Aurora can be a complex game with lots of details that don’t always line up the way we think they do. So I thought it might be fun to talk about the things we thought we knew that turned out to be wrong.
So I learned recently that you can in fact put more than one shield generator on a ship. I always thought you all could only do one per.
I must have tried to at some point but clicked a different type of generator so the game said: ‘you can’t do that!’ and I internalized that and ran with it.
Yesterday I learned the calculations for required damage values to a given penetration depth for the different weapon damage templates (unless I am mistaken about how they work).
a(n) = n^2 for the missile template
a(n) = n(2i - 1) - 3i^2 + 3i, where i = ceil(n/3) for lasers.
I modified the last one by myself, which means there’s a high chance of it being wrong but it works for the known values I’ve tested, to work for railguns
a(n) = n(2i - 1) - 2i^2 + 2i, where i = ceil(n/2)
Damn, I wasn’t able to find a simple answer yesterday but apparently ceil (n^2 / 3) works? I will refrain from unleashing my inner schizophrenic and say good to know.
Unless I accidentally only tested the instances where rounding up works and there are others where you round down, in any case the formula I posted is exact.
I learned that SM Restore will bring the officer back into active service. However, I also learned is completely bugged, because restored officers seem to disappear after you reload the Commander menu. I lost defenetly two retired commanders doing that… don’t restore commanders!
Today I learned that when an NPR accepts your sovereignty over a system it will transfer any colony it has there over to you. I got a friendly NPR to spawn within 3 jumps from Sol and it was the first contact for my Empire, we have been growing alongside one another for over a century now with good relations. In that time it got too big for it’s britches and began growing into my territory. I had a real colonial dispute with this NPR in one of the systems I believed was mine, I made a colony after invading a spoiler world there, and then later noticed that there was a lot of neutral traffic there. After a naval patrol I noticed they had an actual colony in another planet in that system… One I was already terraforming. They showed up, realized that I had already done the work for them to be able to live there (they prefer really cold climates) and now had a pop there. I had to quickly dump infrastructure in the other world, move people there, then send them a demand for them to leave, they accepted but then I realized I owned one of their pops! 15 Million of their own.
I was not really gunning for a multi-race Empire, but I couldn’t keep the terraformers on as they would choke out the aliens on the planet… What made it worse was that they looked like little robotic dog guys. I can’t just let them all die. I decided to make a habitat world where they are allowed to live and reproduce freely, but their world will never be allowed to industrialize or expand into the stars. I suppose they are a bit like an Amish community now, taken care of by a garrison of human troops and a Corvette in orbit. I love how the game’s deep mechanics generate these interesting narrative moments.
I suppose that in a sense they are already doing that. I inherited the two unnamed CMCs from the Virar Coalition when they granted me sovereignty over the system too. I’ll see how the RP for this game goes! Currently they are classified as a “Candidate Population” so maybe the Virar can be made into true human patriots like they should be… And to prove it in the frontlines, of course.
Humans and Virar can’t share a world unfortunately, and the altering of human genetic material is highly illegal in my Empire, so we are doomed to always see one another through bulky hazard suits.
Cool