Well, between IRL mess, Aurora burnout and then the sheer momentum of it being so damn hard to go back to stuff one has too much of a break from, this AAR might as well have appeared as completely dead, abandoned and all the worst - I'm sorry.
I couldn't bring myself to play Quasar 4x again, especially after looking at 2.0 changelog, but fortunately 2.0 is here, together with some later patches and hotfixes. And a new major version might be just what I needed. I'm back, and that means this AAR is back as well. Originally I planned to run everything on one save, but fortunately what I have prepared for Part two will just work perfectly on a fresh one (but same story!), this time on the legendary Aurora 2.0 (more like 2.1.1 to be precise...). And so I live on, this AAR lives on and hopefully I'll finish it without any further major hiccups along the way.
Part one - introduction and Synthetic Dawn - was made to set up this retrofuturistic cyberpunk world, the general outline of lore and its major points that are yet to be properly resolved and the beginning of reconnecting the fallen world with the one that later emerged from the N.O.V.A. Bunker System. But what's a cyberpunk story without a proper cyberspace run - hence Part 2 (though honestly it's more like Part 1,5). For a change of pace figured out Aurora's minimalistic interface of stars and planets will do more than fine to represent cyberspace nodes and clusters. With the way I build my own lore it'll probably work even better than it did for my regular space adventures, because this time being restricted by jump points actually works because cyberspace routes, connections and everything.
This section is meant to be quick and intense, just for me to avoid second burnout due to long periods of staring at a loading screens without anything interesting happening - only 10 stars, but 2 NPRs, very high chance of generating a new one in a new system, all the spoilers turned on (both by me and NPRs), with the required number of player known systems for them to appear to be set to 1 (so active right from first turn), difficulty 400% and terraforming 250% as well as much higher player race's tolerance for environmental factors (acquiring a node in cyberspace is not really as lenghty project as terraforming a planet and it's all set this way for increasing of pace and intensity).
Expect intense combat as well as more lore development as some questions will be answered and new ones ask as more data is pulled from the nodes. Hope you'll forgive me this too long break and are as excited about this change of perspective as I am.
