The House of the House Rules - AKA how to ruin your own life and enjoy it

[ArcWolf]

personally I play the 20%/20%/20% rules as standard but i have a few house rules on top of that.

1) No Box launcher on anything Over 5k tons with the exception if "special" ships. (think ICBM Subs)

2) After the first 9 Research Labs, Labs have to be equally distributed amongst all fields. I can still target/fast track techs, but i can only do so with 9 labs. Once a field is out of useable tech (Bio) they labs have to equally redistributed.

Edit: just realized i said "under 5k" instead of 'Over 5k"... you all probably know what i meant though

[Stormtrooper]

The one that worked extremely well for me was to pre-stabilise every jump point and require every interstellar thing to either have its own jump drive or be docked at something that has one. That way I avoid all the jump tenders and mess I just don't really like to be fair, both from gameplay and lore perspective, getting more classic sci-fi approach to FTL travel and the all jump points stable option made nprs surprisingly more dangreous, because they could find me much quicker not wasting time to stabilise jump points and now I can't even detect them unless I really detect them - everything is stable, not just stuff nprs had visited already.

Also I do care about my exploration ships and try to avoid getting them killed whenever possible, giving them armor, sometimes gauss and all that or trying to get them fast enough to have a chance at running away.

Oh, and I play without civilians, too. Painful at the start, but so satisfying knowing I transported it all by myself and am rewarded with less lag sources.

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

The one that worked extremely well for me was to pre-stabilise every jump point and require every interstellar thing to either have its own jump drive or be docked at something that has one. That way I avoid all the jump tenders and mess I just don't really like to be fair, both from gameplay and lore perspective, getting more classic sci-fi approach to FTL travel and the all jump points stable option made nprs surprisingly more dangreous, because they could find me much quicker not wasting time to stabilise jump points and now I can't even detect them unless I really detect them - everything is stable, not just stuff nprs had visited already.

Also I do care about my exploration ships and try to avoid getting them killed whenever possible, giving them armor, sometimes gauss and all that or trying to get them fast enough to have a chance at running away.

Oh, and I play without civilians, too. Painful at the start, but so satisfying knowing I transported it all by myself and am rewarded with less lag sources.

While I like a lot the way that stabilization/jump works, I would agree that jump could be ship related and not tonnage.

1 module 1 ship and to create tenders 2 modules or more 2 ships or more.

Eventually, the commercial/military option is already enough to avoid tender exploit and keep a decent layer of strategy/managing.

Therefore, you could have 1 military jump device and 1 commercial jump device (larger).

I have also considered a new slider related to jump engine option could be added into the design engine component at the expenses of a little extra tonnage and RP + minerals. Just if we want to keep things consistent witb the actual design and UI.

[seinwave]

Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.

[Kristover]

Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.

Try 5-10%.  That may sound weird but it actually makes exploration match the expansion rate of productions + engine speed very nicely to the point I think it should be default.  Most surveying is more dependent on engine speed because you spend most of exploration in transit anyways. 

[seinwave]

Dang this thread makes me want to abandon my current game and start again. I play on 50% research but I hadn't even considered dropping survey speed. One of the things that rubs me the wrong way is how quickly your survey ships vastly outpace any kind of expansion effort, and reduced survey speed sounds like just the ticket.

Try 5-10%.  That may sound weird but it actually makes exploration match the expansion rate of productions + engine speed very nicely to the point I think it should be default.  Most surveying is more dependent on engine speed because you spend most of exploration in transit anyways.

Agh, the agony of knowing 1.14 is probably relatively close but wanting to start anew...

[nuclearslurpee]

Agh, the agony of knowing 1.14 is probably relatively close but wanting to start anew...

From experience, the next update is rarely close enough that you won't restart abandon finish a game before it comes out...

[Kristover]

For me it isn’t that I don’t have time to finish a new game before the next version.  It is a combination of A) I always have another game lined up to keep me occupied and B) the next version has a feature that once I hear about I decide I can’t do without - in this case the new spoilers are a big draw.

[Blogaugis]

To be completely fair, there's literally nothing in the world even remotely as valuable as TN materials are in Aurora. The closest thing would MAYBE be something like uranium, or some other radioactives maybe, but TN materials are orders of magnitude more important. After all they are limited, they don't renew at ALL, and have NO  possible substitute ever. Without them you are stuck on earth while waiting for the heat death of the Universe 

Well, we know there is no substitute ever for them; they have no more evidence about it, then we (real ones) know it about iron and rare earth metals ores, hydrocarbons and phosphates: all those are non-renewable (in quantities) and we know no way to build or support civilization without those. Yet nearly all extraction industry of those remains commercial.

