Aurora - Dwarf Fortress In Space

So I am in year 25 and have decided to restart. The enormous log of a "mistake" that led to this decision is what I edited in when I answered my own question a moment ago.

Basically it is 5.4 times more efficient to convert Conventional Industry to Industrial Capacity than starting from scratch and leaving your initial CI alone. Given that Industrial Capacity growth is a geometric progression (I think, I don't think it's exponential) after 25 years that is quite a pitfall.

There are also some minor things I'd like to do more efficiently. Apparently there are a lot of revenue and mineral generating activities that get started on the civilian side once you have some colonies set up, so I'd like to make that more of a priority. I went governor-less for 20 years, missing out on a lot of bonuses there. Also I wasted some research and production on financial centers which didn't seem to pay off. I am sure later you will be paying fleet and ground crew salaries and whatnot but for now I am way in the black. Lastly I will try to get a Commercial Shipyard out quicker, maybe more than 1 of each shipyard, and constantly expand them when nothing else is happening.

As a point of reference over how far I will (hopefully) improve in the next playthrough in the year 25 I currently have:
Annual Production of 3008.4
Research Generation of 2160
Population of 879.30 million concentrated in one world.
Maximum Mining Production of 1440 in my homeworld, which will run out of its first mineral in 7 years.
22 Offworld mines in 7 locations harvesting easily accessible minerals that my homeworld is either generating slowly or about to run out of.
I have no jump field experience whatsoever.

Come mighty Dwarves, let us try again!

Yonder: Any chance you could write up all the stuff you do in detail for a period at the start of a game? Not looking for in depth discussion of why, or what UI buttons you used to do it, just like "Designed a new Geographic Survey Vessel, the Frankenfurter", "Re-tooled my yard to build Frankenfurters", "Queued up a couple of Frankenfurters to be built" sorts of things. (And presumably any research you needed to do to designed the Frankenfurter, or whatever.)

I should poke around a bit more on the Aurora site, but that's what I felt I was missing when reading the tutorials. There was a lot of "here are tons and tons of details that won't mean anything to you because you don't have any idea what you ought to be doing" and not so much "here's an example of what somebody would do at the start of a game."

Sure Hypatian, as a status update operation "Upgrade Conventional Infrastructure First" has been a wild success so far. In my restart I got shafted with useless Scientist managers, but I got a really awesome planetary governor to make up for it.

Here are the breakdowns of the important stats I was tracking:
yr 25/ yr 8
Annual Production of 3008.4 / 10254.6 (helped by a 30% governor bonus compared to a 15%)
Research Generation of 2160 / 1400
Population of 879.30 million / 622.52
Maximum Mining Production of 1440, which will run out of its first mineral in 7 years. / 3769.9 production, 3 years!
22 Offworld mines in 7 locations harvesting easily accessible minerals that my homeworld is either generating slowly or about to run out of. / 0 spaceships, but some largish shipyards!
I have no jump field experience whatsoever.

So overall I am really happy!

Ok, back to the opening strategy. I will assume a Conventional Start, so I'm guessing a lot of this earlier stuff won't apply.

To start out with hit F4 to bring up your leaders, switch the dropdown menu to the leftish to change the leader type from "Naval Officer" to "Civilian Administrator." You should have at least 3-4 choices, and they should all be experienced enough to run Earth. I would look for Factory Production Bonus first, followed by Mining Bonus, Population Growth Bonus, and I guess Shipbuilding or Shipyard Management would be nice too. You can close that menu when you're done

Before I bring up bring the event window up with Ctrl F3, you can monitor this every turn for important things you may miss. Examples include a sweet scientist or civilian administrator joining you, or seeing that one of your production projects has run through its resource stockpile and things should be shifted around.

Next step is to go to the research screen, by far the most important research project you can have right now is "Trans-Newtonian" under Construction/Production. If you have a scientist that specializes in that, great, if not give all the labs to a random guy and crack the whip.

Next go to the Shipyard Management screen. The two main things you can do with shipyards is increase the number of slipways and the capacity of all the slipways. 1000 tons should be more than enough to build your first batch of survey ships you will need in 5-10 years, so first add another 4 slipways or so. Once it gets to that point I tell it to continuously up the capacity. My first useful Commercial ship, however, runs in at around 30k tons, so when I get my first commercial shipyard up and running I increase the capacity to around there, then start adding slipways.

