Undercover Universe - a newbie Aurora AAR with a little help to get me started

[undercovergeek]

I know Kushan did a great set of videos, i just thought id stick a few screenies up as i stumble through this game and share the experience what with my Polaris AAR coming to a buggy end. A loooong time ago i happened upon the game and it terrified me but now theres enough lets play and strategy guides. Ive watched a few, read a few and i hope i know enough to at least get a fledgling empire up and running and you can read the calamitous results

Home -



Home as a spreadsheet - as i understand it, the left hand column is mostly immersive fluff except planet suitability (0.0000) - which means its totally perfect for the humans, no bio-domes or atmospheric shenanigans required. The right side is to be considered the list of buildings present AKA the city screen in Civ - we have one military academy - the building(s) responsible for providing Earth with its luminaries and leaders, the more we have the better class of leader, scientist, officer we get. Theres 1000 factories across the land performing old age conventional industry tasks, these will be replaced by the new minerals, 5 research labs, and a shipyard with a max capacity for each ship been 1000 tons



The dawning of a new age - Transnewtonian minerals. I chose the option to start the game when humans have just discovered the new, ground breaking, physics defying set of transnewtonian minerals, and here they are in all there abundance, or lack there of. What i know so far - Duranium is essentially the new building block of the universe, the steel of the new age if you will, so we will need every ounce of this. We have 100% access to 187800 tons of it - that is to say we can mine all of it, theres none hiding under rocks or at the bottom of the sea, like say Boronide where we can only get to 40% of the reserves, i hope i dont need Boronide much. Sorium is the fuel of the future and is highlighted in yellow because im already refining it - i switch this off - its been refined for ships and i dont have any of those yet



Our very poor naval shipyard, renamed to Ellis Dockyard after a hardy Midlander who spent years fiddling with metal - there are many improvements to be made and the yard will rise in his honour



Research - in the middle of the screen are the 8 main fields of research. To the right our small team of scientists who will make us great, the fields they specialise in and the bonuses they bestow upon the research. Clearly here Isabelle is our go to girl, chosen as our head researcher she will bestow a 25% speed bonus on the field. As i understand it if that field is her speciality, ie energy weapons, the bonus quadruples, for now though we need to get a handle on the new minerals.............



...........so she is assigned to lead the team researching production of the new minerals and she'll be done in 4 years time



Construction - in the middle are our very earliest construction options, again, like Civ, think temple/granary/walls/barracks etc. The most important here is the Military Academy, so we order an extra one, this will increase the output of good scientists, officers and leaders



Assignments - There are many, many planetary roles to fill and officer jobs to fill, leaders of army groups, squadrons and admin roles in the government - these can all be set to auto assignment and the AI will put the right people in the right job and check every 2 years to see if theres a better candidate. However, it wont choose the Planetary Governor or the Commander in Chief of Planetary Forces - we get to do that. The Governor requires an admin level of 2 or above and handily we have 2 candidates, at level 5, Ewan and Imogen - at this stage of the game its all about the mining and bumping the production and although i fancied myself a governess of Earth, Ewan comes with a mining bonus, so out goes Imogen, and Ewan gets the job of his life. He will shortly undergo a name change, because nothing says interplanetary awesomeness like Governor Goatfury.............



That leaves the Commander of Fleet HQ - we need a mans man, straight talking, straight shooting leader of men, wont take any crap from aliens or uppity colonist leaders, we need Jack Nicholson from a Few Good Men. He was busy.......

So we got Ugg wearing, womens furry boot sporting, surf board carrying, cant light a fire or a close window, massive time piece laden, furniture undecided Commander Toonces. He brings a mining bonus too, and a bad taste in music and whiskey, he'll do, remember the AI checks in 2 years if hes still worthy, god i hope so



We expand Ellis yard to accommodate fatter boats and press the 'advance some time' button



more soon

[undercovergeek]

Our research into the fancy new elements is finally completed and the menus fill up with all manner of new projects. The logical next step is to return to the stars after a protracted absence and find some more of the new elements on nearby planets, asteroids and moons. All kinds of things need to happen first - we need to design a ship capable of leaving Earth, we need to research and design new rocket engines and we need to research and design geological survey sensors to find the elements on distant planets.

Our first step then is to design a ship. Long before the nuclear war that wiped out most of humanity leaving us where we are now there was a famous geologist, lover of rocks and lover of finding rocks in distant rocky places - there is no finer person to name our Geological Survey ships after than Windigo. Here's the very basic template for our new survey ship, we have just completed the research of the sensors and these have been added to the hull, the 2 most notable things are - its currently only set up to spend 3 months in space (top left), not in itself a bad thing but if it spends longer than that in space the crew get grumpy and stop performing their tasks well, and it has no engines(!) - we need to design some conventional engines to get this bad boy off the ground......



