So, this is a community-driven LP on the game Aurora 4X. You make the major choices, I implement them and and play the game based on those. I will give you information and screenshots by which to make the decisions.
I will probably make one to two posts per day on average, depending on the circumstances - this will also mean that I will be checking for the consensus decisions that often.
Anyone can come in and play by dropping a comment - majority rules are what I'm going by.
The Game:
Game start, situation:
On the glorious year of 2010, human researchers broke away from the traditional boundaries of technology and Einstein's trap. A series of groundbreaking experiments, what are together called the Trans-Newtonian studies, allowed for the creation of previously unheard of technologies.
Among these are Jump Engines, which allows the instantaneous transfer of a ship from a specific gravity point in a system to a specific gravity point in an entirely different star system.
With the circumvention of momentum, starship engine design began to break into new and different practical solutions from known technologies - as it stands, probes using ion engines have in less than a year mapped most of the solar system bodies for suitable colonies and important minerals used by trans-newtonian tech. It has been shown, on paper, to be possible to build a ship that can travel from Earth orbit to Mars orbit in a few days based on Ion Engine tech design.
The technologies have also had a significant impact on more mundane technologies - productivity has drastically increased accross the board, sensor and communications technology have jumped ahead by decades and computing technology is ahead the curve predicted by Moore's law.
It is now 2015. Humanity stands in the cusp of becoming an interstellar empire.
---
4 orbital shipyards, with 8 slipways between them. All currently idle. One of them is for commercial ship designs only, with a capacity of 40 000 tons. The rest are military ones, with capacity ranging from 5 to 8 thousand tons per slipway per shipyard.
Minerals enough to last several years at full production and geometric expansion - but let's face it, Earth is pretty much mined out.
Industrial capacity of 5000 units (per annum) for planetbound construction. Ordance production of 1440 units, fighter production of 720 units.
Annual starship fuel production from Sorium gas: 4 800 000 liters a year.
20 (idle)Research labs, with 3 head scientists:
Ellen Green, specialist in Biology and genetics (15% bonus to all tech, 60% for biology). Can administer up to 25 labs.
Sophie Mann, specialist in Construction/Production technologies (bonus of 10% for all tech, 40% for construction tech). Can administer up to 25 labs.
Lily Steele, specialist in Defensive starship systems, but has no actual bonus to it at the time (may increase in time and with experience). Can administer up to 15 labs.
No current mobile spacebound assets - no ships, no probes, no fighters, no missiles.
Limited passive Earthbound sensor capability.
Current Earth administrator:
Madison Matthews; Factory production bonus 20%, Wealth creation bonus 25%, Ground Unit training bonus 10%.
Military Leaders:
Numerous and plentiful, with a variety of specializations.
Modernized Earth armies into a dozen or so specific battalions - ranging from engineers to mobile infantry to heavy assault.
---
Mercury. An inhospitable rock that can be colonized at substantial cost. Poor in all but few minerals - Neutronium, Corbomite and Gallice veins however are measured in millions of tons. They are hard to get at however.
Venus. Another inhospitable planet. Extremely rich in Tritanium, Vendarite, Uridium and Corundium - some measured at 10+ million tons. Lacks everything else.
Mars. No usable minerals whatsoever, but fairly easy to colonize. All raw materials would have to be imported by cargo ships or by shooting them there as mass driver packages.
Titan. Our little gem of a moon at the outer solar system. Has almost every basic mineral near or above 100k concentrations. Colonizeable with reasonable costs - 4x that of Mars, but roughly 1/3 of Venus. Majority of costs are incurred from temperature (on average -173 degrees Celcius) and atmosphere (1.6x Earth atmo pressure, with 95% Nitrogen, 5% Methane composition).
Several asteroids with varying mineral contents - several suitable candidates for automated mining have been identified.
30 Unsurveyed gravity anomaly locations, situated between the orbits of Saturn and Pluto. Surveying these reveals Jump Points to other solar systems - a system normally contains 3-5 jump points, though it can naturally vary.
---
Your Input - What to do?
