“Grab your fedora, it’s time for Aurora – that real shit!” This looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, this isn’t the game – it’s footage from a show called “The Expanse”. THIS is the game. Yeah, this took me a while… I’ve heard the jokes about “EVE Online” being a space spreadsheet game, but I think this is it – this is THE space spreadsheet game. Despite how it looks, it’s got a dedicated following and a lot going on, so let’s check it out. “Aurora 4X” has been built over the past 13 years by one Englishman named Steve Walmsley. It started as a companion program for a 1970s’ pen and paper game called “Starfire”. The reboot of it was kind of odd. Over the years, “Aurora” morphed into being a 4X empire-building game, with many of the inspirations coming from games that Steve liked to play in 70s and 80s. In a Rock Paper Shotgun interview, he basically said that no one was making those games, so he went and made his own. That’s pretty admirable. For comparison, this is like someone making a program to speed up combat in “Dungeons & Dragons”, but recreating the campaign map in “Rome: Total War”. But it still keeps the individual combat in the same level of detail as “Dungeons & Dragons” – and that is a BIG scale increase. So, before I even start – this is an AMAZING side project for one guy to do. He’s still working on updates to it, has kept it free, and this man is clearly passionate. It’s a testament to his work that I’m gonna be able to compare it to some bigger budget 4X games and not really feel bad about it. So let’s take it from the top. When you start a new game, you’re gonna have a few options to tinker with. Then you’ll get even more options. This is gonna be a bit of a running theme. Some options – like starting year – are just for roleplay purposes. Then you have your more significant choices – like deciding whether you’re gonna be a Trans-Newtonian empire starting out or a conventional one. If you’ve played “Distant Worlds”, it means you’re pre-warp. But even if you choose Trans-Newtonian, you’re still gonna be in your starting system for a while. There’s also a few options for simplifying some of the harsher game mechanics. I’ll talk about a few of these later, because there’s just too many to cover in one video. You also create your race from this screen, and this gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re getting into. If a game is asking you about temperature and pressure tolerances, you’re in for some shit… When you start the game, it might look like you did something wrong, but it’s cool – you just need to press F3. And there it is. If you already feel lost before the game even started – you’re not alone. I tried the older version out years ago, but even this time around, I needed to use a wiki just to start a new game. This is a good time to talk about the visuals. I’ve heard them called intimidating, boring and ugly. What’s weird is that whenever I look at this game, I’m always reminded of using a Ti-83 calculator. I’d show you what I mean, but I lost it somewhere in my recording studio, and I’ll probably never find it. Getting back on track, I wouldn’t necessarily call it ugly – more like utilitarian. This style isn’t unusual for simulator games, but I’ve never played a lot of those. Even with those games, they try to inject SOME artwork into it. I found most of the graphics in the game were in the race editor (if you don’t count the taskbar at the top). If you’re raising an eyebrow at these races, it’s also because I’m using the all-in-one installer. It’s a pre-patched and packaged version of the game which includes some artwork and a soundtrack. The art stuff is okay, but I really dig the music they included. It’s made by a Lithuanian composer who goes by the name Stellardrone, and he releases all this stuff for free. If you like the more synthy stuff in “Stellaris”, you’ll probably be a fan of his work. You could play this stuff in almost any space game, and it would sound great. It’s also the only sound in the game besides the Windows error noises, so… take what you can get. So, this style of interface is about as simple as it can be. The game is just crammed with features to the point where all the buttons look really intimidating. But there are two glaring problems with the UI. 1) Some areas have a lack of player feedback. For example, here is me researching a technology. It asks: “Are you sure?” Yeah! And then it pops up at the top. I get that I did something. A lot of the time there is no confirmation prompt, and you just click from a dropdown menu option, and the order is sent. So you would not need to click this big button below all the options. What’s more difficult is that these menus have a lot going on. Sometimes, it looked like the game was about to crash, but then it was all fine. It was just processing a more complex command. When I designed a ship part and pressed “Create”, the game just stared at me. Did I do something wrong? Well, no, because if you go to the research tab, you’ll see – it’s right there. It just doesn’t tell you it worked. Some features have prompts, others don’t. Some work flawlessly, some look like they’re about to break your computer. The problem is inconsistency. It makes the learning curve way steeper for an already complex game. Steve himself admits that this is the nature of the game, and he can’t really fine-tool everything to be streamlined. This means that player is dealing with a significant learning curve. I could handle “Distant Worlds”, I could handle “EVE Online”, I could even feel comfortable in “Dwarf Fortress”, but “Aurora” might be my limit. Even after loads of research and watching tutorials, I’m still confident that I’m missing a lot. It tries to help you with mouse-over tips, but it feels like you really need outside material. The first hours of “Aurora” feel like going into a room, forgetting why you went there, getting a snack and then putting your cereal box in the fridge. 2) When I said there were some glaring problems, I meant that a little more literally. Let’s look at some other space 4X games. Here we have “Endless Space”, “Master of Orion 2”, “Stellaris”, “Distant Worlds”, “Sword of the Stars” and this game. Now, these games have very different mechanics, but they have the same goal – which is to have the player sit down and play some long campaigns. I’m gonna rapidly show you the screenshots from these games, and I want you to see if you can tell when “Aurora 4X” comes up. Ready? Don’t blink! Assuming YouTube didn’t mess up the frames, you could probably tell by the blinding white light that went into your eyes. "AHHHH!"
