(April 29th, 2024, 20:30)Ray F Wrote: So unless you are sure that your spies can remain hidden safely, think long and hard about maintaining spy networks in xenophobic empires. THEY HATE SPIES.
Cool flavor - but given the number of spies constantly getting caught by the player in the games I'm reading about, does this mean that Xenophobic empires are in a perpetual rolling state of war with other AIs in the galaxy? Or do the other AIs spy less on Xenophobes than on other races, knowing how much they hate it? If the latter, does the player's race have a hidden "personality," as it does in MoO, that affects the way other races see them (and make decisions about them)?
Er, but back to this SG: I've indeed been fiddling with the EitB map while waiting for everyone to check in, but I can try to get some turns in on this one tomorrow - I'll post a Got It when I can if nobody else does in the meantime. I don't have many useful comments on the turns so far, as I'm still very unfamiliar with RotP's interface changes. (I miss the Map screen, which y'all will mostly think is silly since we can always just zoom out, but I'm a weirdo, and I really miss MoO's Fleet screen, which Ray F will not even possibly believe - but it let me see all my already-en-route fleets and where they were going, all in one place! Of course there are compensations; for instance, I love the tech progress bubbles visible from the main command screen!)
Well, if you're looking for the various filter modes of the Map screen, the Systems one can do a good imitation, if the entire issue is the zoom thing then I can't help you there . Same with the fleets screen, don't think I ever clicked that button in MoO.
I will agree with RefSteel that the Fleets screen in MOO is something I used a lot. I do miss it in RotP. But there are a ton of positive things about the RotP interface that I am really liking.
I do wonder about the AI vs AI spying. They certainly are throwing a ton of spies at me in my lizards game. I think some of that is having the shape shifters as a neighbor, but the bugs are spying a ton as well. It is literally every single turn that I get a "we caught a spy" report, sometimes showing spies from multiple AIs were caught.
On the diplo, it is nice to be able to see the size of the diplomatic effects of various things. (Not with the Nazlok, which makes them very difficult to get a feel for.) There is unhappiness every turn for my empire being "too large" but that effect is smaller than the regular positive boost from a decent-size trade deal. The occasional framing has the same effect as a forced confession (spies caught making trouble, basically) and is a bigger negative, but it can be offset over time by posititve effects.
Another reason to risk spying is that apparently you can not trade techs with an AI for which you do not have an active spy network. The option does not even appear during an audience. So immediately trading techs when you meet a new race is not an option, and you can not use that as a way to get an idea of what they have.
(April 29th, 2024, 08:09)Sullla Wrote: If I can provide a little constructive feedback, this was where things went off the rails a bit:
Fenn Wrote:On Turn 11 Sssla starts building an 8-turn colony ship for Rinnenth and I put a tick of spending into tech. Computing and Construction had the full selection; Planetology offered up Improved Terraforming +10 and Improved Eco Restoration, but not Controlled Barren which could have been handy for colonizing Parath. Weapons has just Hyper-Vs, and the all-important Propulsion offers...Hydrogen Fuel Cells for Range 4. Well, it'll have to do. For the time being I put all tech spending into Planetology and Propulsion, not that there's much to spend while Sssla works on the Colony Ship.
This was a mistake; pausing factory construction to start building colony ships when they still need 8 turns to completion (in other words when net production on the homeworld is only about 70 BC/turn) is not a good decision. Doing research when the homeworld is far short of maxing factories is also typically a bad idea. Doing ANYTHING other than maxing factories as soon as possible tends to be wasteful because building factories allows you to do everything else faster and better. Rather than spend 8 turns building a single colony ship, the homeworld could build factories for those 8 turns and then start cranking out future colony ships at 4 or 5 turns apiece. There are times when you don't want to max factories first, but there has to be some kind of a major strategic priority taking predecence: a key world to grab, a key tech that's needed for expansion, etc. Building the early colony ship to settle Rinnenth, a size 45 planet in the backlines under no threat at all, doesn't many any strategic sense. I know it can be boring sitting there hitting "Next Turn" and doing nothing for a dozen turns in the early game but it really is the best opening most of the time!
This actually make the succession game more interesting to follow so... good luck!
