Aurora4X is one of the most forefront in the 4X gaming world. For those not in the know, 4X stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate.

OK, What Does That Mean Really?

In Aurora4X you take the role of the leader of a Space fearing civilisation, tasked with expanding from your homeworld into other star systems. Design components such as weapons, ranging from high powered microwaves disabling your enemy's sensor systems, to large 30 Inch laser cannons, or devistating meson cannons bipassing your enemy's armor belt and powerful missiles. Engines to power your ships with different configurations according to its application, and even the magazines to store said missiles. All of these are based on research your scientists have undertaken. Design and construct ships to fulfil various roles, from cargoships,  to tugboats and salvagers, aircraft carriers, troup transports, and even luxury liners.
Allot of people find this game a bit tricky to get started with however, so I've decided to start my own little playthrough thing to hopefully help you out. Note, this is a very complexed game, and I don't know everything. My methods may not be the best ways of doing things, just what I choose to do. Playstyles is all dependent on the type of game you want to play, which we'll get to in a second. I mostly found my way by googling my questions. Because yes, unlike most audiogames there's a large and vibrant Aurora community. The folks on their reddit is pretty warm and welcoming, and their wiki page is quite comprehensive. I'll post the links to those at the bottom of the page. For now, lets dive into it.

A disclaimer

This isn't intended as a tutorial, or the bible of what you should do. I don't intend to explain all the concepts and mechanics in complete detail, however I will give an overview so you know what I'm doing. Once again, the wiki page, youtube and reddit are excellent sources of learning material for the game. I'll link to some great tools at the bottom of this post later on, but again, just keep that in mind. This is more like a guide, or a hinter, not a full indepth tutorial. Once again there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to play this game according to what you want to do, your enemies, etc.

Lets Make A new Game, Already

Lets get into it, we're going to create a new game for the purposes of this walkthrough. Tab over to the game window button, press enter. When the window pops up, tab over to new game and press enter and we'll go from there.

Explaining the Complicated Stuff

A lot of the options are pretty self-explanatory, so I'll only talk about the things I'm adjusting. The first thing we'll look at is the Sol Disaster. Its as the name suggests, some tragedy within our solar system. The sun can either heat up or cool down, and I believe the earth  can move further or closer away depending. Research speed is how fast research projects happen. 100 is the default, and anything lower is slower, while anything above is faster. Since this is just intended for teaching purposes I've sped it up to 120. Note, this also affects the rate at which aliens can research too. I've left Teraform and Survey Speed at the default. They function the same way as Research Speed. I've turned on Realistic Commander promotions. In other words, commanders will be promoted based on their relative merit and skill rather than if you had enabled political bonus, where they'd be promoted based on their political connections.

The Spoilers

The spoilers are predefined races that Steve, the creater of the game coded in. The NPR's, (Non-Player Races), are all randomly generated, but Spoilers have specially defined atributes, tactics and behaviours. I'll go over them now, and you can choose whether or not to enable them. I'm up for a challenge, so I've enabled Precursors, Star Swarm and Aether Raiders. I don't have much experience with the Invaders, but I've read that they're quite challenging, and dealing with 4 enemies at once plus NPR's could become overwelming.

Precursors

The Precursors were once apart of a mighty empire that ruled the galaxy. That is, until a mighty enemy came in and wiped them out. That enemy as of now is unknown. At present, their empire is nothing more than a few scattered ships traversing  the galaxy attempting to destroy all ships that are not of their, "Race". Its advised to keep them on as a newby, as they're not really a structured enemy force. They're just a merry band of misfits running around the universe.

Star Swarm

Star Swarm is your stereotypical alien faction. As I understand it, they're a *organic* race. I couldn't find too much on them, but as I understand it, they overwelm you like a hoard of cockroaches or locusts. They even have  a mothership and everything.

Aether Raiders

Think of the raiders as pirates. A redditor put it best when they said the following: "Pirate bros basically. Warp into a system, fuck with your civvies, then nope back out for shits and giggles." They just send in a few ships to attack your merchant shipping. They might also send in an invasion fleet to capture and enslave your colonies. They can get pretty nasty if left unchecked.

Invaders

Invaders, as the name suggests rapidly expands throughout the universe, to conquer and subjugate non-invader races. They're a pretty damned nasty spoiler, so only enable them if you know what you're doing.

