Aurora, an amazing free 4X for PC that needs to be seen to be believed

This is the absolute best 4X space game that you haven't heard of. Best description is Dwarf Fortress in space.

Micromanagement of everything from warp engines to chemical fuel capacity tanks. Totally open sandbox with an excellent AI for the baddies. Also multiplayer or solo.

Start with no techs and get them scientists working on warp drive while you manage the civilian economy or begin with warp drive.

It's just been massively updated and is now very fast and largely bug free (new platform released yesterday) after several years of development.

WARNING It is for the dedicated 4Xer.

Don't expect fancy graphics, learning curve is steep but the community is very good with a helpful Wiki to begin to understand how all the economic, industrial, diplomatic, military processes all link together.

Everything down to the naming policies of individual officers/administrators is covered. More complex than GalCiv, Stellaris, Distant Worlds and pulls the good stuff from all of them

It is far and away the best 4X and it is FREE and perfect for lock downs. Here's the link to download

Aurora C#

Recommend you read up on it before you open the exe unless you enjoy being totally overwhelmed. No one is going to hold your hand and give you a nice tutorial but all the information is available.

Thanks for the heads up, I might check it out. Your desciption reminds me of Distant Worlds, which has a simulated private economy which was a very interesting twist.

Same type of private economy in Aurora.

I'm currently Earthbound with no warp engines so looking to improve mining and fucking around with a prototype design for a geosurveying ship so I can find out if the Moon has decent minerals or not. Really inefficient chemical engines that I have to research thereby taking scientists off warp drive work making it longer to finish. Still, minerals are my lifeblood. Without them I can't build shit. You have to design each ship and research the components (engines, sensors) before you can build them and install them. They have a recommended design but it's always better to tweak it.

One hears rumours of ruins on Mars which may be able to rapidly accelerate my tech acquisitions. Don't think I can get there before warp engine research is finished so might as well stay on home turf.

The Federation of Null stands tall.

yeah, ship design isn't my favorite part of these. Does the auto-builder work sufficiently well to at least play the game?

Absolutely. You can just go for the default ship types.

Bug control is very on the ball. The new version was released about 24 hrs ago. Since then the sole coder has released three patches for minor stuff - typos, bits and bobs. He is very dedicated to the game and it is totally playable atm.