Remnants of the Precursors - Initial thoughts

[RefSteel]

None of the AI's "cheat"

What's the difference between the different difficulty levels then? That is, what makes Hardest different from Harder and so on, given the same AI for each one?

[rgp151]

Ok, yeah, this is over. Now the Darloks are using entirely cloaked fleets, so I can't see them on the map, they are just picking apart my planets one by one and not much I can really do about it. A planet by itself can't stop an attack, and I can't get powerful enough fleets at every planet, so they are just moving invisibly to any planet without a fleet and destroying it.

I guess I'll try Xilmi Normal.

I see two big difficulties with Xilmi:
1) The level of opportunism. You can take nothing for granted because they will just attack any vulnerability. Your current status with them doesn't really matter.
2) The ship tactics are far more advanced.

Defending planets requires Repulsor Beams and Auto Repair and ships strong enough to stand up to attacks.

You have to switch to destroy-only mode much sooner against Xilmi, because defending planets is so difficult. So Planet quality is a much bigger deal. You need a few good Rich and Artifact planets that you can heavily defend and then just destroy everything else.

The three big techs IMO are Repulsor Beams, Auto Repair and Cloaking Device. The really powerful thing about Cloaking Device for the player is being able to get past Repulsor Beams. If they are defending with a strong Repulsor Beam ship, you can still just slip in and bomb the planet.

But also, defending against Cloaking Device gets very difficult, because when they go 100% Cloaked you can't see the ships on the map anymore and you can't stop them from bombing you even with Repulsor Beams. And its almost impossible to kill stacks of Cloaked Ships before they get to your planet. So once Cloaking Device is obtained protecting planets becomes extremely difficult.

[Cyneheard]

None of the AI's "cheat"

What's the difference between the different difficulty levels then?  That is, what makes Hardest different from Harder and so on, given the same AI for each one?

There's production bonuses, but they're mild. "Hard" = 110%, "Harder" = 125% and "Hardest" = 145% is what I see in the modded version, I'd expect the base to be similar/identical.

That's obviously very different in scale from base MOO.

[rgp151]

Ok, I just tried Normal Xilmi and failed. Something seems off because the metric you get from the racial status don't seem reasonable sometimes, like when some race with small population is way ahead in tech and production somehow.

The tactics used by the AI us certainly a big challenge. I would say in this game even more than MoO, combat movement speed is very advantageous. Just had a fleet come in with Warp Dissipators that would come up, use the Warp Dissipator, then retreat. I was trying to defend a planet against a bomber, so I didn't want to leave the planet and get suck out away from it. So they ended up disabling my ships, which reduced their beam defense, and then after they were both disabled then came in and killed them off, but it was a no-win situation because if I left to purse them then the bomber would have just wiped the planet. And their ships were huge with Auto Repair so my 10 missile bases weren't even to overcome the Auto Repair, but with the missiles and the Sips I could have taken the Huge ships, but then I would have lost the planet to bombers.

Yeah, very tricky.

But, it might be the case that Normal Xilimi is the thing to play.

So far I'd say that Normal Xilmi is harder than Hardest Modnar.

Its required to have large multi-ship fleets and you have to be selective about which planets to defend. Unless you are way ahead in tech, planets cannot defend themselves like they could in MoO, which makes things very challenging. I'm not sure how the AI, with no cheats and no bonuses, is generating more research and producing as many ships as it does, given that I've had the population advantage most of the game, and I'm Klackon vs Silicoid in this case.

Several times now I've had some interesting things happen when being about to wipe out a race. I guess when things are going poorly you have a higher chance to getting some kind of good event. So its been common to get a race down to a single planet and then that planet will become Rich, or, even better, they will discover a Derelict Ship. I've had one of those two things happen many times now when getting an enemy down to one planet. Then you can storm that last planet and get all those techs, which may be cheesy, but against Xilmi you need anything you can get.

[Ray F]

But, it might be the case that Normal Xilimi is the thing to play.

So far I'd say that Normal Xilmi is harder than Hardest Modnar.

Just want to clarify about the AIs.. The "Base" AI is the one I wrote as I developed the game. Its goal is to be able to play the game and use all of the features. That alone is a pretty significant effort. In the first Beta, there were complaints about weaknesses in the AI which I tried to address but I was also working on a massive "last call" request list to finish up every thing improvement in the game I could make. This is where I started adding the ability to limit ship constructions, change research before you hit next turn, add the research bubbles on the main UI, display ships stats in combat... just lots and lots of QoL features. So I was really pressed for time!

