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Difference between revisions of "VB6 Aurora:New Game"

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{{update}}
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=Aurora Requirements=
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=Overview=
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If you are living in a country which uses the comma (,) for decimal separator, then while playing Aurora you have to switch the Regional Settings of your computer over to US or UK or another country that uses the period (.) as the decimal separator. In XP this is in the Control Panel.  
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This tutorial, while a couple versions old, takes you through the basic process of creating a new game and getting the starting technology and infrastructure setup.
 
  
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=New Game Creation=
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# The minimum resolution required is 1280x1024. A higher resolution or multiple monitors will allow you to see more windows at once. If your display doesn´t support this, there are ways around it, provided your video card supports a higher resolution than your monitor/display.
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# Scrolling desktop. A program that extends the desktop beyond your screen can be found at http://360desktop.com/
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# In XP, something similar is already built in but it does carry a warning from Microsoft so you will have to decide if this is worth trying. Go to the screen where you set your resolution. Select the Advanced button and then select the Monitor tab. There is a checkbox which reads "Hide modes that this monitor cannot display". If you uncheck this box, you can set resolution to anything your graphics card can handle. If this resolution is higher than what your monitor can display, whenever your mouse pointer reaches the edge of your screen, the whole screen will scroll in that direction.
  
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When you launch Aurora, you are presented with the Game Detail screen. This screen, by default shows the last game selected (Usually Steve's campaign). To create a new game, click the New button. I'll present the steps as they are shown to you.
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=Part 1: New Game Creation=
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# You are asked for a starting year. Type in the year your campaign starts at and click OK.
 
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# Next you are asked if you want Aurora to create Sol and create a race on Earth. If you select No, you will need to create your own starting system and race. We'll click Yes for now. See [[#Alternate Startup]] for creating a new system/race.
 
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# Next you need to enter in the number of jump points for the Sol system. We'll enter in 3.
 
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# Next you are asked if you wish to create the race in stages. If you click No, the race will be created randomly. We'll click Yes.
 
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# A suggested species name of 'Terran' is given. You are asked if you wish to change this. We'll click No.
 
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# Next is the suggested maximum deviation in oxygen pressure. In this example it is 45%. We'll leave it at that.
 
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# Next is the suggested maximum atmospheric pressure. In this example it is 2.9. We'll leave this alone too.
 
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# Next is the suggested maximum temperature deviation. In this example it is 23 degrees (Celsius). We'll tweak this to 30 degrees.
 
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# Next is the suggested maximum gravity deviation. In this example it is 60%. We'll leave this alone.
 
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# Next is the suggested race name. The game suggests 'Terran Federation', but we'll change that to 'Confederation of United Terra' with a short race name of 'Confed'.
 
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# Next is the theme. The game has suggested Italia. We'll change that to USA.
 
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# Next is the government type. The default is Player Race. We'll leave this alone.
 
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# The default commander name theme is USA. We'll leave this too.
 
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# Now we are asked if we wish the race to have surveyed the home system for jump points. We'll say yes.
 
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# Next is the suggested population. In this example it is 265m. We'll change this to 750m.
 
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# Next we get a warning that it may take a bit for large populations.
 
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# We get asked if we wish less industry than normal. We'll say no.
 
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# We get asked if we wish to convert ordnance factories to construction factories. We'll say no.
 
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# We get asked if we wish to convert fighter factories to construction factories. We'll say yes.
 
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# We are asked if we wish to set a name for the homeworld. We'll say no.
 
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# Next we are asked about starting research points. In this example we have 180,000. We'll increase this to 250,000.
 
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# Now we are asked if we wish random distribution of the points. We'll say yes.
 
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# The game now goes through the creation process and you will get a notification that the process is complete.
 
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# Now we can change any game settings. We'll just turn on the 'Use Inexperienced Fleet Penalties'. You can hover your mouse over any option and a tip will pop up to explain it. If you change anything, be sure to click Save, then Select. If you do not click Save, your changes will not take effect.
 
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# Now we are at the main screen.
 
  
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=Alternate startup=
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When you start Aurora, the first thing you should see is a small window with Game Details in the title bar. Across the bottom are four buttons: New, Save, Delete Game and Select. In a moment we are going to be pressing New but a quick word on Select first. Select will choose the currently selected game and take you to the main menu bar (which is really just a window title bar and a menu in the centre of the screen). If you accidentally press Select and get to this menu bar before setting up a game, you can go back to the Game Details window by pressing Ctrl-I or choosing Game Info from the Game menu.
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Welcome to the alternate start up tutorial. In the last tutorial, you'll recall we were asked if we wanted to create the Sol system, and we said yes. In this one, we'll click No, and proceed from there. After clicking No, we are presented with the basic game setup. Consult Tutorial 2 for detailed information. For now, we will click Save, then Select.
 
  
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We are now looking at the main game bar. In this case the title shows 'New Game #115 1st January 600 00:00'. New Game #115 is the name of the game, and 1st January 600 00:00 is the current game date and time.
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To start a new game, press the New button on the Game Details window, This will open a much larger window with the title "Create New Game". This may seem a little overwhelming at first but most of the standard options are already selected. I'll run through most of them so you can set up the type of game you want.  
  
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First, click the Game Menu and Select Default Race. This brings up a list of all the races in the game. You should only see SM Race. Select that by highlighting and clicking Select, or double-clicking. Our title bar now has changed to show SM Race after the game time. Click the SpaceMaster menu, and SpaceMaster On. Type in your password, if any, and click OK. Our title bar has changed again, adding (SM) to the end to show we are in SM Mode.
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Game Name is self-explanatory. Perhaps "My First Game", or maybe "My First Rampage Through the Galaxy", depending on your style. Leave the SpaceMaster Password blank as that is really for refereed multi-player games.
  
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Now, we need to create a system for our new empire. Hit the F9 key, or Empires/System View.
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Starting Year: Any number you like. Aurora keeps track of time using years, months, days and seconds. You will start at 00:00 on January 1st of whatever year you select.
  
