The Trial: Lessons Learned

[pappy_reen]

If you’re anything like me, when you play a game, you struggle to avoid the expert beginner trap

Let’s take Starcraft as an example. I play the tutorial and learn the controls, becoming a Novice. I play a few games against the computer and start to learn how to play (Advanced Beginner). Then I browse a few forums, learn some build orders, and deploy those against other players. I get better and better with these tools (Expert Beginner).

I never learn the underlying rules which govern success or failure, and get frustrated when I try to experiment as I always do worse than I would if I followed the expert advice of others.

I started this campaign (The Trial: Campaign) to try and avoid this trap and try to experiment and learn the underlying rules. I have, and will continue, to make big mistakes in this series, and wanted to collect these mistakes into a Lessons Learned doc.

I don’t want to use the word ‘tutorial’, as I don’t think the steps I outline are optimal, or that this is the best way for anybody to learn. I hope, however, that this fills a niche between ‘what button do I press’ Novice and ‘trust me, you don’t want to do that’ Expert to help people like me.

All readers please assume that, after every post is the disclaimer:

“Do not keep this thread pristine. Critique, comment, argue as much as you want!”

[pappy_reen]

Lesson 1: Missile design

When I designed my first survey missile, I optimised for distance. Here are the stats edited down to the relevant ones:

Missile Size: 5.00 MSP  (12.500 Tons)
Speed: 200 km/s     
Fuel: 4,500     
1st Stage Flight Time: 52,417 hours    
1st Stage Range: 37,740.1m km
Second Stage: Geo Buoy Alpha x1

When I reflect on this, the underlying thought wasn’t totally illogical. The longer the range, the more bodies sit within my range (assuming a static launcher on the surface of Earth). Speed is more-or-less irrelevant, as it takes so long for a conventional scanner to detect everything, so travel time might as well be zero.

This only makes sense, however, if bodies are totally evenly distributed across the system. In Sol, they aren’t! Neptune / Pluto are about 4,000m km away.

Missile Size: 5.00 MSP  (12.500 Tons)
Speed: 320 km/s
1st Stage Flight Time: 4,366 hours    
1st Stage Range: 5,030m km
Second Stage: Geo Buoy Alpha x2

This second design, therefore, is strictly better for the mission I actually have (Survey home system ASAP from static Earth-orbit launchers). It gets there faster, it delivers twice as much survey time, halving the delay in getting information. It’s also cheaper.

What went wrong

I was optimising in theory, rather than understanding the problem properly. If I had begun by clearly expressing my aim, I would have done better

Indeed, on reflection, I could look at the map and see that there really are two or three types of survey:

• Within asteroid belt
• Gas giants
• Beyond

and, respectively, use a missile which was, by weight ratio (survey : delivery)

• 4 : 1
• 3 : 2
• 2 : 3

Conclusion

If you’re learning at home, try making the three types of missile above, and visualising on the map the ranges they reach. Experiment with the distances in your home system, if for no other reason than the get a more intuitive grasp of the ranges between bodies on the map and in the system.

Apply the same critique to the launchers you use - do you need them to have deep magazines if they’re orbiting Earth? Are box launchers a default or a considered choice? How many launchers per spaceship, and why?

[paolot]

In the Solar System, Aurora includes 626 bodies.
Can you redirect the missiles after completing each survey?
I think no.
Therefore, if you have to send one missile to each body, how many tons of minerals do you need to build them?
Can you salvage a missile after the survey if complete?
It seems to me that it isn’t possible (a missile disappears after completing a mission).
So, those tons of minerals are lost.
Simply put: IMO, use a ship, even a small one, to perform the surveys.
You can direct it everywhere when you want, it can perform multiple surveys, and you can scrap/refit at the end of life (if it isn’t destroyed by a hostile race ).
You need some fuel and some MSPs after each mission for the next one. But I feel (haven’t done the calculation) they will be much less than the minerals necessary for hundreds of missiles.

[pappy_reen]

Thanks for this - choosing between these different survey approaches and the logic you outlined is important.

