When starting the game, you can set the distance at which aliens spawn, but it is given in Light Years. How does that translate to Jumps? Say I don’t mind if an alien race spawns 10 jumps away from home, but I don’t want one next door, how do I tell the game that?
– Mal
On the galactic map view you can tick a ui box to show distance from selected system in LY. Known real life systems use actual distances - but that doesn’t necessarily mean the next jump is the actual next closest star. They’re clumped into groups and if you “roll” a certain number it generates one of those systems.
Not entirely sure how it works when not using real life systems - I’ve quite literally never played without them on in the ~10 years of playing this game. I know you can adjust the grouping system but as I said never tinkered with it before.
This only works in Known Stars games. All the 65,000 stars in the Known Stars database have the correct 3D coordinates, so setting the range will choose stars at that distance from Sol. There are about 150 systems with 25 LY of Sol, around 900 within 50 LY and almost 4000 within 100 LY.
When you explore an unlinked jump point in Known Stars, the game creates a list of known systems in order of distance in 3D space, then cycles through them. For each one there is a 20% chance it will be selected as the destination so you generally link to nearby systems.
In 10% of cases, the chance of selection is reduced to 5% so you occasionally get connections at a greater distance.
Agree, it would be much more clear to have it expressed in number of Jumps.
But those systems will have random contents, right, Steve? ie, the “Known” system will have different bodies and so on every time you start a new game?
Oh, and incidentally, I think you’ve designed a pretty cool game here. Thanks a lot.
– Mal
Jumps is not a very meaningful measure of distance.
To me jumps seems like an significantly more meaningful way to control when you will encounter aliens than real star distance in terms of LY which tells you not very much at all and very well can lead to aliens in your first few jump if you get unlucky and move “in the same direction in 3D space” even if you wanted to put aliens fairly many LY away.
It’s also not really distance that we are trying to measure here… if that was the case we would be using bn of km instead.
What is meaningful to decide for a player is how soon (in time) you are going to encounter aliens which will mainly be decided by the survey speed if we use number of jumps. It’s also alot easier and more straight forward to understand.
I agree with skoormit.
If I choose that NPRs should be at least at X jumps, I can adjust my exploration speed to remain within that limit until I feel myself strong enough to face a potentially hostile NPR. This seems to me as playing without spoiler races.
The mechanics that Steve has explained, for the distance at which a new system can be, IMO increase the suspense of each new jump, and push the player to develop its own techs from the very beginning in the game, to try to be ready for a menace, because the depths can be just one step beyond. If everything is deterministic, where is it the thrilling of playing a 4X game? 
Not really. The NPR would still be out there exploring and would expect to find YOU at e.g. min:x max:y jumps away from their homeworld, even if you never leave yours. I further disagree that jumps are a poor measure of distance in this case. Jumps are how the map displays systems, it’s the basic delineator between “over here” and “over there.” Number of jumps is how the game decides the shortest route between systems, even if fewest jumps isn’t actually the shortest route between systems. Systems (i.e. jumps) are are how territory is claimed between races. 20 Jumps between homeworlds gives a lot of space to make claims and mount defences no matter how “close together” they are in km. Jumps IS a poor measure of how much fuel and time it will take to get from A to B, which is not the issue here.
I think the main problem with a proposal like this is the actual implementation. Real Stars distance works because each homeworld exists in a system at a specific point in space and the jump exploration mechanics cause exploration to generally occur in the local area so each race gradually expands “outward” until they find each other. What would be the jump-based counterpart? It would be neat to have so Random Stars games could use it.
For games not using Known Stars, does that mean normal NPR generation rules apply as soon as you start making your first jumps out of the home system? What about starting NPRs? Are they created in a system local to the home system in regards to database ID or purely random?
Why, I suppose it all depends on what your cup of tea is. If the naval combat aspect is most important to you, than obviously setting a pre-determined standoff range for aliens will not scratch that particular itch; but if you are interested in a cozy game of exploration and development, then having aliens muck up the situation will take away from the fun of that.
Incidentally, if naval combat is your cup of tea, I cannot recommend Rule the Waves enough. Their design spreadsheets are at least as complex as Aurora’s, and the combat can be a lot of fun, if messy.
– Mal
I can’t speak for NPR.
I can instead guess the attitude of a human player, especially someone that’s starting to learn Aurora (I can imagine about myself, during the first matches).
He could feel comfortable having decided how many jumps are needed to probably meet a NPR, maybe not fully aware that NPRs are expanding too.
With the current implementation, we could meet someone out there even at the first jump. I think this has generated the many approaches developed to explore the galaxy: grav ships, small scouts, probes, etc.
The best solution could be to have both the options, but I don’t know how complex could be to program the jump one.
It can’t be expressed in jumps because the systems (and their jump points) are only generated when they are explored. At game start, no jumps exist.
That’s a good point. For aliens present at game start that is the only way.
For some reason I was thinking about the random chance to “spawn” new aliens on generating a new system.
For that, just start with 0% chance to spawn until you have explored however many jumps out you want, then change it to the percentages you want.
FWIW having a close neighbor NPR makes the early part of a standard TN start much more interesting.
For a given value of “interesting.”
– Mal
Yeah do not confuse the game-start NPR with the chance to spawn new NPRs and spoilers. Two different things.