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We are now presented with a blank system view screen. In the lower right corner you will see a number of buttons. We are interested in the Create Empire and Create System ones. Click the Create System. After a moment, the game will show you the system it has generated. I got lucky on my first shot, with a cost 0.0 planet in the system. You may need to generate a number of systems before you get one that is suitable. Once you have, click your new homeworld. Since this is the SM Race we are still under, click the 'All SB Survey' button. This will run through the mineral generation process for all of the system bodies. Our new homeworld has 46,426,250 (.5) Duranium, 2,944,656 (.5) Tritanium and 15,163,240 (.1) Gallicite. Not very conducive to a burgeoning empire's home planet. So we click the HW Mineral button. This skews the mineral generation process to give all minerals in decent amounts with a fairly good availability.  
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Maximum Number of Systems: This isn't really the max number of systems that you can have in your universe as it can be changed at any time during the game. In effect, it is the highest system number that will be generated by the program in a random (not 'Real Stars') universe. Small numbers of systems means more chance of races being close together. So if you want a knife fight in a phone booth you can choose a low number of systems and if you want a slow leisurely build up before the carnage begins you can choose a high number. 1000 is in the middle of the range and is a reasonable number for a starting game.
  
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Our next step is the actual creation of the race. Click the 'Create Empire' button. Make sure you have your homeworld selected, or you'll get an error, or a race where you don't want it. You'll be asked if you wish to create the race in stages, or randomly. If you click No, you will have very limited input as to what the racial makeup is, so we'll click yes. Clicking no is a good option for throwing in NPR's later in the game.
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Local System Generation Chance and Local System Generation Spread determines how much 'clustering' there is in a random game. This is something you don't need to worry about yet so you can skip this paragraph if you like. Still here? Well here we go then. In a 1000 system game, the program will select a number from 1-1000 when generating a new system. If the Local System Generation Chance is 50% then there is a 50% chance that instead the program will pick a number close to that of the current system. Just how close depends on the Local System Generation Spread. If your current system is number 100 and the Local System Generation Spread is 15, then if a local system is selected it will be between 85 and 115. Why does this make a difference? Well, if you pick a system that already exists when entering a jump point, you will create a link to a new system. If every system was generated randomly from 1-1000, the galactic map will probably comprise a large number of independent chains of systems stretching out form your start point. If the number range selected is small then there is a lot more chance of encountering nearby systems so you generate a far more inter-connected universe with a lot of connections between chains and loops of systems.
  
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Our first decision is whether to use an existing race or not. We'll say No. We get a suggested species name of Adobreny. We'll accept this.
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Construction Cycle Time: You get to build a lot of things in different things in Aurora and the actual construction takes place in what is commonly referred to as the 5-day increment. It would affect performance if Aurora updated construction times in every 5 second increment or sub-pulse so instead the game waits until an number of increments have passed that add up to about five days and then runs all the construction code after the normal movement/detection/combat phases. Because Aurora increments rarely add up to exactly five days between construction cycles, the program uses the actual amount of time that has passed, whether it is 5 days, 12 days or 6 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes and 45 seconds. This means that the amount of 'construction' carried out in each construction cycle may vary a little between cycles. You can choose to change the trigger time for a construction cycle from the standard 400,000 seconds if you want it to happen more or less often but I would suggest leaving it alone until you have a lot more experience with the game. Just for interest, here is a list of some of the things that happen during a construction cycle (jump to the next paragraph when you get bored )
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The next question is Maximum deviation in Oxygen pressure. We'll accept the game generated default. Note that this value changes per species. You will not always get the same value every time.
 
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Next question is about Suggested Maximum Atmospheric Pressure. Again, we will take the default.
 
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Next is the Suggested Maximum Temperature Deviation. This value is in Celsius. We'll take the default value here too.
 
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Next we are asked about the Suggested Maximum Gravity Deviation. We will accept the default value here also.
 
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Next, we are presented with the suggested Empire name of Adobreny Empire. This sounds good, so we will accept it.
 
  
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From here, the steps are the same as in Tutorial 1. You will be asked if you wish to change the name of the homeworld. I suggest not changing it, as this will only change it for the SM Race.
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#) Population Growth takes place
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#) Each population is checked to see if sufficient workers exist to man its factories, shipyards, etc, If there are too few then the planet's industry works at a lower capacity
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#) Orbital Motion takes place
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#) Lifepods are checked to see if they run out of air
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#) Comets move
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#) Transfers of Foreign Aid take place
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#) Wealth is calculated and added to the wealth balance for each Empire
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#) Each population calculates its trade goods production and supply and demand are set for civilian trade.
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#) Ships are checked for system failures. If failures occur, the affected ships will resolve the problem automatically if they have sufficient maintenance supplies.
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#) Maintenance is calculated for ground forces.
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#) If some form of disaster scenario is in play, such as the Sun gradually heating up, then planetary environments in the affected system are updated.
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#) Mining production for both player-owned and civilian-owned mines and asteroid mining ships. There are eleven different 'minerals' in Aurora and they are required as the raw materials for virtually everything you can build
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#) Fuel production for harvesters in orbit of gas giants
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#) Terraforming updated
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#) Fuel is refined at populations with fuel refineries and sufficient Sorium.
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#) Shipyard Activity takes place. This isn't shipbuilding but rather modification of shipyards. Increasing their size, adding new slipways or retooling to build a different ship
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#) Ship Construction
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#) Training of new Ground Forces
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#) Construction of new installations, such as factories, shipyards, research facilities and about two dozen other facilities
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#) Ordnance Production (building new missiles, sensor buoys, recon drones, mines, etc)
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#) Fighter Production (small spacecraft < 500 tons are built in factories rather than in shipyards)
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#) Research
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#) Survey of planets by geosurvey satellites. Geosurvey by ships takes place during normal movement
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#) Civilian Shipping Lines may build new ships if they have sufficient wealth. Rarely, new Shipping Lines may be formed
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#) Civilian Mining Colonies may be setup. You can tax these or buy their minerals.
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#) Crew Training takes place
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#) Mass Drivers (usually on mining colonies) create new mineral packets and fling them toward their targets (usually populated worlds in the same system). Important safety tip! If you tell one population to send minerals by mass driver to another, make sure the receiving population has a mass driver too to catch it. Otherwise, the planet gets bombarded with unfortunate results for both industry and civilians.
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#) Political Status of each planet in your Empire is checked. Those that have been conquered will move through several stages over time before they are eventually fully integrated into your Empire. This can take a number of years, depending on a number of factors including their species characteristics, the strength of the occupation forces and just how much damage you caused capturing the planet in the first place. It's hard to see your occupier in a good light when the planet is still in a nuclear winter and all the cows have two heads. 'Loyal' populations can suffer from unrest due to a number of factors, including radiation (due to alien bombardment), insufficient military protection, minority status (of their species within the Empire), etc. This can be quelled with sufficient ground forces. Garrison battalions are ideal as they are relatively cheap but effective in this role.
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#) Ruin Recovery: Xenology teams try to decipher ancient alien languages and symbology from ruins. Engineer Regiments try to recover alien installations from ruins where the Xeno teams have completed their work.
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#) Geology teams search planets for mineral deposits that may have been missed by an orbital survey
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#) Espionage Teams try to gain intelligence data from rival Empires.
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#) Radiation effects are reduced slightly
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#) Ground units recover readiness and morale. Readiness is recovered far more quickly if Replacement Battalions are available.
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#) Ground combat units loaded in combat drop modules potentially suffer loss of morale if they are held there too long.
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#) Ground Combat (Boarding combat takes place during regular movement/combat phase)
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#) Communication attempts with alien Empires. Diplomatic Rating are updated or those Empires with which comms have been established and the status of treaties is reviewed
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#) Commanders are checked for health problems and training accidents
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#) Commanders potentially gain experience
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#) If automated assignments are being used, the program review existing assignments and assigns new officers as appropriate.
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#) Warnings are generated for any ships that are low on fuel
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#) The Danger Status of systems is gradually reduced over time. This is used by civilian shipping lines to decide whether it is safe to operate in a given system.
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#) Industrial Reactivation is checked. Sectors of industry on a particular world (Ordnance Production, Shipyards, etc.) can be shut down in the case on a manpower shortage. Reactivation of a sector takes six months
  
