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GarfunkeL

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http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org

http://aurora2.pentarch.org
---------------------
Introduction is right below - read it, please!

Table of Contents

Year 2000
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1736830#1736830
Years 2001-2002
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1736953#1736953
Years 2003-2006
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1737104#1737104
Years 2007-2009 were lost to the mists of time.
Years 2010-2014
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1738488#1738488
Years 2014-2019 were lost to the mists of time.
Years 2022-2021
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1744179#1744179
Years 2022-2023
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1744669#1744669
----------------------

Few foolish individuals asked for this - Let's Learn to Play Aurora!

The links to get the game and to the wiki are up above - though the wiki is really shitty compared to Magmawiki.

In any case, let's get this show on the road. I'm trying to explain WHAT, WHY and HOW as I go along so others can also get into the game. I'm definitely not an expert either but hey, just as in DF, losing is fun!
************************************************************************************
SMuJw.jpg


Allrighty, here are the settings. Game name is obvious and password can be left empty.
BASIC PARAMETERS
-Starting year is purely flavour. I'm playing a conventional, historical game so we'll start in 2000.
-Maximum number of systems means nothing when using "Real Systems" and it can be changed during game anyway.
-Difficulty modifier will be kept at 100%, we're not pussies here.
-Non-Player Race generation at 30% means there won't be too many NPR's messing around during the game.
-Construction Cycle Time means how long the game takes between checking for everything else but movement/detection/combat. The default is five days and works pretty well. If you have plenty of CPU-power, then by all means push it down which will ensure more optimized empire building.
-Minimum number of comets will be left at 0. This doesn't affect the maximum number of comets anyway.

STARTING EMPIRE PARAMETERS
-Empire title is as it should be.
-Species name is obvious too.
-Main empire theme will select us the titles of officers, hence it's just flavour.
-Government type - THE HIVEMIND OF MULTI-HEADED DICKS
-Homeworld name.
-Commander theme will select us the names of officers, again just flavour. Just as titles, names can be changed.

SPECIES TOLERANCE
These four categories allow the player to tinker with his starting species. One could create such large deviations that terraforming would become almost meaningless - but where's the fun in that? We'll use baseline humanity.

STARTING POPULATION
-Six billion as that was the real population of Earth in 2000
-The rest were randomly given to us by the population size and the government chosen.

STARTING SYSTEM
-Random number of jump points. Let's hope there's at least one or this is going to be a pretty frustrating game :D
-No geo or grav survey done yet - popamole NASA/ESA didn't manage to even do that before the glorious revolution that swept the globe.

STARTING TECH
-Similarly technological advancement will be started from zero.

RIGHT-SIDE SPECIAL OPTIONS
Well, you can read the stuff. Maximum realism and FUN! ensured.

CREATE THE GAME ALREADY!

Okay, okay...
 

GarfunkeL

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eowC6.jpg


Right. Here's the system screen, which will be staring quite a lot.

The top-most row has buttons for the important screens, all of which can be accessed through short-cuts. F3 opens this system map and F2 opens colony summary - these are the two most often used ones.

Scroll and zoom are self-evident. Time increment means how far will the game "jump" - the really short commands are mostly useful during combat. Sub-pulse length allows us to determine how often the game calculates movement - best to leave it on automatic.

The large window on the left holds all the information and tools for manipulating the map. We're going to make few changes:

On the display screen (which shows in the above screenshot), I selected "Show order time and duration" which will allow us to see on a glance how long it'll take for each Task Group to finish its current task. I also selected "Show events" so I don't need to check the game log all the time as events will be displayed on the bottom of the map window. On "Display 2", I selected all of the combat options. We don't need to touch the rest of them - though "All bodies" is a good way to see quickly what sort of shit a solar system has and enables you to zoom from one celestial object to another.

Okay, the big blog in the middle is the solar system. Let's zoom in:

vaNBZ.jpg


Now we can see the Kuiper Belt, which is the outer asteroid field, surrounding the actual solar system. Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt Note that the game still considers Pluto to be a planet :P

You can also just make out Pluto and Neptune and Uranus and Saturn. The inner solar system is a mess, so let's zoom more in.