At this point, there are mostly higher-level decisions available. Remember, only few actions are mutually exclusive - we can run up to 3 simultaneous research projects (as we have 3 scientist leaders), we can freely allocate planetbound industry based of percentages:
Research goals - what should we focus on?
Improving our general ship technology (fuel storage, command components etc),
improving our ship defence (shields, armor, start Cloaking technology tree - expensive and time consuming!, Thermal signature reduction)
improving offence (Energy weapons v kinetic weapons - which specifically?)
Improving our production technologies - planet- or spacebound?
Improving ground forces
improving sensor technology
improving engines and power-production technology
Improving space-bound logistics abilities
Start churning out device and component blueprints for sensors, engines etc based on current theoretical knowledge <- must be done for critical components before any shipbuilding can take place
Expanding shipyards - should we focus more on maximum size or number of slipways? Should we build more shipyards using planetbound resources?
Allocation of planetbound resources:
- expand industrial base?
- expand fuel, fighter and/or ordnance manufacturing capacity?
- increase amount of research labs?
- invest in academics, producing more officers, civilian administrators and scientist-leaders?
- prepare for space colonization?
- prepare for automated mining ops on planets/asteroids?
- expand civilian economy centers?
- expand passive planetary sensor arrays?
Space-wise:
Colonization/remote mining/survey goals?
I will probably make one to two posts per day on average, depending on the circumstances - this will also mean that I will be checking for the consensus decisions that often.
Anyone can come in and play by dropping a comment - majority rules are what I'm going by.
The Game:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php
Aurora is a 4x (eXpand, eXplore, eXternimate, eXploit) game, written by Steve Walmsley. It has limited graphics but incredible complexity and depth. It has been called, and for good reasons, the Dwarf Fortress of space-games. The micromanagement level, should one wish for it, goes down to assigning individual officers to command individual ships. But most of the time is used to explore space, expand your imperium, exterminate aliens or make peace with them and exploit found resources.
This is a game that simulates political reliability of officers, training or lackthereof in crews during stressful situations, possibly several competing NPC empires doing the exact same things as you, mineral levels, damage in ships down to component level and armour hit locations etc. It is a complex, but rewarding game.
Aurora is a 4x (eXpand, eXplore, eXternimate, eXploit) game, written by Steve Walmsley. It has limited graphics but incredible complexity and depth. It has been called, and for good reasons, the Dwarf Fortress of space-games. The micromanagement level, should one wish for it, goes down to assigning individual officers to command individual ships. But most of the time is used to explore space, expand your imperium, exterminate aliens or make peace with them and exploit found resources.
This is a game that simulates political reliability of officers, training or lackthereof in crews during stressful situations, possibly several competing NPC empires doing the exact same things as you, mineral levels, damage in ships down to component level and armour hit locations etc. It is a complex, but rewarding game.
Game start, situation:
On the glorious year of 2010, human researchers broke away from the traditional boundaries of technology and Einstein's trap. A series of groundbreaking experiments, what are together called the Trans-Newtonian studies, allowed for the creation of previously unheard of technologies.
Among these are Jump Engines, which allows the instantaneous transfer of a ship from a specific gravity point in a system to a specific gravity point in an entirely different star system.
With the circumvention of momentum, starship engine design began to break into new and different practical solutions from known technologies - as it stands, probes using ion engines have in less than a year mapped most of the solar system bodies for suitable colonies and important minerals used by trans-newtonian tech. It has been shown, on paper, to be possible to build a ship that can travel from Earth orbit to Mars orbit in a few days based on Ion Engine tech design.
The technologies have also had a significant impact on more mundane technologies - productivity has drastically increased accross the board, sensor and communications technology have jumped ahead by decades and computing technology is ahead the curve predicted by Moore's law.
It is now 2015. Humanity stands in the cusp of becoming an interstellar empire.
---
4 orbital shipyards, with 8 slipways between them. All currently idle. One of them is for commercial ship designs only, with a capacity of 40 000 tons. The rest are military ones, with capacity ranging from 5 to 8 thousand tons per slipway per shipyard.