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Before continuing on to the next tutorial, be sure to select your new empire as the default race.
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OK, I did say I might digress . So back to the New Game window
  
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=Technology Setup=
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The Non-player Race Generation Chance is the chance that an alien empire will be created if an eligible world is created during system generation. Eligible worlds are not that common but 30% is probably reasonable for your first game. A world may still be eligible even if it appears to be uninhabitable to your species.
  
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This tutorial picks up where part 1 or 1a ended. We should be looking at the main game bar. The tutorials that follow assume the Human race on Sol.
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The Non-player race Population Modifier is a difficulty modifier. The size of a new alien homeworld population is generated on a bell curve with the midpoint being equal to the average player race total population. If you change this value to less than 100 the midpoint of the bell curve will move below the average player race population. If you increase, the midpoint will be higher than the average player race population. This method of alien race generation also means that you can choose any starting population size and the game will scale appropriately
  
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First, click the SpaceMaster menu and select SpaceMaster On. Enter in your SM password and click OK. This will make some of the stuff we want to do a bit easier.  
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If you really like comets, you can set a minimum number per system. Comets are good in the sense that they usually have accessible mineral deposits, often in the ten of thousands of tons range, but bad in the sense they may disappear into the Oort cloud with your mining colony and come back in a few thousand years . Short period comets are much better for mining or you can make hay while the sun shines if a long period comet happens to be in the inner system for a while. We have completed the Basic Parameters section and I can see this tutorial is going to take a while to write if I don't starting getting a lot more concise
  
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Next, click the Empires menu, and select System View, or hit the F9 key. We want our race to have not only completed a grav survey of the Sol system, but a geo survey too. In the lower right corner you will see a box that says Spacemaster Functions. In this box, click the 'SB Survey' button. This will grant our race the knowledge of what minerals are where in the system. Take a moment to look and see what you get. At this point, your game will be different from what I am seeing. A quick summary of what I've got. Mercury has Duranium Neutronium, Sorium, and Uridium, with Sorium and Neutronium having high amounts and concentrations. Venus has 7 of the 11 minerals, though only Vendarite and Tritanium are above .5 concentrations, and both are 15+ million amount. A few scattered asteroids and moons have minerals. Neptune and Uranus have good amounts of Sorium. At the moment, Titan is the only other system body that is eligible for colonization at 5.67 cost. Go ahead and close this window.  
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The next section is Setting Empire Parameters. Empire Title, Species Name and Homeworld Name are just text entry fields so you can be as imaginative as you like, or just leave the standard 'Terran Federation', 'Human' and 'Earth' entries.
  
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Click the Empires menu and select Economics, or hit F2. The first thing you see is the summary screen. This gives you an overview of your race. Something to look at is the number of shipyards/slipways. We?ve got 7 shipyards and 14 slipways. We?ve also got 120 automated mines. I think we'll move those to Mercury and Venus as soon as possible to start exploiting those planets.  
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Government Type includes some modifiers for Empire characteristics, such as Xenophobia, Militancy, Determination, etc. and affects the amount of industry and how it is divided at game start. For now, just leave it as a player race.
  
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First thing we need to do is build ships. But before we can design ships, we need technology. Click the Research tab. You can browse through the list of what you have available to research. For an experienced player, this will give you a good idea of what has been selected already. For example, I see a lot of early beam techs available and Capacitor Recharge Rate 2. This means Beams will not be a high priority on our warships at the beginning. Scrolling through the list, our missile tech does not seem to fare any better. In the upper right corner, you can see some sorting options for the tech list. Click Completed Research (exc Start). This shows you what the game allocated our 250k research points to. Glancing over the list now, we see the Confederation has active grav sensor strength of 28, internal armor 3, and thermal reduction 25% normal. Click on the Category droplist and select Racial capabilities. Here we see increased fuel efficiency .8 and increased research rates. Click the droplist again and select Ship Components. There is not much here that looks good, beyond Improved Geological Sensors. Turn the sorting back to Available Research Projects.  
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Main Empire Theme adds flavour to your race. Your starting ranks, random system names and auto-generated names for ship classes will be based on the theme. So for example if you chose United States for the theme, the ranks would be US Naval and Army ranks, the system names would be US cities and the class names would be Essex, Lexington, Spruance, Ticonderoga, etc.. All names can be overridden during the games if you prefer something else and you can change theme mod-game. There are currently over sixty different themes including such varieties as Canadian, Deutschland, Demonic Realm, Ancient Egypt, Knights Templar, Welsh, Barsoom, Swedish, ASEAN, etc.
  
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At the bottom, you should see 8 buttons labeled Research, Design, Instant, Turrets, Instant RST, Fighters, Delete, Missiles. Click Design.  
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Commander Theme affects the naming of your Commanders. For the US theme I imported the latest US Census data into the Aurora database. When you generate a Commander it will pick a random first name from 2000 possibles and a random surname from over 50,000. That provides about one hundred million names for the US theme alone. Different name themes will vary in how the names are generated are displayed. For example, the Roman name theme uses praenomen (given name), nomen and cognomen. The German theme will put the occasional 'von' in for flavour, etc. There are currently thirty-four name themes, including Russian, Japanese, Ancient Greek, Polish, Jewish, Arabic, Hobbit, Zulu, Norse, Indian, etc. Any name theme you need should in there somewhere. If you want to see more themes, I am always open to players creating themes and sending them to me for the next version. Let me know if you want more details.
  