I picked missiles because

• I started without shipyards, which are expensive to make early on
• I like that the launchers provide security alongside the economic benefits of surveys
• I had all the excess fighter / ordinance productivity going to waste in conventional industries
• I don’t like having to retool the shipyard before /after grav sensor research

They were also useful from an educational sense as I

• Practiced putting waypoints and firing missiles
• Designing missiles
• Designing fighters
• Designing hangers / carriers

That isn’t to invalidate any of your points, which are all valid, just a little exploration of my logic.

[S810_Jr]

There is a 3rd option. Both.

Ship for the vast amount of bodies, but missiles for those ones that are waaaaaaay out there. Frees up the ship to carry on surveying much more bodies in another system or getting overhauled instead of wasting time and fuel (and MSP) traveling massive distances to 1 body to get 100% surveyed.

[S810_Jr]

Some times you don’t have to worry about retooling. The [Number] is the year they were designed

[Boscodiogigia]

Very nice way to learn the game. I’m still learning new things about Aurora all the time as well.

From my experience of expert beginner, dedicated geological survey ships work better: they’re more efficient and faster. As someone pointed out earlier, using ships also costs fewer minerals in the long run. For early game and low tech I usually build few easy and small ships, with engine (slow) and some geo - grav component. Then when Sol is survyed, or I explore 2,3 systems, generally I scrap them for proper exploration ships.

What I usually do is use geological survey probes to avoid sending the ship too close to a planet or other body that might have defences. I can simply launch the probe from a safe distance.

My survey ships also carry passive sensor buoys, which I deploy in strategic locations, as well as geological survey probes (not the design you see here). Sometimes I also use scout fighters (pathfinder) to check an area before sending the main survey ship in.

Here’s my Magika class, my main exploration ship, in case it can give you some ideas.

the probes, buoy. Geo probe has 2 stages to work properly, first with engine. Second with GEO sensor and Active sensor (but this is not needed)

[pappy_reen]

Lesson 2: Freight

Correction

Since making this post, I’ve found out the maths I used wasn’t correct. Namely, cargo shuttle installations don’t impact load speed.

Effectively, this means that my “zero infrastructure” paradigm reflects the game as is.

I still think the analysis and the discussion is useful, however!

Introduction

One of the first, and most important, ships one designs is the freighter. The ideal freighter moves fast, unloads fast, and carries a lot of gear. These three variables are clearly in tension - we cannot optimise for all of them in one design.

I wanted to take the making of this quite simple ship quite seriously, and see what I could learn from the process.

Furthermore, I wanted to see if there was any way in which freighters could be specialised.

In the core worlds, with lots of ground-based Cargo Shuttles, do we need fewer Cargo Bays the freighters? Do we have a long-haul freighter with more, to deal with the barren and undeveloped periphery? Or do the longer distances mean faster movement outweighs the slower unloading, while short-haul freighters can afford to be slower?

It seems like intuition alone can’t answer these questions - we’ll need to do some calculations.

Limitations

As the campaign is just starting out, I have a relatively limited set of tools at my disposal:

• Weight: 40,000 tons
• Engine: NRE commercial

Engine Power 62.5    Fuel Use Per Hour 7 litres    Fuel per EPH 0.112
Commercial Engine
Cost 15.625   Size 1,250 tons   Crew 12   HTK 5

This means that the ship cannot have more than one standard cargo bay (25,000 tons). This makes the calculations far easier; I have one axis to ‘solve’ - Shuttle Bay : Engine Ratio.

Method

I use “door-to-door” time across a series of colonies from Earth. “Door-to-door” here means the sum of:

• Loading time at Earth
• Travel to colony
• Unloading time at colony
• Return to Earth

(Travel time to colony / Earth are assumed to be the same)

I assume that there’s the most ground-based Cargo Shuttle Installation on Earth (3), with progressively fewer as we move away from Earth, as follows:

I use the class design as the basis for the base unload time (5 days, 18hrs, 53 mins)

and the wiki for the formulae: (Spaceport - Aurora 4x Wiki and Cargo Shuttle Bay - Aurora 4x Wiki)

Results

The Shuttle Bay : Engine count which gives the smallest “door-to-door” time under these conditions is -

This intuitively makes sense - the distance to the moon is so small that loading / unloading takes a huge proportion of the total journey. All other bodies benefit from greater speed more than greater loading / unloading capacity.