Yeah I hadn't spotted the very early colony ship build in the post originally. I generally don't build (in MOO) col ships until I am either maxed (half maxed for Meklar) or it is absolutely imperative that I settle a spot early.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
(April 29th, 2024, 17:49)Dp101 Wrote: Well, since we're on the topic of factory maxing there's something I've always been curious about: Playing as the Meklar/Meklonar, do you still max factories before doing anything else? Because sitting there all the way to 400 feels like it can take absolutely forever, and in any case where there's a third colonisable world within reach of the start with zero research necessary, it feels like getting the extra planet up sooner so it can start maxing factories itself is useful - if you stop your homeworld at, say, 300 factories, you've got 1.4x as much production as anyone else (if we pretend waste cleanup doesn't exist since that makes maths harder) when they'd start building colony ships, so if that speed is acceptableish, taking a break to make 1 colony ship and then going back to factories feels not terrible? If the situation required research to claim a world though, I'd probably always finish factories first. Obviously not a question relevant for this game though, I'd just been missing the opportunity to ask.
Anyways, I'll take the save now. Going to play up through eot 50 to get back to regular numbers.
I generally half max Meklon (in original MOO) and then start pumping out ships. When there are pauses in colonisation, I build out more factories. It's slower to max, but at the same time, you've more colonies up earlier, which I think is the real snowball in MOO.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
(April 29th, 2024, 20:30)Ray F Wrote: So unless you are sure that your spies can remain hidden safely, think long and hard about maintaining spy networks in xenophobic empires. THEY HATE SPIES.
Cool flavor - but given the number of spies constantly getting caught by the player in the games I'm reading about, does this mean that Xenophobic empires are in a perpetual rolling state of war with other AIs in the galaxy? Or do the other AIs spy less on Xenophobes than on other races, knowing how much they hate it? If the latter, does the player's race have a hidden "personality," as it does in MoO, that affects the way other races see them (and make decisions about them)?
Er, but back to this SG: I've indeed been fiddling with the EitB map while waiting for everyone to check in, but I can try to get some turns in on this one tomorrow - I'll post a Got It when I can if nobody else does in the meantime. I don't have many useful comments on the turns so far, as I'm still very unfamiliar with RotP's interface changes. (I miss the Map screen, which y'all will mostly think is silly since we can always just zoom out, but I'm a weirdo, and I really miss MoO's Fleet screen, which Ray F will not even possibly believe - but it let me see all my already-en-route fleets and where they were going, all in one place! Of course there are compensations; for instance, I love the tech progress bubbles visible from the main command screen!)
Was going to say I could pick it up tomorrow evening, but I'll leave it to you and grab the save once you're done.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
(April 30th, 2024, 03:50)Dp101 Wrote: Well, if you're looking for the various filter modes of the Map screen, the Systems one can do a good imitation, if the entire issue is the zoom thing then I can't help you there :p. Same with the fleets screen, don't think I ever clicked that button in MoO.
Yeah, the Systems screen is great! (Although I can't tell what the giant blinking colored cross-hairs on different systems are supposed to mean...) But it's absolutely the zoom: I'm used to using a single key-press to jump from my standard view of the empire to a full map of the galaxy and back. Of course, I realize that isn't really practical with Remnants, where the galaxy can be so huge, you could lose your empire in its depths. It'll just take me some getting used to.
(April 30th, 2024, 13:32)Brian Shanahan Wrote: Was going to say I could pick it up tomorrow evening, but I'll leave it to you and grab the save once you're done.
Well, in that case, I'd better get started!
Inherited turn report:
Already over a century old, scales worn and scarred and buckling, weathered down from their one-tie teal to a dark, mottled grey, a monitor lizard in old working clothes crawled into the central command room, dragging his bad leg by such strength as he still had in the other three. An experienced claw, someone had said - maybe his election manager - and somehow it had persuaded the population that he was the right lizard to take office one more time: One last stint as emperor-elect ... or ... what was that new-fangled title they had given him? The old monitor could barely remember what flavor of vat-mash he'd had in the morning; changes to imperial custom - or whatever kind of custom the others were calling it now - were beyond him. The command chamber was gorgeous - a far cry from the cobbled-together, functional but bare-bones place he remembered from his heady, healthy youth, when half the joy of command was figuring out how the clunky-looking controls worked and discovering their underlying elegance. Decades older now, inclined to grumble about anything to which he hadn't yet grown used, he grudgingly admitted, "They've certainly made the place nicer since I've been away."