6FBU9.jpg


Right. The large green circle on the outside, next to the mouse cursor, is the orbital path of Jupiter. Going towards the star, there's next the Asteroid Belt - read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt The asteroids are randomly generated, though. Would be really fucking cool if the game pulled them off the Minor Planet Centre database but oh well.

Now we can see Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury but it's still a bit of a mess, so let's go deeper! In fact, let's zoom in on Earth and see what's that blue stuff above it is.

415pq.jpg


A-HA! There's Luna and Earth - the cradle of civilization in all of its manboon glory! More importantly, we have 600 Missile Bases on Earth and because I earlier turned on the various combat displays, we can see that the missiles (Conventional ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile)) have a range of 100,000 km (light blue) but that's not much of use to us as the fire control system currently in use (dark blue) only has range of 50,000 km. Oh and from now on, to avoid the thousand-zero-syndrome, I'll use kkm (thousand km), mkm (million km) and bkm (billion km) when talking about distances. Anyway, that's the only defence that Earth currently has. But what are those missile bases? Let's take a look.

TW3RB.jpg


Pressing F6 gets us to the "Individual Unit/Ship"-screen. Let's go through each of these panels.

TOP PART
-Ship commander would tell us the name and skills/rating of the commander. They can have a multitude of skills - most important being initiative and crew training.
-Basic information tells us the class, this is flavour purely for the player; Fleet and Task Force tells us the organization and hierarchy this unit belongs to - the game stupidly uses Fleet and Task Group interchangeably sometimes, when in reality Fleets are combinations of several Task Forces which are made up of several Task Groups. Moving on, we got Species, Construction Date and Transponder none of which are important at the moment.
-Power systems tells us nothing, as missile bases are PDC (planetary defence centre), they don't have much power for anything, especially these primitive ones. We'll take a closer look at them when we have ships.
-Maintenance is zero for PDC and the Mothership/Parasite-tools are useless as we don't have fighters or fast-attack craft

BOTTOM PART
-Now this is the meat part. I'll quote each window to explain it in detail
Missile Complex class ICBM Launch Base 13900 tons 212 Crew 366.4 BP TCS 278 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 1-51 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control 1 PPV 240
Annual Failure Rate: 0% IFR: 0% Maintenance Capacity 0 MSP
Magazine 240

ICBM Silo (10) Missile Size 24 Rate of Fire 43200
ICBM Launch Control (1) Range 50k km Resolution 50
Conventional ICBM (10) Speed: 10 km/s End: 16.7m Range: 0.1m km WH: 6 Size: 24 TH: 0 / 0 / 0

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This ship is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre
First line:Name and Class first, then size in tons. This is important to note whether it can be loaded into bigger ships and serviced by maintenance stations and jump gates and so on. Also, it affects speed and to-hit%. Number of crew and number of build points required to make one. TCS is target cross-section, which is only used for sensor purposes - basically it tells us how large the ship looks to sensors. Then come THERMAL and ELECTRO-MAGNETIC emissions of the ship, these are the two main passive sensors in-game.
Second line: Speed would be here but since this is an immobile missile silo, there's nothing. Instead the first thing is Armour. 1-51 means that we have a single layer of armour that is 51 "blocks" wide - which means that there are 51 different "blocks" for hostile weapons to hit but they only need to pierce one before getting to the soft insides. Then we have shields which are, unsurprisingly at zero as we don't have any. Sensors reads as 1/1/0/0 which means we have sensitivity 1 sensors for both TH and EM emissions - basically Mk1 eyeball combined with 20th century radar. Damage control is also just 1, meaning the Missile Base can repair a single point of internal damage - armour cannot be repaired outside of maintenance facilities. PPV is planetary protection value, meaning that civilians are feeling safe and secure for this amount per missile base.
Third line:Annual failure rate and IFR% are both related to military-grade vessels and their maintenance or lack of it - the first one shows the yearly average for something breaking down and IFR is the actual percentage that the game checks during every 5-day "turn". Naturally we would love to keep them both as near zero as possible. Finally maintenance capability tells us if this ship can maintain itself and others - looks like it doesn't. Magazine tells us how many missiles this PDC has - 240 may sound like a lot but we have 10 silos, meaning that we can only launch 24 salvoes before running empty and 240 missiles isn't anything to brag about when facing proper defences.