Section II

It was at this point that, for some reason I can’t fully explain, the idea of “Doctrine” starting making sense to me. I’ve seen the word used a great deal, yet I have understood it very poorly. I don’t want to misuse the word here, so will instead use the word “Paradigm”. I think the ideas of this Freight Paradigm, however, can be a good introduction to the ideas that inform “Doctrine”.

Paradigm

There are clearly things I cannot control:

• Planet distance
• Max ship size
• Engine tech

There are also clearly the things I am trying to optimise for right now:

• Shuttle Bay : Engine ratio

Yet there’s a third group that is the ‘Paradigm’ I am working in. Or, to put it another way, variables that are in my control more widely, but aren’t within the specific vessel I’m designing right now.

• Distribution of cargo installations on planet

I should dissect the logic of that paradigm first before prematurely optimising my freighter for what could be a silly paradigm.

If we chose a zero-installation paradigm, for example, we get a different distribution:

In this paradigm, there does seem to be a short / long haul freighter divide, which it might be worth specialising for.

If we chose a high-installation paradigm, however, where the first things to arrive on any colony are the Shuttle Installations, we go:

back to the previous distribution.

Closing thoughts

While the answer to my initial problem isn’t particularly interesting, I found the ‘paradigm’ angle useful to consider more thoroughly.

I don’t yet have the industrial capacity to put cargo stations on every body. Moreover, I won’t be reaching out beyond Mars very often.

I therefore designed a freighter with 5 engines i.e. max - 1:

Industrial Intent class Freighter      40,000 tons
390 km/s
Cargo 25,000    Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 6      

Com. Drive (5)    Power 312.5 
Fuel Capacity 245,000 Litres    Range 9.8 billion km (292 days at full power)

As the paradigm changes (or I change it) my designs should too.

[kyonkun]

Cargo Shuttle installations don’t stack with the ship’s own shuttles nor each other, and Spaceports only add 1 shuttle no matter how many spaceports there are.

Aurora 4x — Documentation Archive

I have experimented with shuttle-less cargo carriers and I don’t think the tiny volume and cost penalty is worth the reduced flexibility. I think there’s a much stronger case for shuttle-less colony ships but depending on how you play the civilians may take care of that for you.

Engine volume is worth looking at, how do you maximize ton-km per BP-seconds. There’s a point where another engine would contribute less to speed than it would contribute to cost, so you should just build two freighters. But you might care more about gallicite expenditure so fewer engines (toward the optimal minimally boosted one engine) would be better, or you might care more about raw speed so more engines (or less boost-reduction) is better. Or maybe you care about fuel so bigger low-boost engines are better. Etc.

[pappy_reen]

Thanks very much for this. Just to confirm:

• Cargo handling modules on ships STACK
• Cargo installations (spaceport and shuttles) DONT STACK - binary y/n cargo handling capacity

If so, will update the above and the wiki for clarity. There’s a formula on there about adjusted load time that must be out of date.

[pappy_reen]

Lesson 3: Mining

This post is inspired by two things. First, this post New mining technology and machinery suggesting existing orbital mining is underpowered and maybe a new approach could be useful.

Second, thanks to the elections in my current campaign forbidding any automation, I’m wondering just how restrictive this is.

Starting beliefs

I feel like you always want to use orbital mining modules if you can.

I treat automated ground based mines as the last resort because of their increased cost.

I haven’t ever used forced mines, leaving manned mines as the default.

I don’t know when ark pops are better than infrastructure supported pops. Obviously CC 0 is ground and CC > 5 ark, but not sure where the break point is.

The methods I use seem to change every post on this thread. For this, I’m going to start with a huge number of assumptions as I compare alternative approaches, and then try to put numbers in for each assumption until we get a semi-useful model.

Paradigm

I assume every TNE is equally valuable and interchangeable. When I look at cost, therefore, I will use cost in wealth as the standard.

I am assuming that the mining is happening on a body and then mass-drivered away, rather than used in-situ for production.

