Remnants of the Precursors Showcase Game

[RefSteel]

Looking forward to seeing you go on the offensive (if that turns out to be a possibility)! I've gotten the impression so far that there have been no really major engagements on the defensive so far - one side runs away or wins handily, apart for some early skirmishes involving small numbers of ships. Is that a false impression?

[Dp101]

Looking forward to seeing you go on the offensive (if that turns out to be a possibility)! I've gotten the impression so far that there have been no really major engagements on the defensive so far - one side runs away or wins handily, apart for some early skirmishes involving small numbers of ships. Is that a false impression?

No that's fairly accurate - the AI is pretty cautious and generally doesn't like taking a fight that it can't win handily. At the moment my shielding is too good for the cats (who lack any bomb tech and have mass drivers as their peak, not doing much into 5+5 shields on my planets) so the AI recognises that it can't attack and simply doesn't. Granted, it also then seems to rule out attacking less-developed planets, but it still somewhat makes sense in that the AI probably doesn't see value in them? Honestly not entirely sure, it might be that the AI is just very all or nothing in terms of offence.

[Dp101]

Ok, resuming, might play >20 turns this time as things seem to be heating up and I want to play more, but I don't want to spend a session simply building factories and not using them for anything much. I notice that the cats are somehow all the way up to *neutral* with the council vote, so I could theoretically get peace with them, but I'd rather go after them first and bugs second since they're much less scary.

End turn and I immediately get a triple pop of BCV + range 8 + fusion beams, followed by advanced space scanner over BC VI, impulse engines over range 9, and omega-Vs over anti-matter torps/fusion rifle/megabolt cannon (as a failsafe if stealing bombs doesn't work out).

The next few turns are uneventful, until a steal on turn 184! I mean, on the rocks, and the choice is between II9 and controlled barren, but it's something at least (took II9). The turn after I hit them again with a better but still low-grade attack, grabbing ECM MKII to up my own spying capabilities, though terraforming +20 was tempting.

Controlled irradiated comes in on 186, with cloning, atmospheric terraforming, and advanced eco on offer. Atmospheric seems like the best call, since I can't steal it from anyone else, and frustratingly the one irradiated world I could see is nabbed by the rocks the very turn I get the tech to colonise it. Only size 10, but it's the principle of the thing!

Then controlled barren is the only option for a steal on the bears, as my colonies start to finish remaxing on IRC4. Kinda wish I had a design for the rich worlds to work on, but without bombs there's just no point. Although, I did have one idea...




As it turns out, the cats have pretty pathetic bases, stuck firing scatter pack Vs as their strongest option (6 damage apiece), and I have class V shields, while they've only got a total of 8. I don't like going with heavy fusion beams, and this count won't do much of anything (I could get 17 of nothing but them, but I'm treating them more like bombs here), but given that this design will be *immune* to the bases for now (given auto-repair) it doesn't really matter how slow the destruction of them is so long as it's possible. Also note that I'm not using any of the ship slots for this design, but rather the "prototype" feature in the top right, which lets you make new designs (that you can then copy to an existing slot) without having to scrap an existing one first. I put the Sun Fire into production, 9 years at the soonest out of Teller.

And then 2 turns later, I experience immediate regret, as it turns out the lizards have had anti-matter bombs on offer for this new wave of tech. I throw the fuel cells at them and resolve to finish this wave of ships before putting another design into production. At least I noticed eventually... and the next turn they have terraforming +40 for fusion beam (my choice) or BCV! That'll be transformative for all my tiny worlds. I want to start Maxwell on them ASAP, but its missile base blows up.

A bunch of peaceful turns of development follow, which I've been skimming over since there's not much to talk about. I do *finally* get a good spy hit in vs the bears:




Now if only this had been sooner! I shoot for the 50/50 on battle suits and get Duralloy instead, lovely. Then I get the pick of everything they have, only to realise I'm mere turns away from exoskeleton so grabbing battle suits makes no sense, I try for ion rifles instead but get the fusion bomb. The first of my Sun Fires rolls out on turn 202, with its twin on 203, and I fail an ion rifle 50/50 on the bears. At least they're running out of junk to give me! I debate slapping together a new ship design with omega-Vs already in the percentages, and decide to do so, not wanting to wind up waiting for ages and wasting shipbuilding time. The Constellation looks much better:




Almost, almost to the offence! I send out the sun fires to see how they do while I get started on their successors. The council meets the next turn, and I see something positive, yet concerning:




It seems the power of terraforming has suited me well, but on the other hand I'm nominated with no veto with several races at war with me. The cats also being at war with the rocks luckily has them stay home, and the lizards vote for me with the Nazlok abstaining, so I'm safe, and should remain so when atmospheric terraforming comes in.. that same turn, actually! And advanced soil enrichment is up next! Seems like the era of the constellation will be short-lived, given that I expect techs to come through between the first wave emerging and terraforming being completed. The Sun Fires, clearly frustrated with being pushed out of the spotlight, show up and... oh no:




Seems the cats stole fusion beams from me, but also, look at that accuracy! Racial bonuses aside, this is ridiculous. Only 3 of these being present might save me though. Sure enough, I blow through them easily, but the bases are doing considerably more damage than I expected, 135 missiles per volley sure is a lot even if each one only deals one damage, especially given the total attack level involved. Eventually though, the Cheetahs are worn down and a couple bases drop, and my ships' HP starts to rise each turn rather than fall, never dropping below around 450. No clue what the Lynxs were doing though, they didn't want to engage at all, I guess having nuclear bombs made the AI mark them as unsuited for ship to ship fighting? I set the battle to auto-play and the bases eventually all go down. Glad that this proof of concept worked even if it became outdated so quickly. Any invasion force must be slightly delayed by the need to do atmospheric terraforming before any nearby world can regain the ability to regrow population, so the fleet will have to sit around a bit. They're rebuilding 3 bases each turn, but if 9 weren't enough, 3 certainly won't be. And waiting allows absorption shields and omega-Vs to pop, onto class 7 shields (over cloaking device, which I've never found particularly useful even with torps) and auto-blasters over phasors/scatter pack VII/pulson missiles/tachyon beam (the brains really do make research decisions hard by always giving me *everything* I could want, but given that I'll be on the offence for a bit I see little need for the missiles).

Impulse engines come in to pair with the bombs for the next generation, and I grab star gates next, finding them great for logistics. Exoskeleton keeps being in the percentages, but is still *just* out of reach, and will be a huge help with the invasion, so I keep holding off on clicking the button.. but for ship designs, the need to hold back there has largely faded, and with advanced space scanner (on to BC7 over ECM6) on 211, I get tired of waiting and throw together this:




Honestly it might be better to use antimatter bombs over omega-Vs, but I wanted to future-proof the design a little. The Nova will be my last upgrade for a while, and I thought this would be a good time to show off a screen I hadn't before:




The Fleet screen is how most large-scale coordination is pulled off. You select all your systems, then slim down the list in various ways - here I selected only things building the constellation, since that's all my rich/UR planets. I then switch them over to making the Nova, and also set their rally points to Yalow. There's also ways here to automatically launch waves of ships or transports, which I haven't used before, but mass-setting designs and rally points is already useful enough.

Armoured exoskeleton naturally pops the next turn (Andrium the only option to progress, though I'm not complaining), but the terraforming is still *almost* complete.. I refuse to end this session until I've taken a planet, so i wait for just a little more, and the rocks suddenly call me up, I wonder what they want?




Ok apparently sitting in orbit occasionally dropping bombs makes them really happy? I get that "enemy of my enemy" seems to be the biggest genre of boost for relations, but I figured I had to be more active than this. I turn off my own spying and rejoice in putting this era behind me. The first troop transports are launched in celebration, due in 3 turns, and the first Novas start to pop out. With a +15 ground combat bonus I send about 2x the target's population, wait, steal their mass driver trying to grab their ion rifle (and frame the bugs!), and finally, the first truly offensive action all game:







And yes, I was deliberately trying to approximately max the planet after taking it (it could hold 90 population). I salvage Ion Rifle, Gatling Laser, Range 6, Inertial Stabiliser, ECMIII, and battle suits - mostly junk, but with some actual upgrades mixed in. I expect the conquest of the cats to be all downhill from this point, and once I get up to 4 Novas, I send those out too, targeting the tiny rich world of Auva in the east. The invasion is slated to land turn 221, so I play out another turn just to see how my latest toys do, and they proceed to blow up both bases in a single drop, very nice. The invasion is of course even more lopsided than last time and gives me stuff all the way up to ion stream projector! Guess the cats are as good at weapons tech as always, though by now they're largely out of goodies. The rocks call me up to tell me how happy they are with my acts of violence, which is always nice to see, though I feel them being in danger of joining in nabbing cat worlds once they become clearly gassed, but it seems their fleet took a hit since the last ranking put them in first:




Partially just posting these so I can stare at the curve on those population/production graphs and think happy thoughts. And just for fun, some overall graphs since its been a while since those:




Approaching where I want to be, but damn the bugs are intimidating with that production lead. I don't *think* I can lose from here, but it's certainly not impossible. Finally, here's the front, and the customary overview:








Hopkins in the north-east is a size 40 irradiated rich world that I definitely want to snap up before the rocks get a chance to. Who knew that all it would take for the game to seem firmly in hand was better computers, better shields, better engines, better guns, better terraforming, better ground combat, and more factories! Felt like I had a sudden wave of massively more useful techs than before, and the game is blown wide open, though I'm still looking for improved industrial tech.. ah well. Things are looking up enough that I'm not super worried.

[Anskiy]

Funny how you pulled off the classic Psilon strategy of undercutting your opponent by massively out teching them, and then going on the offensive. Psilons are just so delightfully broken lol.

[haphazard1]

Nice to see the balance shifting with new tech. And now the fight is being taken to the enemy, rather than happening at your worlds. That is usually a very positive sign.

[Dp101]

Funny how you pulled off the classic Psilon strategy of undercutting your opponent by massively out teching them, and then going on the offensive. Psilons are just so delightfully broken lol.

Nice to see the balance shifting with new tech. And now the fight is being taken to the enemy, rather than happening at your worlds. That is usually a very positive sign.

Yeah it really does feel like I've finally gotten to take advantage of racial advantages to catch up, but also if you look at the tech graphs, you'll see that the cats are actually in last place and I'm still only middle of the pack, so I only have a localised tech advantage for the moment. I'm confident that that'll quickly start shifting though, given the state of the production graph.

[Cyneheard]

Things certainly seem to be looking up. You have managed to hold on to your worlds, reclaimed the one that was conquered, and are still expanding with the new environment tech. Nice work.

The council votes are remarkable evenly divided. Most of my MOO games have at least a couple stunted AIs, even if there is not a runaway leader. Even the Nazlok are not all that far behind the rest of the pack.

The nova event hitting the rocks is interesting. In original MOO the AI was generally very good about preventing the nova event. Maybe Garnet was a very new, small world as you said. With the rocks' pop growth penalty it might have had very little production.

I have no idea about the 'Altair' thing. Maybe the game just grabs star system names from a set list, including races that are not present in a particular game? I will have to keep an eye on the names in my current game and see if there are any odd ones.

The AIs being better about speed in their ship designs would certainly be a large improvement from original MOO. I have played so many games where extremely advanced AIs had ships with tons of advanced armor and weapons crawling along at speed 1. Or mixed fast and slow designs together in fleets and wasted the faster ships' speed.

Thanks for the update!

Max speed and shields/computer/ECM, and one weapon slot on Large/Huge ships for ground attack (bombs or bioweapons depending, probably "highest tech level") seem to be the default. So you'll win almost any fight that's equal tech + equal numbers - they're definitely wasting a decent % of their ship-to-ship power on ECM and the ground pounder slot, and their special choices are sometimes iffy (I've never seen High Energy Focus even when my games go late!), but it's a very safe set of design choices which is definitely what you want in an AI. You'd rather have them be 60-80% efficient consistently than constantly making exploitable mistakes.

This ship design philosophy is also another reason why missile bases are a much weaker choice to invest heavily in - the AI is both better protected from them than normal, and they're basically always able to crack them with sufficient numbers (and they do merge fleets effectively too); the other issue is that the game actually calculates the missile base cost correctly so they're a lot more expensive too.