And that is... a bit of a gripe for me - the only way to feasibly acquire more of TN elements is to expand - more solar systems are generated, more TNEs to acquire... (salvaging civilian ship wrecks is... so odd, that I consider this as a too perverted way to acquire TN elements).
Even in our world, no element in the periodic table is truly non-renewable: you can bombard any element with sufficient energy to convert it into any other element, provided you have sufficient power to do so - our nuclear power plants pretty much opened this new capability... Of course, the amount acquired this way is quite low, it will hardly be enough to satisfy the full demand, but at least it is a way to get the rare elements if you are desperate enough.
And this got me thinking - say folks, what do you think of synthetic Trans-Newtonian element plants? These can be extremely expensive to operate in terms of wealth, cheaper if you convert existing TN element into other TN element, but... we do have some equivalents in our real world - there were synthetic oil plants and fuel substitutes in world war 2...

[nuclearslurpee]

Even in our world, no element in the periodic table is truly non-renewable: you can bombard any element with sufficient energy to convert it into any other element, provided you have sufficient power to do so - our nuclear power plants pretty much opened this new capability... Of course, the amount acquired this way is quite low, it will hardly be enough to satisfy the full demand, but at least it is a way to get the rare elements if you are desperate enough.

The problem here is one of scale. Aurora works at a scale where TNEs are measured in tons. There are obviously individual unit or component costs in the fractions of a TNE but these generally need to be built at scale anyways. Nuclear fabrication really doesn't work at that scale, and the set of elements for which it is practical is really a very small subset of those needed to run a modern technological society.

And this got me thinking - say folks, what do you think of synthetic Trans-Newtonian element plants? These can be extremely expensive to operate in terms of wealth, cheaper if you convert existing TN element into other TN element, but... we do have some equivalents in our real world - there were synthetic oil plants and fuel substitutes in world war 2...

Not personally a fan, and more importantly Steve has flatly denied this possibility many times so it will not happen either way.

[Blogaugis]

The problem here is one of scale. Aurora works at a scale where TNEs are measured in tons. There are obviously individual unit or component costs in the fractions of a TNE but these generally need to be built at scale anyways. Nuclear fabrication really doesn't work at that scale, and the set of elements for which it is practical is really a very small subset of those needed to run a modern technological society.

Given enough time, miligram after miligram or ounce after ounce and You'll eventually make it to ton...
It can be an interesting thing to have TNE purifying facilities, whose efficiency is limited by the size of the body they are on - which could give an extra emphasis on territory control, and even if a player ever goes on a limited expansion, or even stays only in the starting system, it still gives him/her/it an option to acquire more resources. Of course, it shouldn't surpass the regular mining techniques.
Alas...

Not personally a fan, and more importantly Steve has flatly denied this possibility many times so it will not happen either way.

That basically settles it. Steve hasn't changed his mind about that?

[Garfunkel]

Nope. Something like that gets suggested every now and then but Steve has always said the same thing: acquiring more TN minerals is one of the core tenets of the game and he does not want it to be circumvented even at a limited scale.

[nuclearslurpee]

Given enough time, miligram after miligram or ounce after ounce and You'll eventually make it to ton...

This is technically true but "time" is not an infinite resource.

For a current analogue, Mo-99/Tc-99m production which is used for most medical diagnostic imaging procedures worldwide is fabricated at a rate of roughly a kilogram per year, and generally the state of world supply can be characterized as a shortage - in other words, we need more capacity than we have, so the low rate of production is not due to low demand. This is to be frank pretty typical of nuclear fabrication. Even with the famous TN handwaving of Aurora we are still talking about essentially scaling up to an entire planet's population of workers and the necessary hundreds if not thousands of advanced reactors employing them just to produce a few tons of a TNE per year - a nice, comfy CC=0.00 planet with 500m pop can perhaps match the output of one mine at base tech, if we are generous.

Even leaving aside Steve's distaste for the idea (which is based on very sound gameplay reasons IMO) it's simply not a feasible approach and strains credulity at best.

[Blogaugis]

This is technically true but "time" is not an infinite resource.

For a current analogue, Mo-99/Tc-99m production which is used for most medical diagnostic imaging procedures worldwide is fabricated at a rate of roughly a kilogram per year, and generally the state of world supply can be characterized as a shortage - in other words, we need more capacity than we have, so the low rate of production is not due to low demand. This is to be frank pretty typical of nuclear fabrication. Even with the famous TN handwaving of Aurora we are still talking about essentially scaling up to an entire planet's population of workers and the necessary hundreds if not thousands of advanced reactors employing them just to produce a few tons of a TNE per year - a nice, comfy CC=0.00 planet with 500m pop can perhaps match the output of one mine at base tech, if we are generous.

Even leaving aside Steve's distaste for the idea (which is based on very sound gameplay reasons IMO) it's simply not a feasible approach and strains credulity at best.

Which ironically makes the renewable resources, not renewable to begin with. 
So, thanks for, indirectly, supporting my idea. 

Since time is limited anyway, these regenerating resources are not renewable. They are only renewable, if we take time out of the equation.

[serger]

You can make it practically renewable by DIM_SystemAbundance table modding, with a cost of no bugreporting.