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I?ll only walk through creating Lasers. The other tech is very similar in how it is created. You?ll want to go through each category and create some items for each. For lasers, our choices are Laser Focal Length, Laser Wavelength, and Capacitor Recharge Rate. Of these, we?ve only got an increase in wavelength. So we will create a 10cm C1 Visible Light Laser. That is the game suggested name. As you can see, our laser has a maximum range of 60,000 km, a rate of fire of 15 seconds, and does 3 damage. We can change the name or leave the default. We?ll change the name to ?S&W 100mm Laser Cannon?. Click the create button. This creates a research project (shown under Ship Components) for you to research. Go ahead and create the rest of your technology.  
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The final part of this section is an option between a Trans-Newtonian Empire and a Conventional Empire. Stick with Trans-Newtonian for now, which is a standard Aurora Empire. A Conventional Empire starts with no space-age tech and you have to pretty much start from scratch, converting your conventional industry and researching all of the normal basic starting tech. This would be frustrating for a new player and this tutorial will assume a standard start.
  
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As a note, Missile Launchers can be created any size 1 to 24 that you wish. The size of your launchers will affect the size of missiles you can fire. As a practice, I create a size 2 launcher, used for point defense if the fire rate is low enough; and a few sizes (usually even) up through size 8-12 depending on reload rates. I also create size 24 ground based launchers for our PDCs. Note that missile launchers can also fire smaller missiles, so a dedicated PD sized launcher is not always needed.  
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Next is the Species Tolerance section. Each species in Aurora has environmental tolerances with their midpoint being their homeworld. The habitability of planets will vary considerably depending on the species tolerances so a world that is ideal for humans may be uninhabitable for some other species and vice versa. Even humans can be set with varying tolerances that can affect the difficulty of the game. For now, set the maximum deviation in oxygen pressure to 50%, the max deviation in gravity to 70%, the max deviation in temperature to 22 and the max atmospheric pressure to 4.
  
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Once you have created all your basic tech items, you can either research them individually, or click the Instant RST button. This button gives you knowledge on how to build your Race Specific Tech. You will also want to create turrets and missiles. Turrets need to be created '''AFTER''' you create some beam weapons to put in them. Not all weapons may be turreted. Turreted weapons are good for point defense and for mounting multiple barrels. Once you have created turrets and missiles, click the Instant RST button again.
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These settings will mean that an ideal habitable world will have a temperature between 0 and 44C, an oxygen pressure between 0.1 and 0.3 atm, a gravity between 0.3G and 0.7G and a maximum atmospheric pressure of 4.0 atm. In addition to the individual species tolerances, the ideal habitable world will also need to have no dangerous gases such as Chlorine and will need the oxygen to be no more than 30% of the total atmospheric pressure. A planet that doesn't meet those criteria may be uninhabitable (if it falls outside the gravity range) or may require infrastructure to support the population. Note that you can put ground bases, troops, sensors etc. on any world except a gas giant, regardless of the habitability. If you want an actual population though, which you will need to run shipyards, factories, etc,, then the planet has to be habitable or at least have enough infrastructure for the inhabitants.
  
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=Homeworld Setup=
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Next is Starting Population. This lays out the parameters for your initial population on Earth. Somewhere between 500m and 1000m is a good amount for a new player. Lets leave it at 500m for now. The other boxes can be left alone as they are mainly for specialized scenarios. For example, you might set the Wealth Creation Rate and Industrial Percentage fields to be very low (perhaps 15-20%) to simulate a country like China that has a lot of population but a much lower per capita industrial output and per capita income than the USA. In games that feature multiple starting Empires on Earth this can be an important balancing factor for the SpaceMaster.
  
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In this part, we will concentrate on setting up shipyards, assigning commanders, creating our initial Order of Battle (OOB), and setting up the research queue.
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Moving swiftly on to the Starting System section. Set the number of Sol Jump Points to 6. and leave the other boxes unchecked, This will give us plenty of avenues for exploration
  
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First, let's set up our shipyards. Click the 'Manage Shipyards' tab. The Confederation has 7 yards. They are summarized below.  
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In the Starting Tech system, uncheck the Assign Starting tech points box so we can allocate our own tech at the start of the game. If the box is left checked, the game will randomly assign our starting tech points to background technologies. That can be fun if you want to create a more challenging start where you have to cope with whatever tech you are given. As we are learning at the moment, it's much more educational to choose them ourselves . Likewise, leave the Create Ship Systems box unchecked as we will be doing that ourselves as well.
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*1 2 slipways, 4000 ton capacity
 
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*2 3 slipways, 7000 ton capacity
 
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*3 3 slipways, 7000 ton capacity
 
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*4 2 slipways, 9000 ton capacity
 
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*5 1 slipway, 5000 ton capacity
 
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*6 1 slipway, 4000 ton capacity
 
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*7 2 slipways, 9000 ton capacity
 
  
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We'll assign classes as follows. To assign a class, select the yard, then select the Task Type droplist. Select Retool. This will show the ship class drop list and activate the Set Start Class button.
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Now we move to the second half of the Create New Game window. This is easier to explain as much of the information is already on the screen. Leave the Starting Race as it is so we can start on Earth. The other option is for SpaceMasters who are setting up their own universe and it is a LOT more complex.
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*1 Since this yard has 2 slipways, we'll assign the Lexington to it.
 
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*2 We'll need one of our 7000 ton yards for the survey ships. Since both have 3 slipways, Yard 2 gets it.
 
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*3 This yard gets the Spruance.  
 
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*4 This is one of our big capacity yards we?ll need these for the civilian freighters/colonizers and the flag ship cruisers. Yard 4 gets the civilian ships.  
 
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*5 This yard will get the Coontz scout.
 
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*6 Yard 6 we will leave unassigned for the moment.
 
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*7 Yard 7 gets the Enterprise flagship.  
 
