I haven’t tried ARMA III, although I own the first two games. The gameplay loop in GSW is addictive as you slowly build up your gear and gain access to different vendor levels, plus there is a genuine cost to dying. You have one chance to return to your corpse and get your gear, but if you die trying it’s all gone. As you died the first time with all your gear, the recovery attempt is usually ‘fun’. Therefore, the scouting and stealth element of the game is important, especially as it is realistic damage and you can die to a single bullet in the wrong place. As it is an extraction shooter, you also have to get back to a base, or an LZ, before you are safe.
It works fine as single player, but you can also create a squad and do the missions together so my son and I often play as a pair. There are PVP servers, but it is more of PVE game. There are other players present on the PVE server (48 max per server) so you will run into others, but not that often as the map is huge. It is still early access so will get better over time.
Its been a while since I played any paper map games, but in terms of hours its probably Star Fleet Battles, Advanced Squad Leader, Pacific War and Gulf Strike by Victory Games, the Fleet games by the same company, World in Flames by ADG and the Third World War game by GDW where you bought four separate games and linked them all together to play one huge game.
Reported. I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
For other titles like this and other tasty nerdy games:
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead and its forks
Rule the waves
Command: Mordern Operations, Sea Power, and the OG Jane’s Fleet Command
Factorio and factorio-likes, Zachtronics games (to scratch that automation itch)
Terra Invicta
Solar Nations
Distant worlds
Edit: To contribute to the discussion, Aurora is one of these games where you will either absolutely love it or you will immediatelly be repulsed, I don’t really see a way to convince somebody to play it if the game doesn’t speak to them by itself to some degree.
It’s not really something you can really casually try either, it’s too complicated for that. So I think you either love the concept enough to stick by it and learn the game or you bounce off hard
Other than having better documentation and a tutorial (pretty hard when the game is in active developpment, especially as just a hobby), I don’t really see a way to alleviate that fact. And even then, it would just be in a pretty limited fashion.
My list looks more similar to Steve’s minus the tabletop.
Age of Empires (mostly 2)
Civilization IV
Roller Coaster Tycoon
Sim City 4
Fire Emblem (GBA/GC, before it turned into a romcom simulator)
Skyrim
Paradox, mostly HoI3 with HPP mod
XCOM Long War
BattleTech (more recent, have not yet gotten into Roguetech)
Oh, and of course, Minecraft
There are surely more but these are the highlights. I also played management modes in many sports games but those lack the depth to be really good for roleplay.
Often for me a common theme if not requirement is something akin to Aurora’s SM Mode to fix annoying bugs and tune the game to my preferred roleplay. As few games offer the flexible god mode of SM, often this meant mucking around in game files even before modding was a common thing.
I simply love those type of games,a big free sandboxes with rules. it all started with war games , like CM or WITP AE, my ultimate list for similarity is:
CDDA in its hardest ;
Megamek HQ , almost Aurora but about meks and single unit management, which I highly recommend.
Dwarf fortress and starsector.
Those titles I still play a lot today( less df and starsector)
I fit that mold, having played about half of those extensively. I’ll add to the list, Space Empires IV. I’ve spent well over 1,000 hours playing it, and Aurora is one of the only games that scratches a similar itch for me. If someone faithfully re-made SEIV I’d be a happy man.
Still not mentioned, from my list awaiting for a normal life:
Ancient Cities (early access, for antropology and ancient history geeks)
King’s Orders (a medieval strategy with unique mechanics of non-instant information flows)
Field of Glory: Empires (ancient history strategy)
Sprocket (tank design sim for geeks)
Star Dynasties (quite an anunusual space opera strategy)
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts (a derivative of the Rule the Waves with normal graphics - I don’t actually like the graphical part, AI is also wery weak, yet RtW’s UI is so ticky-tacky and thoughtless I tried anyting else before returning)
Alpha Centauri
World of Warcraft (old school private servers)
Pokémon
Personally very into the emergent and accidental stories that come from overlapping systems. While they all have simple rules and structures, that gives more room for the player to create the world within the game, imo.