Finishing touches

We're keeping the all jump points are stable checkbox unchecked. Basically this means if its on, then you'll be able to go through all the jump points without stabalising them. In experienced fleet penalties as the name suggests penalises your fleets for not being trained. When you build and staff a new ship, it'll have a stat called fleet training. This measures how skilled the ship's gunnery and so on are. If its under 50%, the ship might not be able to fire her guns, or may alternatively fire the guns so poorly that it goes boom and you're engineering team is gonna be so pissed they might end up turning those 25CM guns at the gunnery crew. No maint is pretty self-explanatory. With this on your ships won't use maint supplies or will suffer system failures. NPR"s generate precursors means that the NPR's will also encounter the precursors. I've turned that on. Civilian shipping lines are pretty damn useful. Basically private industry will transport colonists to your colonies.

You've finished with the Universe! Build your Empire now!

And we're done designing our universe. The next few steps is all about customising your own empire.

Getting into it

I'm calling my empire The Federal Republic of Nigeria. The British Empire, Space USA and Space Japan are so overdone, lets try something different. The Short name will be FRN, class theme nations of earth, rank theme War Hammer Empire, and name theme English. I'm leaving all the environmental stuff alone for now, however setting population growth to 1.10, ditto for manufacturing and density.

The Population

I'm setting the population to 1.6 billion, or 1620. Remember, the game measures in thousands of millions, so it can get confusing. I left all the industrial stuff to what the game gave me with the acception of 20 shipyars instead of 10, and 100 labs. Something to note; All of these facilities, shipyards, factories, etc all need people to man them. If you don't have large enough a population, you'll suffer efficiency penalties. So they'll be functioning, just not to optimal conditions.

Auto-Design Classes

Auto designed classes are interesting. Basically what this will do is use your available technology to design various ship classes. Some common ones are fuel harvestors, heavy and escort cruisers etc. If you're new you might want to put it on just as a guide as to things you could do, but I'm keeping it off because I like designing my own ships. I will leave auto designed ground force units on though. Note, in order for the game to auto design classes, you'll need to check the allocate techpoints checkbox. When you've done that, the game will randomly research things and from there, the game will pull on your available tech to design components for the ship.

And we're Done. Lets Actually Play Now

Enough technical jibber jabber, tab over to create race and you're ready to dive into the game. The entire universe is at your finger tips.

Lets Begin

When it finally does load, you can glance at your auto designed ship classes by pressing F5. Ctrl+F2 will also show you the things researched via the events screen. Anyways, lets go design a few ships together, shall we?

Our Ship Platforms

For now the main ships I want to design are a survey platform and a small corvette for planetary protection value.
Much like in the real world you have to send out ships equipt with specialised sensors to scan bodies for their sweet, sweet lute. Planets, astroids, comets etc all have to be surveyed before further action can be taken, meanwhile, in order to break out into other solar systems, you have to scan for jump points, or basically wormholes. These roles require separate, specialised sensors, however to simplify production we're going to make a duel purpose vessel, or in otherwords a ship with the capability to do both. So we'll design one together.
When designing ships, people like to pain stakingly plan every detail. Its displacement, speed, etc. I don't do that for commercial/utility vessels like surveyers. I like thinking of things I want it to do, and how I plan to do it. So, here's our short list for this ship.\

The Shortlist

1. It should be able to survey both for minerals and JP's.
2. It should have a pretty decent fuel range. Anything above 85billion KM would be fine.
3. Likewise Maitlife should be high.
4. Her engine should be small as to make her less detectable from alien ships if we should encounter any.

Lets Actually Design The Damn Thing

So with our 4 design cues out of the way lets get to designing shall we?
I named this ship Christopher Columbus, and the name scheme will be 16TH century explorers, I set the deployment to 48 months or 4 years, meaning the ship's crew is capable of surviving 4 years in space before they have to go back to earth for overhalls and shore time. I designated it as a survey craft, and equipt it with a pair of each sensor.
We're mostly done, now all we have to do is design an engine for her. Press F10 to get into the component design window. Tab over to the dropdown that says Active Search Sensor/Missile Fiure control. Scroll down until you meet engine and shift tab over to the engine tech. Example Nuclear Pulse, Radio Isotope engine, etc. Use your best available engine tech, press up arrow until you get your lowest engine power. The lower, the less fuel it'll use, but the less output the engine will give. This is a surveyer, so speed isn't required. Best tech for fuel consumption. Thermal reduction isn't important  for now, and lastly, I've made the displacement of the engine 4HS, or 200 tons. Name your engine, and the company and create. I usually like to go into space master and instant the design, but some of you may choose to research it. You can go back to the economics screen by pressing f2, navigating to the research tab and then going to the power and propulsion option. Focus on your engine, and tab over to instant, and you're done. If you've left the class design window opened, hit refresh tech. If you closed it, just open it as usual. Add the engine to the design and you're good.
With our engine added to the design, I'm quite impressed. I decided to make a few changes. I upped the deployment to 10 years and added enough engineering facilities to support this. You can see the design below.

