Race to the Stars - Comments Thread

[Triato (OP)]

Finally the chinese are having some luck!

[Froggiest1982]

A 5d increment takes about 20s time to process for me at current.

You have many empires, so many civilians. In my game I have turn the time back to 5/7 secs by purging them plus another thing I left at the end. So I keep around only civilian companies with a decent amount of ships and get the rid of the others. For instance I had an average of 5 civvies per race (3 in total) and I kept only the biggest per race plus another race I kept a second one because strangely there werent enough freighters in the big company. Both lagging and zooming issues were sorted in many systems as well.

I have also removed all other games and kept only the one I was playing. But this helped most with loading times as these were getting pretty long as well (around the minute versus 30/40 secs after the purge).

You can try to see if works for you by copying the database as backup, do the procudure and save.

Beware: First save will still be a long one, maybe longer.

Finally I have been playing on HDD and want to move to SSD and see if there will be increase in performances as I suspect there should be at least in saving/loading but not processing, that should still land on CPU shoulders.

EDIT: you will encounter a non threatening bug http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11565.msg139813#msg139813

[Black]

A 5d increment takes about 20s time to process for me at current.

Finally I have been playing on HDD and want to move to SSD and see if there will be increase in performances as I suspect there should be at least in saving/loading but not processing, that should still land on CPU shoulders.

EDIT: you will encounter a non threatening bug http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11565.msg139813#msg139813

Save times are definitely shorter with SSD in comparison with normal HDD, but turn time in my games was not affected. I even played from flash drive and only difference were long save times.

[Zap0]

You have many empires, so many civilians.

SO MANY civilians. Over 37m tons of civilian shipping. The Chinese have not just one, but two lines with a hundred ships in them!
The universe being alive with activity is nice, but I actively fear getting the human empires into a war with another where they start targeting each others civilians or having an NPR prey on their shipping, as there are just so many ships to chew through.

The slowdown is still bearable to me, I'm sure it wouldn't if this was still VB6 Aurora. If it gets longer than I'm willing to tolerate I'll look into cutting down on the number of civvies. Is it really just as easy as deleting a line and all the associated ships will vanish with it, or would the ships need to be deleted individually?

Save and load times are in the same ballpark of ~20s with my fast SSD. The db file has expanded itself to 94MB now.

[Froggiest1982]

You have many empires, so many civilians.

Is it really just as easy as deleting a line and all the associated ships will vanish with it, or would the ships need to be deleted individually?

Yep, just as easy as that. You can try it out without saving.

At least they disappear from any view. I don't know if they remain in the database idle though. For that, you should have a look in there. Anyway, as long as they are gone I don't really care what happens behind the scenes.

[lochmere]

Hey really love the series and your writing! Just had a question from a gameplay point of view:

How much do you actually play in this game vs observe? I think I saw in an earlier post you were playing as the Argentinians since they were struggling the most, but do you actually play like one normally would in Aurora or just intervene sparingly?

I was thinking of doing my own version of a multi NPR on Earth start, seems like a fun experience just watching the AI develop and act on their own.  Can't wait for the next write up!

[Zap0]

It's nice to hear that people are reading and enjoying my story, thanks!

In a sense, I do all playing and no observing: All six human empires are player races. It's a little like playing six games in parallel. The event log is set to show events for all races (an SM option) and I react to whatever happens with whatever empire is affected. The Xining and all other aliens are NPRs on the other hand, I can't look at what they're doing.

Having an NPR on Earth really limits the way you can interact with them - either you'll be friendly or it's all-out war. Witnessing NPR-NPR interactions can be really cool however, like with that alien conflict the PRL just stumbled into.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

FYI: it is not currently possible to actually use captured alien missiles. They can only be scrapped for resources.

[Zap0]

FYI: it is not currently possible to actually use captured alien missiles. They can only be scrapped for resources.

It does appear so. But I am a magician!

Or at least somebody with DB access. Distributing the missiles between the empires required some DB editing too. In order to make them usable I then also added the missile to every empire's tech list. That means they now show up in the ordnance selection screens like any race-designed missile - and can be built like one too. I'll be refraining from building any more of them, unless I want to role-play that they got fully reverse-engineered at some point.