I wasn't aware as to any "incorrect" base cost formula, could you elaborate? And yeah I haven't seen HEF myself, but the AI will still throw on interesting specials when given the chance (the cats have had battle scanners on all their large designs, and in the lategame cloaking or displacement devices are common, as are subspace teleporters) as to not make designs *completely* monotonous. Bases seem to still be valuable mostly in terms of "shield checks", raising the minimum amount of damage necessary to get any casualties, but it does seem like most of the time the AI can beat any given number of bases if it's able to beat them at all.

That's Xilmi who points out that there was a bugfix, and Xilmi's a key developer behind some of the mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/1...&context=3

I thought what it was - and I haven't been able to confirm it - is that the base RP cost for a missile base no longer goes down due to miniaturization. "Shield check" and "have enough that it's hard for the AI to sabotage them the turn they're sending in a fleet" seem to be the relevant numbers in my experience. If you build 200 bases, they will just assemble a big enough fleet where they just die.

[Dp101]

Things certainly seem to be looking up. You have managed to hold on to your worlds, reclaimed the one that was conquered, and are still expanding with the new environment tech. Nice work.

The council votes are remarkable evenly divided. Most of my MOO games have at least a couple stunted AIs, even if there is not a runaway leader. Even the Nazlok are not all that far behind the rest of the pack.

The nova event hitting the rocks is interesting. In original MOO the AI was generally very good about preventing the nova event. Maybe Garnet was a very new, small world as you said. With the rocks' pop growth penalty it might have had very little production.

I have no idea about the 'Altair' thing. Maybe the game just grabs star system names from a set list, including races that are not present in a particular game? I will have to keep an eye on the names in my current game and see if there are any odd ones.

The AIs being better about speed in their ship designs would certainly be a large improvement from original MOO. I have played so many games where extremely advanced AIs had ships with tons of advanced armor and weapons crawling along at speed 1. Or mixed fast and slow designs together in fleets and wasted the faster ships' speed.

Thanks for the update!

Max speed and shields/computer/ECM, and one weapon slot on Large/Huge ships for ground attack (bombs or bioweapons depending, probably "highest tech level") seem to be the default. So you'll win almost any fight that's equal tech + equal numbers - they're definitely wasting a decent % of their ship-to-ship power on ECM and the ground pounder slot, and their special choices are sometimes iffy (I've never seen High Energy Focus even when my games go late!), but it's a very safe set of design choices which is definitely what you want in an AI. You'd rather have them be 60-80% efficient consistently than constantly making exploitable mistakes.

This ship design philosophy is also another reason why missile bases are a much weaker choice to invest heavily in - the AI is both better protected from them than normal, and they're basically always able to crack them with sufficient numbers (and they do merge fleets effectively too); the other issue is that the game actually calculates the missile base cost correctly so they're a lot more expensive too.

I wasn't aware as to any "incorrect" base cost formula, could you elaborate? And yeah I haven't seen HEF myself, but the AI will still throw on interesting specials when given the chance (the cats have had battle scanners on all their large designs, and in the lategame cloaking or displacement devices are common, as are subspace teleporters) as to not make designs *completely* monotonous. Bases seem to still be valuable mostly in terms of "shield checks", raising the minimum amount of damage necessary to get any casualties, but it does seem like most of the time the AI can beat any given number of bases if it's able to beat them at all.

That's Xilmi who points out that there was a bugfix, and Xilmi's a key developer behind some of the mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/1...&context=3

I thought what it was - and I haven't been able to confirm it - is that the base RP cost for a missile base no longer goes down due to miniaturization. "Shield check" and "have enough that it's hard for the AI to sabotage them the turn they're sending in a fleet" seem to be the relevant numbers in my experience. If you build 200 bases, they will just assemble a big enough fleet where they just die.

What you posted and what was said the bug was don't quite line up - the post says it's about upgrading missile bases being cheap, whereas you talk about the cost not going down from miniaturisation. Is it both? Some combination of the two? If it's just the upgrade cost then it seems relatively low-impact, but if it's miniaturisation then that's very fair.

[RefSteel]

This ship design philosophy is also another reason why missile bases are a much weaker choice to invest heavily in - the AI is both better protected from them than normal, and they're basically always able to crack them with sufficient numbers (and they do merge fleets effectively too); the other issue is that the game actually calculates the missile base cost correctly so they're a lot more expensive too.