The Design

Christophor Columbus class Survey Craft      1,377 tons       37 Crew       298 BP       TCS 28    TH 13    EM 0
464 km/s      Armour 1-11       Shields 0-0       HTK 11      Sensors 0/0/1/1      DCR 2      PPV 0
Maint Life 12.61 Years     MSP 270    AFR 8%    IFR 0.1%    1YR 3    5YR 47    Max Repair 100 MSP
Captain    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 120 months    Morale Check Required    

Warner-Webb Nuclear Pulse Engine  EP12.80 (1)    Power 12.8    Fuel Use 12.80%    Signature 12.80    Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres    Range 254.9 billion km (6357 days at full power)

Geological Survey Sensors (1)   1 Survey Points Per Hour
Gravitational Survey Sensors (1)   1 Survey Points Per Hour

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Survey Ship for auto-assignment purposes

Remarks

As you can see, its pretty cheap to build only requiring 290BP. We can build it in about 6 months or so. the chances for system failures are low, and its supply usage is quite low. You might be wondering, if its deployment is 10 years why does it have a maintenance life of almost 13 years? Simple. Its to allow room for failure such as fuel running out, an attack, etc. Its good practice to have slightly more supplies than its deployment. Ditto for fuel. 

Something Very Important When Designing Ships

Something that's very important when you're designing your ships are the AFR, 1YR, and 5YR. The AFR is the Anual Failure Rate. Meaning the chance something in the ship will be damaged thus requiring a repair, eating up MSP on the ship. 1YR and 5YR shows the amount the ship is expected to use in the first and 5TH years of service respectively. You want to try and keep these as humanly low as possible. The AFR, 1YR and 5YR for our design is great.

Our Patrol Crafts

The next design I want is a small patrol craft. Its main purpose is to keep colonial holdings and even earth feel safe. When a colony grows beyond I believe 10,000,000 inhabitants, they like feeling protected, so we'll design a ship like that now.

Back to The Naval Design Board

For this one I want to plan it out a little more. For roleplay purposes, I like limitting the displacement of my ships of war to under 3500 tons for the first 10 years. And that's one of the first glories of Aurora. Your imagination lets you run wild in the things you can, and can't do. Anyways, I want her to have a speed above 4000KM/s. I want her to have a light armor belt, perhaps 3 layers at the most, and I'll equip her with plasma carronades. Range isn't quite the issue, perhaps 5 billion KM if so much. Her main role will be to patrol Earth, the moon and Mars which I intend to colonise first.
So lets get into it. Since this is a patrol boat we'll name it after ships of the Scarlet Ibis Class of the Trinidad And Tobago Coastguard. I set the armor belt to 3 layers, and gave it a deployment of 18 months. Now we're gonna design a few components. The first thing I want is an active search sensor, which is basically a space radar system. So design tech, you start off on the design window for them so just start designing straight away. I'm using my best tech for Active Grav Sensor Strength, ditto for EM and thermal sensetivity. I'm setting the size of the combonent to 6 HS, or 300 tons.
Resolution is a specialised range of the sensor. In otherwords, the sensor will be specially trained to detect enemy ships at, or larger than that. Anything smaller the sensor will struggle to see. It'll be able to pick it up, but instead of seeing, say a 5,000 ton object 20 million KM away, it'll see a 500 ton object 150,000 KM instead, which isn't ideal. So this is why we have sensors for different size ranges. So I'm going to equip this one with 2 sensors of equal size, and a third smaller one but different resolutions. One will be equipt for vessels 4,4500 tons or larger, and another one for 250 tons or larger, basically fighters and raiders because they use cloaking technology which we'll talk about much later in this walkthrough. The third smaller sensor will be for hunting down enemy missiles should they be fired against me. Early on in the game this may not be necessary, however I'm thinking in the future these can be refitted to be fleet sensor platforms. And this is yet again, one of the glories of this game. The play style is completely up to you,and  your ship classes are completely dynamic in their roles and functions.
We're setting this to a search sensor, not a missile Fire Control sensor, and finally name your sensor, and research/prototype and you're done. Adding both components to the ship, the next thing we want is an engine with decent power.
For the engine I gave it best available power boost tech, best available tech for fuel consumption and thermal damping, displacement of 500 tons, and we're done. Right now she's pretty fast, but when we add guns, which we're going to do now, it'll come down.
For armament, I want to use Plasma Carronades. They're relatively cheap, but can provide a decent punch if needed. Remember, the only purpose of these ships is to look shiny and sexy, and fight as a last resort. This section is relatively short, I'm going to use a 15CM Carronade, though in some cases a larger one provides more power to weight ratio, but 15 is my best tech right now. Give it the best recharge rate you have, and then we're done. The next thing we're going to add to our ship is a power plant. All guns, with the acception of Gauss Cannons require power which is fed to them by a power plant. Our ship needs about 12 power, so we'll design to suit. I ended up on a displacement of 2.45 HS which gave me 12.17 power which is perfect for our needs.
And finally, beam fire controls allow your guns to aim and fire. Without them those sweet, sweet shiny guns won't be able to blast your enemies into oblivion! And ya know, impress your citizens at official naval parades or something. Our guns have a range of 60,000KM, however my max fire control rating is 48. Have no fear, we can increase our max tracking range by increasing the size of the component. You can also increase the fire control tracking speed I believe which will allow your guns to target enemies faster than you. I've made this a single weapon fire control as our ship has a unified armament.

