Remnants of the Precursors - Initial thoughts

[rgp151]

Ok, I finally won on Xilimi Normal, Small 50 planets, using Psilons against Klackons, Humans and Mrrshan. Was certainly more of a challenge than Modnar Hardest.

In this case I'd say my start was average, but not bad. I didn't get any great planets. Got 1 distant Artifact planet. The Klackons had a better position and some better early planets. The Humans were kind of screwed.

I started research very early with 10 BC into research after founding first colony. Locked that in and it grew over time. I had Tech 9 and 80% from Construction, +10 and Improved Eco in Planetology and both 4 and 5 range to chose from, with me taking 5 for the conditions. I started with Tech 9, then also took 80% and then took Tech 8 over Duralloy. I started with +10, then took Improved Eco, before then taking Dead landings for 2 small Rich Dead planets. I stopped my first 3 planets at about 70% factories until I got past my major expansion phase, directign production to either research, growth or ship building instead. 

The Klackons got to the rich planet on the same turn as my ship, but they had guns and I didn't, so I lost it to them. But I just immediately build ships and took it from them, it was only 25 pop Rich, but still, it was also in a strategic spot. I took them out with a mix of Medium and Large NPG ships, but it went back and fourth a bit. I got Auto Repair but was still struggling, until I got Zortium, along with a steal of Ion cannons.

Ultimately I went with Auto Repair, Warp Dissipator and Repulson Beams, along with one ship in the fleet that had Battle Scanner. One I got HEF it was pretty decisive, with Warp Dissipators and staying out of range.

Took only the best planets or ones needed for range, but bombed out the rest, and then had a few cleanup crews that would keep making sweeps to bomb out new colonies. Main offensive fleets were a bomber, a fast Large with Internal Stabilizers in high volume stacks, along with a few Huges. All ships except the bomber had Warp Dissipators. For defense I'd leave one small Huge stack with Auto Repair, Repulsor Beams and Warp Dissipator, along with a few supporting small stacks with Warp Dissipators, HEF, and whatever else. With three ships that had Warp Dissipator I was able to pretty well stop attacking ships, and the one with Repulsor Beams prevents bombing the planet if any got through before being stopped. Other ships with bombers would move on to attack again, while those few would stay behind to defend newly taken planets. 

Several of my planets got attacked, but they kept trying to invade instead of bombing them and I was usually able to rescue them while the enemy was in orbit. Xilmi uses a lot of fully Cloaked fleets for surprise attacks.

Never was able to develop a planet that could fully defend itself. But I never went over 10 missile bases, and most of the time I have class 10 planetary shields.

[rgp151]

Yeah, playing Xilmi is very frustrating. The main issue is that with Xilmi what tends to happen is that one opponent will just grow massively and takeover the galaxy very quickly. It is often the Silicoids. I was just playing a game and the Silicoids of course were the first to 6 planets, but I was doing well. I was somewhat trapped in a corner and the Silicoids were sort of in the middle. They quickly crushed the Humans and took over all their worlds. Then as I was getting ready to start on offensive against the Alkari to my west, the Silidoids came in and just wiped them out starting with the planet I was in the process of sending ships to, which then cutoff my access, and they had entirely annihilated teh Alkari in 5 turns. At that point they had like 75% of the planets and I had the rest. Tech wise I was slightly ahead of them still, but I knew it wouldn't  last for long. Then they started hitting multiple planets of mine all at the same time all with masses of Death Spore ships that I could do nothing to defend against. I didn't get Antidote in my tech tree, nor did I get Repulsor Beams. No one yet had Repulsor Beams. I just just gotten Fusion Drives and Class V ships Shields I also had Planetary Shields.

My ships could beat their ships, but within like 3 turns half my planets had been killed by Death Spores. So, game over.

But basically, if the Alkari and Humans had been able to put up a better fight against the Silidoids and actually defend their territory it wouldn't be so bad. But what tends to be the case is that one Ai will get a better starting position. That will result in them getting faster growth and spreading to the most planets. Once they have the most planets they will then dominate the other AIs and take them over quickly, at which point they'll have over half the galaxy to themselves. 

