I played Aurora for the last month and it really is an astonishing game! I salute you, Steve, and appreciate your hard work! I would love to show that with a donation, if you would take any.
Large distance combat, focus on sensors and actually finding and locating the enemy before any action can be taken. Lack of information about alien technologies until you can test them or salvage them. The resulting thrill of preparing your fleet many years just to see them succeed or fail in a matter of days. Great economic details, but still enough automation to keep it manageable (i.e. civilians). Many, many ways of killing your enemy and getting killed by them. There are so many unique points that it's hard to list them all.
Like, as it seems, many here, i come from Dwarf Fortress, so the lack of graphics is not much of a show-stopper. Yeah, sure, mouse wheeling for zooming would be good and some menus are a bit cluttered, but once you see whats beneath, you stop thinking about those tiny things.
There's just one thing that's getting more and more of a show stopper for me and that's performance. I know there is much to calculate, but i feel like that's not the only reason. The sudden increase in processing time at some point in most of my games doesn't feel naturally. So first of all, is a constant processing time of one minute for 5 day or 30 day ticks normal in a moderately advanced game (i.e. 25 years, 10 of max 100 systems discovered, 1 NPR from the start)? I've got Win7 64bit and a Core 2 Duo E8500. Funnily, while testing further around, the time was reduced to half a minute, without me doing anything (so presumably the AI did stuff.) But I guess it'll change again sooner or later. I've got a save before and after, in case there is interest.
So what processing time is normal for you guys? I'm not talking about interrupted turns. Just plain simple 5-day or 30-day cycles in an rather advanced game. Maybe I'm just expecting too much