Hi, I was browsing the forums and saw this thread about AuroraCharles Lewis wrote:Steve Walmsley has built a campaign engine based (loosely) on Starfire and has full automation tools available for it. You have to register to download it, but most of the forums are viewable unregistered, including screenshots. Worth a look!
http://aurora.pentarch.org
Originally Aurora was going to be a more advanced version of Starfire Assistant using a system generation model I have developed. However, I had some problems with the owners of Starfire so I decided just to create a brand new game. So while my years playing Starfire inspired me in terms of the type of game I wanted, Aurora is a completely different game from Starfire in terms of mechanics (with the exception of warp points) although it shares the idea of an epic space campaign game.
It a little difficult to explain the game but I'll repost some info I posted over on the Star Ranger forums a while back
There is no pen and paper or tabletop element as there was with with Starfire Assistant. Aurora is a complete game, not an assistant, and everything necessary to play the game is in the software and all the battles are played out on the in-game system map. At the moment there is no AI to play the main races, although there is a more limited AI that controls monsters or robot-controlled ships that appear in the game and there are automated elements for surveying or civilian colonization. One of my priorities in the future is to expand the AI element so that non-player race are AI-controlled but with the complexity of the game, that will take a while and will be a gradual process. The game is designed to be played either multi-player, usually with a spacemaster as referee, or far more often it is played solo with a player controlling multiple races. The game is designed to give completely different perspectives depending on which race is active so its very easy to put yourself in the position of each race. You can have two races exploring the same system and if neither has spotted the other, they will both see a threat-free system when they look at their respective maps. Solo is also easier because it will take a long time to play a major campaign. You can also view the game in spacemaster mode which allows you to do things you couldn't in player mode, such as view SM-only events, design areas of the universe, setup technology or modify populations.
I designed Aurora primarily to provide an environment in which I (and others) could build detailed Interstellar Empires and write associated fiction (like the Rigellian Diary), which is why the forums have such a large fiction section. I found 3rdR Starfire players, like myself, tended to produce a lot of action action reports and it was building up a detailed universe and writing about the Empires and characters within it that was the main reason for playing the game. That is the goal with Aurora and its probably why many Starfire 3rdR players have taken to it. The amount of optional automation means you can play large empires with relative ease. Also, with the amount of detail, you can create pretty much any type of campaign universe you want to. Check out the fiction section for some idea of gameplay.
Many players (including me
) treat each Empire almost like an RPG character, playing each one with a style and character of its own, not necessarily following what might be considered the "optimal path", although that is not usually obvious in Aurora due to the variety of possible problems and potential solutions. Many aspects of the game are based around the story-telling element and Aurora tries to do a lot of the difficult (or tedious) tasks for you, such as creating a "theme" for your Empire and coming up with all the required names for things. For example, if you choose the "Deutschland" theme for your Empire then Aurora will name systems with German city names, create classes with the names of historical German ship classes and use German naval ranks. You can also choose a German commanders theme so all your officers will receive German names. There are over fifty Themes in Aurora at the moment, such as Roman, Russian, Native American, Norse, Aztec, Gaelic, Arabic, Swedish, Indian, Mongol, etc. There are some weird ones as well, like Demonic Realm, Orc, Hippie, Barsoom, Tolkien, Magician, etc. More are added all the time. A few example of Commander name themes include US, English, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Medieval France, Romanian, Polish, Arthurian, etc. All use real names. For example, the US commander names theme uses the last US census data and generates names from 50,000 surnames and 2000 first names, This type of background material makes creating an Empire with a particular personality very easy.
The great detail in ship design (which includes designing weapons and other components before you even start worrying about the ship designs themselves), plus the wide variety of ship types needed to play the game effectively, also adds to the themed approach as Empires tend to build their fleets around a particular combat philosophy. One of things I didn't like about Starfire was how alien races all developed the same tech and built relatively similar ships. With Aurora, every race has its own tech and its own designs.
Some background on mechanics.
Each star system is completely to scale, with over 230 star types from tiny brown dwarves to massive supergiants. Every planet, moon, asteroid or comet is detailed individually and some systems will have over a thousand system bodies. You can colonise and mine any of them and there is an unlimited number of systems. The type of detail for each system body includes orbital distance, size, gravity, temperature, atmospheric pressure and content (e.g. Nitrogen 74%, Oxygen 22%, Carbon Dioxide 4%, Pressure 2.26 atm), hydrosphere, density, magnetic field, day length, year length, axial tilt, greenhouse factor, albedo, etc.
