Hello, so I've been having an idea for a more fantastic game of Aurora, where basically the common way to play it (realism, efficiency etc.) doesn't matter and everything is made to serve the theme or style first.
This specific game will start with a custom race of mine trying to build a huge military design with ridiculous large maintenance life and mostly made out of hangar space. It will work as some sort of mothership that my race uses as the center of a mobile home swarm fleet, so that it can abandon its former home and completely convert the race to a swarm like nomadic life between the stars.
You may know that I built really large space battlestations in the past, where essentially a military and a x50 sized commercial ship were bound together by tractor beams to form a fake compound supership cacpable of sustaining itself in the void without the need of maintenance, shore leave, or any kind of resupply or rearming. This here will not be one of these games, though similar. The military center ship will have a lifetime -large, but limited-, which means it has to be scrapped and rebuilt eventually as overhaul is really uneffective for around a decade+ old ships. The mothership will be accompanied by a larger swarm fleet of commercial support vessels. Those carry around all the necessities to ensure life in the void, containing habitats, huge mineral and equipment storage, terraformers, gate builders, asteroid miners, shipyards and fuel refineries.(but no maintenance modules this time) The capital vessel will contain all the military capability of the fleet in hibernation. It will not just house fighters and bombers (/or my equivalent of those), but also the fleets defensive "turrets", engine-less to be tractored weapon platforms of varying purpose, which are the only real weapon carriers that protect the fleet on position. The idea is that as long as those are not needed they stay encased in their hangars, so they won't require any maintenance and will still be cared for, while the huge mothership itself does only age very slowly, essentially eliminating maintenance need and mineral upkeep in some sense. Should enemies close in or be detected by smaller scout crafts that help sighting any new system, the mothership may "engage battle mode" and swing out the number of defences it sees necessary.
Another thing that is very special about this game is that research will be forbidden. There will be a backstory about how the race unlocked a number of essential technologies that make such a nomad fleet possible at all (which I will list below), and also I will get the usual 30k starting tech points to decide to spend on engines, weapons, armor, sensors and such, yet nothing beyond that. Research labs can still be used as a development department, so I can put together known tech into the components I need, but I am disallowed to research hard theory. The only way to gain advanced tech therefore is for the mothership and the swarm fleet to explore ancient ruins, or salvage and eventually conquer alien technology on its way. Whenever the advances become great enough through this method, the swarm will undergo a time of reconstruction to integrate the new technology.
The goal of the hive is therefore primarily to find and "integrate" new technology, and secondarily to mine and store enough resource on the way to be able to afford the constant update and growth phases. Ultimately the whole galaxy (1000 jump linked stars) should be surveyed and unified in a massive high tech hive.(though it is unlikely to ever get this far) I will hold myself open the option that if I should have discovered a couple of endgame technologies already, or the story becomes redundant through repetition, I may end it ahead of time.
I could also lose the game pretty quickly, since literally all my military in the beginning will be very low tech and be kept in the mothership. There are ways an enemy could out-tech you that no mass advantage will ever save you, so it could all fall to dust on the next corner. ...Especially since Invaders are
on.(maybe I should reserve that to later points?)
Also, since I opened a topic about conventional fleet doctrines recently where I somewhere made a remark about thinking to document how enormous ship sizes are easy to do in any standard game: This is not this game, nor do I really intend to do that with how busy this here will make me. I will try to accumulate enough minerals to start this mothership and its support fleet as early as possible, but given that I have the tech headstart, and then the no research restriction, ..it will not prove anything.
Ok, now a list of the technologies that I will have at the start, sorted into 3 categories: 1.Freely Unlocked ones up to the hypothetical maximum tech grade. 2. Automatically Progressing ones that improve by one level for every civilization I subjugate.(to compensate that certain technology is just not found in wrecks and thus near impossible to be discovered by any other means). 3. And of course such that I bought at start.
Generally I have any technology unlocked to be able to build the most simple component. This means I get no engine tech, as you can have the simplest engine (chemical) at start, but I
do get a Pressurized Water Reactor, as otherwise won't have any means to build a reactor. For weapons I unlocked simplest lasers, carronades, railgun, gauss and particle beams, yet no meson or microwave tech. Another exception are shields and jump engines, which I will have to find to obtain.
| Freely Unlocked | | -Sorium Harvester | | -Asteroid Miner | | -Habitat Module | -All Troop Transport and
Drop Module tech | | -Boat Bay and Hangar | | -Cryo Transports | | -Terraform Modules | -Genome Sequence + Full
Temp. Range tech, as well
as one new sub species | | -Flag Bridge | | -All engineering sections | -All conventional fuel
storage techs | | -Cargo Handling System(1st level) | | -Tractor Beam | | -Jump Theory | | -All different Ground Forces | | -Active Sensor Strength 10 | | -Beam Control Range 10k | | -Shipyard Operations (full -50%!) | -Level 1 for Magazine Feed Efficiency,
Magazine Ejection Chance, Gauss
Velocity, Gauss Fire Rate, Railgun
Velocity, Railgun Fire Rate, Plasma
Carronade, Laser Focal, Laser
Wavelength, Particle Beam Range,
Particle Beam Strength | | -Electronic Warefare Unlock | | -Spinal Mount (both techs) | | -Pressurized Water Reactor | | -All Engine Power Factors |
| | Automatically Progressing (+1 per NPR) | | -Armor Tech | | -Salvage Module (1st level free) | | -Geo and Grav Sensors (1st free) | | -Launcher and Laser Size Reduction | | -Jump Gate Contructor (1st and small one free) | -Cloaking techs (theory already unlocked, but
no base tech known yet) | | -Colonization Cost Reduction | | -Enhanced Radiation Warheads | | -Thermal Dampening | -Construction, Refinery, Fighter, Mining,
Ordnance, Shipbuilding, Economy and
Research (starting at ~1.6 the base value) | | -Terraform Rate (starting at 0.002) | | -Planetary Sensor Strength (starting at 400) | | -Ground Force Strength (starting at 20) | -Turret Tracking, but following the Fire Control
Speed instead of advancing per NPR | -Eventually Fuel Efficiency depending on if the
technology can be found or not (never seen it) | | -Missile Tracking Bonus | | -Generator Power Factor |
| | Purchased | -Duranium and High Density Duranium Armor
(3k - A headstart since armor would be too big
for a beginner ship otherwise) | | -Capacitor Recharge 2 and 3 (6k) | | -Nuclear Thermal Engine (2.5k) | | -Fuel Efficiency 0.7 (7k) | | -Implossion Fission Warhead (2k) | | -Gauss Fire Rate 2 (3k) | | -Particle Beam Range 100k (2k) | | -Particle Beam Strength 3 (4k) | | -Thermal Dampening 25% (1.5k) |
|
I notice I come to 31k by the purchased ones, but I didn't want to waste the last 500, and there was nothing in this price class around anymore. I selected a little head start for thermal dampening on top, because it costs 1.5 and would lead to a full 10 number (*OCD*).
Ok, all this in preparation to the first post, because there I will always write like "in character" for the race, and thus not be able to explain any concept anymore.
///Edit: I greatly welcome any comment and discussion, but I also want this thread to be consistent and only about actual story. This is why I created a comment/discussion section here:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,7303.0.html