Minerals enough to last several years at full production and geometric expansion - but let's face it, Earth is pretty much mined out.
Industrial capacity of 5000 units (per annum) for planetbound construction. Ordance production of 1440 units, fighter production of 720 units.
Annual starship fuel production from Sorium gas: 4 800 000 liters a year.
20 (idle)Research labs, with 3 head scientists:
Ellen Green, specialist in Biology and genetics (15% bonus to all tech, 60% for biology). Can administer up to 25 labs.
Sophie Mann, specialist in Construction/Production technologies (bonus of 10% for all tech, 40% for construction tech). Can administer up to 25 labs.
Lily Steele, specialist in Defensive starship systems, but has no actual bonus to it at the time (may increase in time and with experience). Can administer up to 15 labs.
No current mobile spacebound assets - no ships, no probes, no fighters, no missiles.
Limited passive Earthbound sensor capability.
Current Earth administrator:
Madison Matthews; Factory production bonus 20%, Wealth creation bonus 25%, Ground Unit training bonus 10%.
Military Leaders:
Numerous and plentiful, with a variety of specializations.
Modernized Earth armies into a dozen or so specific battalions - ranging from engineers to mobile infantry to heavy assault.
Mercury. An inhospitable rock that can be colonized at substantial cost. Poor in all but few minerals - Neutronium, Corbomite and Gallice veins however are measured in millions of tons. They are hard to get at however.
Venus. Another inhospitable planet. Extremely rich in Tritanium, Vendarite, Uridium and Corundium - some measured at 10+ million tons. Lacks everything else.
Mars. No usable minerals whatsoever, but fairly easy to colonize. All raw materials would have to be imported by cargo ships or by shooting them there as mass driver packages.
Titan. Our little gem of a moon at the outer solar system. Has almost every basic mineral near or above 100k concentrations. Colonizeable with reasonable costs - 4x that of Mars, but roughly 1/3 of Venus. Majority of costs are incurred from temperature (on average -173 degrees Celcius) and atmosphere (1.6x Earth atmo pressure, with 95% Nitrogen, 5% Methane composition).
Several asteroids with varying mineral contents - several suitable candidates for automated mining have been identified.
30 Unsurveyed gravity anomaly locations, situated between the orbits of Saturn and Pluto. Surveying these reveals Jump Points to other solar systems - a system normally contains 3-5 jump points, though it can naturally vary.
Ship modules:
Basic Jump Gate construction module - can construct a Jump Gate to any jump point, allowing any ship to jump without having a jump engine. Construction of said gate takes 180 Earth days, a jump gate alows only one-directional travel - gate is required at both ends for free travel at both directions.
High density Duranium armour, Tier 3 technology - mostly useful for being the backbone of starships and stopping low-powered weapons. Provides actual real protection only in bulk.
Crew Quarters - provides decent, if slightly cramped, space for 250 people per module. Includes life support, mess halls, R&R areas.
Cryogenic transport, each module carries 10 000 persons.
Cargo module, each module can hold up to 5000 tons of materials or installation components.
Cargo handling system. Mechanical assintace for loading and unloading cargo in bulk - massively reduces logistics times planetside in ships carrying cargo.
Luxury passenger modules. Good accomodations, services and premium entertainment for 250 people per module for space-cruises.
Bridge - starship control module and central operations centre, applicable both for civilian and military use.
Fuel storage, each module carries 50 000 liters of fuel stored in a non-combustible way and behind several emergency release systems - perfectly safe barring extremely severe accidents or battle-damage.
Theoretical level only:
Ion Engine technology, with linked power production technology. This is a Tier 3 technology.
Energy shielding technology. Crude, inefficient and low-powered, Tier 2.
Basic energy weapons: mesons, lasers and microwave emitters, along with short-range Plasma carronades. Most at Tier 1 - the lowest level.
Basic kinetic energy weapons: Gauss cannons and railguns, along with basic missle technologies.In here, our bloodly history has helped us out: most of our missile technology is at Tier 3 (T3 [Levitated-Pit Implosion] nuclear Warhead, Tier 3 agility, T3 reload rate, Missile Ion Engines [T3], Reduced launcher size [0.75x launcher size, 4x reload time].)
