Remnants of the Precursors Succession Game?

[Dp101]

Will take a bit to read all the words but briefly, that thing about weirdness with planets marked as clean that suddenly have waste reported is why I always have the eco sliders unlocked when I'm not fiddling with anything, because the game will automatically adjust them to avoid waste if the amount of production fluctuates during a turn (most often as a result of bumping up spying spending or starting a new trade deal) which saves on peace of mind if nothing else. Of course, there is the slight issue where if the required eco slider *drops*, the stuff adjusted out will follow typical automatic priorities (i.e. industry -> eco -> defence if not capped/upgraded -> research) which can be annoying at shipbuilidng worlds. Generally speaking none of this matters, but anything that reduces the number of popups in lategame is welcome lol.

Edit: Have read through, great job on the everything! I doubt I'll get to play another turnset at this rate lol, and if I do it'll end halfway through my reign at the vote after next. Also iirc in the discussions at the start we decided on no AI final war.

[williams482]

There's a persistent bug with the interface reporting incorrect population regrowth figures. This is present even in Fusion Mod, although the various "smart maximize" options do work as they should despite the interface frequently projecting an excessive amount of population loss. Apparently this has to do with some rounding weirdness?

[haphazard1]

Nice wrap up report, RefSteel. All the galaxy shouls tremble before the might of the...whatever we are calling the left over fragments of our former enemies.

It does feel a bit odd to be approaching victory, and still not having met three entire races.

[Fenn]

About halfway through the turnset now, report to hopefully come tonight. I'll say now that I had to revise my plans when the Cryslonoids teched Atmospheric Terraforming and traded it to us.

[Brian Shanahan]

About halfway through the turnset now, report to hopefully come tonight. I'll say now that I had to revise my plans when the Cryslonoids teched Atmospheric Terraforming and traded it to us.

It's alway nice when the AI makes a massive mistake like that. Maybe even enough to hand us the game.

[Fenn]

And here we are!

First order of business is to reassign production on many of our planets which were researching while well behind on population, or building planetary shields when they were nowhere near danger, as well as refitting our factories and building up to the new limit everywhere else.

I also make some new ship designs, turfing the Omega Bombers and poor unloves Standoff ships to make room. The first one is an improved Chameleon design - four Phasors instead of two, the latest engines and maneuverability, but no Battle Scanner since there was no room. We'll still have the Chamelon 5.0s around to scan enemy ships.

The second design is more indulgent:

"How tanky can one ship be?" was the thought process here. I even stuck on some Heavy Ion Cannons in case we ever fight Repulsors, although in the end the AIs didn't field a single one. I only build a couple of these because we really only need one in any given engagement. They ended up performing well enough, but it's hard to say much because the rocks' fleets are no match for ours in general.

Turn 211 brings the news that the Cryslonoids have reached Atmospheric Terraforming - a tech we could never research. I don't suppose they'd trade with us for it...

Well, as it turns out, they will! I'm more than happy to trade Reajax IIs for this - removing the growth penalty from our hostile planets is nice, but the real benefit will be the +20 size they'll all get. We very well could win the council vote just from peacefully growing...But I have other plans.

Turn 212, the Cryslonoids complain to us about a false confession - that's alright, you'll soon have a lot more to worry about!


...Just not as soon as if you hadn't traded Atmospheric Terraforming to us. Instead of building ships to conquer with, we take a few turns to grow our worlds and build out factories. Enya, like our other Rich worlds, suddenly has massively more room to work with, and it's making our production edge even larger.


Having cleaned up the pirates earlier, the main body of our fleet is heading to the extreme north of our territory. Most of the space between us and the Cryslonoids is filled with nebulae, but the area around Akaali is clear of them. That's where we'll stage for our attack, and where another Stargate will go up once Akaali's maxed on factories.


After Akaali 4-turns its Stargate, every shipyard in the empire can send their products more or less directly there - but first, our existing fleet starts us off with simultaneous assaults on the lightly defended Apat and Apophyl. The ship-to-ship combat is trivial, and arriving with the warships are the transports:


Apat's 66 defenders came close to evening it out, but our slight advantage in numbers and tech gives us the win on the first wave.