Systems can be zoomed out to see the whole system at once and stepped in until a single star or planet fills the screen. All bodies follow their orbital paths so you can see them move as time is advanced. Ship and fleet movement plus any sensor contacts are shown on the system map. Each fleet has a tail showing speed and direction and you can optionally show additional details such as speed, current orders, estimated time of arrival, etc. Any missiles in flight are shown, as are fighters, mass driver packets, civilian trade convoys, lifepods, wrecks, etc.
Each species in the game has a specific homeworld and their environmental tolerances are based on the planet where the species is created. So a species might have a gravity tolerance from 0.35G to 1.65G, oxygen content from 0.1 atm to 0.3 atm, temperature from 0C to 44C and maximum pressure of 3.1 atm. If a planet or moon fits within those tolerances, it is completely habitable with no support. The further outside the tolerances a planet moves, the more supporting infrastructure a colony will need (or you can terraform it).
Colonies are measured in actual people. A colony will includes some or all of the following: Infrastructure, construction factories, ordnance factories, fighter factories, fuel refineries, mines, automated mines, mass drivers, terraforming facilities, research labs, shipyards, financial centres, ground unit training facilities, naval acadamies, maintenance facilities, ground-based sensors, commercial freight facilities, spaceports, fuel stockpiles, etc. Every colony also has details of how the workforce is broken down to man the industry, the pop growth rates, planetary suitability, any atmospheric dust or radiation from orbital bombardment, political status within the Empire, thermal and EM signatures (for detection by hostile sensors), production modifiers for undermanning, political unrest, Empire economic problems, etc. This is a lot easier than it sounds because the programs handles a lot of this for you. You just decide what to build.
Research includes hundreds of different items from racial capabilities such as production rates, terraforming rates, trade creation, wealth generation, etc. to background technologies for armour types, laser wavelength, laser focal size, capacitor recharge rates, torpedo ranges, sensor strengths for active, thermal and EM, jump drive efficiency, missile engine power, missile fire control ranges, etc plus actual component technologies (with possible combinations in the high thousands) developed from known background tech, such as a 12cm Ultraviolet Laser, a particular model of jump drive, a specific missile or fighter design, specific types of fire controls, sensors, railgun, plasma carronade, etc. and many more.
Ship desigh consists of assembling pre-developed components into designs. There are no specific hull types so you can build ships of any size or capability and give them whatever names you want (but remember you still need to pay for them and build them). Ship speed is based on size vs engine power so you need to decide on a trade-off between engines and other internal systems. Ship types in my current campaign include cruisers and destroyers armed with missiles, escort ships armed with lasers, grav survey ships (to find jump points), geo survey ships (to find the eleven different resource types that underpin all construction), asteroid mining ships, terraforming ships, fuel harvesters (which extract Sorium from gas giants), jump gate construction ships, fast attack craft with lasers, missiles and high power microwaves, freighters, colony ships, troop transports, planetary defence centres, jump ships (which are needed to escorts other ships through jump points if they lack a jump engine and there is no gate on the jump point), and many more types.
For combat, you first need to find your opponent so most players design a wide variety of sensors. Thermal sensors detect engine emissions, EM sensors detect shields or hostile active sensors, while active sensors detect the cross-section of enemy vessels but can give away your position to hostile EM sensors. Shields reduce damage but can be blasted down while armour is now based on the Renegade legion model with different weapons having different damage templates. Internal hits are distributed within the ship and each component has a chance to be hit and a chance to be destroyed. A separate damage allocation chart is automatically created for each different ship design. To target an enemy you first need to lock on and different fire controls are needed for different situations. To track incoming missiles you might design a fire control with short range but high tracking speed while you may need the reverse for slow-moving distant targets. Of course you could develop a fire control with max range and max tracking speed (based on current tech) but it will be very large and very expensive.
Your naval academy creates both crews for your ships and officers to command them. Every officer is named and tracked individually, along with a variety of skills that can increase with experience over time. As you can have thousands of officers, Aurora will optionally handle all promotions and command assignments based on the officers skills.
Unfortunately that covers only a fraction of the game but I don't want to bore you to death Try downloading it from the Installation forum (its free) and give it a try. Please ask on the forums if you need any help.
Steve