Fifth line: Shows us the name of the weapon: ICBM Silo, and their number (10), then comes the maximum size of ammunition it can use - in this case size 24 missiles (pretty fucking huge) and rate of fire which is abysmal as 43,200 seconds means 720 minutes between salvoes - that's 12 fucking hours. Obviously, if we need to defend Earth with these missile silos, better hope that the first salvo (10x600=6,000 missiles) will do the job.
Sixth line: Shows us the fire control for the above weapon: ICBM Launch control, and their number (1), which means that all ten missiles are slaved to the same fire control which can only target a single unit. It has a range of 50kkm with a resolution of 50 - which means that it can see&target any ship that is at least 2,500 tons (size 50) from half-a-million-kliks. If the target ship is smaller, we won't spot it until it gets closer. If it's larger, we can see it farther away. A 10,000 ton alien ship (size 200) would be "visible" to the fire control from a whopping 8,000,000 or 8bkm away! This relates to both active and passive sensors in everything they do or take part in so it's a important thing to remember.
Seventh line: Shows us additional, related information. In the case of missile weapons, this line shows the actual missile that is launched from the launcher and controlled by the fire control shown above - first is name "Conventional ICBM" and number of units in the weapon (10), then is speed which is paltry 10km/s. Endurance is 16.7 minutes so the missile has an effective range of 0.1bkm. WH is warhead - size 6 is quite respectable. Size is already explained and TH in this context is To-Hit and the numbers are explained below - as the poor ICBM is so fucking slow, it'll never catch a real target that is trying to evade it but should help us shoot down assault craft and such. Or maybe not. In any case, they will keep the population happy but should be upgraded ASAP!

Next up is Class Design Display which is almost identical:
Missile Complex class ICBM Launch Base 13900 tons 212 Crew 366.4 BP TCS 278 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 1-51 Sensors 1/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 240
Magazine 240

ICBM Silo (10) Missile Size 24 Rate of Fire 43200
ICBM Launch Control (1) Range 50k km Resolution 50
Conventional ICBM (10) Speed: 10 km/s End: 16.7 minutes Range: 0.1m km Warhead: 6 MR: 10 Size: 24


This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre

Yeah. Moving on. Next is Combat Settings and here I have to use a screenshot:

e7xmp.jpg

Okay, by now you should have an hard-on already. Here we can go through each FC that the ship/base has, assign them a target, assign suitable weapons and PRESS THE RED BUTTON - plus point defence and ECCM options. Shields and active sensors are automatically off because keeping them on is like advertising your existence to all passive EM-sensors. Imagine two guys sneaking in a dark forest with flashlights - they need to get pretty close to each other, unless the one is stupid enough to turn on his torch, immediately illuminating himself as a target.

The rest of the screens aren't really important.

In the next update, we'll take a look at the industry and mining situation of Earth, plus research.
 

GarfunkeL

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Here's the economy/summary screen you can view by pressing F2.

2LYh7.jpg


On the left is the list of colonies - they can range from full-blown planets, like Earth, to mining colonies, listening outposts and military bases and can be placed on planets, moons, asteroids and comets. In fact, unlike other 4X-games, you don't build colonies but rather designate an celestial object as one which allows you to then start fiddling with it. So your colony ships are actually cryogenic human transports, rather than ships with a "Colony Module".

On the right is the summary screen for the currently selected colony. Most of the information is self-explanatory and as the colony grows, more information will be added to it. What's important at the moment is that we easily surpass the "Requested protection level" so the population will remain happy and that we have not completed a geological survey for Trans-Newtonian Minerals. These are the special stuff that the games uses for almost all of the space-faring stuff - there is no basic geology for iron, coal or uranium or anything like that. Neither is there visible food production, that's all abstracted under the hood. Thus even TN-mineral poor planets, which otherwise have good conditions, are viable for colonization as they can bring much civilian wealth to the empire.