Still, there's no need to take chances, so I make a trade with the Kholdan to really swing things in our favour.


Apophyl saw our obsolete models in action. The old Chameleons are definitely showing their age here, but surprisingly (to me anyway) the Beamers were still inflicting terrific damage on the Cryslonoid missile ships, and even the AM Bomblets were able to wipe out the planet's defences in a single volley. In fact, they end up wiping out the colony altogether next turn when I meant to just soften it up a little. Oops!


The turn after that little accidental slaughter of 140 million souls, the Mentarans make a bizarre display of complimenting us on our mostly unprovoked invasion. Our longtime friend the Kholdan also rings us up to high-five, but that at least we can respect.

We go into turn 220 in control over the world of Quartz, and with lizardly fleets heading for the worlds of Quartz, Scheel, and Ajoite - but the council vote has already come...


Our position is almost enough for an outright victory thanks to all the terraforming we've been doing. I'm not sure if anyone else will vote for us in the moment; we share a mutual enemy with the Kholdan, and they've more or less been on good terms with us the whole game, but they're still just Wary with us and there's no way we're winning without their support. As it turns out, however...


Not only do the Kholdan throw their support behind us, but so do the Nazlok who we've never met (maybe they had it in for the rocks), along with...the Mentarans! You have to wonder what's going on in those brains of theirs. In any case, the game's over, and rightfully so.


We get a lovely-looking splash screen for our troubles, although some of this victory message is being generous with the facts - I don't think the people of Apophyl would agree we handled them with "respect and care"!


More interesting is the replay feature; you can see what planets each race controlled at any given turn. The poor Fiershan, Nazlok and Ursinathi trio were really squeezed up there - the Fiershan especially seem to have had a horrendous starting position with no room to expand.


Bit of an anticlimax, but most of the drama was already over when we were able to absorb the Mentarans without anyone else interfering. After that, it was a matter of gobbling up AI empires until we had enough votes in the Council to pull through. Having more than twice as many worlds as the next-biggest empire, and more than all our rivals put together, says it all.

I had a lot of fun playing and reading this tagteam - thanks everyone for being a part of it, and I'd be glad to join in on a sequel. Maybe a higher difficulty or some self-imposed variant, since this run got out ahead pretty early and never looked back. Here's the save from T219 if you want a look at the state of the game when we won.

  RSG-01-219.zip (Size: 164.25 KB / Downloads: 2)

[haphazard1]

About halfway through the turnset now, report to hopefully come tonight. I'll say now that I had to revise my plans when the Cryslonoids teched Atmospheric Terraforming and traded it to us.

It's alway nice when the AI makes a massive mistake like that.  Maybe even enough to hand us the game.

Wow. The rocks do handle Planetology differently. Does Atmospheric even benefit them at all? I guess there is a base size boost involved. I have not tried playing them in RotP yet.

[haphazard1]

OK, read the conclusion. Very nice work, everyone. It has been fun playing together as a team, and I have learned a lot. The ship design discussions in particular have been very informative, with some different approaches that I do not usually think about. We had a decent start (after passing on our initial, even better start) and built upon that to keep growing in power and total systems. As seems to happen in many SGs, the overall skill level of the team was very strong and we ended up dominating the galaxy.

I feel sorry for the cats, looking at that final revealed map. It seems there were two clusters of starting positions, on opposite ends of the galaxy, with a huge middle region unoccupied. Then the rocks did their usual thing and ran wild grabbing worlds. The bugs were far enough away to get a sizable number of planets, and we ended up conquering our end of the galaxy.

[rgp151]

I do recommend that you guys do a game against Xilmi just for the experience of it. However I would definitely recommend only Normal difficulty if you do. If you've played MOO Impossible, I'd say that Modnar Hardest is not as hard in some ways as MOO Impossible, but Xilmi Normal is harder.

[Dp101]

damn, unforgivable, not splitting the weapons on the last design made, how could you :P

Great job all! Agree that things got rather easy rather quickly, could bump things up to Hardest but that might not be enough, and I'd rather keep the more flavourful Modnar AI rather than going to Xilmi. Maybe a variant would be the way, not sure I've actually tried one before in MoO. Anyways, was fun!