VB6 Aurora:Quickstart for Beginners

This is a very basic quickstart for people trying the game out, or trying to learn the basics of how the game works.

Start the game, and when the initial screen comes up (game details)click the new button on the bottom left. This brings up a very large screen. Most of the info we can leave alone for this tutorial. On the far right of the screen there are a couple of things to change. Under Commanders the second check box is for commander political bonuses. Uncheck this box, and the box below this for Inexperienced Fleets. They both add complexity that can confuse the begginner. The only other thing you should really change is on the far left. There is a section titled Species Tolerance. Put the Max deviation in oxygen pressure to 50%, the max deviant in gravity to 70% and leave the other two alone. The last thing to change is in the bottom middle of the screen is a box titled Starting Tech. Check the box for create starting systems and ships. This will create your initial ship designs. One warning, you may not be able to build them based on the size of your shipyard. An optional section to change is for the name of your empire. The second group of info on the left side allows you to customise the name of your empire, and the name theme that you will be using. This effects the names of the officers that are created. It is strictly cosmetic however. Now press Create. There will be a couple of things to click on while you wait, but you will get back to the game details screen. Press select to start your new game. This will give you a small menu bar with the name of your game (you did put a name in and not just the default "new game". If not you can bring up the game details screen under the game menu on the bar and change it then save it. When you make changes here it will ask for a password, unless you put one in the default is to leave it blank. This is for multi player games mostly.

To get started actually playing there is a bunch of stuff that you will need to do. Press F2 to bring up the Population and Production screen. This screen has a bunch of tabs on it to make it easier to navigate. The first thing to do is go to the Team/Acadamy tab. In the middle left is a button for Open officer window. click it then when it comes on click the check box in the upper left for automated assignements. This will have the game automatically assign officers to ships, and ground units. It will not assign leaders to colonies however, this is something you need to do. On the upper left is a pulldown for the type of leaders. It starts out showing naval officers. Choose Civilian Administrators. In the middle of the screen is a window that shows the Potential Assignments. There will be a list of colonies and to the left is A#. The number indicates what rank your administrator (A) needs to be for this colony. It will probably be an A3. On the far right of the screen there is a search function. On ability A pick Administrator rating. This will automatically sort all of your admin people by their relative seniority. Iff you click on the name of an administrator, thier abilities will be displayed at the top left (Ratings and bonuses). Pick an admin person that fits what you want your colony to do. For a starting game, I usually pick someone with a high mining bonus as it is very easy to run out of minerals to build things when you start. After picking your administrator, close the screen and go back to the Population and Production menu.

Go to the industrial tab. This is where you will build most things except for ships. On the far left is a list of Population Locations. Clicking on them will change which colony you are looking at for everything else on this screen. Under the row of tabs is a pulldown menu for different types of things to build. Choose installations. Most starting setups do not have enough mines for everything you want to do. Pick Mine under the list of things to build and then go to the area that says Create Industrial Project For ... Put the number to build at 200, and the percentage of industry at 20%. This will now use 20% of your industry to build a total of 200 mines. This is just to get you started. Next do the same thing for infrastructure. Put it at 1000 and 10%. This will help when you want to start a new colony. For the rest of your industry, pick what you want to build. If there is not enough industry left for the percentage that you put in, that build order will be qued up and will start once enough industry is available from projects that have been completed.

The next tab to go to is Manage Shipyards. This is where you will build your ships. If you let the computer design your first ships then you can go directly to assigning designs to different shipyards. It usually helps to open up the ship design screen (F5) to check what each ship does. Make sure that when you assign them that the biggest possible design is given to each shipyard. You do not want to have your largest shipyard capable of building 20000 ton ships working on 1000 ton gunboats. The first time you assign a design to a shipyard it happens immediately, afterwards it will take some time for the shipyard to retool to build the new design. While it is retooling you can continue to build ships that had already been started. You will not be able to start any new ships untill you finish retooling. You can build any ship you want in the military (naval) shipyards. Only civilian designs can be build in the commercial shipyards. Commercial/civilian designs tend to be much larger than military ships. Civilian shipyards start at 10,000 ton capacity and build up faster than military shipyards that start at 1,000 ton capacity. Play around with what you want to build. You will need one freighter design and one colonist design to start a new colony. To survey for warp points you will need a Gravitational Survey ship (this is going to be a military design). To survey for minerals on the planets, moons, and asteroids you will need a Geological Survey ship (this can be a civilian design). To transit a warp point you either need a ship with a jump engine, or you need an existing jump gate. To build a ship click on the shipyard and then go to the create task area. Choose which ship that this particular shipyard is capable of building and make sure that the task group the ship is being built in says shipyard tg. If a ship is being built in a TG that has ships in it the ships can not move without changing their TG(task group). Then click on the add task. Each shipyard has a number of slipways, each slipway can build one ship at a time.

The final thing to do before you can get started is to assign your scientists to different reasearch projects. Go to the Reasearch tab. The top of the screen has an empty area that you will be filling. On the right side is a list of scientists with their area, bonus and the max number of labs they can use. To assign a scientist to a project you will need to click on the scientist, a technology (center screen) and then above the scientist screen designated the number of labs to use. Then click create. This will start that reasearch project. A note about the scientists reasearch bonus. The listed percentage is used to boost the points produced, If the technology being reasearched is from the same field as the bonus, the percentage is instead x4. A 25% bonus for energy weapons will add 100% if you are reasearching a laser size. This makes a big difference in getting projects done quickly. To que up a project for a scientist that already is reasearching something you will need to click on the scientist up above, the technology you want him to reasearch, and then the queue button on the bottom right. Try to use all of your labs in the fewest possible technologies untill you get the hang of it.

At this point you will now have all of the very basic work set up to start playing. If you have any ships you will need to give them orders under the F12 (Task Group) screen.

This will be a seperate tutorial.