Quasar4x - An Aurora4x VB6 clone q4x

[Agm-114]

There's a lot of other settings in there as well.  Automation can be found in the Quasar4x dropdown menu.  It comes disabled by default.  To enable it, go to Quasar4x > Mods and check the Default AI and "Default Library boxes.  (As an aside, I simplified the 'Enabled' column.  Previously it was a customizable dropdown that let you enable the mod for specific conditions only, and it was a coding nightmare for me and the modder.  Now its just an On/Off checkbox)

Haha Yes
This was unironically the most challenging part of a lot of the simple mods I was trying to make.
I'm loving all the bugfixes, keep up the good work.

[xenoscepter]

 --- 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.

[Kyle (OP)]

--- 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 Sol

I 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 powerful

Right 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

-

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.

[Droll]

Well first of all it would be nice to see the designs of your impotent combat ships and see how far you could take your weapons with your given tech. Other than that, the recommendation is generally to specialize in one weapon type + gauss for missiles. However 10cm railguns are also decent if not optimal so as a beginner beam tech you could go railgun + missiles.

With low tech missiles do not try to get massive ranges for them. Focus on speed and warhead, range comes later when you have researched some good techs. Engine boost is pretty much mandatory for missiles. Your initial missiles probably wont be able to reach the hardcoded maximum beam range.

As for the diplomacy overhaul - do not worry, C# isn't that much better. Given that aurora is very combat focused, the diplomacy is very barebones. So any improvements you do will end up deviating quasar from VB6.

Going forward as you play you are going to have to decide whether you want to keep to the VB6 legacy, or take quasar on its own path.

[Kyle (OP)]

Why go through all the trouble of analyzing my ships when I could have just as easily not attacked the explorer ships?  It's kinda beside the point   The NPR's expansion shouldn't grind to a halt because their explorer ships are paralyzed in Sol.

For tech balance tweaks, this is what I'm probably settling with.  If the player leaves the suggested starting tech points alone, then there is no change to the NPR starting tech logic.  However, if the player adjusts the starting tech points, like I did in my game, then NPR's will be adjusted by a similar amount.  For example, I changed 120000 to 0, which would have changed the NPR's starting points from 220000 to 100000.  This works both ways.  If the player starts with 5 zillion tech points, the NPR will start with 5 zillion as well.   In pseudo code,

T = starting tech points assigned by the game
N = the starting tech points the player types in (which is just T if untouched)
D = difficulty modifier * 0.01 (so, 1.0 by default)
A = the number of tech points the NPR would normally get before adjustment

Adj = N - T
if Adj < 0 and D > 1 then Adj = Adj / D
if Adj > 0 and D < 1 then Adj = Adj * D
A = A + Adj
if A < 0 then A = 0

This is only for game starts, and does not apply to NPRs discovered later.  The important thing to note, for the purists out there, is that if you leave the recommended starting tech points alone, then it behaves exactly the same as "vanilla VB6."  My reasoning is that if you want to make the game harder, you change the difficulty modifier.  If you're tweaking the starting tech points, like I was, then you're more likely just wanting a different style of game.  This lets you change the style of the game without making it any harder or easier for yourself.

I hold this same reasoning for the number of starting research labs too.  When I changed 20 labs to 15, I wanted techs to trickle in more slowly in the beginning, not a specifically harder game.  So I'm capping the number of research labs an NPR starts with at 150% the number of labs the player starts with.  In an ongoing game, newly discovered NPR starting labs are capped at 150% the number of labs owned by the player with the most labs.  The "150%" is multiplied by the difficulty modifier * 0.01.  So at 200% difficulty, the cap is 300% * player labs.

Again, for the purists, I need to point out that this 150% cap almost never comes into play if you don't touch the # of starting labs the game picks for you.  I generated 20 test NPRs, and none of them hit the cap.  Getting a 35-lab NPR in a 500-pop game start is quite rare and unlucky.

[iceball3]

Will conventional starts also provoke the tech scaling on other starting empires? Though if it does, i suppose you could do the spacemaster empire start option for the vb6 experience.

[TMaekler]

I was wondering if you could add a menu entry for the events window. It can only be reached through the system view - which I tend not to use. Alternatively, if you could add the text and bg coloring to the system view for the events... 

Oh, another thing: In System View, there is no option to display/hide comets and names of comets. It wasn't in VB6, but why not have it here 

[Kyle (OP)]

Will conventional starts also provoke the tech scaling on other starting empires? Though if it does, i suppose you could do the spacemaster empire start option for the vb6 experience.