So really the main issue is not fighting against the AI per se, its the fact that one AI will dominate the other AIs so much that they gain too much dominance. The leading AI will exploit the weaker AIs to grow and expand. And in this case teh Siliodis were in the middle and had blocked me in. I had no access to the Humans and very little access to the Alkari with the Silicods having a broad flank against me. But this is how like 80% of games against Xilmi go.

[Anskiy]

Sounds more like Xilmi AI exploits advantageous positioning and a total lack of diplomacy to snowball and win. I wonder how well it would play if it actually respected diplomatic treaties, like actual states.

[rgp151]

The derelict ship event is often way too powerful. The Alkari, who were already ahead of me, got teh Derelict Ship event on turn 70. From this they got:
Every Shield up through IV, including Planetary V. Every weapon up through Neutral Blaster. They are also already ahead of me in Computers, so I can't spy on them. Prior to that they had no shields and only Hyper-V rockets. I mean come on, and we're still trying to vie for planets, so now I have no hope of contesting any planets against them.

[Ray F]

The derelict ship event is often way too powerful. The Alkari, who were already ahead of me, got teh Derelict Ship event on turn 70. From this they got:
Every Shield up through IV, including Planetary V. Every weapon up through Neutral Blaster. They are also already ahead of me in Computers, so I can't spy on them. Prior to that they had no shields and only Hyper-V rockets. I mean come on, and we're still trying to vie for planets, so now I have no hope of contesting any planets against them.

That event is implemented as described in the Official Strategy Guide. It is a powerful event!

[williams482]

I am late to this thread, but very excited to see it! I've played a ton of RotP since I learned about it for the first time about a year ago, and I was hoping it would get a foothold in this community.

Base RotP is fantastic in it's own right, but I very, VERY strongly recommend downloading the Fusion Mod, available for download here: https://github.com/BrokenRegistry/Rotp-Fusion/releases

Fusion Mod is essentially a small-scale expansion of the original game. There's a ton of QoL changes, extensively customizable settings, and a bunch of different AIs, most of which are decedents of the "Xilmi" AI mentioned here, and even more fiendishly difficult to win against. Of these AIs I personally recommend "Hybrid", which is the base AI's diplomacy package stapled to the Xilmi AI's rigorously optimized tactical and operational level gameplay decisions.

Also present: the original MOO1 species names!

Fusion mod remains under active development, which in practice means that when somebody shows up in the discord with a bug or feature request that turns out to be feasible, Xilmi or BrokenRegistry will frequently just go implement it.

Here's some notable features of Fusion Mod, some but not all of which I like to set for my own games:
- There's an AI governor you can turn on which can handle most of the "micro" level parts of running and empire, and then some. If you want the AI to handle resource allocation on your worlds, scouting, colonizing, sending "seeder" pop transports, and espionage, or any combination therein, you can. Personally I shut it off completely except for automatic infiltration for spies, but most people are very happy with it.
- The minimum distance between empire starting positions can be adjusted. I find 170% does a very good job distributing empires enough to avoid the really egregious "AI started on top of you, so you just die" scenarios.
- The AI is willing and able to absolutely swarm your planets with transports in the late game. I really hate being completely unable to protect my worlds, so I set it so that the "Combat Transporters" tech cannot be researched by anyone. Other techs which can be limited (or guaranteed) to the player, AIs, or both include Cloaking, Atmospheric Terraforming, Hyperspace Comms, and the maximum range, environmental colonization, and factory cost techs.
- There's a "missile base modifier" which reduces the space requirement and production cost of missile launchers and missile bases, to make both more cost effective choices than in base RotP (and more in line with how useful they were in MOO1). 67% is the default setting, which I am happy with.
- There are "Iron Man" options, which can be configured to harshly limit or eliminate the ability to reload for better RNG results or the like.
- If you don't like events, or monsters, you can shut off either or both.