The final stop is the Industry tab. Until we get Trans-Newtonian tech in a year we can't do much that is useful. I set it up so that I get one-two maintenance facilities out and a financial center.

Fast Forward a year.
Going back to the Industry tab I scale back the Maintenance Facility Work and the Financial center work to 10% production capability each and just have them finish the remainder of the current building. I then queue up 250 CI to Mining Conversions (30% Capacity), 700 CI to IC (40% capacity), and 10 CI to Fuel Refinery. That last bit is mostly there so that I don't eliminate all of my refining capabilities without remembering about it, it is low priority so only 10% capacity. In the short term we want to start working on a Commercial Shipyard and in the longer term we will start building Research Labs, but those are both pretty expensive so we'll wait awhile.

Speaking of research, in my first game and this new one I queued up an increase to my IC, Mining capacity, and research. I have been tearing through my minerals so quickly, however, that if I were to start again I would go straight to the technology needed to get some survey ships up so I can find some quick asteroids to tide me over (asteroids don't have a lot of material usually, but it's all generally .7 to 1 accessibility, getting 10 Automated Mines set up there is just as good as 50 mines back home trying to sift through the .2 accessibility of the rarer materials.)

For these survey ships you'll need (in the Power and Propulsion tree) a Pressurized Water Reactor and then a Nuclear Engine. Once that is done you will have to design a specific engine type, either Military or Commercial, I did military for my first one to keep it small. The other tech you absolutely need is "Geological Survey Sensors" in "Sensors and Fire Control." Other than those I suggest you also research "Fuel Storage - Small," "Engineering Section - Small," and "Crew Quarters - Small" in the "Logistics" tree. One to two of those smaller sections will replace their larger alternatives for your survey ships and let you keep that first survey vessel in the 700 ton range. They are pretty quick things to research too.

Before I wrap this up and get back to playing I'll get back to the Industry side. You will start burning through some mineral or another pretty quickly, (watch either the stockpiles or your event window) when that happens reshuffle your capacities to your other projects. The first time that happens is a good time to shift half to three quarters of your IC production to a Commercial Shipyard (I am assuming you will run low on Tritanium first). Once you have 200-300 Industrial Capacity converted you have enough industry that it's time to start working on more Research Labs as well. This entire time you should be supplementing your Shipyards, heck you may even want to start working on a second shipyard of one of those two types, I haven't gotten far into the game so I don't know when one is generally required.

Good Luck!

Thanks! That's a good rundown of stuff, and actually makes clear to me how a couple of things work that I didn't know about. (Although it wouldn't if I hadn't already been poking around the game.)

Hypatian, I cannot stress enough that you should not start with a conventional tech if you're confused about what research and/or build.

Yeah, I am pretty weird in that way. I always like to start from the very beginning so that I can see exactly what the bare minimum for everything is. Which I actually thought was pretty useful since there are just so many research options. But from what I gather that isn't the same for most people.

Short story: Asteroid mining is going swimmingly. The long story will come when I am at work. Right now I'm wasting playing time!

I dove in last night and really stalled out at the shipbuilding portion. The tutorials really skip over the part about retooling a shipyard to build a class. I only found that info here, which is bizarre.

So I got as far as building my first survey ships in 2 hours Do I have to give them explicit survey orders or will they zip about the system on their own?

You can give them orders to survey specific bodies, or you can go to the "Special Orders" page (second tab) and give them a default order of "Survey Nearest Body." You probably also want to use the two conditional orders to make them refuel at 30% and resupply/overhaul at 20% supply (the event screen (Ctrl F3)) will tell you when a conditional order is invoked. When one of them hits 30% fuel and triggers the order I usually tell them to resupply and overhaul as well.

Protip: A range of around 120 billion km is needed to be absolutely sure your survey ships won't turn around from the far Kuiper belt at 30% fuel, then peeter out at around the inner asteroid belt.

Okay, so what's with the industrial capacity conversion mentioned above? Converted to what? why?

Man I wish I could install this on my work computer :p It would be a great time waster. Sadly, no admin permissions and it wont just happily run on a USB drive the way Dwarf Fortress and other games will.