"How come some of our fleets have those yellow lines behind them? They're not faster than the others; I know that much: They're all as slow as me! It looks like only the armed ships are shown that way, maybe? At least, the same ships still have them when I break up the fleets to send them somewhere singly, and the scouts in orbit at other worlds don't have the things. But if that's the case ... hang on, there are bug fleets flying around, and they don't have the yellow lines, so I'd better hope that's it. Let's see."
"Right, so those two both are Bumblebees, and we don't have any scans, but I wasn't born yesterday - nor last week - nor last year - nor this century - and these seem to be the only class of bug ships we've ever seen, so I can make a pretty good guess that they're scout ships. So. Cool new command room, right? Let's see if I can..."
"I am loving this interface. So I've told our military scanning officials to give those so-called Bumblebees a code name that I'll understand when we pick them up on scanners. Should make it easier for them to stick in my aging memory. Of course, I still have to take notes, because although this shows when we last saw each ship type, which is nice to know, it doesn't record when we first saw them, which is vital to understand what they might be packing! So I'll still have to keep track of that myself, same as before. Also, I see we're meant to be spying on the bugs and machines, but we aren't spending anything on it since we have as many spies in place already as we intended. Nice way to save forgetting to switch back and forth, okay. I'm cutting off even the non-spending though. We have an idea of what they've got already, and if our spies get caught, I don't want any more costs and trouble from them than we've got already. One other change though: Our chief advisor on race relations warned that when our spy inevitably gets caught in bug space, they're going to assume the poor lizard was there to sabotage something even if he's just hiding out. Well, he's going to get caught before too long anyway - as I remember, they always do - so I may as well give him a chance to help us out in the meantime and maybe make the bugs feel better about it when they catch him: No way to recall him as far as I can see, but I can ask him to check out their labs, and maybe they'll believe the truth if instead of hiding or sabotaging, he's sniffing around for new technology. Oh, and speaking of technology..."
"This works nothing like it used to. Time was, you'd build your labs, the more you build, the faster results you get, as long as you keep 'em staffed, raising their budget slowly and steadily. Now it's all about trusting the tech lizards: Throw money their way, spread it out for everybody, and they'll do it slightly faster than if you give them all a special project to focus on. Moves the math around a little, and changes the way you have to manage things to get good results. It also means there's no point in researching consistently over time the way there used to be. That matters more early on, but even now, it's going to play a role. It'll take me a while to get my head around all the consequences of this change. But let's start with Planetology. We were diverting some extra resources from other places to push a little heavily here when I arrived, but I'm canceling that policy. If I can grumble like the old lizard I am for a minute, if only we were researching terraforming instead, we'd already be done with it and have more room on all our worlds, and be able to do everything better on all of them! We'll have to prioritize this all-important field eventually, but not yet - not while we still have to sink trillions of credits into it just to develop a form of technology we didn't want in the first place. I will say, apart from the weirdly backward controls for scanning left and right through each tree, being able to see what we have skipped from here is nice. The older, clunkier, less-informative screens I remember did have higher information density, but that won't be an issue for a long, long time, and then it'll just be a matter of a few extra key-presses when looking into things. Anyway, the new plan is going to be to equalize everything like the union wants. That might not be the right move right now, but I'm too old to optimize a whole new system on my first try, and we'll revisit things soon - maybe as soon as next year!"
"Maybe I should say I love some things about this interface, because I do, but then there's this thing. In the new system, as far as I can tell, the only ways to even tell how many ships of a given design we have flying around space, never mind where, are to either go through the galactic map and manually count them, hoping we don't miss any, or to go to the design screen and threaten to scrap them all so they warn us how many will go down that way ... and hopefully I remember to cancel the scrap order rather than putting it through. If it sounds like I'm complaining and longing for my old-style fleet screen, okay, I'm an old lizard, let me complain. But also I'm letting you know how you can find the information in case you couldn't either. And so that someone who knows a better place to find it might come out and tell me!
Either way, after spending five minutes finding out we actually have two colony ships already on their way and at least ten more complaining about it, I'm ready to send some transports out to help get things started at the new colonies-to-be, knowing our lizard people can breed them back up quickly. That's where I'm starting; here's hoping I still have some idea of what I'm doing in what for me is practically a whole new galaxy!"
Or in other words: GOT IT! Compared to a MoO game, I have absolutely no idea what to expect here - but here goes anyway! I'll try to get at least the save and a bare-bones report out in time for Brian's tomorrow evening - with emphasis hopefully not too heavily on "try."