For UI/UX changes:
- You can "smartmax" planetary spending sliders such that you can allocate surplus spending in a single click while automatically maintaining waste cleanup spending. it will also (for example) automatically limit industry spending to the amount needed to finish factories. Unless you want to overspend and put the rest into the reserve, in which case right-click will do that for you. As someone who doesn't use the governor for any planetary management, I've found this to be an enormous timesaver.
- When sending population, you can right click the bar to autofill with the amount of pop that can be regrown in one turn with max eco spending. right-ctrl-click will also max out the eco slider to regrow that pop, and you can do this for a bunch of worlds at once from the "fleets" panel. Large scale invasions are so much easier this way.
- There's a "show next council" option that will tell you how many turns until the next council, compensating for the fact that council votes aren't limited to turns which are multiples of 25.
- There's a council win setting called "Realms Beyond" which makes a decisive council vote truly game ending (neither the player nor the AI can stage a rebellion if they lose the vote). On a victory, it tells you if you got a Diplomatic, Domination, or Conquest victory, based on the criteria used by Realms Beyond Imperium.
- Beam weapons have distinct sounds and graphical animations, all clearly inspired by the MOO1 graphics, and there are animated shield effects as well. They make combat much more lively than in vanilla.

There's more, but this is just a highlight reel. The point is that if you like RotP, there's surely something in Fusion Mod that will make it even better for you.

[rgp151]

Interesting, I may have to give it a try.

I don't really like playing against Xilmi, its just very annoying. I played til I could beat it at least once, but it was very tedious.

I just auto-played a game with all Xilmi players, with the one I was watching being Pislons. It was interesting that the AI did things very similar to how I do them. The AI did a lot more adjustments to research to rush research one certain thing at a time. It also did a better job of streaming population than I do manually, but it sounds like this mod can help with that.

In this game the Silicoids won the game, again, by Death Sporing everyone to death.

When I play against Xilmi there a rea few things that stand out. One is that without relations you should just turn off the Council vote because there is no real way to influence it.

Also Death Spores are really bad and should probably turn those off. The Silicoids are I think guaranteed to get them and Silicoids seem to be better in RotP than they were in MoO1. So many games I see them rush to Death Spores and then just lay waste because its virtually impossible to stop.

If you don't have repulsor beams its essentially impossible to prevent ships from bombing your planet. Even if you can kill the ships, you typically can't kill them fast enough that early in the game to stop them from unloading. They send in like 2 to 4 designs all with death spores and you just can't stop them all.

[williams482]

Yeah, the Xilmi AIs are infuriating. I've managed to get something not far under a 50% win rate on neutral difficulty against Hybrid, and am quite pleased with myself for it. No-relationship-modifier AIs just don't interest me, I've barely played at all with them.

My less frustrating go-to is the "Rookie" AI, essentially the base AI from vanilla but with a couple bugs fixed. Them with 140% production is probably the closest experience to MOO1 impossible, although in truth none of the AIs quite imitate the lumbering, threatening, nakedly opportunistic clumsiness of vanilla MOO1 AI.

[rgp151]

Yeah, the Xilmi AIs are infuriating. I've managed to get something not far under a 50% win rate on neutral difficulty against Hybrid, and am quite pleased with myself for it. No-relationship-modifier AIs just don't interest me, I've barely played at all with them.

My less frustrating go-to is the "Rookie" AI, essentially the base AI from vanilla but with a couple bugs fixed. Them with 140% production is probably the closest experience to MOO1 impossible, although in truth none of the AIs quite imitate the lumbering, threatening, nakedly opportunistic clumsiness of vanilla MOO1 AI.

I do pretty well against Modnar Hardest. I'll try Hybrid. 

But I still think that MoO1 Impossible is harder than Modnar Hardest. However, there are other parameters, where you can set how aggressive the AI is. I have not changed those, but I imagine that changing those would be impactful, but it seems to me that Modnar just isn't aggressive enough. It is isn't as aggressive as MOO Impossible is anyway. But there is also something to be said for just having the simple settings of Normal, Hard and Impossible. Its very difficult to benchmark when there are many many options. 

Anyway, yeah I've been playing the Fusion Mod and its good. I think I'll keep using it. I like the auto-population streaming which works mostly ok for worlds that you can just set on autopilot. Still have to manually do a lot fo pop management in the beginning.

[Ray F]

Also present: the original MOO1 species names!

I just want to say that I think this is a really bad idea. The copyright owners of MOO (Wargaming.net) specifically asked me to change the race names to avoid conflicting with their intellectual property. If individual players want to change names to whatever they want, that's fine. But to change the names in direct conflict with Wargaming.net and then distribute that publicly is just asking for lawyers to intervene.