Remnants of the Precursors Succession Game?

[RefSteel]

Wow, you got them all! Great turns, Brian!

PS I've tried to misspell Human differently every time I had to talk of them

I noticed this and loved it! Let's show those Soloids who the real planetologists are in this galaxy!

Just one thing to be aware of: I believe that in Remnants, "rally points" don't work like MoO Reloc orders. Setting a rally point is the same as just building the ship without one and then sending the ship to the rally point manually: They're mainly a convenience for managing large empires continuously building ships in lots of different places. Either way, in this case, because nebulae are horrific abominations of unrelenting pain*, it would actually be faster to build another colship for the UR at Garuga (up to three turns faster with enough reserve spending) and send it to Bevurth directly than to wait for the existing one to reach Oviraptoria and send it on from there, even with its head start. (Fenn, if you do this - or in fact, either way - remember to cancel the rally point between Garuga and Oviraptoria first!)

* - I didn't fully understand Dp101's loathing for nebulae until I witnessed their effects in this SG. In MoO, nebulae reduce passing ships' speeds by an unpredictable amount - roughly half - which is difficult to deal with, especially early. But in Remnants, the nebulae seem to be much larger and reduce ships' speed to a flat warp 1 - meaning that there's no way short of Star Gates to ever speed up travel across wide swaths of a map unless (like Dp101) you turn nebulae off when setting up the game. At least it's predictable ... except that it's hard to know exactly how much a nebula will delay a given trip that (may) pass through a part of it unless you have a ship with the right warp rating correctly positioned to check. Of course, in MoO, the time needed for most ship courses even without nebulae in the way have to be guessed at unless you have a ship you can use to test it like this, but Remnants thankfully fixed this ... apart from the nebula thing.

[Dp101]

Just one thing to be aware of: I believe that in Remnants, "rally points" don't work like MoO Reloc orders. Setting a rally point is the same as just building the ship without one and then sending the ship to the rally point manually: They're mainly a convenience for managing large empires continuously building ships in lots of different places.

Ah, I guess I should have mentioned this in my showcase game, but yeah I'm pretty sure that RELOC thing in the original game was a bug so I neglected to mention that it was fixed lol. I'm personally glad because it's a bit annoying, but it would have been good for me to mention it.

It's funny, while the inconsistent nebula speeds is definitely a lot of why I hate them, my bigger issue is the complete lack of defensive play allowed by nebulas, or any interesting play at all really. You have to slowly move in fleets at such a pace that pre-stargates you can never reinforce a world, the number of bases needed to secure one given that they're all unshielded is absurd, you have no reliable means to prevent damage on the offence in them either... so the overall effect is that you can't guarantee when forces will get anywhere that goes through a nebula, you'll take basically constant attrition in every single fight that takes place in one, and any reinforcements you send to compensate for said attrition will be so late as to be worthless in a lot of circumstances. It's really just star gates and subspace teleporters that make them tolerable (and even then, the latter just makes it so that if you have them and the enemy lacks interdictors then you can get clean victories, if you yourself lacks interdictor and the enemy has the teleporter, have fun never being able to hold a world in a nebula ever again) and those are late enough that they just generally cause suffering lol.

[Fenn]

Here we go:

INTRAGOVERMENTAL AFFAIRS OFFICE
SUMMARY REPORT FOR 1102
RESTRICTED - DO NOT COPY OR DISTRIBUTE


The Ssslaura possess considerable holdings among civilized peoples, even as further expansion awaits - Bevurth and Vorlanth up in the galactic north await colony ships. What should be by now a routine operation briefly devolved into farce when the colony ship intended for Bevurth began its long voyage...in the wrong direction, towards Oviraptoria, burning all its acceleration fuel before the error was discovered planetside.

The ensuing scandal and recriminations flying every which way are by now public knowledge, so it will only be said that such was the delay imposed that it was faster to construct a second colony rather than wait for the previous one to arrive; you will recall that engineers and prefab sections were flown in to Garuga on short notice in an attempt to bring the embarrassment to an end sooner.


Scouts exploring the far eastern reaches of our range found Cryslonoid colonies at their destinations - one was heavily guarded, Andalus in this image had evidently only been settled recently. The Imperium's ambassador was predictably wroth at our intrusions, but as of this writing harsh language has been the extent of their reaction, and an expansion of our mutual trade agreement was negotiated without issue, if under a terse atmosphere.


The same cannot be said for the Meklons, who have become increasingly aggressive as of late: multiple ships chased away our garrison at the empty system of Askook, and one of their scouts went so far as to launch Hyper-Vs at our ship guarding Bevurth! The Volranth detachment hastened to the system and found the Meklons departed, but, at the previous administration's discretion, the matter has thus far been kept secret to avoid any unnecessary expressions of public outrage. Of considerable importance to this decision was that at the time, the Sub-light Drive, Scatter Pack V Rocket System and the latest generation of ECM jammers were very nearly ready for production. With the addition of these technologies, it can be said that our new ships will possess an overwhelming advantage against the Meklons - should your office judge a kinetic solution appropriate, of course.