So, from all these examples of good games, how can we describe/advertise Aurora?
A merge of (just my opinion! ): Dominion or Dwarf Fortress, for the strategy depth + Sword of the Stars II (but with 2D maps), for the space setting + Command: Modern Operations, for the layout of the tactical map + Stars! or WitP:AE, for the approach to the ships management + Crusader Kings, for the management of the commanders + Rimworld, for the ability to tell stories, and in part for the resources management + Kerbal Space Project or Sprocket (I don’t know this second game indeed), for the design of the ships + Sim City (I like the IV), for the development of the settlements + Combat Mission (the initial series of games), for the control of the battlefield and almost for the time management + Hearts of Iron (maybe the II or the III), for the way to create new ground units and for the technology tree + something else that I’m surely missing in this moment.
Brings back memories…that was the first game my wife got mad at.
We had gone to the mountains for a weekend trip, and I took my PC and monitor (laptops were luxury items in those days) because, you know, I was in a 3-turns-a-week PBEM and I could not possibly miss a turn.
Rimworld
Stellaris
Total War Warhammers
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic
Empire Total War
Europa Universalis IV
Wargame: Airland Battle
Blue Archive
Cities Skylines
Rimworld blows all of them out of the water with almost twice as much time played as #2.
10 most Steam played for me.
1 Stellaris (830h)
2 Skyrim SE+Normal (750h)
3 Terra Invicta (507h - extremely surprising. I never even finished a game. “Long War” indeed.)
4 Civ V (413h)
5 Mount and Blade II Bannerlord (397h - I even mod this)
6 Dragon’s Dogma (317h - this I vote as 1st)
7 Empyrion (207h - Only started last year. It’s gonna be near top eventually)
8 Kenshi (177.5h - again, never got anywhere ever)
9 Conan Exiles (174h - ditto. I only built and saw maybe 20% of the map)
10 Avorion (111h - Only ever got to Titanium tech. Used it mainly for free build, including to make models for Aurora game ships)
Seems I am pretty in line with the target audience predictions. However, I must stress, I have met people with the same profile who still wouldn’t want to play Aurora.
So more of a concomitant than a predictor perhaps?
Apart from that I am pretty much middle of the road (Rimworld, Hoi_3, the original Xcom by Gollop and in the age of paper SFB, Starfire and Interceptor)
When I saw Aurora my first thought was “Harpoon in space? Sold!” It was another gaming discussion board, a long time ago.
Then when I fiddled with it and managed to blast Earth with mineral packets from Mercury since I accidentally transferred the last Mass Driver from Earth to some asteroid, I was hooked. Sadly that has not been possible for a long time now, the game prevents you from moving the last mass driver away if there are incoming mineral packets.
I’ve been away for a bit since I fell into the Project Zomboid rabbit hole. But yeah, all old Paradox titles, Gary Grigby’s game before Matrix ‘remade’ them, Jagged Alliance series, UFO/X-Com of course, Dwarf Fortress - for some reason Rimworld never grabbed my attention despite giving it a fair try. Oh yeah and Space Empires IV was definitely a great game, plus naturally the Master of Orions (yeah, I did play 3 quite a bit too!)
Aurora has largely ruined me for other space games now - I tried really hard to get into the MoO remakes as well as Stellaris but they are just so simplistic compared to Aurora that I found myself thinking that why am I wasting my limited time with this when I could be playing Aurora instead.
As others mentioned, you don’t ‘sell’ Aurora to other players. Either they fit the mold and ‘get it’ right away, or they don’t and never will.
Well that got changed then because I definitely remember it working the way I described but I just tested it and I have to say that this change - while probably helpful for new players - is not ideal. Sure, all mining colonies have their MD destination wiped if their destination no longer has an MD but the mineral packets in transit indeed arrive at Earth and then just vanish. I can see why we don’t want Earth to be bombarded by them anymore but why change from last MD lockdown to this method?
