This a a very short tutorial section that provides a brief overview of how advancing time is handled in Aurora. Aurora doesn't easily fit into a description of turn-based or real-time as it is a little of both. Aurora has a choice of time increments ranging from 5 seconds to 30 days and you choose which increment to use, usually by selecting from the top row of time buttons on the System Map. Once you select an increment, events in the game will advance by that amount of time, unless there is an interrupt (which I will cover in a moment). Early in a campaign when not much is happening you may be using 5-day or even 30-day increments. During the approach phase of a battle you might select 1 hour or 20 minute increments and when you are under missile attack you will probably select 5 second increments to give your point defence systems the best chance of detecting and engaging incoming missiles.
As an increment play out, various events may occur. These are divided into two types:
1) Interrupt Events. These are the events to which you might want to react, such as detecting a new ship from an alien race, having one of your task groups finish its orders or detecting a missile coming at you
. These will interrupt, and therefore shorten, the time increment that you asked for. For example, if you asked for a 1-day update and an interrupt happened 30 minutes into it, the game will only advance 30 minutes then stop so you can change your instructions. These interrupts have an opportunity to occur at the end of every sub-pulse (see below). 2) Informational Events. These are the events that you probably want to know about, but for which you don't want to stop time. One such example is finding minerals due to completion of a geo-survey, or having one of your civilian ships leave your sensor range. These don't stop the game but the message still shows up the next time the game stops.
Each increment is split into movement sub-pulses. For example, if you choose to run a 1 day increment, it will automatically be split into forty-eight 30-minute movement sub-pulses. You can choose to override this and set a larger or smaller sub-pulse if you wish using the second row of time buttons on the system map. The reason for the sub-pulses is because a sensor detection phase takes place after every sub-pulse, which allows you to spot alien ships fairly quickly even when using 1-day increments. If an interrupt event takes place during one of the sub-pulses, then the increment ends after that sub-pulse. So you may a select 1-day increment but the increment might end up being 16 hours or 2.5 hours. There are 229 event types in Aurora and, as described in the previous paragraph, not all of them will interrupt time.
Because the computer-controlled races (NPR for non-player race) play the same way as the player, they too may need a small increment size so sometimes you will select 1-day and an NPR may need 40 second increments because it is launching missiles. In that case, the short increment takes precedence. The program itself may decide to override the player and the NPRs if it determines that something is likely to happen soon. An example might be that missiles are approaching their target or that opposing groups of ships are about to enter detection range. In this case, the program will select a suitable increment size that will override the choices of individual races, including your own.
It is possible that while nothing much may be happening for you, two NPRs have decided to fight to the death which will result in a long series of short increments. Or an increment may be cut short because an NPR has generated an interrupt event, perhaps because it just detected your homeworld
. However, you do have an option called Automated Turns. If you click the automated turns checkbox before clicking an increment size, the program will keep running increments of that size until an interrupt event affecting you. So if two NPRs decide to have a long battle, set automated turns and go and have a cup of tea The 5-Day Construction Cycle
You get to build a lot of things in different things in Aurora and the actual construction takes place in what is commonly referred to as the 5-day increment, or 5-day construction cycle. It would affect performance if Aurora updated construction times in every 5 second increment or sub-pulse so instead the game waits until an number of increments have passed that add up to about five days and then runs all the construction code after the normal movement/detection/combat phases for that increment. Because Aurora increments rarely add up to exactly five days between construction cycles, the program uses the actual amount of time that has passed, whether it is 5 days, 12 days or 6 days, 14 hours, 12 minutes and 45 seconds. This means that the amount of 'construction' carried out in each construction cycle may vary a little between cycles. You can choose to change the trigger time for a construction cycle from the standard 400,000 seconds in the game setup if you want it to happen more or less often.
Steve
