Majno,

If the civilians are launching, say, a colony ship or a freighter of their own, you don't need to do anything with them. You can use them to carry automated mines or other cargo if you don't want to deal with that yourself, but otherwise they will do their own thing. Civilians will start carrying colonists and infrastructure to Luna, and you can pretty much let them alone. Eventually, if you colonize other bodies or get 10 million or more people somewhere, they'll start carrying other trade goods on their own, and probably start setting up mining complexes on asteroids or moons as you survey them. You can buy the output from them for a small amount of wealth or just tax it, as they come with a free mass driver.

Hope this helps.

bananas,

You need to basically drag and drop targets to the fire controls you want to, erm, target them. You can also drag and drop weapons on your ships to the fire controls they will use. Alternatively, you can press the auto-assign buttons to have the game try to calculate assignments for targets and fire controls for you, though it currently has a few issues with missiles. You can also copy a ship's orders across it's fleet, so that ships of the same class target the same enemy units, or what have you.

Combat is admittedly the area in which I have least experience, so if you care to send along your database I can have a look at what you're seeing and try to provide more practical guidance.

Bananas,

Okay, here goes…

For starters, the sheer amount of weapons and such on your ship makes things kind of confusing all on its own. Basically, I can walk you through the UI, but I wouldn't want to try actually fighting a battle with this ship. In addition, some parts of this, like determining range to target, require you to muck around in other parts of the fleet window. I've asked that range information be included in the list of potential targets if possible.

Here's how things work.

You have to drag weapons to the fire control you want them to be assigned to, or just use the auto-assign FCs, button. If you check the "Assign all," checkbox, that will automatically assign all weapons of the same type to the same fire control. There's also a variety of fleet buttons which basically copy the FC assignments or targeting info from your ship to others in the same fleet, of the same class.

You then have to drag the target from "Potential targets," to the fire control you want to use. All this is indicated in the tree view as you do it. Finally, you can click "Open Fire all," or "Open fire BFC," or whatever.

Note a few things.

Your cruisers do not have missiles. You need to specify the default load out on the ordnance tab, I believe. Thus, I was unable to test missile combat but was able to fire at Mercury with some of your lasers. NOte that your cruisers start out orbiting Earth, not MErcury, so it takes about 6 hours for them to get into beam range.

Hope this helps a little, though combat is still an area that could use some accessibility support. The actual controls are fine, it's just a little hard to tell where things are at the moment.

Also, don't forget to turn on your active sensors before you fire at anything.

Just a quick note, as I've been messing with fire controls, beam weapons and related things.

It's a good idea to have multiple fire controls on a ship if you want to be able to target multiple targets or missile salvos at the same time. That being said, mixing tons of different beam weapons without a specific plan for how you're going to use each of them is still a questionable idea.

Also, just as a note, when I fired my lasers at Mercury your cruisers were utterly wrecked within five seconds or so by massive beam weapons fire. Just as a heads up. It's not a very survivable position to be in, firing at a planet.

i found this tactics usefull: you need to fly to the planet, where you know that is enemy here. and stop flying at range, where you can fire him with weapons. it's somehow long process, but if you want, you can calculate time to stop at needed range.  it's dangerous because enemy launch lot of missiles, but. if you construct good ships, you can shot down them. one problem is missile design, but we will waiting a new ubdates. using alot of cyws helps too with missile problem.

Majno,

The "Ground-based survey potential: Completed," thing is a little misleading. It is indeed related to the potential to find new minerals, but it's the default for bodies which won't benefit from a survey as well as for bodies which have already been surveyed. If you find a body which will benefit it will say something like Potential: minimal or potential: good. At that point you need to design a ground unit with geosurvey equipment and land them on the planet to start that process.

Bananas, there is an order to "follow," a particular target, and when you give that you can also tell your ship to stop at a specific range in KM, by using the "minimum available,' box. It's useful for  stopping yourself at your weapons range. Also, you can design anti-missile missiles, which can help thin out the herd, and set your beam weapons to fire in  various point defense modes, in addition to CIWS.

LordLondon, combat is one thing I haven't looked much at, but it's also an area where we'd benefit most from a few accessibility tweaks. I've asked Steve to add range finding info for us, and he has said he will look into doing so for the next version. The actual combat UI is easy enough, it's just the mechanics of applying it that can be confusing.

Hi Bananas.
Mass drivers can not send minerals through systems.
The range thing is something we have suggested but I don't know if he'll implement it. It's a relatively easy thing though so I'm fairly confident he will.
I don't know what you mean with colony cost.

bananas

We have wrote suggestions for the game dev here:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?t … #msg133089
Feel free to add your suggestions there

You mean a .rar?

Use 7zip
https://www.7-zip.org/download.html

well, in my opinion, naval, commanders tree and system view,. it's some parts, where at start people can have problems. for example, i don't know how properly create a fleet comander now. maybe in design window people can be in trouble too. but, it's only my opinion.

Daren,
Okay. You need to just unzip all three folders to one place, replacing the files as you go. So start with 1.51 and put that into somewhere like c:\aurora, then just put the other versions on top of it.