Fuel efficiency at all engines at 0.8x standard - T2 technology.
T3 Jump Engine efficiency technology.
Capacitor technology for weapon reloads at 2 power / 5 seconds - T2 technology.
Advanced active sensors - Strenght 21 /sensor size. T4 technology.
Basic fire-control, tracking, Electromagnetic- and thermal sensors - all at T2.
Basic Jump Gate construction module - can construct a Jump Gate to any jump point, allowing any ship to jump without having a jump engine. Construction of said gate takes 180 Earth days, a jump gate alows only one-directional travel - gate is required at both ends for free travel at both directions.
High density Duranium armour, Tier 3 technology - mostly useful for being the backbone of starships and stopping low-powered weapons. Provides actual real protection only in bulk.
Crew Quarters - provides decent, if slightly cramped, space for 250 people per module. Includes life support, mess halls, R&R areas.
Cryogenic transport, each module carries 10 000 persons.
Cargo module, each module can hold up to 5000 tons of materials or installation components.
Cargo handling system. Mechanical assintace for loading and unloading cargo in bulk - massively reduces logistics times planetside in ships carrying cargo.
Luxury passenger modules. Good accomodations, services and premium entertainment for 250 people per module for space-cruises.
Bridge - starship control module and central operations centre, applicable both for civilian and military use.
Fuel storage, each module carries 50 000 liters of fuel stored in a non-combustible way and behind several emergency release systems - perfectly safe barring extremely severe accidents or battle-damage.
Theoretical level only:
Ion Engine technology, with linked power production technology. This is a Tier 3 technology.
Energy shielding technology. Crude, inefficient and low-powered, Tier 2.
Basic energy weapons: mesons, lasers and microwave emitters, along with short-range Plasma carronades. Most at Tier 1 - the lowest level.
Basic kinetic energy weapons: Gauss cannons and railguns, along with basic missle technologies.In here, our bloodly history has helped us out: most of our missile technology is at Tier 3 (T3 [Levitated-Pit Implosion] nuclear Warhead, Tier 3 agility, T3 reload rate, Missile Ion Engines [T3], Reduced launcher size [0.75x launcher size, 4x reload time].)
Fuel efficiency at all engines at 0.8x standard - T2 technology.
T3 Jump Engine efficiency technology.
Capacitor technology for weapon reloads at 2 power / 5 seconds - T2 technology.
Advanced active sensors - Strenght 21 /sensor size. T4 technology.
Basic fire-control, tracking, Electromagnetic- and thermal sensors - all at T2.
Your Input - What to do?
At this point, there are mostly higher-level decisions available. Remember, only few actions are mutually exclusive - we can run up to 3 simultaneous research projects (as we have 3 scientist leaders), we can freely allocate planetbound industry based of percentages:
Research goals - what should we focus on?
Improving our general ship technology (fuel storage, command components etc),
improving our ship defence (shields, armor, start Cloaking technology tree - expensive and time consuming!, Thermal signature reduction)
improving offence (Energy weapons v kinetic weapons - which specifically?)
Improving our production technologies - planet- or spacebound?
Improving ground forces
improving sensor technology
improving engines and power-production technology
Improving space-bound logistics abilities
Start churning out device and component blueprints for sensors, engines etc based on current theoretical knowledge <- must be done for critical components before any shipbuilding can take place
Expanding shipyards - should we focus more on maximum size or number of slipways? Should we build more shipyards using planetbound resources?
Allocation of planetbound resources:
- expand industrial base?
- expand fuel, fighter and/or ordnance manufacturing capacity?
- increase amount of research labs?
- invest in academics, producing more officers, civilian administrators and scientist-leaders?
- prepare for space colonization?
- prepare for automated mining ops on planets/asteroids?
- expand civilian economy centers?
- expand passive planetary sensor arrays?
Space-wise:
Colonization/remote mining/survey goals?