That's probably the most "invasive" DB edit I've done. Other edits I've done:

• Components with sizes (engineering spaces, fuel tanks, maintenance bays etc.) are renamed: Tiny Engineering Space -> Enginering Space (5t) - Script here: https://old.reddit.com/r/aurora4x_mods/comments/h17gfv/db_script_to_rename_components_engineering_spaces/
• Tractor beam changed to 1 HS instead of 10 - They were going to be part of the Russian experimental new doctrine, but then they spent all their Gallicite on much-needed upgrades of what they already had and have been struggling to build up a stock again.
• I changed the flag for precursors (the Qian), was initially a British Bermudas flag.
• I disabled the player interrupt for discovering a JP. I don't usually investigate them right away anymore.
• And I set the Xining to have established communications with the EU as the "establish comms" SM button does not go both ways, it seems.

Did you SM Luna as Jungle in the last AAR? Just out of curiosity

No, they just moved all their terraformers away to Mars and then Sheng Yúe in Santa María when Luna became habitable. They specifically built a few more terraformers recently to change the terrain of Luna. If I'm understanding the mechanics right there was a chance it could have been any of several terrain types, and I changed the temperature specifically to be above the minimum required for jungles. Mars was also trying the same, but Mars is already Prairie and I don't think I can change the terrain without giving the planet a CC cost again. Everyone still has infrastructure there, but it'd seem like a step back, so I won't do it.
Terrain rules post: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg104912#msg104912

[Black]

You should be able to change terrain of Mars if you increase water coverage or change temperature. Some terrains have 25% or 30% water coverage requirement or 20-25°C temperature requirement. Terrain can change if you cross these thresholds.

[Zap0]

You should be able to change terrain of Mars if you increase water coverage or change temperature. Some terrains have 25% or 30% water coverage requirement or 20-25°C temperature requirement. Terrain can change if you cross these thresholds.

You say every time it crosses those thresholds there's a chance it rerolls? Mars is already above 30% water, I've attached the current environment screen.

[Black]

I checked again and in your situation it seems you are stuck because there are some limitations for terrain change and for Prairie there is no upper limit for water coverage. I was mistaken in this as I thought that there was a limit for Prairie, sorry about the confusion.

In your case you would need to get above 50°C and go back down to change the terrain.

Edit: I suppose you could go below 0°C (Prairie has minimum temperature requirement of 0°C) that should force the terrain re-roll to Taiga or Steppe and still keep the colony cost at 0

[nuclearslurpee]

Having gotten up to date on this I wanted to say that I'm enjoying this quite a bit.    Really liking the colonial-era style of limited flare-ups between the powers instead of all-out galactic war, although things keep escalating with each incident and I can't help wondering what will happen first - massive war between humans or an alien invasion?

With the Consortium now establishing what is basically a puppet state from the ex-EU Martian colony, I can't help but wonder how the PRL will respond as their chief competitor Will they continue looking to other systems or maybe consider the value of tightening their own control of the solar system?

I'm curious, by the way: how do you work out what will happen during some of the incidents and other clashes? Sometimes it's easy - ram two fleets together and see what happens - but I'm thinking of examples where one side sets a trap with an obvious bait and the main fleet hidden in deep space.    As the player you have to decide when it's reasonable or not that the other side would "fall for it", do you have an approach for this or is the decision based on whatever makes the most interesting story and/or most exciting space combat?

[StarshipCactus]

Race to the Stars is the best C# fiction imo.

[Froggiest1982]

Having gotten up to date on this I wanted to say that I'm enjoying this quite a bit.    Really liking the colonial-era style of limited flare-ups between the powers instead of all-out galactic war, although things keep escalating with each incident and I can't help wondering what will happen first - massive war between humans or an alien invasion?

With the Consortium now establishing what is basically a puppet state from the ex-EU Martian colony, I can't help but wonder how the PRL will respond as their chief competitor Will they continue looking to other systems or maybe consider the value of tightening their own control of the solar system?

I'm curious, by the way: how do you work out what will happen during some of the incidents and other clashes? Sometimes it's easy - ram two fleets together and see what happens - but I'm thinking of examples where one side sets a trap with an obvious bait and the main fleet hidden in deep space.    As the player you have to decide when it's reasonable or not that the other side would "fall for it", do you have an approach for this or is the decision based on whatever makes the most interesting story and/or most exciting space combat?

You know Aurora helps you a lot with this.

First of all every empire has only their limited vision. So you as player do you what is out there or what your general strategy is but the race you control does not. So galaxy map not same, if you dont fly over a colony you won't know there is one. Detection, class recognition etc.

Regarding decision making there is the RP component but also you could use the traits of the leading officer to set the story. So an impulsive pr aggressive captain will fall into the trap while a cautious or suspicious one migh send in some scouts.

The key is discipline, you should act as you are playing alone against AI or you could go for what creates the most interesting setup considering the story you want to tell.

Sometimes the story writes itself as the more info you add the more you will have to stick to the past events and so on.