownership. Eventually I want to do something similar, in fact, I've always seen Diplomacy as one of the end-games of the quasar programming project. There's always room to make NPR's more lifelike and interactable. But not now. I still want to get the faithful VB6 replica as good as I can get it. So at most I would like to come up with a small, elegant solution.
2. Or they need to not get angry at my presence - Except that the issues with this is the same as the above. The diplomacy system really needs to be overhauled and I don't want to do that right now. I would need a small elegant solution for this while retaining the legit annoyance they should feel at ship presence in no-mans-land systems.
B. NPR starts too powerfulRight now, the player can chose their starting tech, but they can't chose what the NPR gets. I should be able to start with no tech points if I want to, and tell the game I want the NPR's to start at a reasonably fair equivalent tech level to me. It's not as simple as
1. Another text box where you can specify NPR starting tech points, because it depends on a number of RNG factors, government type being an important one.
2. Another difficulty modifier independent of the existing one - what would be the exact formula? The formula would have to include the player's starting labs and tech points too, because if an NPR starts with 35 labs and 220k tech points, that's only difficult if I start with 15 labs and 0 tech points. It's not difficult if I get 50 and 1000k
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I'm leaning on A.1. and B.2 right now, I just need to come up with specifics. I welcome any input anyone wants to give. I'm probably one of the least experienced Aurora players here; I've figured out how a zillion mechanics and how almost every database field works, but I've never actually encountered an NPR in an Aurora game, and I don't read AAR's or other people's war stories. Don't have the time
I don't know what's considered normal. I feel like my first organic encounter from an NPR can't be *too* far off from what some other people have seen - if they've been able to handle the VB6 turn times long enough to get to that point. Again, discussion is more than welcome! I shall make some tweaks based on any input I receive, plus any of my own ideas that may come to mind, then I'll start another campaign and continue finding and squashing bugs as they come.