I know of four mining modules:

• Automated mines
• Manned mines
• Forced mines
• Asteroid mines

All have the same production / year but different costs. The metric I can use to compare them, therefore, will be time to payback investment.

Mines requiring population can have that supported by

• Infrastructure
• Ark modules

I will add their cost into the overall cost of the mine, as I think ground based construction capacity is a limiting factor and is always useful.

My reference asteroid miner is:

Amber class Orbital Miner      
25,669 tons       
Orbital Miner: 5 modules producing 
50 tons per mineral per annum

Costing 708 wealth.

This makes the maths a little easier as it is (almost) the size of one standard cargo hold, which is my unit of transport

My reference ark module is:

Indigo class Orbital Habitat      
502,082 tons
Colonist Berths 200,000    
Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 1     

Costing 293 wealth.

I am not adding the cost of the transporting craft into the cost of the mine. I will use the time to transport to site, and assume that one cargo hold of cryo, freight, tug or ark is equally hard to move a given distance.

We begin with something like this in arbitrary units:

Name	Cost	Output	Return
Automated	240	1	240.0
Manned	120	1	120.0
Forced	40	1	40.0
Asteroid	708	5	141.6

At 1 accessibility and with no tech, this looks like:

Name	Cost	Output (t/year)	Return on investment time (y)
Automated	240	10.0	24.0
Manned	120	10.0	12.0
Forced	40	10.0	4.0
Asteroid	708	50.0	14.16

Let’s normalise output to t/year.

Wealth

Manned and Forced mines generate taxes from workers and overseers, employing 0.05m and 0.01m employees respectively. This is 5 and 1 wealth / year with default starting conditions.

We can convert from wealth into mining output by looking at what civilian complexes charge for purchase and sale.

My thinking: what amount would I have to pay to get the same mineral output from a civilian mine and / or what wealth am I forgoing by not taxing them.

The ‘swing’ from buying to selling the output of one Civilian Mining complex is 375 wealth (I no longer pay 250 per complex and gain 125 in tax per complex). As a complex has 10 mines, the output of one mine over one year can be valued at 37.5 wealth / year.

A manned mine, therefore, outputs 1 mine’s worth of mining and 0.133 (5/37.5) mine’s worth of wealth per year, or 11.33 tn / year. A forced mine has 1+ 1/37.5 mines worth, or 10.267 tn/ year.

I think this is now the output normalised. Now we need to account for size.

Delivery time (mine)

The return on investment will only begin when it arrives, we add delivery time. For forced camps, this is 4x the others as it is 4x larger.

While we can easily calculate journey time, which I add onto the return on investment timer (it will only start paying off when it arrives).

Delivery time (workers)

Thanks to this lovely sheet Aurora Colony Cost and Workforce - Google Sheets I can get a good estimate of how many colonists I need to add to the body to get enough workers.

I am not certain on the exact maths behind arks. I will treat arks as CC 0 with a pop requirement 95.24% of normal (as we don’t have the 5% working in agri anymore)

For infrastructure, I need to add the cargo size of infrastructure plus colonists, who take up 100,000 per cargo hold.

Arks are 10x less space efficient, at 10,000 per cargo hold.

So, on an example planet with 100m pop and colony cost 1 which is 1 year away:

We now know how many cargo holds worth of building and people and support are needed to get one mine running.

Cost

Finally, we just add the cost of infrastructure and Ark modules.

Infrastructure costs 2 per unit, which is modified by colony cost.

The Ark module above costs 293/200,000, which we also add.

Results

With the following conditions:

• Journey time: 1 year
• CC: 1
• Current population: 1m
• Accessibility: 1
• Upgrades: none

We get this table:

Name	Cost	Employees (m)	Output (t/year)	Mine Size (Cargo Holds)	Citizens (m)	Population Size (Cargo Holds)	Journey Time (y)	Full cost inc. citizens	Return on investment time (y)
Automated	240	0.0	10.0	1	0.0	0.0	1.0	240.0	25.0
Manned (I)	120	0.05	11.333333	1	0.075758	0.757583	1.757583	120.000015	12.34582
Forced (I)	40	0.01	10.266667	4	0.015152	0.151517	4.151517	40.000003	8.047621
Manned (Ark)	120	0.05	11.333333	1	0.06707	6.707042	7.707042	120.000098	18.295286
Forced (Ark)	40	0.01	10.266667	4	0.013414	1.341408	5.341408	40.00002	9.237514
Asteroid	708	0.0	50.0	1	0.0	0.0	1.0	708.0	15.16