Assuming YouTube didn’t mess up the frames, you could probably tell by the blinding white light that went into your eyes. Yeah, the map has a nice dark scheme, but 95% of the time you’ll be in menus. This is absolute hell on my eyes. It’s the same feeling you get from office work or writing a big paper in university, only it’s worse, because the font is small and there’s a lot to read. 4X games in and out of space use a dark UI so you don’t burn your eyes out playing it. If “Aurora” did have a night mode, I’d probably be able to play it longer in one sitting. I guess, the bright side to this is if you have an office job with poor supervision, you could probably play this at work, and no one would call you out on it. That being said, let me tell you how this game is played. This is gonna be a bit streamlined. Sorry, but I didn’t have a choice here. Explaining one mechanic in detail has pitfalls lead to other mechanics, and each would take about 3-5 minutes, and it would go on forever. I’m trying to give an overview, but I was accidentally making a guide at first. Do you know how much I had to scrap to do… When you start a new game, you’ll have a big pile of resources on your starting planet. “Quantity” is self-explanatory, but “Access” is how easy it is to actually dig them up. You could have a fat stack of Uridium, but that won’t help if you can’t get it out easily. So your first priority should be building some ships and exploring the universe and finding more resources. But that’s not so simple. First, you need to make sure that slipways for the space port can actually fit the big ship you’re gonna build. You can constantly increase the size of them, but that costs some resources, and you don’t need a ton at the start. Next, you need to do research to actually build your space ships. If you had a conventional start, the first thing you wanna look into is that Trans-Newtonian tech, cause that’s gonna make things a lot faster. But you wanna research the right way. Sciences are broken up into fields, and to research something, you need a scientist and labs. Scientists have a field they specialize in, like real life. So, you put your physics and engineering experts into their own relevant projects. Biologists make everybody lunch. Research gets faster the more experienced the scientist gets or if you build more labs for them to work in. So we’re already touching on two other areas of the game, but I’m gonna start with the scientists. The game has several kinds of characters, and you’ll end up with several hundred if you keep going. That sounds a bit daunting, but it’s really not that bad. Characters have a wide variety of personality traits. In other games, these reflect drawbacks or bonuses, but not here. These can be customized, and are purely for the roleplaying aspect of the game. So this part down here doesn’t matter. The top right is what’s important. Clicking through the people here will show their bonuses. For a pure research scientist, a lot of these won’t matter, but they can have huge impacts in other areas, like assigning a planetary or sector leader. You get a set amount per year, but you can get more by building military academies. This gives you chances for more researchers, along with the other kinds of leaders. Luckily, there’s an "automated assignments" button, so you don’t have to micromanage everybody in the empire. But we’ll come back to that a little bit later. That’s part ONE of the research question, but where do labs come from? "Woof, woof!" The easy answer is “construction”, but “Aurora” has a rate of construction. You might be noticing a pattern here… You increase it by building new factories, or converting your old ones into Trans-Newtonian facilities. This takes time and resources, but you control what percentage of your factories’ output is spent on what, so you can build new factories while working on other stuff. Star ship fuel isn’t a part of that – it uses refineries. And yeah – of course there’s star ship fuel… Now, passage in time in “Aurora” can range from 30 days to 5 seconds. Most actions, like research and construction, are only measured in 5 day increments. That really short stuff is for combat, which is almost real time, I guess. So your earliest turns are based around construction and getting people assigned. When a turn ends, you’ll notice some orbital bodies have moved, and you’ll get an update on the bottom. Sometimes, so much has happened that information can be buried. But it does highlight important stuff, and there’s a log you can look at for details. So the game does try to help you manage all this information and doesn’t leave you completely to the wind. It’s rough, but manageable. Your starting solar system is also a test. If you find it too hard here, you’re not gonna make it in the rest of the game. So, while your initial planet management is pretty… well… manageable – it’s when you deal with space flight that things can get tricky, and I suspect a lot of people drop out here. Building one does have more convenience features than other games, but it also has some drawbacks. So, here’s how you build a ship: what the ship is gets decided by the parts you put in (this thing up here doesn’t mean anything – it’s for roleplaying). The designer will just flood you with these stats, but adding a part to your ship is as simple as