The colonization of Beurth did proceed according to plan, despite the unusual complications involved. A one-off low cost long-ranged colony ship was drafted from old designs to head for Volranth, to which it is still en route. It should go without saying that our current military presence in the region - four Laser-armed scouts - becomes more inadequate every year, especially as enemy fleets become bolder.

-END REPORT-

A pretty quiet set of turns. Meklon ships chased us away from Askook and Bevurth, but in both cases they wandered off afterwards, so no lasting harm done. We picked up SubLight Drives, Scatter Pack Vs, and ECM III; I set our next techs to Inertial Stabilizer, Graviton Beam and BCM V; we had no choice for next Computers tech, the Stabilizers are cheap and could be helpful, and Graviton Beam is a personal favourite of mine (we also had Hard Beam and Anti-Matter Bomb to choose at tier 4 but I figured Gravitons would be most useful vs the Meklonar).

I think we're ready to build some ships have a go at the Meklonar now. I started on a couple of Large Warp 3 ships with Ion Cannons and a set of Scatter Packs - none finished yet since the techs popped pretty late into the turn, so you have time to adjust the design as needed.
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[Brian Shanahan]

Looks like a goo set Fenn. I think we could soon think about gobbling up some of the weaker empires around us to strengthen our council position.

[Ray F]

It's my understanding that the MOO1 OSG says that nebula reduce travel speeds to 1. I don't have it handy so I can't confirm.

[Dp101]

Here we go:

INTRAGOVERMENTAL AFFAIRS OFFICE
SUMMARY REPORT FOR 1102
RESTRICTED - DO NOT COPY OR DISTRIBUTE


The Ssslaura possess considerable holdings among civilized peoples, even as further expansion awaits - Bevurth and Vorlanth up in the galactic north await colony ships. What should be by now a routine operation briefly devolved into farce when the colony ship intended for Bevurth began its long voyage...in the wrong direction, towards Oviraptoria, burning all its acceleration fuel before the error was discovered planetside.

The ensuing scandal and recriminations flying every which way are by now public knowledge, so it will only be said that such was the delay imposed that it was faster to construct a second colony rather than wait for the previous one to arrive; you will recall that engineers and prefab sections were flown in to Garuga on short notice in an attempt to bring the embarrassment to an end sooner.


Scouts exploring the far eastern reaches of our range found Cryslonoid colonies at their destinations - one was heavily guarded, Andalus in this image had evidently only been settled recently. The Imperium's ambassador was predictably wroth at our intrusions, but as of this writing harsh language has been the extent of their reaction, and an expansion of our mutual trade agreement was negotiated without issue, if under a terse atmosphere.


The same cannot be said for the Meklons, who have become increasingly aggressive as of late: multiple ships chased away our garrison at the empty system of Askook, and one of their scouts went so far as to launch Hyper-Vs at our ship guarding Bevurth! The Volranth detachment hastened to the system and found the Meklons departed, but, at the previous administration's discretion, the matter has thus far been kept secret to avoid any unnecessary expressions of public outrage. Of considerable importance to this decision was that at the time, the Sub-light Drive, Scatter Pack V Rocket System and the latest generation of ECM jammers were very nearly ready for production. With the addition of these technologies, it can be said that our new ships will possess an overwhelming advantage against the Meklons - should your office judge a kinetic solution appropriate, of course.


The colonization of Beurth did proceed according to plan, despite the unusual complications involved. A one-off low cost long-ranged colony ship was drafted from old designs to head for Volranth, to which it is still en route. It should go without saying that our current military presence in the region - four Laser-armed scouts - becomes more inadequate every year, especially as enemy fleets become bolder.

-END REPORT-

A pretty quiet set of turns. Meklon ships chased us away from Askook and Bevurth, but in both cases they wandered off afterwards, so no lasting harm done. We picked up SubLight Drives, Scatter Pack Vs, and ECM III; I set our next techs to Inertial Stabilizer, Graviton Beam and BCM V; we had no choice for next Computers tech, the Stabilizers are cheap and could be helpful, and Graviton Beam is a personal favourite of mine (we also had Hard Beam and Anti-Matter Bomb to choose at tier 4 but I figured Gravitons would be most useful vs the Meklonar).

I think we're ready to build some ships have a go at the Meklonar now. I started on a couple of Large Warp 3 ships with Ion Cannons and a set of Scatter Packs - none finished yet since the techs popped pretty late into the turn, so you have time to adjust the design as needed.