Alrighty, Status update on the Arnok's Hammer Empire in the Dolomite Globe of Wails.

First of all I will fix some minor errors I said earlier. First of all it turns out that "Engineering Spaces - Small" and "Fuel Storage - Small" are really not important. "Crew Quarters - Small" remains useful though. My Survey ship actually clocks in at 850-900 tons, not 700 like I remembered. I also upped my Cargo ship from 30k tons to 40k tons. I gave it many, many more engines and am very happy with the increased performance. If anyone is interested I can post my ship designs, but they are pretty rudimentary with no surprises. The only real thing to watch out for is to tweek your survey ships fuel capabilities, I had to send out a freighter twice to refuel them before I got it right.

So it's now year 18, and the last 15 years have been spent in constant thirst for minerals. This wasn't an issue in the first playthrough, my meager industry was sufficiently stocked by my meager mining capabilities. Now my decent mining capability is wholly unable to keep up with my Industrial capability. If I were to start again I would just research the first mining upgrade, then go straight to ship stuff. I would also convert my starting CI to 600 IC/390 Mines/10 Refinery instead of 740/250/10.

The Minerals that are important to me right now are Duranium (used for everything), Mercassium (Research Labs), Tritanium (Industrial Capacity), and Curronium(sp) (Mining).

Your starting planet always starts with all minerals. You always have a lot of Duranium (at 1 Accessibility too) and Sorium, and decent amounts of the other stuff. The secondary elements I mentioned above have been at .2 Accessibility in each playthrough. At the beginning my mines could get enough Duranium, but would run out of the secondary resources. When that happened I shifted around my industry concentrations to balance everything out. After a couple years I wasn't getting enough Duranium either, at that point I started officially wasting Industrial Capacity, that was 15 years ago.

So I needed more Duranium, however my home planet has 1 accessibility for it. In addition my homeworld can use Mines which are half the cost of the "Automated Mines" I would need everywhere else. That means that the most efficient possible way to get more Duranium is just to build Mines on my homeworld. The real problem was that even with every single ounce of Curronium going straight to my factories I was still not building mines fast enough to make a difference. My homeworld's Curronium accessibility is .2, so if I could find a "1" source elsewhere each mine would work 5x as fast, so even though Automated Mines are twice as expensive that's still the way to go. With that new Curronium I could build Mines (to get Duranium at home) and Automated Mines (to ship offworld to get more Curronium).

I had known that this was coming, so once I was done converting CIs to Mines I had started working right away at making Automated Mines. By Year 14 when my freighters rolled off the line I had more than 50 of them. At this point I had already mapped out all of the planets, my two comets (both in short orbits) and most of the Inner Asteroid Belt. In general bodies go in this order: Planets -> Moons -> Comets -> Asteroids. As you move from left to right you seem to get smaller deposits of rarer minerals at higher accessibilities. Comets seem to be overall the best from a pure mineral standpoint, though you have to be careful with how far away they get.

Now most asteroids are worthless, but there are some really really nice ones. My needs were: Inner Asteroid belt (since my freighters would be making a lot of trips, the comets were close enough too), and over 3,000 Curronium at an accessibility of 1. Anything less than 3,000 and I'd have to move all the factories really soon and I didn't want to bother. If the asteroid had Mercassium, Tritanium, Duranium, or anything else, so much the better.

Exactly one Asteroid fit my exact specifications (in the upper right click on the "Surveyed Bodies" button, or something like that) a sweet little number with over 4k Corrunium, and over 2k Mercassium and Duranium. The first two minerals had an Accessibility of 1, the last had an accessibility of .8. There were 4 other "close fits;" three asteroids with 1-2k Corrunium, and a comet with more than 20k Corrunium at .8. I'll definitely be heading there once I empty out the asteroids.

When my three freighters roll off the line I immediately have them all start shipping Automated Factories out to Asteroid #148. By the end of the year the Asteroid's Corrunium production is more than my Homeworld's. Now, in year 18, I have 74 Automated Mines on the Asteroid which are making more than 700 Curronium yearly, my Homeworld is only making 500-ish. In another 2 years I'll have to relocate them, but at this point I have 10 Freighters with nothing to do, so that won't be a problem.

One last note, It turns out that Mining directly from ships is cost-effective, purely from a Corrunium standpoint. More on that later.