With that out of the way we've finished all the major components. We're just going to add engineering and mait facilities. A few corners had to be cut to make the 3500 displacement limit, but its still a pretty OK design in my opinion.

Here's what the Admiralty Came Up With

Scarlet Ibis class Police Cutter      3,424 tons       102 Crew       518.7 BP       TCS 68    TH 320    EM 0
4673 km/s      Armour 3-20       Shields 0-0       HTK 26      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 2      PPV 8
Maint Life 4.10 Years     MSP 189    AFR 47%    IFR 0.7%    1YR 18    5YR 270    Max Repair 80.00 MSP
Captain    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 18 months    Morale Check Required    

Hammersmith Police Thrusters Nuclear Pulse Engine  EP160.00 (2)    Power 320.0    Fuel Use 452.55%    Signature 160.00    Explosion 20%
Fuel Capacity 400,000 Litres    Range 4.6 billion km (11 days at full power)

Morgan Ordnance 15 cm C3 Plasma Carronade (2)    Range 60,000km     TS: 4,673 km/s     Power 6-3     RM 10,000 km    ROF 10       
Hart-Watkins Beam Fire Control R72-TS6000 (SW) (2)     Max Range: 72,000 km   TS: 6,000 km/s     86 72 58 44 31 17 3 0 0 0
Murray & Wall Pebble Bed Reactor R12 (1)     Total Power Output 12.3    Exp 5%

Howells & Nicholson Active Search Sensor AS16-R5 (1)     GPS 240     Range 16.4m km    Resolution 5
Howells & Nicholson Active Search Sensor AS42-R90 (1)     GPS 4320     Range 42.9m km    Resolution 90
Howells & Nicholson Active Search Sensor AS6-R1 (1)     GPS 24     Range 6.8m km    MCR 609.3k km    Resolution 1

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Warship for auto-assignment purposes

Something I forgot to mention, you can go to the misc tab of the class design screen and customise your class a little more. Select a name scheme, and even assign a prefix to your vessels. Since we're playing as Nigeria, the prefix will be NNS.

Now For Our Big Rigs

WE designed ourselves a pair of nice military ships, however its time to build up a fleet of commercial ships to handle our shipping needs. We're going to build a fraiter, with the cargo capacity of 25,000 tons.
This is a much more straight forward platform to design as there are less variables. I've named her St Lawrence, after the Canadian river system. I've given her a deployment of 3 months, and I've also turned on the conscript option. Basically what this means is we won't be pulling away skilled military men to operate a cargo ship. Nextly going to add 1 standard cargo hold, and 2 cargo shuttles. Nextly we're going to design yet one last engine for this, however we're going to give it a 1 size fits all approach. All our commercial ships will use this one going forward. Lowest possible engine power and consumption, and we're giving it a size of 2,000 tons, 40HS. Anything above 25HS and a engine power under 50% qualifies as a commercial engine. The benefit to this means that it won't suffer any Maintenance failures. The downside is these ships are balls slow, but doesn't matter anyway. I've also added a single CIWS. CIWS are basically guns that you can  equip to commercial ships as a last resort. They can fend off missiles in a pinch, but not meant to attack or anything like that. I've used the best available tech.

