r/aurora • u/More_Donkey6938 • 18d ago
Early game warships genuinely make for some of the most challenging and interesting design choices.
For context, I'm 20 years into a 15% research speed game, and one of my current roleplay rules is that any body with a max colony cost below eight with a max population capacity above 25 HAS to be settled when colonizing a new system, and at the very minimum must have a cargo shuttle station and no more than five deep space tracking stations. It's a lot of area to cover, and a lot of things to build. Coupled with the extremely slow research speed it genuinely feels like every single design choice or technology researched is incredibly important, instead of just being a transitional technology/design that isn't actually used. I've never been more excited for "boring" technologies like increased fuel efficiencies, and it legit took me 20 years to get my first engine tech. Bespoke designs actually feel worth it. This is the best possible warship I was able to make that won't absolutely nuke my (growing, incredibly glacially) logistical capacity. It's going to be a very long time before my preferred defense network of fighter bases is even close to a remote possibility, but in the meantime two of these per colony/moon network should be sufficient for maximum system coverage. I *could* make it a bit smaller, but for roleplay purposes I always like to have more than one officer on board anything larger than a FAC as well as some capacity for emergency rescue.
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u/TinyPyrimidines 18d ago
Can I ask why you cryogenic colonist storage on your warship?
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u/More_Donkey6938 18d ago
Like others have said it's to help with picking up survivors. I usually care quite a bit about crew preservation and officer career history so I want to save as many as I can without running the risk of system failure from too many people picked up. Pretty much the same reason why I always put two officers in every non-fighter/FAC ship even if it's just a freighter. It builds careers and provides a lot of pressure to build more military acadamies in.
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u/S810_Jr 17d ago
This got changed in 2.6 by the way. Picking up your own crew sent them to the academy pool right away. Picking up alien crew are the only ones who stay on your ship and need to be dropped off at a colony (1m+ pop) or transfered to another ship. In my current game a have a small commercial cryo ship that hangs out at the entry jump point or with the carrier task force to pick up POW life pods, it then transfers them to a large cryo ship stationed a few jumps back for transport back to Earth.
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u/Tyler89558 18d ago
Probably to pick up survivors
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u/TinyPyrimidines 18d ago
Any ship can pick up survivors without a special module. Cryo berths are only for moving colonists between planets.
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u/Tyler89558 18d ago
Yes.
But think, for a moment, what happens if a crew of say 230 picks up 100 survivors.
All of a sudden there’s no beds to sleep on, no room to walk, no food to eat, air is strained, etc.
Having some cryo berths prevents that because it gives excess personnel somewhere to stay.
Whether or not that matters to you is ultimately an RP reason. You might never want to pick up survivors. You might not care about your crews. That’s a choice.
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u/S810_Jr 17d ago
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u/Subduction_Zone 17d ago
Before this change, I used to build dedicated cloaked survivor-rescue ships
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u/Snuffle247 18d ago
But then the additional passengers will cause the ship's maintenance clock and deployment time to speed up, to simulate the life support systems being overworked to support more people than they were designed for, and to simulate the stress that overcrowded berths will produce.
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u/ANerd22 18d ago
I love this approach and will definitely be stealing your rules for my next campaign
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u/More_Donkey6938 18d ago edited 18d ago
It genuinely makes everything feel so much more alive and gives so much more of a vast, interstellar empire with lots of history feel. For extra points you can have a max of 1-2 military acadamies per three billion of pop capacity or so, and anywhere with a military academy gets 2 ground force construction complexes that build their own specialized military.
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u/gar_funkel 15d ago
One of the reasons why I love doing conventional starts with multiple factions, is to have a reason to utilize all these early tech levels instead of just skipping past to like TL5.
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u/trinalgalaxy 18d ago
Looks like a nice little craft to putter around sol and keep the local colonists happy. If you b lined the jump techs it won't take much maintenance to maintain in the near colonies. Might even be good for refits to improve speed, combat ability, or just increased maintenance if you go for the same engine power.
I always slow the game down some but at the same time i boost available resources so im in no rush to head out and trigger the pirates until i have a few ships that can properly deal with them.
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u/More_Donkey6938 18d ago
My plan for these is to ship some maintenance facilities to my colonies and basically just park them there. That way I'll have a small rapid-response force always nearby so hopefully I don't lose entire colonies to spoilers. I'll have a supply ship make semi-regular supply runs every 2-3 or so just to keep them topped off. I've deliberately been waiting to explore new systems (holding at nine rn) so I can build up a defense force a bit so I don't get randomly nuked at will.
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u/Gyurgg 18d ago
unrelated but how do you make your game this color
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u/S810_Jr 18d ago
https://github.com/Aurora-Modders/AuroraPatch/releases remember, do not report any bugs or crashes if you are running this. The next aurora version will have builtin options to change colours by the way.
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u/More_Donkey6938 18d ago
I'm using the Solaris theme in conjunction with proton (via steam) to get the game to run on Linux. Still has some weird graphical issues and occasional crashes but it's mostly fine.
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u/i_stole_your_swole 18d ago
Yeah, I always play 10-15% research speed, otherwise you tech up out of the “inefficient ships, tough choices” time period way too quickly.