Aurora 4X Terraforming

[moglus]

Not an apt comparison. If Dwarf Fortress was completely unplayable, and absolute micro management hell, then you might be close

I've played Aurora a lot. You don't play aurora. You fight it. Every single action you take in Aurora is a struggle. From navigating menus, to controlling your task groups. Nothing is easy. Nothing is intuitive. You fight with a god awful interface, in the hope that something cool can be pulled out of the experience.

Dwarf fortress is extremely simple to play by comparison. It has a clunky, but usable hotkey driven interface (aurora has virtually no hotkeys). The game screams along on a modern computer, runs well, runs fast, isn't a micromanagement nightmare once you set things up.

Aurora isn't a game, it's a chore, and it's a shame because underneath that struggle to play, is probably the greatest 4x ever.

I have to disagree, most things in Aurora are not a chore nor that hard to do when you learn the mechanics.

At least in Aurora i know that if something goes wrong it was most likely 100% my fault, unlike DF were sometimes your dwarfs are as brain dead as an inbreed teenager that was dropped down an upwards-going escalator during it's infancy, preventing them from comprehending even the simplest of orders.

I'll never understand why people praise DF for it's hotkeys, hotkeys are great, but you know what's better 99% of the time? A DAMN MOUSE
(also Aurora does have SOME hotkeys, every sub-menu in the "empiers" tab is hotkeyed to F2-F12 and Ctrl+F2-F12, and honestly those are the menus you'll be looking at 99% of you time with the game anyway)
The problem with restricting all the game controls to solely hotkeys is that you force the player to have to learn and memorize all the different hotkeyes for all the actions in the game, which is hell for anyone first trying to learn the game, not to mention that it is perhaps the very definition of an unintuitive game design.

 

[Invader_Canuck]

I have to disagree, most things in Aurora are not a chore nor that hard to do when you learn the mechanics.

At least in Aurora i know that if something goes wrong it was most likely 100% my fault, unlike DF were sometimes your dwarfs are as brain dead as an inbreed teenager that was dropped down an upwards-going escalator during it's infancy, preventing them from comprehending even the simplest of orders.

I'll never understand why people praise DF for it's hotkeys, hotkeys are great, but you know what's better 99% of the time? A DAMN MOUSE
(also Aurora does have SOME hotkeys, every sub-menu in the "empiers" tab is hotkeyed to F2-F12 and Ctrl+F2-F12, and honestly those are the menus you'll be looking at 99% of you time with the game anyway)
The problem with restricting all the game controls to solely hotkeys is that you force the player to have to learn and memorize all the different hotkeyes for all the actions in the game, which is hell for anyone first trying to learn the game, not to mention that it is perhaps the very definition of an unintuitive game design.

It's not about learning the mechanics. The mechanics of aurora are not difficult. The game itself is simple in its concept. The issue is that nothing is easy to do. It's all driven by a terrible interface that makes navigating the depth of the game an absolute nightmare.

I've got conservatively 300 hours into Aurora. I've played it a lot. This isn't about not understanding how to play the game. It's about how you interact with the game. Dwarf fortress is played on a single screen, everything is accessible through hotkeys. Aurora is played on a dozen or so screens, that don't popup to the front. You open a task group, and you have to go and pull that screen up.

The game is a chore to play. It also isn't about hotkeys versus mouse, it's about not having useful hotkeys. Aurora doesn't have useful hotkeys. Dwarf fortress does. Without hotkeys, dwarf fortress would be neigh unplayable. If Aurora had hotkey utility the way DF does, its playability would increase exponentially. Again, it's not about one or the other. It's about having both. Good mouse support with clickable menus and what not combined with hotkey support. At the end of the day, nothing is more efficient or faster than hotkeys. Hotkeys allow you to choose your own level of hotkey involvement. If you want to memorize every key, great, if you don't you still have the option to memorize those you do want to use.

 

[Haldan]

My favorite is the gas process. You build terraforming stations that pump gas in or pump gas out. So you can use terraforming as siege weapons by slowly replacing the atmosphere with arsenic or what not to kill the population without damaging the infrastructure...

Damn, that is fucking morbid as hell.

 

[TheDungen]

Damn, that is fucking morbid as hell.

Been there done that.

 

[safe-keeper]

It's not about learning the mechanics. The mechanics of aurora are not difficult. The game itself is simple in its concept. The issue is that nothing is easy to do. It's all driven by a terrible interface that makes navigating the depth of the game an absolute nightmare.

So it's like Hearts of Iron 3? I anticipated as much when I decided to give it a try and found that you had to go through lengthy tutorials just to download and install the game, and another just to start a new game.

I've played enough Dwarf Fortress and Hearts of Iron 3 (and Stars!, which isn't that complex, but has a very aged UI that makes even simple tasks pretty tedious and burdensome) to grow tired of this kind of games for a long time. I can handle complex games, but I'm very much done with that kind of UIs. There are DF fanboys who will praise the game's dreadful UI to heaven, but the bottom line is, the dev should've planned ahead more and could've done a much better job. It's a mess, to be honest.

As a side note, Quill18 is playing/just played Aurora on his channel. It did nothing but reinforce my view of the game .