Anyone given Aurora a go?

[Fiyenyaa]

I've been playing Aurora like mad the last couple of days; much like the time many years ago when I discovered Dwarf Fortress and didn't stop playing it for weeks, I've been sucked in by another ultra-complicated, low-fi game.
So far I've played a couple of games, one of which lasted for about a hundred years and ended in resource-based hell, as the easily-exploited resources of the Solar system faded and left my ill-thought out empire without fuel. So far in my new game (it's amazing how much a different leader-naming theme can help in spicing things up) I've been much more disciplined when it comes to fuel, and I think I'm on to a much more stable expansion.

Has anyone else enjoyed this most exciting of spreadsheets? Is there a person out there who knows how combat works (so far I've lost every ship that's been attacked)? Are there any fun stories to be told?

[Kelron]

I don't find it much fun. A lot of it seems like complexity for complexity's sake, rather than the depth of simulation and potential for creating stories that Dwarf Fortress has.

[agentorange]

Are you aiming at a specific section of an enemy ship? The way shielding works is that you have to blow through a shield tile before you can being damaging the interior components and do crippling damage; if you are firing scatter shot you'll never penetrate the shielding.

I don't find it much fun. A lot of it seems like complexity for complexity's sake, rather than the depth of simulation and potential for creating stories that Dwarf Fortress has.

There's plenty of opportunities for player made stories, it's not just not as lul random XD-though you can do stuff like annihilate a planet by shooting resources at it with a mass driver-as Dwarf Fortress. I say it's more like GalCiv 2 but with more numbers and charts in place of any graphics.

[R-F]

I exhausted Earth of resources and ended up being crushed by some random alien race. :(

[Fiyenyaa]

Are you aiming at a specific section of an enemy ship? The way shielding works is that you have to blow through a shield tile before you can being damaging the interior components and do crippling damage; if you are firing scatter shot you'll never penetrate the shielding.

Hm... Right. That's useful to know, but I think I'll need to go through a much more detailed overview of how combat worked - I was essentially just moving ships towards enemies (although they were much higher-tech than I was and never got into range).