  
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From this screen you can assign tasks to the shipyard (increasing slipways, increasing capacity, retooling to a new class). You can also assign construction tasks here. These tasks will be displayed on the 'Shipyard Tasks' tab.  
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Precursors, as the blurb states, are robot ships that guard some of the ruins in the game and small Precursor ship occasionally appear in non-ruin system. Leave this selected as Precursors provide valuable combat experience. Rather than a complete Empire similar to your own (which is what NPRs will be). Precursors are isolated groups of ships left over from an ancient Empire that dominated the galaxy until they were destroyed by a foe that is yet to be introduced to the game. All that remains are the few ships that guard the ruins of defeated foes waiting for new instructions that never arrive. Their mission is simply to eliminate all non-Precursor life. They have no real populations, although they may have small listening posts and weapon caches in the system. Although few in number and they don't have any survey ships for exploration, they are likely to be higher tech than your own Empire at game start and any starting NPRs. You will need to overwhelm, outsmart or simply avoid them until you are ready.  
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For the moment, we decide we want all the shipyards to have 3 slipways. So we assign the ''Add Extra Slipway'' task to yards 1, 4, 5, 6, & 7. Yards 2 and 3 are fine for now how they are.  
 
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After we've done this, we see that the smaller yards, 1 & 6 will finish in 2252, the medium yard 5 in 2253, and the large yards 4 & 7 in 2255.
 
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We don't add any construction tasks as we will be using the Fast OOB to add our initial ships.  
 
  
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From the main bar, click the SpaceMaster Menu, and select Fast OOB. This small window shows us our Empire, Species, Task Group and Class. We decide we want 10 civilian ships, 5 each Fletcher and Ark to go into the Cargo and Colony groups respectively. So we select the Colony task group from the list, type 5 in the Number box and click Add. The same procedure is used to add our Fletchers and our combat ships as well as the survey ships.
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Leave the number of computer-controlled Empires (NPRs) as 1 and leave the two checkboxes in the section checked. One NPR is plenty for a starting game as new ones will be generated as the game progresses and new systems are found. An NPR is an Empire much like your own. It will be exploring the galaxy, encountering and fighting Precursors, setting up new colonies and improving its industry. When you finally encounter an NPR it may turn out to be friendly, depending on how diplomacy progresses, or it may be an implacable foe. Or it may change from one to the other at some point.
−
Our Task Groups end up with the following.  
 
−
'''Battle Group'''
 
−
2x Enterprise CA
 
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8x Spruance DE
 
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8x Lexington FFG
 
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4x Coontz SF
 
  
−
'''Cargo Group'''
+
Don't bother with the optional simplifications for now. If you want to run a different style game in the future, you can always experiment with them.
−
5x Fletcher FT
 
  
−
'''Colony Group'''
+
Leave Realistic Commander Promotions on as it is one thing less to worry about and it does provide a good flavour to the Commander system. Turn off the Political Bonuses option as it adds an unnecessary complication at this point.
−
5x Ark CS
 
  
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'''Survey Group'''
+
Leave Inexperienced Fleets on for now. You can turn it off later if you wish but the need to institute fleet training exercises adds a good degree of realism to the game.
−
5x Stellar SS
 
−
5x Geode SS
 
  
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'''Shipyard Group'''
+
Lets play with Real Star systems on as well. That takes care of system naming and it will add some familiarity to the universe. You can leave the Orbital Motion on as well. If you have a modern PC, you can turn on Orbital Motion for Asteroids as well.
−
4x North Carolina PDC
 
  
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Looking at this, we decide to create a Terra Ground Group for the PDCs and create a Geo Survey Group for the Geodes. We do this by hitting F12, which brings up the Task Group window. Here is where we assign orders and control our ships. We start by clicking the New TG button twice. This creates Task Groups #426 & 427. We select 426 and click the Rename TG button, renaming it Geo Survey. 427 becomes the Ground Command.
+
Aha - the Moment of Truth! When you are ready click Create Game. This will take a minute or two and there will be a couple of popup messages. When all that is complete you will be back at the Game Details window with your new game selected. Press Enter to select the game and you will be at the main menu bar. Press F3 for the System Map.
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Now we need to move ships into these groups. We select the Survey Task Group and click the Organization tab. In the far right droplist, we select the new Geo Survey group. We add ships by selecting them (in this case the Geodes) and clicking the right-facing arrow button. The same procedure is used to move the PDCs to the Ground Command.
 
−
 
 
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Next we'll set up some default orders. Under Conditional A, for all fleets we set the condition to "Current Speed Not Equal to Max" and the order to "Change to Maximum Speed".
 
−
The only other fleet we want to set default orders for are the two survey fleets. Select the Geo Group, and set the Primary Default to "Survey Nearest Planet or Moon". For the Grav fleet, set the Primary to "Survey Next Three System Locations". For both fleets, we will issue orders to Transit Jump Point #1. Select Jump Point #1 (Unexplored) from the locations list. Then double-click the Transit order in the Actions list.
 
−
 
 
−
The Battle group we need to have rearm. Click Earth in locations, and double-click Load Ordnance from actions.
 
−
 
 
−
If you recall we wanted to move some automated mines to Mercury and Venus. Select the Cargo group. Click Earth in Locations and double-click Load Automated Mine in actions. Now click Mercury in Locations and Unload Automated Mines in Actions. Click Earth again and Load Automated Mines. Now click Venus and unload them. With our cargo ship design and the number in the fleet, they will transfer 5 mines per load/unload. We wanted to move 60 to Mercury and 60 to Venus. So we need to do our order another 11 times to move them all. Under the Plotted move list you should see a "Repeat" button. In the box next to it, change the number to 11 and click Repeat. For clean up purposes, click Earth and select the Refuel and Freighter Maintenance Check orders. This should keep our Cargo fleet busy for a bit.
 
−
 
 
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Now we want to assign commanders to various posts. In the upper left corner, in the Empire section, you will see a check box labeled ?Automated Assignments? along with a drop list labeled "Tour Length". I suggest checking the box. This will rotate your commanders into new slots (and assign commanders to new construction) automatically every (by default) 24 months. The only slots not rotated this way are governorships and Task Force commands. TF staff commands are rotated.
 
−
 
 
−
To do this, hit the F4 button. This brings up our commanders. We have more slots than commanders, but we'll do the best we can. Click the Admiral rank. Our Admiral is named Sandy Bowsher. Admiral Bowsher is about to be assigned to the Governorship of Earth. Click her and you'll see a list of potential assignments. Click R6 Governor of Earth. And click the Assign button in the lower right corner. Admiral Bowsher is now the Governor of Earth and her bonuses (listed in the upper right corner) apply to Earth.
 
−
 
 
−
You should see a list of ship commands and Task Force command. Let's get our survey ships commanded. On the right side, you will see the "Search by Ability or Location". In Ability A, select Survey Bonus. I got lucky with 10 commanders with this bonus. I'll select the first, and assign him to Geode 001. I'll repeat the process with each commander to a new ship.
 