St Lawrence class Freighter      33,057 tons       99 Crew       408 BP       TCS 661    TH 256    EM 0
387 km/s      Armour 1-91       Shields 0-0       HTK 28      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 1      PPV 0
MSP 7    Max Repair 50 MSP
Cargo 25,000    Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 6    
Commander    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    

Bell-Armstrong Thrust Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine  EP128.0 (2)    Power 256.0    Fuel Use 4.05%    Signature 128.0    Explosion 4%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres    Range 67.2 billion km (2010 days at full power)

CIWS-120 (2x4)    Range 1000 km     TS: 12,000 km/s     ROF 5       
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Freighter for auto-assignment purposes

Lets Build the Things

With all the design work complete, we can actually build the bloody things. Remember, try and get the smallest shipyard that can possibly build your design to do it. There's no point getting a 50K ton shipyard to build a 750 ton sub-micro-corvette. In my case though, the smallest yard I have is 8K tons, which means I'll be looking into building a smaller yard at some point in the future. Alternatively, make sure that your slipway can support your ship. Lets say your ship was 30001 tons, and the yard supported 30K tons. It wouldn't be able to build the ship. Retool the yard to build your ship, then tab over to the tasks section, and order your ships.
Another thing I'm going to do is add a slipway to all of my shipyards to allow for increased production later on. Most of them have 1 slipway which isn't quite ideal. It'll take a few years for them to add the slipways, but it'll pay off later on.

Research and Development

Research is an important part of the game. Its necessary to carry out the plans and action of any empire, so we're going to look at this now.
For Logistics, I researched boatbay which will open up carrier development. I've added Tracter beams to the research cue because that'll be very important later on.
For Sensors and Control Systems, I upped my beam fire range tech and researched active grav strength which will let us make better sensors later on.
I only had one scientist working in power and propulsion so I could have researched 1 thing in there. I chose to reserch jump point theory. This will allow us to build jump drives, jump gate construction, etc.
I have nore more available labs to work with, so we'll have to make do with what we have.

Lastly, Assign A Governor

The next thing I did was assign a colonial Governor. In the combo boxes I wanted him to boost ship construction, production and mining. Unfortunately, I didn't have any admins that fit the job description, so I had to manually assign one from the commanders tab, F3. Still, Admins can really give you a leg up.

Wrapping Up

Anyways, I think that's it for now. My next few months will be pretty boring, so its best I end it off here. Thank you so much for reading this 3 and a half thousand word walkthrough, and I hope to see you back for the next one. Hopefully this has in some way, helped you, or given you an idea. Aurora is really a pretty fun game. Despite its complicated exterior, once you get the hang of the things available to you, the possibilities are endless. I'll be posting a separate topic to compliment this where you can ask questions that I'd have missed in here. Under this I'll post a few resources to help you out.

Resources

I'm going to post some resources that I found helpful, and can hopefully sort it out.
Here's a playthrough done by a youtuber. He goes very deep into it, and for those of you who like audio resources this might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgV0YPA … LeBaxSCDW_
Here's a playlist dedicated to tutorials done by the same youtuber. These are unscripted and longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SyxUsA … -S9PLUJVyh
Here's some tutorials done by the same guy, just more formal and scripted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Y4c_m … SS06T7m9UB
Here is the player maintained Wiki: https://aurora4x.fandom.com/wiki/Aurora4x_Wikia
Here is a quick guide for beginners: https://aurora4x.fandom.com/wiki/Quicks … _Beginners
Along the same lines, here are some tips for beginners: https://aurora4x.fandom.com/wiki/Tips_for_beginners
Confused on the lojistics and ins and outs of fleet management? They have you covered: https://aurora4x.fandom.com/wiki/Fleet_ … _Beginners
Here's a reddit guide discussing fleet lojistics: https://www.reddit.com/r/aurora4x/comme … ment_101a/
And here's another guide discussing missiles, forward bases, etc: https://www.reddit.com//r/aurora4x/comm … ment_101b/
Download of the game here

Parts of This Playthrough

Move on to the second part[
Part 3
Here's part 4
Here is part 5