No, starting as conventional vs TN has no impact on NPR starting tech, either before or after this change.  To have conventional start NPR's with the similar reductions a player gets, (start with 1/4th the normal labs, start with only conventional tech, start with Conventional factories, etc) you have to check the box for "Generate only non-Trans-Newtonian races".  This checkbox is different than VB6, because VB6 doesn't give you conventional NPRs

I was wondering if you could add a menu entry for the events window. It can only be reached through the system view - which I tend not to use. Alternatively, if you could add the text and bg coloring to the system view for the events... 

As in VB6 there's an icon on the F3 window that opens the events window.

Oh, another thing: In System View, there is no option to display/hide comets and names of comets. It wasn't in VB6, but why not have it here 

Yeah, I've been thinking about adding that.

[TMaekler]

I was wondering if you could add a menu entry for the events window. It can only be reached through the system view - which I tend not to use. Alternatively, if you could add the text and bg coloring to the system view for the events... 

As in VB6 there's an icon on the F3 window that opens the events window.

That is what I was trying to avoid - open the F3 System View, click that button, close the System View. Waaaay simpler to have it also in the menu and open the events window there

[Kyle (OP)]

I was wondering if you could add a menu entry for the events window. It can only be reached through the system view - which I tend not to use. Alternatively, if you could add the text and bg coloring to the system view for the events... 

As in VB6 there's an icon on the F3 window that opens the events window.

That is what I was trying to avoid - open the F3 System View, click that button, close the System View. Waaaay simpler to have it also in the menu and open the events window there

It's there, though.  SpaceMaster > Event Updates, same as in VB6.

[Kyle (OP)]

Progress update 2021-08-14:

Well, I found out why my game went down the gutter.  There was a bug where diplomatic teams were not providing any boost to political modifiers due to a typo.  I went back and checked my backups of the game's progress.  If teams had been working, they would have been more than enough to counter the ongoing xenophobic reaction.  The Chimbia would eventually have become friendly, deemed Sol to be a safe place, and their explorer ships would have gone back to their tasks and left Sol.

(heel of palm on forehead.)

My next patch will fix this, and then I think I'll resume this campaign from a backup just after I met the Chimbia.

[TMaekler]

That is what I was trying to avoid - open the F3 System View, click that button, close the System View. Waaaay simpler to have it also in the menu and open the events window there

It's there, though.  SpaceMaster > Event Updates, same as in VB6.

I'll be dammed. Never saw that - even in VB6 

[TMaekler]

Is there a way to research a missile prototype engine? If I construct a missile with a prototype engine, I can't create a project for that missile. When I exchange it for a real researched engine, I can. Maybe you can program it in a way that "Create" is also active when a prototype engine is selected and the game asks if you additionally want to research that engine and create two projects?

[Kyle (OP)]

Is there a way to research a missile prototype engine? If I construct a missile with a prototype engine, I can't create a project for that missile. When I exchange it for a real researched engine, I can. Maybe you can program it in a way that "Create" is also active when a prototype engine is selected and the game asks if you additionally want to research that engine and create two projects?

Yeah you're right, I need to add a way to do that.  For now, just use the <current engine in the engine design window> option for missile engine, and create a non-prototype research project from the engine you have designed.

[TMaekler]

One thing with Aurora always bugged me - a good way of organising cargo transfer with easier setup of cargo routes. Because there are like six general types of cargo transfer one has to organise: Installations to Destinations, Minerals to Production Sites, Refuelling of Fuel Depots or Transfer from Harvesters to Colonies, Colonists to Colonies, Troops to Action or Unrest Suppression and tugging ships to destination fleets. But the order system makes setting these up a bit painful. Saving templates and repeating orders can help. But I think they could be made a lot easier to handle and make the game more fun to play.

If you are interested in setting up an easier transfer system, here are some ideas I had for such a thing. This might be possible to realise as an "Order Generation Menu" which generates the known order list through the options you select in that menu. Thereby it could be done on top of the already existing system without generating bugs and problems with rewriting the transfer system.

The basic idea goes like this:
You select a fleet you want to set up a new order list for and open the "Order Generation" submenu. Here you can select Source and Destination (a list of only colonies and/or possible fleets) and the amount of units you want to transfer from S to D. Since all modules have different sizes, this window can show you how many runs from source to destination that would entail as well as the expected duration of that operation.
The system also warns you if you would exceed the maximum range of the fleet. Additionally you can select several destinations where that fleet could refuel (planets or fuel depots ins space).
Once you are happy with the settings you click on "Generate Order List" and this auto generates the needed steps to transport anything from S to D and refuel the fleet on the way if necessary.

So this system in the end would take away the need to have to setup everything repeatedly in a manual fashion. You also could save these "Order Generations" as a template and apply them again and again as needed.