You can look at the design screen, and each design slot shows how many are currently in existence. You do not have to actually threated to scrap them, and risk doing so by accident.
The little lines behind the ship icons do indicate whether they are armed.
(April 30th, 2024, 03:50)Dp101 Wrote: Well, if you're looking for the various filter modes of the Map screen, the Systems one can do a good imitation, if the entire issue is the zoom thing then I can't help you there . Same with the fleets screen, don't think I ever clicked that button in MoO.
Yeah, the Systems screen is great! (Although I can't tell what the giant blinking colored cross-hairs on different systems are supposed to mean...)
Think of the Systems screen as a "To Do" list or task organizer for your empire. There's really nothing like it in any other 4X game. On the Explore tab, those blinking crosshairs indicate systems that haven't been scouted yet. On the Expand tab, it identifies systems that are uncolonized. On the Exploit tab, it's all about indicating how developed each of your colonies are. On the Exterminate tab, it's about your military defenses.
Clicking on a system will tell you why the crosshairs are flashing. Red crosshairs are generally most urgent, while Green crosshairs are least urgent.
(April 30th, 2024, 03:50)Dp101 Wrote: Well, if you're looking for the various filter modes of the Map screen, the Systems one can do a good imitation, if the entire issue is the zoom thing then I can't help you there . Same with the fleets screen, don't think I ever clicked that button in MoO.
Yeah, the Systems screen is great! (Although I can't tell what the giant blinking colored cross-hairs on different systems are supposed to mean...) But it's absolutely the zoom: I'm used to using a single key-press to jump from my standard view of the empire to a full map of the galaxy and back. Of course, I realize that isn't really practical with Remnants, where the galaxy can be so huge, you could lose your empire in its depths. It'll just take me some getting used to.
(April 30th, 2024, 13:32)Brian Shanahan Wrote: Was going to say I could pick it up tomorrow evening, but I'll leave it to you and grab the save once you're done.
Well, in that case, I'd better get started!
Inherited turn report:
Already over a century old, scales worn and scarred and buckling, weathered down from their one-tie teal to a dark, mottled grey, a monitor lizard in old working clothes crawled into the central command room, dragging his bad leg by such strength as he still had in the other three. An experienced claw, someone had said - maybe his election manager - and somehow it had persuaded the population that he was the right lizard to take office one more time: One last stint as emperor-elect ... or ... what was that new-fangled title they had given him? The old monitor could barely remember what flavor of vat-mash he'd had in the morning; changes to imperial custom - or whatever kind of custom the others were calling it now - were beyond him. The command chamber was gorgeous - a far cry from the cobbled-together, functional but bare-bones place he remembered from his heady, healthy youth, when half the joy of command was figuring out how the clunky-looking controls worked and discovering their underlying elegance. Decades older now, inclined to grumble about anything to which he hadn't yet grown used, he grudgingly admitted, "They've certainly made the place nicer since I've been away."
"How come some of our fleets have those yellow lines behind them? They're not faster than the others; I know that much: They're all as slow as me! It looks like only the armed ships are shown that way, maybe? At least, the same ships still have them when I break up the fleets to send them somewhere singly, and the scouts in orbit at other worlds don't have the things. But if that's the case ... hang on, there are bug fleets flying around, and they don't have the yellow lines, so I'd better hope that's it. Let's see."
"Right, so those two both are Bumblebees, and we don't have any scans, but I wasn't born yesterday - nor last week - nor last year - nor this century - and these seem to be the only class of bug ships we've ever seen, so I can make a pretty good guess that they're scout ships. So. Cool new command room, right? Let's see if I can..."
"I am loving this interface. So I've told our military scanning officials to give those so-called Bumblebees a code name that I'll understand when we pick them up on scanners. Should make it easier for them to stick in my aging memory. Of course, I still have to take notes, because although this shows when we last saw each ship type, which is nice to know, it doesn't record when we first saw them, which is vital to understand what they might be packing! So I'll still have to keep track of that myself, same as before. Also, I see we're meant to be spying on the bugs and machines, but we aren't spending anything on it since we have as many spies in place already as we intended. Nice way to save forgetting to switch back and forth, okay. I'm cutting off even the non-spending though. We have an idea of what they've got already, and if our spies get caught, I don't want any more costs and trouble from them than we've got already. One other change though: Our chief advisor on race relations warned that when our spy inevitably gets caught in bug space, they're going to assume the poor lizard was there to sabotage something even if he's just hiding out. Well, he's going to get caught before too long anyway - as I remember, they always do - so I may as well give him a chance to help us out in the meantime and maybe make the bugs feel better about it when they catch him: No way to recall him as far as I can see, but I can ask him to check out their labs, and maybe they'll believe the truth if instead of hiding or sabotaging, he's sniffing around for new technology. Oh, and speaking of technology..."