Let’s look at some examples

Examples from my game

At the start of the game, I’m using freighters with a speed of 360 km / s and no upgrades. Where colony cost > 5, I don’t consider ground mines and, where asteroid mining is impossible, I also don’t consider it.

I’m not allowed to use auto-mines on Venus. How much worse is using orbital pops to man mines down below?

---

Venus (average)
distance: 130.0 mkm
CC: 10
Accessibility: 3
Population: 0m

Name	Return on investment time (y)	Proportional to best (%)
Forced (Ark)	1.94699	100.0
Manned (Ark)	6.276434	322.365989
Automated	8.011451	411.478734

Huh - not actually worse at all. In fact, it seems like using manned orbitals over Venus is better!

What about an asteroid?

---

Cromelin
distance: 2000.0 mkm
CC: 10
Accessibility: 2
Population: 0m

Name	Return on investment time (y)	Proportional to best (%)
Forced (Ark)	3.753094	100.0
Asteroid	7.256166	193.338224
Manned (Ark)	10.556897	281.285171
Automated	12.176166	324.430061

So once again, this is interesting, but perhaps expected. The forced mines, which have all sorts of externalities I haven’t measured, are the best by far (especially for an asteroid so nearby).

BUT, Asteroid mining is far and away better than manned ones which don’t have any of those externalities. And my guess about Auto being worse is still true!

Findings

1. Forced mining is incredible

While they are larger to transport, this is offset by their incredibly low cost and lower pop requirement, taking less time to pay off and less colonist transport / support

2. Asteroid miners are well balanced

They’re the best for best they are for yet they aren’t universally superior. Forced mines still win out in places and there are bodies that you wouldn’t want to asteroid mine even if you could.

3. Forced mines and asteroids can be thought of on a spectrum

We can think of asteroid mines as expensive high output VS the cheap low output of forced mines. This makes them well suited to their roles.

Want to plonk something down on pluto? Forced mines - make a load of them, dump them there.

Need something to rapidly clear out several bodies? Asteroid mine

4.Ark mining can be well paired with forced

Orbiting overseers living in luxury whilst slaves endure the blistering winds of Venus? RP heavy and productive!

Conclusion

I hope this has been useful. I was quite surprised by the utility of ark modules to support mining.

I also feel like this shows that asteroid mining modules are pretty balanced - best module without externalities. Seems like you’d always want to use them on any high CC body if possible, but you are limited to just small ones.

Please let me know where I went wrong. If there are comparisons you’d like me to make, I can add them.

If people want my code, please let me know and I’ll put it on GitHub and link it here.

[S810_Jr]

Just to add something I think you missed. Bonuses.

Ground based can have gov and sector bonuses.

Orbital based can have a chain of fleet admin bonuses along with their ship captain bonus.

[pappy_reen]

Thank you very much for this - really good point. Adding this into the code now for V2!

[AuroraSteve]

You should probably also consider the pop capacity for manned mines on small bodies.

There are a lot of opportunity cost considerations too. One of the downsides of towing Arks any distance for example is that it makes tugs unavailable for a long time, which might affect others things such as getting harvesting stations into action.

Forced mines do require population to man (only 5k) so CC is still a consideration and cost pop to create, which means that pop can’t do something else.

[pappy_reen]

Pop size limits make sense, a tradeoff against infrastructure.

With the Arks, I tried to account for it by making everything into hull size units, but I’m guessing it takes longer to tug 1 x 200,000tn than 10 x 20,000tn, and I’m not accounting for that. Probably will work instead with a set EP for tugs and the rest.

Can I also double check that it’s 5k overseers not 10k. In my game one forced mine had 0.01m workers, but perhaps it rounds up on the screen?

[AuroraSteve]

Yes, it is 5k.