Anyway, doing a geological survey is important as it can reveal much larger deposits of TN-minerals. Currently Earth has the following TN-deposits:

mtFwr.jpg


We don't have much of Neutronium, which is bad since it's a very useful mineral. So let's assign a geological survey team to search for more stuff. We go to the "Teams / Academy" page:

6En6C.jpg


and select "Geology" from the drop-down menu.The numbers after the names tells us the current proficiency of the individuals in surveys, whether gravitational or geological. There isn't different skills for it, just a general "Survey"-skill. Anyway, let's select 5 people, as every team needs to have exactly five members to work. I skip over the scientist, as he's probably needed for real research and go with a full-military team:

ucsT0.jpg


Rating of 75 is pretty shitty but they'll learn as they do. In the future, once geological survey ships have done the initial surveys on all the bodies in the Sol system, we'll assign geological teams on each and every one that has any minerals.

*******
Research!

There are eight (8) categories of research:
Biology / Genetics
Construction / Production
Defensive systems
Energy Weapons
Logistics / Ground Combat
Missiles / Kinetic Weapons
Power and Propulsion
Sensors and Fire Control


Everything belongs to each of these. There are two sorts of research - general research topics that unlock advances and specific design projects that give us blueprints for various tools to outfit our ships with.

8snZq.jpg


We have 15 unused research laboratories. Our head-scientists are listed there, with their specialities. When researching their speciality field, they get hefty bonuses, so it makes sense to always use a specialist as the team leader. Unfortunately, what specialities the researchers have is random, so player might get shafted.

***I just got an BSOD, which is another nice feature of Aurora. But luckily Chrome had saved everything I had written so far, hallelujah!***

Here's a screenshot of our initial research:

m0MXA.jpg


You should spot that I left the best Power and Propulsion guy, along with 10 laboratories, in reserve. This is because we will design our next ship first - or rather we'll try to design it and see what we are missing, since I chose the "conventional start", which is rather similar to the "pre-warp" start in MoO2.

Here the currently available modules that we can place on ships:

ARVEy.jpg


We are lacking A LOT. Like, engines, for starters. Okay, off we go to the design-screen to create engines:

cg6VA.jpg


Ah, how beautiful:

Chemical Engine E0.1 Commercial said:
Power Output: 2.5 Explosion Chance: 1 Efficiency: 0.1 Thermal Signature: 2.5
Engine Size: 1250 Tons Engine HTK: 1 Internal Armour: 0
Cost: 5 Crew: 25
Materials Required: 1.25x Duranium 0x Neutronium 3.75x Gallicite

Development Cost for Project: 50RP

I changed the name to a better one. Power output is minimal, efficiency is awful - but it's a start. Let's research it. Connor Short, having 30% proficiency with engines, will only need about five weeks to create a working design - which means I can assign rest of the available labs to the lesser scientists.

****

Finally we get to industry. Because we are pre-space travel civilization, our options are somewhat limited at the moment:

dpj63.jpg


Until we research TN-Theory, that's all there is. So we'll build another military academy - to get more leaders, couple of financial centres - to ensure wealth, lot of maintenance facilities - to make sure we can take care of even large ships and a ton of infrastructure ready for future colonization projects. And our production queue looks like this:

Y5uwD.jpg


****

Let's also delve into the leadership. Here's our Fleet Headquarters - I manually picked these guys:

41ZL9.jpg


For the rest, I'll let the AI to handle it. Here's the leadership screen:

9x3m5.jpg


I selected 36 months as the length for a single tour of duty and checked the box that will let AI to handle assignments - as aside from Fleet HQ, we don't have anything important around at this time.

****

That's all folks for now! In the next update we'll get some research done and (hopefully) design our first space ship!
 

The Thin Man

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Are you going to be recruiting names from the forums? If so I want in, definitely someone who'll be killing stuff.
 
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Ulminati

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Information... Overload.

Do carry on, I'll go make some extra-strong espresso and try to wrap my head around this.
 