Anyway, Modnar was a user on reddit who made some changes, so I added his AI to the game as an option. Then Xilmi came along. He was an AI developer who has worked on multiple 4X games and he started doing his thing with ROTP. At his request, I added the ability to pick different AIs for different opponents. This allowed him to test new versions of his AI against previous versions and he started this incredible iterative effort to create what you see in the game. It's brutal!

None of the AIs "cheat" but you can give yourself (or the AI) production bonuses if you drift off of Normal difficulty.

The Xilmi AI in ROTP is almost certainly the strongest AI in the entire 4X genre. ROTP has the luxury of being functionally complete so the AI can be properly tuned without getting screwed up by new features.

[rgp151]

I just tried Normal using Psilons this time, and again no go. I haven't been able to beat it yet. It looks like it will require having a really good start. For some reason in my recent games I've gotten very few Rich and Artifact planets. In my last 3 games I had no Rich planets at all in the set I originally settled. In every game I've been able to be the first to 6 and the first to 12 or 18 systems, but I still end up falling behind in research. I did even as as Psilons. Of course the main opponent was Meklar, pretty much the strongest once they get going.

Actually taking planets is very difficult and winning battles gets really tedious because of the tactics they use. You can take a planet, but good luck holding on to it. It can be done but they make it a real challenge. Because they use high movement ships, with Auto Repair and high ECM, they are just very difficult to wear down. What I see typically is stacks of Large beam ships with a few bombs on them, with Internal Stabilizers, high ECM and Auto Repair, and they attack and move back, some have Repulsor Beams which block access to other ships making it hard to kill them off.

I usually have like a few Huges with AR and Repulsor Beams and Battle Scanner, or Warp Dissipator.

But I'm really thinking that Psilons are the way to go because there are so many techs that you just can't miss out on. Yes, you can acquire them, but it can be tricky. You must have AR, and you must have RBs, you must be up to date on IRC, you must have good Battle Computers, you must have high armor.

I think one difficulty with this type of game is that really so much of being successful comes own to population management, and population management is very tedious, so people are never going to do it optimally. A good AI will always be much better at population management. If that's a part of what's going on with Xilmi, then I think the game needs better population management tools to help the player compete with the AI. Really being good a pop management requires a lot of streaming populations from planet to planet, making use of early Fertile planets keeping all planets in the zone of optimal population growth, etc. There is a lot that CAN be done with pop management, but really, no human is ever going to fully optimize it. Doing so would require a level of rigor and tedium that only the most OCD and masochistic would enjoy playing at that level.

[rgp151]

Also, when playing Xilmi I recommend turning the council vote off. You don't get the relations meter bar with Xilmi, and it seems that spying doesn't matter either. So there isn't a diplomatic effect as far as I can see, so the vote is pretty much nonsense.

[rgp151]

I'm making more progress on Xilmi, but its extremely difficult, largely because of the lack of any real kind of relations. Every opponent is opportunistic and its almost impossible to defend you planets, so you really are best off just bombing out oppnents, but the problem is that if you just bomb out planets then the other races will just come in and take them over. So you end up allowing other races to grow. Its like you have to wage wage on all races at once at a certain point, which gets very difficult. If you could actually get alliances it would be much better, but you can't, so...

[Ray F]

I'm making more progress on Xilmi, but its extremely difficult, largely because of the lack of any real kind of relations. Every opponent is opportunistic and its almost impossible to defend you planets, so you really are best off just bombing out oppnents, but the problem is that if you just bomb out planets then the other races will just come in and take them over. So you end up allowing other races to grow. Its like you have to wage wage on all races at once at a certain point, which gets very difficult. If you could actually get alliances it would be much better, but you can't, so...

There was a real debate about the purpose of AI when Xilmi was working on his. I am a firm believer in that the AI should be immersive. It exists to entertain you without giving away the game. Xilmi is a firm believer in that the AI should be trying to win. So I believe that his AI in the base game is just that. It's trying to win. No personality.

However, I think after playing many games against his own AI, he's come around a bit and now the Fusion mod has the all-out AI and and immersive AI that has personalities. They are both still extremely difficult to beat, however

[rgp151]

In terms of ship design, a lot still holds over from MoO of course, but for playing against Xilmi I think the best is to have fleets that include Warp Dissipator on all or almost all ships, maximum mobility, maximum weapon range (either heavy weapons or High Energy Focus), at least one highly defensive ship with Repulsor Beams that can protect planets, and sometimes Iron Stream projectors. The key is to immobilize ships with Warp Dissipator and then hit them from a distance. Since ships don't auto fire when you move into their range, being able to stop them, move into range, fire, then back away, is huge, and against Xilmi if you don't do it to them, they will do it to you. So yeah, Warp Dissipator is huge, and you have to do enough damage to overcome Auto Repair, since almost all ships will have Auto Repair.