I wasn't aware as to any "incorrect" base cost formula, could you elaborate? And yeah I haven't seen HEF myself, but the AI will still throw on interesting specials when given the chance (the cats have had battle scanners on all their large designs, and in the lategame cloaking or displacement devices are common, as are subspace teleporters) as to not make designs *completely* monotonous. Bases seem to still be valuable mostly in terms of "shield checks", raising the minimum amount of damage necessary to get any casualties, but it does seem like most of the time the AI can beat any given number of bases if it's able to beat them at all.

What you posted and what was said the bug was don't quite line up - the post says it's about upgrading missile bases being cheap, whereas you talk about the cost not going down from miniaturisation. Is it both? Some combination of the two? If it's just the upgrade cost then it seems relatively low-impact, but if it's miniaturisation then that's very fair.

I assumed Cyneheard was referring to Sargon's discovery that original MoO's missile base costs do not adjust correctly. If I remember correctly, adding ECM increases the costs of the bases, leading to "UPGRD" costs appropriately, but other base-related tech (missiles, deflector shields, armor, battle computers) does not contribute to the bases' costs - whereas any tech gain in a relevant field (especially construction) "miniaturizes" bases the way it would a ship, thereby reducing the cost of building them. Thus, unless your ECM is high, early bases would cost more early in a MoO game than later bases with more-advanced toys.

[Dp101]

Playing some more, hoping to have the cats largely eliminated by the end of this session, as it seems like they have no military answer to anything I can do. I start the turn by giving the lizards Impulse Engines in exchange for cloning, since they already have fusion drives it's not much of an upgrade, and the biggest thing slowing my advance is not being able to send population fast enough. Sure enough Shedir's orbital defences are swiftly battered aside and the cats come calling for peace, a concept I have no interest in until they're reduced to just a single planet.

Shedir falls easily and gives me fusion drives and BCIV, the entire remaining back catalogue of the cats. It'll all help with miniaturisation, even if it's not actually an upgrade for the moment. And the lizards offer fusion rifle or improved industrial 6 for the ion stream projector! With no improved robotic controls on the horizon I grab the gun, figuring getting even better casualty rates against the cats can never be a bad thing.

The Irradiated Rich outpost of Hopkins is grabbed as Star Gates comes in - that'll be nice for logistical purposes. HEF is the only option, not that I think there's ever a second at that tier, and the rocks yell at me for colonising the new world. I once again take advantage of the fleet screen:




My shipbuilding planets will all uniformly need these things, so I assign them to be built by anything currently making the Nova, and I can queue up the various border world gates separately.

Turn 226 marks a new conquest of the small colony of Alnilam and auto-blaster comes in, continuing to have basically everything in my weapons tree as hand phasors, gauss autocannon, particle beam, hercular missiles, *and* plasma cannons are all on offer. I haven't had a missile upgrade in forever so go for that, nice as the autocannons are. With a +20 ground combat bonus, conquests are now routine, though the new stinger missiles the cats got are a concern - so long as they remember to upgrade to them. Achernar didn't get the memo and loses all its bases for its trouble, followed by me getting an immediate opportunity to steal those same missiles for the rocks, take warp dissipator, or a 1 in 3 for soil enrichment with all other options being useless and advanced soil enrichment being in the percentages. Seems like spying is starting to lose its luster as I overtake the AIs, but that's a great problem to have. And then.. the Kholdan attack me at Bohr and Buffon? Their Stinger design, a medium with 3 antimatter bombs each, brushes past the single base at each pretty easily, and I have to reroute ships from the front lines to compensate. I'd stopped paying attention to their fleets since they'd been constantly retreating instantly, hopefully this doesn't cost me, but even a single turn of this bomber attention hurts:




Ah well. I get Andrium armour that same turn, with IIT3, reduced waste 20%, or another armour as the options, and I resolve to fix waste later and get factories now since I'm having to build up a lot of new colonies.