Malakal

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Glory to Ukraine
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Damn, the amount of tedious PERSONNEL management is astounding. Who ever thought it would we a good idea to force player to play with each individual position?
 

PrzeSzkoda

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Project: Eternity
Looks awesome. Downloading as we speak. :salute: I'm probably going to lead Earth into oblivion of bethesdian proportions in my first 10 campaigns.
 

GarfunkeL

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Malakal, you don't have to fiddle with each position - the AI can handle that. Staff positions and civilian administrators are the ones you have to do yourself and it's a good idea to hand-pick captains for important ships.

****
1st February 2000

We get results from the Matthew Harper Geological survey team! His team found additional 100,000 tons of Neutronium on Earth - which is excellent news!

zqVNF.jpg


****
1st March 2000

Connor Short's team finished researching our first engine - Chemical Engine E0.1 Commercial!

A quick word about the differences between military and commercial engines. Military engines are much smaller than commercial engines, use much more fuel, are prone to malfunctions, require extensive maintenance but also give out much, much more power.

Anyway, let's put some engines on our Geological Survey Ship design:

Omega class Geological Survey Ship said:
Omega class Geological Survey Vessel 4,600 tons 98 Crew 84.6 BP TCS 92 TH 8 EM 0
86 km/s Armour 1-24 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Maint Capacity 11 MSP Max Repair 5 MSP

Chemical Engine E0.1 Commercial (3) Power 2.5 Fuel Use 10% Signature 2.5 Armour 0 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres Range 193.5 billion km (26041 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

86 km/s is snail/turtle-slow but it'll get us to Luna. However, we're still missing the actual Geological Survey module, so there's no point in building this ship. The design is updated and we'll wait for further research. I can't put more than three engines on this, because the mass of the engines outstrips the thrust they give - hence with four engines the ship actually becomes slower. Furthermore, our only shipyard at the moment, Boeles Shipbuilding & Engineering, cannot handle anything larger than 1,000 tons, though we are building it up:

SF3Ys.jpg


****
1st July 2000

Sensors and fire control specialist, James Savage (25%), joins us. I put him to work on missile tracking tech, using the single lab that's available after the engines were designed:

FLOwm.jpg


****
1st September 2000

Our first two financial centres are finished. Half of our industry switches to building some maintenance facilities - it'll take about two-and-a-half years to finish that. And since we're talking about finance, here's the "Wealth / Trade" screen:

pZ4PW.jpg


We're currently making nice surplus - 320,350.9 income vs 9255.2 expenditure. I don't know whether that's dollars or just some arbitrary game "wealth" unit and it doesn't really matter. It's a good idea to build up wealth during the slow, conventional start as the costs will ramp up when we start to seriously expand.

At the bottom you can see some of the trade goods and both the import and export requirements that Earth has. Since we don't have any other colonies yet, there's no civilian trade - but once we do have, commercial shipping lines try to satisfy these and we get more money from taxing that trade. Sweet!

****
1st November 2000

Military academies are built and production is switched over to infrastructure. The big chunk of 6,000 will be finished in about two years. And with level 3 academy/training, we get 15 officers graduating each year. Yeah, that's not much but again the conventional start gives us time to build up the officer pool before we really need them. Plus the existing officers get experience commanding those missile bases on Earth.

****
1st December 2000

Matthew Harper's team finds another hefty vein of Neutronium on Earth! Excellent news indeed!

bUOd9.jpg


Told ya their skills would improve quickly! And do notice that Zachary Garner has developed a medical condition, lowering his health. Leaders can die in accidents, in addition of getting sick or retiring of old age. Furthermore, if you don't assign them a job in 6-7 years, they go for civilian jobs instead.

And that's it for the first year of TERRAN CODEXIA!
 

GarfunkeL

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****
Year 2001
1st May 2001

Matthew Harper's geo-team has finished its job! Not only did they found a third Neutronium vein, they also improved the accessability of Neutronium from 0.7 to 1! Very good news indeed! Plus we got our first Energy Weapons specialist - though there's work for him quite yet. I disband the Geo-survey team.