−
 
 
−
You can assign your other officers to your ships as you see fit. One word about Task Forces. The officer you place in there sets the maximum rank for his staff officers. If you place a Commodore in the slot, only Captains and Commanders will be eligible. Once you have assigned all the officers you want, close this window. You may find you have more slots than officers to fill them. This happens. Just wait a couple months game time, and you will have more officers.
 
−
 
 
−
Now, you will recall we gave our Battle Group an order to reload ordnance. Click the Industrial Production tab. You'll notice in the upper right corner, our existing planetary stock of missiles. Along that top row, you will also see our Ordnance factories, and the production queue. Add 1000 of each missile type by selecting the missile, changing the amount to 1000, and click "Add to Stocks". Now our fleet will have sufficient stocks to draw from.
 
−
 
 
−
At the bottom of this screen, you will also see our regular construction queue. One of the first things we will want is a Sector HQ. Scroll through the list for Sector Command. If you cannot find it, you will need to research Improved Command and Control first. This is our case. So we will load up the queue with some infrastructure for when we start off world colonies. We add 10000 infrastructure to the queue.
 
−
 
 
−
Click the Research tab. First thing we do is find Improved Command and Control in the General Science category. We select it and click Research. This starts our scientist to work on this project. Now we have some decisions on what to build. We like the idea of a small (2000 ton) parasite survey ship. But to do that we'll need some new technology. Under Ship Components, we select Small Craft crew quarters and click the Queue button to the middle right. What this does is set the labs to researching this project once they've finished their current one without any involvement on our part. We also add in improved capacitor tech and beam fire control.
 
−
 
 
−
If you went through Tutorial 1a instead of 1, you may not have Jump Point Theory. Without this, you cannot create jump drives, nor use gravitational survey instruments.
 
−
 
 
−
The last thing we want to do is create some ground units to place in our PDCs. Each PDC can garrison 5 battalions. We've got 4 PDCs, so we create 4 HQ units, and 16 Garrison units. This is accomplished on the GU Training tab. Normally, (in our case), we could train 7 units at a time. As part of our "pre-existing" infrastructure, we'll create the units without training them. Select the unit type, and click the "Add Units" button. We are asked how many divisions we wish to create. As we selected HQ, we enter 4. We repeat the process with the Garrison type.  
 
−
 
 
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Click on the Ground Unit tab. You'll see the troops we just created. You can assign them to the PDC by selecting the unit, and the location from the droplist at the bottom. We assign our units to all of the PDCs. If you try to exceed the capacity of the PDC, the game will not let you.
 
−
 
 
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At this point, we?ve started a basic queue for production and research. We've assigned our commanders. We've issued orders to our task groups. All that is left is to start time moving forward. To increment time, there is a number of ways. My preferred setup is having the Economic window and the Event window open. This shows me what is going on, and allows me to issue orders to my planets. Unless something is occurring, I increment in 5 day periods.
 

Revision as of 02:09, 2 January 2010

Aurora Requirements

If you are living in a country which uses the comma (,) for decimal separator, then while playing Aurora you have to switch the Regional Settings of your computer over to US or UK or another country that uses the period (.) as the decimal separator. In XP this is in the Control Panel.

  1. The minimum resolution required is 1280x1024. A higher resolution or multiple monitors will allow you to see more windows at once. If your display doesn´t support this, there are ways around it, provided your video card supports a higher resolution than your monitor/display.
  2. Scrolling desktop. A program that extends the desktop beyond your screen can be found at http://360desktop.com/
  3. In XP, something similar is already built in but it does carry a warning from Microsoft so you will have to decide if this is worth trying. Go to the screen where you set your resolution. Select the Advanced button and then select the Monitor tab. There is a checkbox which reads "Hide modes that this monitor cannot display". If you uncheck this box, you can set resolution to anything your graphics card can handle. If this resolution is higher than what your monitor can display, whenever your mouse pointer reaches the edge of your screen, the whole screen will scroll in that direction.

Part 1: New Game Creation

When you start Aurora, the first thing you should see is a small window with Game Details in the title bar. Across the bottom are four buttons: New, Save, Delete Game and Select. In a moment we are going to be pressing New but a quick word on Select first. Select will choose the currently selected game and take you to the main menu bar (which is really just a window title bar and a menu in the centre of the screen). If you accidentally press Select and get to this menu bar before setting up a game, you can go back to the Game Details window by pressing Ctrl-I or choosing Game Info from the Game menu.

To start a new game, press the New button on the Game Details window, This will open a much larger window with the title "Create New Game". This may seem a little overwhelming at first but most of the standard options are already selected. I'll run through most of them so you can set up the type of game you want.

Game Name is self-explanatory. Perhaps "My First Game", or maybe "My First Rampage Through the Galaxy", depending on your style. Leave the SpaceMaster Password blank as that is really for refereed multi-player games.

Starting Year: Any number you like. Aurora keeps track of time using years, months, days and seconds. You will start at 00:00 on January 1st of whatever year you select.

Maximum Number of Systems: This isn't really the max number of systems that you can have in your universe as it can be changed at any time during the game. In effect, it is the highest system number that will be generated by the program in a random (not 'Real Stars') universe. Small numbers of systems means more chance of races being close together. So if you want a knife fight in a phone booth you can choose a low number of systems and if you want a slow leisurely build up before the carnage begins you can choose a high number. 1000 is in the middle of the range and is a reasonable number for a starting game.

Local System Generation Chance and Local System Generation Spread determines how much 'clustering' there is in a random game. This is something you don't need to worry about yet so you can skip this paragraph if you like. Still here? Well here we go then. In a 1000 system game, the program will select a number from 1-1000 when generating a new system. If the Local System Generation Chance is 50% then there is a 50% chance that instead the program will pick a number close to that of the current system. Just how close depends on the Local System Generation Spread. If your current system is number 100 and the Local System Generation Spread is 15, then if a local system is selected it will be between 85 and 115. Why does this make a difference? Well, if you pick a system that already exists when entering a jump point, you will create a link to a new system. If every system was generated randomly from 1-1000, the galactic map will probably comprise a large number of independent chains of systems stretching out form your start point. If the number range selected is small then there is a lot more chance of encountering nearby systems so you generate a far more inter-connected universe with a lot of connections between chains and loops of systems.