Another council vote, another go around just barely out of reach of a veto block:




Voting broke down basically the same way as last time, but I'm going to have advanced soil enrichment before this happens again, and I'm confident that'll be enough to deal with any issues. I look at the map, and what a mess:




They made a try for Einstein as well, but luckily a single neutrino in orbit means the bombers didn't stay. The bugs aren't up to combat transporters yet, so I'll probably be fine, but this is a lot! As another group of ships comes in at Elion on turn 230, I realise that despite only 1 shield, these are still better targets for Stingers than Scatter-packs, due to a couple of facts:






The bugs care about ECM above all else! So even though the stingers would deal 19 damage on a hit vs the total of 20 from a volley of scatter packs, the improvement in accuracy from +5 targeting compared to +0 is incredibly important. Guess grabbing the missiles off of the invasion was key after all. Advanced Soil Enrichment then comes in, terraforming +60 vs complete eco restoration as the next options, I grab the cleanup tech since I skipped the last one, and start the process of radically improving my entire empire. This is the main reason why I'm yet to play the rocks and have no desire to, I enjoy these big mid to late eco techs way too much to give them up, they're just so cool! This process lets me be happy about the governor again:

Maxing pop via natural growth triggered a reset of the sliders, with exactly enough assigned to do soil enrichment, exactly enough industry to make the last few factories, and everything else into defence to move to get its base back. I love this aspect of the game so much.

Only about 65% of the bugs were shot down as they invaded Bohr, putting them at about 1-1 odds, but our ground combat tech is perfectly equal so defender's advantage carries me through. The cats ask for peace again, and while it is true that I'm now busy with the bugs, I don't think anything would actually change if I got peace with the cats, they're making zero offensive moves. Just 33 bugs make it down to Buffon though, a reassigned Nova getting the count to 3 shoot down almost all of the 200 incoming. It seems this excitement is largely over, and the bugs, uh..




I'm not making any offensive moves?? This war is at worst a stalemate for them, this makes no sense, but I gladly take the peace to reduce future distractions, though I'll 100% be back to take back Margulis from so long ago. The 304 transports to Einstein will likely be set to surrender upon arrival given that otherwise they'd be violating the peace treaty, and sure enough their movements aren't showing up in red despite the fact that they're aiming for one of my worlds:




Also the lizards are willing to give me II6 for repulsor beam, and while the former is about to be outdated, the latter is about to be entirely useless come HEF, so I snap it up in a heartbeat given how many factories I'm making at the moment. The lizards have been my one true friend this game, I appreciate them so much. Of course, the first turn of peace with the bugs is punctuated with a framing, so this'll be fun.. Class 7 deflectors pops, queued up class 9 over Zyon shield (the AIs do not seem particularly missile-happy this run) so my worlds should be getting quite impregnable by this point.

Turn 236 marks the point at which almost all my worlds have completed remaxing, and the graphs look pretty decisive:




While the idea of being tops in total power leading to an imminent victory isn't *always* correct, in this case it feels likely. Once I get the territory of the cats, I don't think I'll fall behind again, and I'll probably outstrip the bugs at that point. Even my Sun Fire and Constellation designs are enough to take out a cat planet given how little they've improved in the meantime, with the only new cat design being essentially identical to the Leopard but with 4 heavy fusion beams instead of 3, hardly terrifying, and the bases aren't much better. The designs aren't actually that awful, it's just that with the rate that they're being produced (slow), them being exceptional would be the only way to make them problematic, and they aren't.

Turn 240 *was* going to be a lovely peaceful capstone, and then this happened:




The bugs seem to not actually have any long-term interest in peace. Yeah I'm going to have to address this *immediately*. Glad that that wasn't the only stargate I built in the region. The transports weren't showing as hostile since we had a peace treaty, I guess it expired at exactly the wrong moment? Frustrating, and the mess is even worse than last time:




This is what I meant by it not necessarily being the case that a lead in total power means victory. With how much stronger offence is than defence in this game, sometimes this'll just.. happen, and scrambling to fix it takes time. With no hyperspace communicators I can't tell the fleet I just sent off for Fierias to turn back, and in general I'm at a quite awkward mark in the rhythm of expansion, most of my ships stuck covering new conquests and unable to freely turn back. At least most of the angry red crosses will go away soon, as it seems like the violation of the treaty was done when the transports hit which is *after* combat, meaning that any vessels in orbit were excluded from having to fight, so a lot of these ships that can't beat the bases they hover above will be swiftly fleeing. This isn't the tone I wanted to end this update with!