clicking it. You don’t need to manually add in all the crew support stuff too, that games like “Distant Worlds” will do. It will automatically give you the bare minimum and adjust if you take something away. Simple enough so far. I noticed something fairly quickly when I was building my first ship – and that’s: I couldn’t see any engines. That’s because you have to DESIGN your first engine. Nearly every ship component in the game can be customized this way. Even the engines you put on your missiles can be customized. I don’t think I can remember any other game that does this. What about the missile design menu? Oh my God… Missiles are… extensive, to say the least, so we’re not gonna deal with that. As for engines, big, fuel-efficient ones are what you want in your civilian ships. The game will tell you if it thinks it’ll be better for a civilian ship or a military one, but it’s your choice. It’s not over yet though, because then you need to go to the lab and research the engine. Any other parts you wanted on your ship, like sensors or lasers, also need to be researched. So you might need to study hard before you go up into the stars. You also need to factor in the deployment time of your ship, so you’ll need to measure the range of how far it will go out and how much fuel it will use on its journey. The last thing you wanna do is build a ship just to get it stuck somewhere. The first ship you build is typically a survey ship. This is because you wanna be scanning for materials as quickly as you can. So, once it’s to your liking, the design is saved. This is why you want to have your shipyard tonnage in check – it can’t be built if it’s too big. So, when it does fit, then you retool the shipyard to build that specific kind of ship you wanna build. Doing this for bigger ships later can take a long time. The ship takes a few months to build, so just work on other stuff in the meanwhile. Then the day finally comes – you built your first ship. But why does it say “shipyard”? Sorry, I hope you weren’t expecting to click around with your space ship… You give orders through a special “Fleet” menu, and your first fleet is usually named after your shipyard. You can give manual orders like shown here, but also add on to them conditional orders, like dropping everything and refueling at a certain tick. This is done in a separate tab of the same menu. It can be a pain to set up, but once it’s working, it’s pretty nice. Orders can be cycled an infinite number of times, or a set number. So, something like constant resupply to a colony is a pretty easy setup. If it’s set up right, the ship will start moving with the turns. Yeah, see? Look at it go! Surveying your solar system is where the game starts picking up. This is where you start developing colonies and mining ores – all that good stuff. There are some detailed survey reports that help the player best decide where to mine, but they won’t be 100% accurate, unless you form a science team to land on the planet and do a ground survey. I’m not gonna get into those, but it gives some other scientists something to do. “Aurora” is interesting, and probably more realistic, in that you don’t need to have populated colonies. You just need to send automated mining equipment there. You might not even have to send it yourself. The private sector is simulated in “Aurora”. If they have enough money, they’ll build their own ships, and sometimes found their own colonies. So you can save on building cargo ships if you just contract Papa John’s to do it for you. Just make sure to fill out the right supply and demand paperwork for it. Because in “Aurora”, deliveries between planets are done by mass driver. If you’ve made it this far into the video, you probably know what that is, so I’m not gonna explain it to you. In “Aurora”, building the mass driver’s also building the RECEIVING system for one. So what if you accidentally mess up your paperwork and send all your mass drivers on Earth somewhere else? This is a 30 ton rock, going nearly 55 MpH, and there’s no Bruce Willis to stop it. So guess what happens? (distorted) "Ahhhhh!" So do your paperwork right… Deciding to make populated colonies is when things get even trickier. Populations become rebellious if they don’t feel protected, or they don’t have enough infrastructure. Now, you could just keep supply lines going, but terraforming is a much better idea. Unfortunately, it’s very time-consuming in “Aurora”. I said that I tried not to make this video a guide, but I’ve dangerously been in that territory. I’ve been doing this to make a point: the steps are simple – it’s learning the process that’s difficult. Building a new ship or researching a new technology is a fairly straightforward thing to learn in other 4X games, but in “Aurora” it requires digging through multiple menus, or at least reading some tutorials about it. So when you get to features like terraforming, that’s where the game really becomes a handful. In a game like “Stellaris”, you just need generic terraforming gasses and liquids and some money, and you’re good to go. By now, you should know what to expect from this game. My favorite examples for describing “Aurora” are either the missiles or terraforming. So here’s how it works. You could build a terraforming ship, but moving over installations is easier at first. Once it’s moved to the