Construction Cycle Time: You get to build a lot of things in different things in Aurora and the actual construction takes place in what is commonly referred to as the 5-day increment. It would affect performance if Aurora updated construction times in every 5 second increment or sub-pulse so instead the game waits until an number of increments have passed that add up to about five days and then runs all the construction code after the normal movement/detection/combat phases. Because Aurora increments rarely add up to exactly five days between construction cycles, the program uses the actual amount of time that has passed, whether it is 5 days, 12 days or 6 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes and 45 seconds. This means that the amount of 'construction' carried out in each construction cycle may vary a little between cycles. You can choose to change the trigger time for a construction cycle from the standard 400,000 seconds if you want it to happen more or less often but I would suggest leaving it alone until you have a lot more experience with the game. Just for interest, here is a list of some of the things that happen during a construction cycle (jump to the next paragraph when you get bored )

  1. ) Population Growth takes place
  2. ) Each population is checked to see if sufficient workers exist to man its factories, shipyards, etc, If there are too few then the planet's industry works at a lower capacity
  3. ) Orbital Motion takes place
  4. ) Lifepods are checked to see if they run out of air
  5. ) Comets move
  6. ) Transfers of Foreign Aid take place
  7. ) Wealth is calculated and added to the wealth balance for each Empire
  8. ) Each population calculates its trade goods production and supply and demand are set for civilian trade.
  9. ) Ships are checked for system failures. If failures occur, the affected ships will resolve the problem automatically if they have sufficient maintenance supplies.
  10. ) Maintenance is calculated for ground forces.
  11. ) If some form of disaster scenario is in play, such as the Sun gradually heating up, then planetary environments in the affected system are updated.
  12. ) Mining production for both player-owned and civilian-owned mines and asteroid mining ships. There are eleven different 'minerals' in Aurora and they are required as the raw materials for virtually everything you can build
  13. ) Fuel production for harvesters in orbit of gas giants
  14. ) Terraforming updated
  15. ) Fuel is refined at populations with fuel refineries and sufficient Sorium.
  16. ) Shipyard Activity takes place. This isn't shipbuilding but rather modification of shipyards. Increasing their size, adding new slipways or retooling to build a different ship
  17. ) Ship Construction
  18. ) Training of new Ground Forces
  19. ) Construction of new installations, such as factories, shipyards, research facilities and about two dozen other facilities
  20. ) Ordnance Production (building new missiles, sensor buoys, recon drones, mines, etc)
  21. ) Fighter Production (small spacecraft < 500 tons are built in factories rather than in shipyards)
  22. ) Research
  23. ) Survey of planets by geosurvey satellites. Geosurvey by ships takes place during normal movement
  24. ) Civilian Shipping Lines may build new ships if they have sufficient wealth. Rarely, new Shipping Lines may be formed
  25. ) Civilian Mining Colonies may be setup. You can tax these or buy their minerals.
  26. ) Crew Training takes place
  27. ) Mass Drivers (usually on mining colonies) create new mineral packets and fling them toward their targets (usually populated worlds in the same system). Important safety tip! If you tell one population to send minerals by mass driver to another, make sure the receiving population has a mass driver too to catch it. Otherwise, the planet gets bombarded with unfortunate results for both industry and civilians.
  28. ) Political Status of each planet in your Empire is checked. Those that have been conquered will move through several stages over time before they are eventually fully integrated into your Empire. This can take a number of years, depending on a number of factors including their species characteristics, the strength of the occupation forces and just how much damage you caused capturing the planet in the first place. It's hard to see your occupier in a good light when the planet is still in a nuclear winter and all the cows have two heads. 'Loyal' populations can suffer from unrest due to a number of factors, including radiation (due to alien bombardment), insufficient military protection, minority status (of their species within the Empire), etc. This can be quelled with sufficient ground forces. Garrison battalions are ideal as they are relatively cheap but effective in this role.
  29. ) Ruin Recovery: Xenology teams try to decipher ancient alien languages and symbology from ruins. Engineer Regiments try to recover alien installations from ruins where the Xeno teams have completed their work.
  30. ) Geology teams search planets for mineral deposits that may have been missed by an orbital survey
  31. ) Espionage Teams try to gain intelligence data from rival Empires.
  32. ) Radiation effects are reduced slightly
  33. ) Ground units recover readiness and morale. Readiness is recovered far more quickly if Replacement Battalions are available.
  34. ) Ground combat units loaded in combat drop modules potentially suffer loss of morale if they are held there too long.
  35. ) Ground Combat (Boarding combat takes place during regular movement/combat phase)
  36. ) Communication attempts with alien Empires. Diplomatic Rating are updated or those Empires with which comms have been established and the status of treaties is reviewed
  37. ) Commanders are checked for health problems and training accidents
  38. ) Commanders potentially gain experience
  39. ) If automated assignments are being used, the program review existing assignments and assigns new officers as appropriate.
  40. ) Warnings are generated for any ships that are low on fuel
  41. ) The Danger Status of systems is gradually reduced over time. This is used by civilian shipping lines to decide whether it is safe to operate in a given system.
  42. ) Industrial Reactivation is checked. Sectors of industry on a particular world (Ordnance Production, Shipyards, etc.) can be shut down in the case on a manpower shortage. Reactivation of a sector takes six months

OK, I did say I might digress . So back to the New Game window

The Non-player Race Generation Chance is the chance that an alien empire will be created if an eligible world is created during system generation. Eligible worlds are not that common but 30% is probably reasonable for your first game. A world may still be eligible even if it appears to be uninhabitable to your species.

The Non-player race Population Modifier is a difficulty modifier. The size of a new alien homeworld population is generated on a bell curve with the midpoint being equal to the average player race total population. If you change this value to less than 100 the midpoint of the bell curve will move below the average player race population. If you increase, the midpoint will be higher than the average player race population. This method of alien race generation also means that you can choose any starting population size and the game will scale appropriately

If you really like comets, you can set a minimum number per system. Comets are good in the sense that they usually have accessible mineral deposits, often in the ten of thousands of tons range, but bad in the sense they may disappear into the Oort cloud with your mining colony and come back in a few thousand years . Short period comets are much better for mining or you can make hay while the sun shines if a long period comet happens to be in the inner system for a while. We have completed the Basic Parameters section and I can see this tutorial is going to take a while to write if I don't starting getting a lot more concise

The next section is Setting Empire Parameters. Empire Title, Species Name and Homeworld Name are just text entry fields so you can be as imaginative as you like, or just leave the standard 'Terran Federation', 'Human' and 'Earth' entries.