Robear wrote:

Okay, so what's with the industrial capacity conversion mentioned above? Converted to what? why?

Edit: Hmm, If you start Trans-Newtonian instead of Conventional you probably don't have any "Conventional Industry."

At the start of the game all of your on planet industry should be in "Conventional Industry" which basically means normal, obsolete factories. They are multipurpose, so one "CI" does the same sort of stuff that a Mine, an "Industrial Capacity," and a Fuel Refinery does, however it's only as good as 1/10th of a Mine, 1/10th of an "IC," and 1/20th of a Fuel Refinery.

You can convert your "Conventional Industries" to either of the three high-tech factories they take the place of, and it is a lot cheaper. Making a Mine, "IC," or Refinery from scratch costs 120 total (60 Duranium and 60 of a (different for each) rarer mineral). Converting a "CI" to one of the other three costs 1.6 the price, 10 Duranium and 10 of the other mineral.

So for the Mines and IC converting an old CI gives you 90% of the advantage at 1/6th the cost, so it is 5.4 times more effective to convert all of your Conventional Industries before you build anything from scratch.

So I've started my own bumbling around. At this point I get how to design ships, sort of. I have some survey ships flying around and checking stuff out. I'm doing some research and using a freighter to fly automated mines to Mars. I tried to design a jump gate construction ship. It basically launched into space and immediately exploded. I guess I am missing some crucial part of the technology there.

I'm currently making some infrastructure because I'd like to get a Mars colony going.

I tried to design a jump gate construction ship. It basically launched into space and immediately exploded. I guess I am missing some crucial part of the technology there.

Hmm... even though Commercial Ships don't have a maintenance clock, it still told me it could break down if I didn't have any Engineering Spaces at all on it, but even a tiny one should be sufficient for a Commercial Ship. Did you have any?

The annual chance of failure was still in the thousands either way so I didn't use one. Guess I'll stick one on there. Also I made it a military ship. Was that an error?

pseudointellectual wrote:

The annual chance of failure was still in the thousands either way so I didn't use one. Guess I'll stick one on there. Also I made it a military ship. Was that an error?

Ah yes, a military ship can break down in flight, so you will need an increasing number of Engineering Spaces based on the size and complexity of the parts they have. My little 850 ton survey ships have 2-3 Engineering spaces and only have a 5% chance of breaking down every year. I am guessing that a military jump gate constructor would need dozens of dozens of them. If the Jump Gate constructor is classified as a military part you'll have to bite the bullet and give them Engineering Spaces. If not then you should be able to design a Commercial version of the offending part (it's probably an engine) and you'll be set to go.

I did a commercial version and it worked. Well, it worked on the second try. On my first try I forgot to add enough life support and the crew bit the dust. The Terran civilization at the moment seems to be suicidally inept. But I'm still getting the hang of things. My little colony on Mars seems to be doing ok at least!

I wish I could colonize Mars :(. My Dwarves have a minimum gravity tolerance of .4 g's and Mars only has .38 g's. Next game I start will either have my Dwarves in another Solar System, or I'll give them a minimum Gravity Tolerance of .35 g's.

This post over at the Aurora forums is pretty hilarious and informative. A fellow is bucking all the folks who say 'you have to do it this way' and 'this is the most efficient way to do it' and instead he's making a hulking mass that consumes a system's worth of fuel every 20 years, and other unconventional designs. The thread is quite long and I imagine people start to enjoy his exploits towards the end rather than continuing to tell him to do it the 'right' way.

Colonizing Mars is more problematic than I thought. I have none of the resources there to build anything I need, so I have to keep flying buildings and minerals out. I probably should have researched a location before I plopped something down just to do it.

polypusher wrote:

Man I wish I could install this on my work computer :p It would be a great time waster. Sadly, no admin permissions and it wont just happily run on a USB drive the way Dwarf Fortress and other games will.

I didn't know that about dwar fortress. Maybe I'll go matrix style and start up a new game.

I have been reading this story where the author models North America, South America, Japan, China, India, Russia, Europe, and the Islamic Alliance (poor Africa and Antartica) as separate Empires with realistic populations and plausible amounts of Conventional Industry and Research Colonies. I have barely started it but it's already phenomenally interesting. Japan and Russia collaborated to each make an Anti-ICBM satellite to protect them from China, and them putting weapons into space is raising tensions across the globe.