colony planet, you move to the environment tab and that’s where you need to do the work. Remember the species’ tolerances in the character creator long ago? Yeah, that’s coming back… You need to choose the exact type of gas to inject into the atmosphere. Once that’s chosen, then you need to choose the AMOUNT of gas you add into the atmosphere. Messing up the pressure is a good way to kill everybody. This process takes years, and you need to monitor the atmospheric data. You need gasses to balance out the first, greenhouse gasses to measure the temperature – you have to do EVERYTHING. This would be a simple deal in another game, but here it’s very specific. Honestly, that’s the best way to sum up the game: “it’s very specific”. This is its greatest strength and its greatest downfall. “Aurora’s” features are so deep and so smartly connected, it would take… Idunno… HOURS to explain it all thoroughly. It makes the thorough mechanic review nearly impossible. However, if you master your first solar system, you should be fine in others. Whatever you learn in your first system will apply to all the others, and the game does a good job of making you learn that. Switching between them isn’t hard with a dropdown menu, or you could just use the galactic subway map. With one exception, there wasn’t anything in another system that radically changed my process of doing things. So what’s that exception? [dramatic music sting] Oh, cool, aliens! Combat’s the last feature I’m gonna talk about, because some people don’t even get it in their games. The weapon systems on your ships can be placed into groups. That means, if you’re willing to, you can control every weapon on every one of your ships manually during a fight. And that’s pretty impressive. If you’re not willing to do that, there’s also an auto-fire option. Either way, these can get pretty destructive. You typically wanna change your turn to the small increments, so you can see how the battle is going. Ships can lose control of their systems if they’re damaged enough, and if they’re hit too badly, they might have to scuttle, or they just blow up. The ship damage system is very intricate. I find it a lot more enjoyable in smaller skirmishes, because when it gets into huge fleet battles, things can get pretty hard to follow. Visually, you’ll see escape pods being marked, explosions, and also wrecks appearing. Battles can also be financially profitable, since it has an “EVE Online”-like salvaging mechanic. They could also provide useful military intelligence. A lot of battles can depend on who brought the best anti-missile missiles, but there’s other things you could do, too. Like any strategy game, knowing which fight to take is your best bet. Ground forces can also be involved in boarding enemy ships, or attacking enemy planets, but most of this isn’t visual. “Aurora” thrives from imagination. You could pretend that your favorite characters from “Starship Troopers” are fighting the enemies in their ships. Well, oka… This isn’t “Starship Troopers”. This is from, ehm… “Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy”, but… beh… You know… I wouldn’t call “Aurora” a bad game. I think it’s just not MY type of game. Let’s say, in theory, you work in some kind of office environment: you go home, you’ve eaten, decide to fire up a game, and then THIS stares back at you… I think, there would be a lot of days, where you just wouldn’t want to play it. For me, a lot of complexity with some tedious areas, on top of having a really visually unappealing design, is a fatal flaw. It’s worth noting that this is version 7.1, and Steve has been working on version 8. So a lot of the nastier bug squashing is probably not gonna be until then. Ultimately, this is a game Steve made for himself and other fans of these older tabletop games. He was just nice enough to share it with the public and do it for free. It’ll always make me curious of what he could do if he had a budget and a team to work with. As it stands, calling this game “specialized” is an understatement, but hey, it’s free, so check it out! This video took longer than the others, but I wanted to give it a fair amount of time. Plus, I was trying to think of a way to maybe make a video a little bit nicer, but… there wasn’t a lot I could do. I’ve started tracking requests using a Google document, that I’m gonna pin in the comments. So let me know what you wanna see next. “Aurora” was interesting for how few games are like it. The one tabletop player I know is nearly dead, but… Anyways, thanks for watching! ♪ They took the credit for your second symphony ♪ ♪ Rewritten by machine on new technology ♪ ♪ And now I understand the problems you can see ♪ ♪ (Oh a oh) I met your children ♪ ♪ (Oh a oh) What did you tell them? ♪ ♪ Video killed the radio star (x2) ♪ ♪ Pictures came and broke your heart (Oh, a, a, a, oh) ♪ Speaking of dead things: I think it’s time this story got told… Today, I will remind them. (Ahhhh)
You're right I did enjoy the first 11 seconds of this vid
Wow.
I've been subscribed to Mandalore for years, watched every video of his about twice or more, yet still forgot he referenced The Expanse in one of his videos.
Ohhh, I remember reading After Action Reports of this game a decade ago on the Paradox Off Topic Forums. It's still alive? Damn.
Definitely sounded like a drum and bass intro to me