1e5DL.jpg


****
1st August 2001

Research on Crew Quarters - Small and Fuel Storage - Small is finished. These are just smaller versions of the existing ones, not dedicated fighter modules or anything. I start a new project, Fuel Storage - Tiny with 3 labs and put the other 3 labs to help existing projects.

During this time, few more scientists and officers join us but I didn't write about them as there were no notable, elite individuals. I also manually added a new rank - Lieutenant - in the Naval order hierarchy. Lieutenants will command fighters, Commanders will rule boats and Captains and above will have actual ships - though all of that is far in the future. The leadership management runs pretty well on the background - new officers join, old ones improve their skills and few get promoted every now and then.

****
Year 2002
1st February 2002

I converted three Low Tech Infantry divisions and three Low Tech Armour divisions into Cadre units. Future ground units will be trained using their experienced manpower. And immediately started the production of 181th Divisional Headquarters.

A small note about ground units - at start we only have conventional units, the aforementioned LTI and LTA divisions. They are useless for pretty much anything else except garrison duty - thus it's useful to convert them to Cadre units, though commanding them allows our ground commander to get some experience. But the real units, the TN-units, that we'll be using are as follows:
Infantry Units
-Assault Infantry Battalion
-Engineer Brigade
-Garrison Battalion
-Mobile Infantry Battalion
Armour Units
-Heavy Assault Battalion
-Marine Battalion
Other Units
-Brigade Headquarters
-Division Headquarters
-Replacement Battalion

Three battalions with a HQ make up a brigade and three brigades with a HQ make up a division. In addition, a Marine Battalion can be divided into five Marine Companies for ship duties. Engineer Brigade is a special unit, as while it's technically infantry and can fight, it sucks at it and is mostly used for searching ancient ruins and building PDCs on non-hospitable planets.

*Another BSOD*

****
1st August 2002

YEEEHAW! Research into Trans-Newtonian Technology has finished! Meaning we immediately get a shitload of new research topics. As almost all our labs and scientists are busy already, I assign only Connor Short, with 2 labs, to delve into the subject of Pressurized Water Reactors - prerequisite for Nuclear Thermal Engines.

****
1st September 2002

Doh, just remembered that TN-Tech now allows Earth to build lots of new goodies. I queue up a ton of stuff:

moduj.jpg


1. Infrastructure and Maintenance Facilities already existed
2. Four more Deep Space Tracking stations, so we have a better chance to see if anything happens in the Sol system.
3. Convert old, civilian industry into new, shiny TN industry as follows:
3a. 10 to Fuel Refineries - Sorium doesn't transform by itself into usable fuel.
3b. 10 to Ordnance Factories - we're going to need thousands of missiles if we need to wage war.
3c. 10 to Fighter Factories - same thing, though maybe we'll survive with just hundreds.
3d. 70 to Construction Factories - TN versions are much more efficient than the old versions.
4. Fifteen new Research Labs as we don't dare to lag in research. These are expensive and slow to build.
5. Two new Military Shipyard Complexes.
6. One new Commercial Shipyard Complex, so the civilians get ships too.
7. Commercial Space Port to facilitate trade.

After these are finished, I'll probably start the massive conversion project.

****
1st December 2002

Codexia receives an exceptional new officer! Lieutenant Katherine Bray is an expert trainer, having Crew Training rating 200 and insanely high Fleet Initiative of 448! I assign her to work as the Logistics Officer in Fleet HQ - we'll keep a close eye on her!

The 6000 chunk of Infrastructure is finished and production switches to the Deep Space Tracking facilities, which should be finished in about two months.

****
And that's it for 2001 and 2002! Stay tuned!
 

GarfunkeL

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Year 2003

Nothing important happened, production produced and research researched.

****
Year 2004
1st January 2004

181st Divisional Headquarters is finished, so next we'll train a brigade HQ.

****
1st February 2004

Our two new shipyards were finished - now both Aker Finnyards and Qeshm Shipyards are able to build star ships! I order both to add another slipways so that they can construct two hulls simultaneously. Both have a minuscule starting capability of 1,000 tons so after the slipways are finished, they will start expansion.