"This works nothing like it used to. Time was, you'd build your labs, the more you build, the faster results you get, as long as you keep 'em staffed, raising their budget slowly and steadily. Now it's all about trusting the tech lizards: Throw money their way, spread it out for everybody, and they'll do it slightly faster than if you give them all a special project to focus on. Moves the math around a little, and changes the way you have to manage things to get good results. It also means there's no point in researching consistently over time the way there used to be. That matters more early on, but even now, it's going to play a role. It'll take me a while to get my head around all the consequences of this change. But let's start with Planetology. We were diverting some extra resources from other places to push a little heavily here when I arrived, but I'm canceling that policy. If I can grumble like the old lizard I am for a minute, if only we were researching terraforming instead, we'd already be done with it and have more room on all our worlds, and be able to do everything better on all of them! We'll have to prioritize this all-important field eventually, but not yet - not while we still have to sink trillions of credits into it just to develop a form of technology we didn't want in the first place. I will say, apart from the weirdly backward controls for scanning left and right through each tree, being able to see what we have skipped from here is nice. The older, clunkier, less-informative screens I remember did have higher information density, but that won't be an issue for a long, long time, and then it'll just be a matter of a few extra key-presses when looking into things. Anyway, the new plan is going to be to equalize everything like the union wants. That might not be the right move right now, but I'm too old to optimize a whole new system on my first try, and we'll revisit things soon - maybe as soon as next year!"
"Maybe I should say I love some things about this interface, because I do, but then there's this thing. In the new system, as far as I can tell, the only ways to even tell how many ships of a given design we have flying around space, never mind where, are to either go through the galactic map and manually count them, hoping we don't miss any, or to go to the design screen and threaten to scrap them all so they warn us how many will go down that way ... and hopefully I remember to cancel the scrap order rather than putting it through. If it sounds like I'm complaining and longing for my old-style fleet screen, okay, I'm an old lizard, let me complain. But also I'm letting you know how you can find the information in case you couldn't either. And so that someone who knows a better place to find it might come out and tell me!
Either way, after spending five minutes finding out we actually have two colony ships already on their way and at least ten more complaining about it, I'm ready to send some transports out to help get things started at the new colonies-to-be, knowing our lizard people can breed them back up quickly. That's where I'm starting; here's hoping I still have some idea of what I'm doing in what for me is practically a whole new galaxy!"
Or in other words: GOT IT! Compared to a MoO game, I have absolutely no idea what to expect here - but here goes anyway! I'll try to get at least the save and a bare-bones report out in time for Brian's tomorrow evening - with emphasis hopefully not too heavily on "try."
YOU CAN RENAME ENEMY SHIP DESIGNS TO TAKE NOTES ON THEM?? Wow. Kicking myself now for not renaming the Transistor fighter to, well, a fighter. Feel free to do so at some point during the turnset, I did note the type in my report but if I'd known there was this easier way to do it I'd have done so lol. Kinda surprised you'd rather grab terraforming +10 over getting a chance at progressing to some environmental tech given that we're entirely out of techless room to expand (and given that propulsion research was already set to the non-range option, not that I disagree with that choice), I guess it is extremely cheap?? And ofc in general I'm feeling thoroughly outclassed in the report entertainment department, very much enjoying reading along though.
Also, just like the old game with no improved+ scanners you can't see enemy paths at all, so can't use that for analysis of colours, but looks like it's all figured out. I suggest in general with UI stuff to click the question mark in the top left of each screen for a lightning round annotated overview of all the buttons, takes barely any time at all and helps catch bits of info that we've failed to either share or learn (I didn't know you could box-select things on the fleets screen until I clicked that one yesterday, for example).
RefSteel's write ups are always great fun to read.
Terraforming+10 is very cheap, both to research and to apply. Worth getting if there is not something very urgent needed instead. I like having more lizards everywhere.
. Same with the fleets screen, don't think I ever clicked that button in MoO.