.....and here it is. Designing it was more complicated than i thought, the default rocket engines are classed as military engines, again not neccessarily a bad thing but this will have an impact on maintenance and shipyard useage down the line so they need converting to commercial engines. To do this their size needs increasing and ouput needs decreasing, this is done and the UI confirms theyve met commercial classification. We appoint Massey Ferguson to build all our commercial engines and it drops into the research queue, and we set Amber Barry our engine specialist to researching them. It takes her only 10 days to sort it out and we move the new engines over to the design template for the Windigo



So the new Windigo, complete with engines, sensors and refitted to last in space for 10 years at a time. She's 3650 tonnes, our initial expansion of the Ellis Dockyard boosted the ramps to accommodate 3000 tonnes of ship so we expand them a bit more to 4000 - that should do for a while.



Speaking of the Ellis Dockyard it now needs retooling to be able to build our new class of survey ships. The first retool of the game is free and we set the yard to specialise in building the Windigo class ships, and we also set it to build our first ship the GEV Windigo. Thats that done, we will wait for the engineers to build



Meanwhile, our industry now needs converting from the old fashioned, conventional style to utilise the new transnewtonian elements. As it happens we have 600 factories, and we set all 600 to convert to new construction factories, and we commit 60% of our global resources to this task, leaving 40% to use on converting 400 of the old industry to new mines.



With the new engines and new sensors researched our scientific teams are free to be unleashed on all the new transnewtonian projects. With no major priorities and urgency we split the research across the 3 labs and assign scientists to developing some weaponry for our soon to be built space fleet, a water reactor that will open the paths to nuclear engines for our ships and improvements to our mining techniques - we utilise all scientists that specialise in those fields



Whilst waiting for the Windigo to be constructed we spot a catastrophe in the events log. 14 lines up from the bottom we see that President Goatfury has finally succumbed to his plethora of STDs and has had to retire early.



With bonuses in mining and factory production we appoint Gusington to the honourable role of Governor of Earth - all hail President Gusington



And a few months later s*** gets real - the Windigo is complete. The AI appoints her Commander as Jennifer Fitzgerald with a 25% survey bonus. Being OCD i checked all the other available officers and she is indeed the most suitable for the role -

The GEV Windigo



Commander Jennifer Fitzgerald

[undercovergeek]

The GEV Windigo sets off for the stars. We try the Moon, Mercury and Mars first and then give her a mission to scan all planets and moons. Within a month our second ship the GEV Sir Ranulph Fiennes is ready, her commanding officer is Captain Rhys Morton with a decent survey bonus, he is instructed to chase down the asteroids and comets and scan for their deposits. Within a few months we have a decent collection of planets, moons and asteroids with healthy deposits of TNM found on them



Looking back at our own deposits on Earth there is no real emergency or shortfall upcoming - we dont need to be rushed into mining a planet or asteroid until we're ready. The only concern on the horizon is our Neutronium - its needed for all ships and shipyards and we only have a 0.5 score for our access to it, and its quite a small deposit at that - we're due to run out in 60 odd years. So if were going to concentrate our search for anything it will be Neutronium.



After a few more months we have found 2 decent sized deposits on the comets Wild and Tempel 1 - the search continues.



Whilst the Sir Ranulph Fiennes takes over the rest of the off-planet surveying we decide to gather a team of top scientists and set them down on some nearby planets - see if we can find more deposits old style - with a hammer. The Morayan GEO Survey Team consists of the worlds finest surveying experts, and within a couple of days they on the surface of the moon verifying the results of the off world scan.



After a couple of weeks the reports come back - there are no new deposits on the moon. The team pack up their gear and prepare to head to Mars.



The Windigo is ordered to pick up the team, head to Mars and drop the scientists there for a more in depth geological survey





After a few more weeks the team report they have found a huge Galicite and Corbomite seam and these findings are added to the Mars file - still no Neutronium. The team will head to Mercury and Venus and see what can be found there

[Kushan]

Home as a spreadsheet - as i understand it, the left hand column is mostly immersive fluff except planet suitability (0.0000) - which means its totally perfect for the humans, no bio-domes or atmospheric shenanigans required. The right side is to be considered the list of buildings present AKA the city screen in Civ - we have one military academy - the building(s) responsible for providing Earth with its luminaries and leaders, the more we have the better class of leader, scientist, officer we get. Theres 1000 factories across the land performing old age conventional industry tasks, these will be replaced by the new minerals, 5 research labs, and a shipyard with a max capacity for each ship been 1000 tons

Don't completely ignore the left column. Especially the requested protection level area. Doesn't matter for you capital but if your colonies don't get the protection level the request then unrest will go up and they will revolt. I'm sure the other fields do matter in some way (come on this is Aurora, stuff like number of shipyard workers IS going to matter although it may not be explained), but agree its probably mainly for flavor.

Looking forward to more.