****
1st June 2004

Connor Short's team finished researching Pressurised Water Reactor so I put him to work on Pebble Bed Reactor - I'm thinking of skipping over the Nuclear Thermal engines. We'll see how it goes.

****
1st July 2004

The commercial shipyard complex is finished - Vancouver Shipyards. Extra slipway for them as well.

****
1st October 2004

The commercial spaceport is finished. Too bad we don't have anyone to trade with - yet.

****
1st December 2004

182nd Brigade Headquarters is ready and the GU Training facility continued with 184th BHQ. In other news, it's noteworthy to note that when building multiple facilities, they come on-line in bits and pieces - so I've been able to add research labs to existing projects every now and then, instead of just having 15 empty ones after the whole production run is done. Which is a nice feature.

****
Year 2005
1st January 2005

The first batch conversion of commercial industry into construction factories is done. This conversion is quite important as CI is much less efficient than CF is: 1 CI produces 1 construction point, whereas 1 CF produces 10 points.

****
1st February 2005

Aker Finnyards gets its second slipway and switches over to "continuous growth".

Lucas Harper's team creates a working IR-laser, which becomes our best (and only) space weapon. Of course, we don't have working focal tech yet, so it's unusable. So Lucas gets back to work, this time working on a 10cm Focal for lasers.

****
1st March 2005

Qeshm Shipyards gets its second slipway as well and switches to continuous expansion. Current status of our shipyards below:

1LoSY.jpg


****
1st August 2005

Vancouver Shipyards get its second slipway and blah blah blah.

****
1st September 2005

Joe Johnston's team solves the riddle of Orbital Habitat Modules! We could start building space stations now. Single module has room for 50,000 people but its size is gargantuan 250,000 tons! We won't have a shipyard capable of building that for a long time! Luckily we don't have to - we can use the construction factories on the surface of Earth to pre-fabricate one and then shoot it to orbit where it can be assembled into a ship. That turns into a space station at that point since no engine will push that mass anywhere with any meaningful speed. But yeah, definitely building - we must have Space Station Alpha!

****
1st October 2005

And my boy Connor Short comes through again! This time with the Pebble Bed Reactor technology. I immediately send the nerd back to the lab to design Codexia a proper engine... except we need the previous generation engine research first! :x

Oh well, Connor gets to do that with 6 labs full of assistants so this shouldn't take long.

****
1st November 2005

184th BHQ is done - time to train Assault Infantry Bn. I'll post a screenshot when the whole division is assembled and properly named.

And again, all this time there are new officers joining the service, old ones getting promoted and few unlucky ones getting sick or killed.

****
Year 2006
1st February 2006
Remember fresh-faced Lieutenant Katherine Brady, who was exceptionally gifted with not only giant tracts of... land but superb fleet movement initiative and crew training rating? Well, here's her career so far:
Katherine Brady said:
1st November 2002: Promoted to Lieutenant
1st December 2002: Assigned to Logistics - Fleet Headquarters
1st February 2003: Relieved from Logistics Officer - Fleet Headquarters. Awaiting new orders on Earth
1st June 2004: Assigned to Missile Complex 031 (Crew Training 200)
1st June 2004: Promoted to Commander
1st October 2005: Promoted to Captain
1st February 2006: Assigned to Missile Complex 001 (Missile Complex)

And I didn't touch after assigning her to be the Logistics officer. She's really climbed the ranks rapidly - we got plenty of Lieutenants that haven't yet been promoted even once! I wouldn't be surprised if she becomes the first Commodore of our Fleet.

****
1st March 2006

Boeles Shipbuilding and Engineering got its second slipway, finally and was ordered to build a third one. And a good logistics researcher, Robert Lambert, joined us.

****
1st April 2006

Lieutenant Marcus Collins was killed in an accident - or was he? Considering he was working as the Intelligence Chief of Fleet HQ, I suspect foul play. Lieutenant Abigail Leonard was ordered to take up the slack. Joe Johnston started a new research project, into more efficient engines this time and Robert Lambert is building a prototype Cargo Handling System that should improve the loading and unloading of space ships.