For the record, the fact that the ships haven't finished yet doesn't actually mean they aren't an investment, this isn't like the original game where you'll keep production invested into a ship when you swap away from it. I have some reservations about the design myself, mainly a non-even number for maneuvre (since there's no increased speed from it, though looking at it it could only be swapped with an ion cannon so the +1 dodge may well be alright), mixed missiles/lasers (if the missiles can't kill a target and you have to slug it out with the ion cannons they'll be dead weight before long, 1 scatter pack V 5-rack weighs the same as 5 ion cannons, 5.5 average damage per ion cannon = 27.5 total damage compared to 30 per missile, so missiles are slightly more damage at better range which is good for first strike purposes, but if there's ever a 6th round of combat their damage advantage disappears), and putting all the ions in one slot (it costs the same amount of space/power to split them 6/6/5 instead of 17/0/0, which'll let you split fire should the situation call for it) but it'll probably be good enough to deal with the meklonar, given their currently known tech. Spy report being 15 years out of date worries me though, class 3 deflectors will make their bases almost immune to these ships, and they could have acquired it in that time, and if we're attacking them anyways there's no reason to worry about aggravating them with spying. Personally I'd have picked the bomb next for weapons tech since we lack any, but graviton beams should be able to scratch bases up through more sizeable shields than I expect we'll have to fight through so we might be good. And I tend to prioritise advancing trees too much (see my death spores over terraforming +10 choice) so while I'd have probably taken fusion drives to get to 4 maneuvre/3 moves on the tactical map, inertial stabiliser will also get us there just as quickly, so I'd probably have made the wrong decision there lol.

Anyways, I'm fully willing to admit that I tend to turtle too much and so these designs are probably entirely workable, I'd just have made different decisions, the only part of it that I'd call "objectively" a mistake is not splitting the ion cannons. So my only suggestion I'd make for Haphazard is to please send some spies after the Meklonar ASAP so we know if it's worth finishing out these designs. Worst comes to worst, they'll certainly be useful defensively at least, but I'd rather know our enemy ahead of time. Their Supreme Arbiter isn't even any kind of aggressive personality (honourable industrialist) so we could probably have hiding spies there pretty much constantly without much diplomatic impact.

[Dp101]

It's my understanding that the MOO1 OSG says that nebula reduce travel speeds to 1. I don't have it handy so I can't confirm.

This is accurate to the documentation, honestly I'd never observed speed in nebula instead being halved but I was willing to trust others since it's been ages since I last played the original.

[haphazard1]

OK, looks like a good set of turns, Fenn. I have the save, and should be able to play sometime tomorrow. Key goals:

- More spying
- Get a fleet together
- Follow up on the existing colony ship efforts and develop the new planets
- Prepare for (and possibly begin, if everything comes together in time) a war with the machines

I am assuming we plan to avoid genocide, due to potential effects in the council. (Should not be a factor in my turnset, but something to discuss.) Suggestions and ideas are very welcome.

[Fenn]

Dp, you're right - I should have done some spying on my turns. I forgot, or rather I felt worried about ruining diplo if somebody was caught on the first turn and forgot about it thereafter. I'm far from an expert in ship design myself, so feel free to critique whatever I come up with! Part of the reason I try to go into detail with what I'm doing and why is so others can see whatever flaws in my play there may be.

BTW, I didn't mention this clearly but I went ahead and upped our trade deals with whoever would take them. Also shopped around for tech exchanges but the only thing anyone was willing to offer was ECM II which was obviously not worth paying for.

[RefSteel]

Great report, Fenn! I love it - and it looks like you've made great progress on every front! I agree with Dp101 on basically every point, but I will note that in Remnants, you do keep production invested in ships that you ultimately don't build - you just can't turn all of it into a magic instant starfleet all at once. It'll still all go into future ships you build over the course of a few turns (how many depends on how much you spent already and how much you're spending on new ships afterward).

And I would definitely recommend designing new ships. 5-racks of scatterpack rockets frankly do not belong on any spaceship under almost any circumstances. If we want to hit and run or just get as much damage in early as we can, 2-racks on dedicated missile boats are much, much better for the purpose. If we want sustained damage over a long fight, beams are much, much better for that. 5-rack scatters have to be fired from so close to avoid being dodged by AI fleets with any maneuverability that even if enemy ships aren't overstacked with ECM (as they tend to be, and note scatter Vs come with no compesnating bonus to hit) you're generally going to be better off with beams no matter what. Regardless, I'll echo Dp101 again that spy reports are needed - and if we're going to attack for real, we're going to want a dedicated bomber unless the Meks are still stuck in Shield 2. (In MoO, I'd go with a small ship with max maneuverability, a nuclear bomb since that's the best we've got, and then whatever battle computer still fits, but depending on enemy ECM and missile base counts, there might be better options here.)

Also:

It's my understanding that the MOO1 OSG says that nebula reduce travel speeds to 1. I don't have it handy so I can't confirm.

Yes, you are correct! MoO's nebula movement is so hilariously bugged that no mod (including any 1oom version I'm aware of) has ever gotten it to consistently report trans-nebula ETAs correctly - which can really frustrating if you don't know about it in advance! But once you know, you can work with and around it, because the nebulae are small, and because better engine tech does increase your speed within them, bugged though the effect may be. Whereas in a game like Remnants with larger maps (I almost never play MoO above "standard" 48 star size) featuring larger nebulae where speed is limited (correctly, per the OSG) to warp 1 ... well, it makes me very glad to there's an option to turn nebulae off entirely!