Thoughts from a new player

[JyeGuru]

Hi!

I stumbled over your game while looking for some Aurora4x resources for a friend, and have spent around 12 hours on it now. Just mostly going through the early game and getting my head around how everything works. I’d like to leave some feedback on a couple of things that I noticed during this time, and some recommendations. Please let me know if you’d prefer these to be in separate threads, or in a bug/feature reporting system, or such.

– There is no “Instantly go full speed” shortcut that I can find. Ideally this would be Shift-click or Ctrl-click on the “Speed up time” button, or similar. This has been most noticeable when I am fast-forwarding waiting for something to happen, but I have a random May Day fleet making their way home, and there keeps being various hostile fleet popups.

– Hull construction requires engine components. While I can understand there may be some resource balancing aspect to this, it is quite strange to see construction on the orbital station (which is unable to have engines) being delayed by lack of warp inducers.

– Information on the Yield/Abundance mechanics does not seem to be very forthcoming anywhere I can find, save a small mention in the “Your First System” page. This makes it very difficult to understand if/when operations should be moved between belts/planets for best efficiency.

Thanks for the great game so far! 🙂

Cheers

[Zorro]

Hi,

Orbital stations use warp inductors as positioning systems to maintain the orbit. Planet-side constructions do not need them.

I’ll have a think about where to talk about yield/abundance more. There’s not really enough to say to justify a separate appendix. but also don’t want to distract too much from tutorials with too much technical detail…

Essentially yield is a direct percentage indicating how much SCU of refined material you’d get per SCU of raw material. e.g. at yield 40 a refinery should turn 100 SCU of raw material into 40 refined materials. “Abundance” indicates how available the resource is and effects a couple of things.

Firstly, it affects the extraction rate, with more raw materials per cycle being extracted for more abundant resources.

Secondly, there is a ceiling on how much of each resource can be mined in a given period of time. If more than this number is mined then the “efficiency” of the extraction operation decreases such that less raw material is extracted per cycle. The amount mined is per resource rather than per extractor or per fleet (you cannot extract more by using 2 fleets than you could with 1). There are diminishing returns once the ceiling is reached, but dropping below 100% efficiency needn’t mean that you should stop adding more extractors, you can still extract a greater number of resources per cycle, except at a lower efficiency. For critical resources (e.g. precious metals) i’ve often gone down to 70% or so.

(maybe there is enough to say to justify an appendix page of its own, especially if I give some examples comparing extraction at an efficiency less than 100%)

[Zorro]

Quick one on hostile fleet alerts. On the [Agent] tab of a fleet there’s a checkbox for “alert detected hostiles” that can be worth turning off on fleets you expect to avoid or survive combat.

[JyeGuru]

Thanks for the detailed response! It’s taking a while to get my head around the ways some of the mechanics work, but this is really helpful. Especially the connection of abundance to the Efficiency column in the Industry tab – I had wondered how an extractor could be waiting for input materials.

With regard to the yield/abundance numbers though:

– Is the yield stored somewhere against the extracted resource, or is it assuming that the refining will always be done at the extraction source? For example, if I have a “central refining” station with all the refineries and factories on it, and just ship in raw resources from extracting elsewhere, how will the yield modifier impact this? Could you get “better returns” by exporting low-yield minerals to a refinery in an area with much higher yield to refine?

– Is there a formula for converting the abundance number into an “approximate number of extraction modules” somewhere, other than trial and error? Doesn’t have to be exact (since I assume the “more extractors together give a bonus of scale” feature will impact it as well), but just so I can look at the number and get a sense of what it means in terms of fleet/station size, rather than just comparing it against another location and seeing which is bigger.

And a couple of other “quick fixes” that have come up in the meantime:

– A way to “unbuild” something. Currently, self-destructing a ship seems to give back no resources (as expected, since it’s instant), but “unbuilding” it by removing all the parts to recover some of the components is a micro-clicking nightmare. Having a button to “disassemble this ship” which sets all the component values to zero in one place would be amazing! This would be particularly useful early game for the 7th Fleet events, where you can unbuild some of the ships that can’t jump to use their parts to repair the rest of the fleet, but also later game when you have ships damaged in combat outside easy supply range.

– Default values or an “ALL” button in cargo transfer “Enter an amount” popups. This comes up most often when moving people, but would also be handy for other circumstances. The popup currently defaults to zero, which forces a number every time. If the popup default value was the total amount available, it would force entering a number only sometimes, when you didn’t want to “move all/max” of something. I find I’m typing 99999 into those boxes quite often.

– A way to change all Cargo Limits values at once, in proportion. For example, clicking the “100%” value in the bottom right to get a slider or something. In my case, I had a fleet that was doing manufacturing and accidentally joined a recovered hulk with 6m cargo space into it (mainly to repair) only to then realise that it was difficult to split off the hulk because the total cargo space was being filled by the cargo limits. This also happens at shipyards – building a new cargo ship results in higher limits for the entire fleet, and fills it up. Being able to take eg: General Manufacturing and have the same relative values, but only to 50% cargo space, would be amazing. It’s currently possible to do this, but involves manually clicking each line and setting the new limits.

– Related to the above, being able to mark a ship (or some part of the overall fleet cargo) as “reserved cargo” or some such, so that it does not contribute its cargo value to the fleet overall. This would be used similarly to the above to be able to break out ships from a large cargo fleet, but could also be useful for temporary storage overrides when doing some manual transfers of stuff.

Thanks again, this game is quickly consuming a lot of my time. 🙂

[Author]

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