****
1st May 2006

Two scientists announced new breakthroughs! Madison Bird finished Improved Command and Control while James Savage successfully demonstrated the Geological Survey Sensors. So what does this mean for our Omega class Geological Survey Vessel?

Omega class GSV said:
Omega class Geological Survey Vessel 5,950 tons 223 Crew 589.2 BP TCS 119 TH 8 EM 0
67 km/s Armour 1-29 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/5 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Maint Capacity 62 MSP Max Repair 100 MSP

Chemical Engine E0.1 Commercial (3) Power 2.5 Fuel Use 10% Signature 2.5 Armour 0 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres Range 150.8 billion km (26041 days at full power)

Geological Survey Sensors (5) 5 Survey Points Per Hour

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

It's getting even slower and slower. I think we'll wait until new engines. It's not worth the resources cost to design this, tool a SY to build one and then send it survey Luna and maybe Mars.

****
1st September 2006

Yeehaaw, Connor Short and his team of pointdexters solved the mystery of Nuclear Thermal Engine tech. Which is all cool and stuff but back to the lab, boy and solve the riddle of Nuclear Pulse Engine tech too!

****
1st December 2006

All twenty terraforming installations are now ready at Earth. Target: Mars. Time: TBA. Meanwhile, there half of production that isn't busy with research labs, gets to work building some Mass Drivers.

****
Aaaaaand that's the end of this update! Thanks for reading!
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
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Awesome read so far. Game looks hella involved but also a bitch to get into. I am however in absolute awe. Could you do a short post on where you roughly are now and what your current in-game goals are? Putting space stations in orbit, start asteroid mining, build a space elevator, visit mars, begin in-system colonies or perhaps even pull an asteroid into earth's orbit for mining?

Fuck, are these things even possible? If they are, why hasn't this become 4x game of the century?
 

GarfunkeL

Racism Expert
Joined
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FUCK ME. Why did I switch to using Notepad++? Got another BSOD - and I never got them before starting Aurora, not on this laptop - and OF COURSE Notepad++ doesn't do temp saves or anything. So years 2007-2010, up to 1st September are gone. :( And I can't roll back to an older save because Aurora doesn't allow saving/loading at all - it updates the database every time you do anything and keeps no previous versions of it.
 

GarfunkeL

Racism Expert
Joined
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1) Space station in orbit
-Possible to put stations anywhere. Space station is just a huge space ship with not enough engines to move under its own power - or move very, very slowly. You can use tugs equipped with tractor beams to move them around. I will make enough of them to have one at Earth orbit and one more at each jump point in the system.

2) Asteroid mining
-Yes, very much possible and necessary. It's slow going but considering the hundreds of asteroids you can find...

3) Space elevator
-Not possible, as far as I know but you can LARP it, since if you build enough commercial space ports, the cargo loading/unloading becomes very, very quick - meaning it might as well be a space elevator.

4) Visit Mars
-Immediately after Luna

5) In-system colonies
-Mars will be first one since it's easiest to terraform. Mercury and Venus will be mining colonies. Listening outposts on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, to give early-warning in-case of hostiles. Probably more mining colonies in other moons and really rich asteroids.

6) It's not possible to move Asteroids, unfortunately :( But you can ship 100 Automated Mines to an asteroid, designate it as a colony and then have freighters ferry minerals off it.
 

Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
Trash said:
Awesome read so far. Game looks hella involved but also a bitch to get into. I am however in absolute awe. Could you do a short post on where you roughly are now and what your current in-game goals are? Putting space stations in orbit, start asteroid mining, build a space elevator, visit mars, begin in-system colonies or perhaps even pull an asteroid into earth's orbit for mining?

Fuck, are these things even possible? If they are, why hasn't this become 4x game of the century?

I'm about half way through the tutorialso far, it seems to be doing a pretty good job of introducing the various systems in the game.
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
Joined
Dec 12, 2002
Messages
29,683
Location
About 8 meters beneath sea level.
No space elevators? Damn. Oh well, been reading the tutorial for a bit. Amazingly involved thing this. Looking forward to see your spread around the solar system and then into the great unknown.
 

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