Government Type includes some modifiers for Empire characteristics, such as Xenophobia, Militancy, Determination, etc. and affects the amount of industry and how it is divided at game start. For now, just leave it as a player race.

Main Empire Theme adds flavour to your race. Your starting ranks, random system names and auto-generated names for ship classes will be based on the theme. So for example if you chose United States for the theme, the ranks would be US Naval and Army ranks, the system names would be US cities and the class names would be Essex, Lexington, Spruance, Ticonderoga, etc.. All names can be overridden during the games if you prefer something else and you can change theme mod-game. There are currently over sixty different themes including such varieties as Canadian, Deutschland, Demonic Realm, Ancient Egypt, Knights Templar, Welsh, Barsoom, Swedish, ASEAN, etc.

Commander Theme affects the naming of your Commanders. For the US theme I imported the latest US Census data into the Aurora database. When you generate a Commander it will pick a random first name from 2000 possibles and a random surname from over 50,000. That provides about one hundred million names for the US theme alone. Different name themes will vary in how the names are generated are displayed. For example, the Roman name theme uses praenomen (given name), nomen and cognomen. The German theme will put the occasional 'von' in for flavour, etc. There are currently thirty-four name themes, including Russian, Japanese, Ancient Greek, Polish, Jewish, Arabic, Hobbit, Zulu, Norse, Indian, etc. Any name theme you need should in there somewhere. If you want to see more themes, I am always open to players creating themes and sending them to me for the next version. Let me know if you want more details.

The final part of this section is an option between a Trans-Newtonian Empire and a Conventional Empire. Stick with Trans-Newtonian for now, which is a standard Aurora Empire. A Conventional Empire starts with no space-age tech and you have to pretty much start from scratch, converting your conventional industry and researching all of the normal basic starting tech. This would be frustrating for a new player and this tutorial will assume a standard start.

Next is the Species Tolerance section. Each species in Aurora has environmental tolerances with their midpoint being their homeworld. The habitability of planets will vary considerably depending on the species tolerances so a world that is ideal for humans may be uninhabitable for some other species and vice versa. Even humans can be set with varying tolerances that can affect the difficulty of the game. For now, set the maximum deviation in oxygen pressure to 50%, the max deviation in gravity to 70%, the max deviation in temperature to 22 and the max atmospheric pressure to 4.

These settings will mean that an ideal habitable world will have a temperature between 0 and 44C, an oxygen pressure between 0.1 and 0.3 atm, a gravity between 0.3G and 0.7G and a maximum atmospheric pressure of 4.0 atm. In addition to the individual species tolerances, the ideal habitable world will also need to have no dangerous gases such as Chlorine and will need the oxygen to be no more than 30% of the total atmospheric pressure. A planet that doesn't meet those criteria may be uninhabitable (if it falls outside the gravity range) or may require infrastructure to support the population. Note that you can put ground bases, troops, sensors etc. on any world except a gas giant, regardless of the habitability. If you want an actual population though, which you will need to run shipyards, factories, etc,, then the planet has to be habitable or at least have enough infrastructure for the inhabitants.

Next is Starting Population. This lays out the parameters for your initial population on Earth. Somewhere between 500m and 1000m is a good amount for a new player. Lets leave it at 500m for now. The other boxes can be left alone as they are mainly for specialized scenarios. For example, you might set the Wealth Creation Rate and Industrial Percentage fields to be very low (perhaps 15-20%) to simulate a country like China that has a lot of population but a much lower per capita industrial output and per capita income than the USA. In games that feature multiple starting Empires on Earth this can be an important balancing factor for the SpaceMaster.

Moving swiftly on to the Starting System section. Set the number of Sol Jump Points to 6. and leave the other boxes unchecked, This will give us plenty of avenues for exploration

In the Starting Tech system, uncheck the Assign Starting tech points box so we can allocate our own tech at the start of the game. If the box is left checked, the game will randomly assign our starting tech points to background technologies. That can be fun if you want to create a more challenging start where you have to cope with whatever tech you are given. As we are learning at the moment, it's much more educational to choose them ourselves . Likewise, leave the Create Ship Systems box unchecked as we will be doing that ourselves as well.

Now we move to the second half of the Create New Game window. This is easier to explain as much of the information is already on the screen. Leave the Starting Race as it is so we can start on Earth. The other option is for SpaceMasters who are setting up their own universe and it is a LOT more complex.

Precursors, as the blurb states, are robot ships that guard some of the ruins in the game and small Precursor ship occasionally appear in non-ruin system. Leave this selected as Precursors provide valuable combat experience. Rather than a complete Empire similar to your own (which is what NPRs will be). Precursors are isolated groups of ships left over from an ancient Empire that dominated the galaxy until they were destroyed by a foe that is yet to be introduced to the game. All that remains are the few ships that guard the ruins of defeated foes waiting for new instructions that never arrive. Their mission is simply to eliminate all non-Precursor life. They have no real populations, although they may have small listening posts and weapon caches in the system. Although few in number and they don't have any survey ships for exploration, they are likely to be higher tech than your own Empire at game start and any starting NPRs. You will need to overwhelm, outsmart or simply avoid them until you are ready.

Leave the number of computer-controlled Empires (NPRs) as 1 and leave the two checkboxes in the section checked. One NPR is plenty for a starting game as new ones will be generated as the game progresses and new systems are found. An NPR is an Empire much like your own. It will be exploring the galaxy, encountering and fighting Precursors, setting up new colonies and improving its industry. When you finally encounter an NPR it may turn out to be friendly, depending on how diplomacy progresses, or it may be an implacable foe. Or it may change from one to the other at some point.

Don't bother with the optional simplifications for now. If you want to run a different style game in the future, you can always experiment with them.

Leave Realistic Commander Promotions on as it is one thing less to worry about and it does provide a good flavour to the Commander system. Turn off the Political Bonuses option as it adds an unnecessary complication at this point.

Leave Inexperienced Fleets on for now. You can turn it off later if you wish but the need to institute fleet training exercises adds a good degree of realism to the game.

Lets play with Real Star systems on as well. That takes care of system naming and it will add some familiarity to the universe. You can leave the Orbital Motion on as well. If you have a modern PC, you can turn on Orbital Motion for Asteroids as well.

Aha - the Moment of Truth! When you are ready click Create Game. This will take a minute or two and there will be a couple of popup messages. When all that is complete you will be back at the Game Details window with your new game selected. Press Enter to select the game and you will be at the main menu bar. Press F3 for the System Map.

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