Once a few of us get a better hang for the game something like that may be really fun, I had never considered starting on the same planet before.

Baron Of Hell wrote:
polypusher wrote:

Man I wish I could install this on my work computer :p It would be a great time waster. Sadly, no admin permissions and it wont just happily run on a USB drive the way Dwarf Fortress and other games will.

I didn't know that about dwar fortress. Maybe I'll go matrix style and start up a new game.

It works with NetHack and the Vultures's Eye graphic client for NetHack as well

Yonder wrote:

Your starting planet always starts with all minerals. You always have a lot of Duranium (at 1 Accessibility too) and Sorium, and decent amounts of the other stuff.

For me at least this has often not been true. My planets often start with only 100,000 Duranium at 0.8 accessibility. That much Duranium lasts me about 2-5 years.

When I start a new game, before I advance any time at all, I do a few housekeeping things.

First, assign a planetary governor.

Second, assign Fleet staff positions. The commander of the fleet should have crew training value if you want your ships to be able to do fleet training.

Third, create a Geology team on Earth to start digging for more ore (always hoping to find more Duranium).

Fourth, go through rosters and fire all of the useless officers (and administrators, and scientists).

Fifth, allocate my tech points if I didn't pick auto-allocate for a new game.

Sixth, open up my race window and adjust all the settings there to my liking: flag, portrait, crew training level (to at least 3!!!), additional name sources, government type (if I'm not happy with the starting type). Make sure you click all of the save buttons.

Queue up my shipyard upgrades (you can retool an unassigned shipyard without cancelling its upgrade task). Queue up 100 financial centres to be constructed. Depending on how many starting academies I have, possibly queue up another 1 or 2 academies as well.

Depending on the tech I have to start with, I may have to design ship components. If I used my starting points to already research those, then design some survey ships and queue up their construction. Otherwise make sure that the first set of research queued up is my ship tech.

Our lists are very very similar, except for this:

MoonDragon wrote:

Fifth, allocate my tech points if I didn't pick auto-allocate for a new game.

How the heck do you do that?

Nightmare wrote:

Our lists are very very similar, except for this:

MoonDragon wrote:

Fifth, allocate my tech points if I didn't pick auto-allocate for a new game.

How the heck do you do that?

I haven't tried it but I believe under the scientist section on the research tab there is a Start RP amount. You click on what you want to research like normal and then click on Start RP and then click the instant button. The instant button will not be there if you don't have a starting RP amount.

I always do the auto-allocate but read about this in a tutorial.

Baron Of Hell wrote:
Nightmare wrote:

Our lists are very very similar, except for this:

MoonDragon wrote:

Fifth, allocate my tech points if I didn't pick auto-allocate for a new game.

How the heck do you do that?

I haven't tried it but I believe under the scientist section on the research tab there is a Start RP amount. You click on what you want to research like normal and then click on Start RP and then click the instant button. The instant button will not be there if you don't have a starting RP amount.

I always do the auto-allocate but read about this in a tutorial.

Hmmm, you learn something new everyday. Thanks!

I didn't see it mentioned here, but 4.91 is out. You will need 4.90 to use it. Going to 4.90 will kill your 4.8x version game.

Full install for 4.91 is here.

Asteroid miner ship module, not seeing how to use it. Currently sitting in orbit at a surveyed asteroid.

Ship in question is:

Scavenger class Asteroid Miner 75750 tons 1200 Crew 1779.5 BP TCS 1515 TH 750 EM 0
495 km/s Armour 1-159 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control 1 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 15 MSP
Cargo 15000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 5
Asteroid Miner: 10 module(s) producing 100 tons per mineral per annum

Ion Engine E0.7 ARM-1C (5) Power 150 Fuel Use 7% Armour 1 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 84.9 billion km (1984 days at full power)

This ship is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposes

** Edit **

Search finally found the answer, got to set up a colony there first... wierd. Okay, routing a freighter to drop one automated mine. Note to self: Next time, design the Scavenger with enough cargo space to carry an automated mine + expected ore.

Ah, I'm glad you figured this out. I was wondering the same thing myself. Isn't there a way to make it a colony without putting a mine on it? I thought I saw a "Create Colony" button somewhere.