Our Story Begins
Upon creating a new game in the universe of Aurora, you will be greeted with this ...
I changed some of the options before creating our adventure, but this is how it starts. Aside from the obvious name of empire, difficulty etc. which require no explanation, the major decision facing us is:
Trans-Newtonian or Conventional Start. Ours is a conventional start(and slightly nerfed at that), i.e. the 'five minutes into the future' feel. A TN start is the 'default' mode, it is how any aliens will start out(meaning we start off behind), and basically represents a world in which TN technology has already transformed society. In a TN game you have a certain amount of ship points and research points which you use to decide what technologies and ships you start off the game with(in our case, being a conventional start, that's none).
Except for a couple of minor changes(no shipyard to begin with, orbital motion for asteroids, random # of jump points from Sol) and the cosmetic name changes, the rest stays the same.
So now we move into the game proper. A fundamental screen that we'll be looking at a lot is this one:
From this far out it looks like a mass of nonsense, but it's a 2D display of all of the bodies(comets, such as Hale-Bopp in the lower left, asteroids, moons, planets, etc.) In the upper left there's the scale(11.1 billion km, that's some serious real estate) and to the left more tabs and options than I'll probably ever use. You can do it other places, but for a number of reasons this is the 'home' screen which I use to advance time from.
Now we'll zoom in to a far more sensible view ...
A fraction of the area, and you'll soon notice this is basically the 'inner system'. The planet orbits out to Mars, and on the right there's enough to see part of the Kuiper Belt. On the bottom the Whipple comet makes it's way inward between Earth and Mars orbits(you can interact with comets the same way you can with anything else, it's just more complicated by the fact that they are often on their way to the outer system and beyond, and in a right big hurry as well).
We can see all of these things because of the Deep Space Tracking Station on Earth, which you always start with. If we had any ships(we don't, and won't for a while), their locations would be displayed in yellow. We'll get to that.
One more from this view to show a further close-up ...
This of course is the Jupiter 'system'. As with the other bodies, all the moons orbit as time advances(increments can be as low as 5 seconds, but most things are set by default for the sanity of the processor to only update at the default 5 days. Combat uses the 5-second interval liberally of course). And for each body, though it is cut off in this screen, you can access more information than you could possibly care about(diameter, orbital period, distance, gravity, atmosphere, etc. ad nauseum) as well as the more vital stuff like what minerals if any are found there, is there a colony and details of that, etc.
I should mention at this juncture that many a campaign has been made just in the Sol system without even trying to do anything else. There's a lot of 'sandbox' features -- you can simply add a tech or bunch of ships or another empire to the game anytime you feel like it. Some interesting stuff has taken place with people using a divided-earth start(pitting the US, Russia, China, Japan etc. against each other in user-created scenarios).
Ok, next up we'll look at some of the economic screens, and then get into assigning a starting character for each of the signups and get this road on the show.