VB6 Aurora:FAQ

(See also the Tips for beginners section) (I was trying to create a new page, but somehow that didn't work out. I'll move it when I find out how)

Tips for beginners

- Remember that not all open game windows are updated when you change data in one of them. So you could e.g. start a new colony on an asteroid or planet, but the Economics window wouldn't list it unless you advanced the time or closed and re-opened it. Likewise, after creating a new component, e.g. a laser or an engine, the technology dropdown in the Research window might not yet show it. Select another tech area from the dropdown, then the one where your new design should appear.

- In the beginning, the most important minerals to look out for/keep an eye on are

• Duranium - most things you're going to build consist of 50% other stuff and 50% Duranium. Call it the steel of the 21st century. You'll need loads of it, and then some.
• Sorium - refined into spaceship fuel. You have a lot of fuel on your home planet, but keep an eye on your fuel stocks. If you run out of Sorium, you are in trouble.
• Corundium - needed to build mines and automines.
• Mercassium - makes your scientists smarter. You'll want to grow your research capabilities ASAP, so you'll need a lot of this.

- If you are confused about the Galaxy map at first, you're not alone. That's mainly because the systems are not automatically placed. Shift-click and drag the star systems to a position of your liking, then click the SysPos button and save that layout, or your changes are lost when you exit the game.

General

Q. What is Aurora?
A. Aurora is a 4x (eXpand, eXplore, eXternimate, eXploit) game. Written by Steve Walmsley.

Q: Are there any System Requirements?
A: The only one is a screen resolution of 1280x1024.

Q: Wait, so there's no way for me to play on my netbook?
A: Well there are a few, but it won't be pretty.

Gameplay

Q: I just surveyed this planet/moon/asteroid, but nothing shows up. And why are there pages/systems/colonies missing from the Mineral Report screen?

A: Very few system bodies will have Trans-Newtonian Elements on them - less than one in twenty. If there are no minerals, the survey/report/window will be blank for that body (well, unless there are alien ruins, which are one-in-a-thousand rare).

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Q: What do ship components you can salvage or build and store on your planets actually do?

A: Salvaged tech gives research bonuses, but once you have alien or your own ship components on your world what are they used for? The building time and cost of new ships doesn't seem to be reduced by having the right components.
A: I assume you're talking about the "completion date" field on the SY management tab when you select a construction task - that's a "feature" :-) If you actually create a build task and look at the next (SY tasks) tab, you'll see that the completion date is shorter if you were able to use stockpiled components.
So long story short, using infrastructure to build ship components reduces ship build time.

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Troubleshooting

Q: My increments were cut short! what gives?
A: Oh, it's NPRs' fault! they are engaged in combat or similarly important activity, luckily you can use automated turns

Q: I have a window that doesn't appear on the screen, or appears to be off-screen. How do I fix that?
A: Close all windows (or restart) and then use the Reset Window Positions option on the Miscellaneous menu on the main menu bar

Q: Help! I'm using windows 7/Vista and the game crashes
A: Windows 7 and Vista, need to have the game run as administrator.

Q: I'm using Windows 7/Vista and I keep getting permission errors when trying to extract patch files to the Aurora folder
A: This has to do with security features. The easy fix is to right click /aurora , go to "Properties", go to "Security", browse to the one called "Users" and modify it to have all permissions.