Remnants of the Precursors - Initial thoughts

[williams482]

Ok, I've been playing Klackons and yeah, they are still very strong, I just wasn't doing it right at first, lol. I've played a couple pretty poor maps with them and still mopped up using Modnar/Harder/Small (70). My first few playthroughs I was being sloppy and not managing my pop/factory ratios optimally in the early game. Once I got more detailed and did that, then yeah, that made all the difference. At first I was over producing factories, but once I stopped just letting the factories build and instead keeping them at the proper ratio I got a lot more early research done and produced more colony ships faster. But it also made me realize what I've been missing. the MAX indicator!

In RotP you only get the Reserve indicator for when you will hit max planetary capacity, but you don't get an indicator showing when you will hit max population capacity like you do in MoO. That's why I wasn't keeping the ratios right. Am I missing something?

You weren't missing anything, but I passed on this complaint to BrokenRegistry in the Discord, and the latest version of Fusion Mod now features this indicator for factories over the workable limit: 

[rgp151]

- The AI is willing and able to absolutely swarm your planets with transports in the late game. I really hate being completely unable to protect my worlds, so I set it so that the "Combat Transporters" tech cannot be researched by anyone. Other techs which can be limited (or guaranteed) to the player, AIs, or both include Cloaking, Atmospheric Terraforming, Hyperspace Comms, and the maximum range, environmental colonization, and factory cost techs.

Yeah, I'm playing Fusion now, with Harder - Hybrid AI. I've done pretty well so far, but but at this point its just me and the Silicoids and at this point they are using 100% cloaked fleets and I think I may give up. I'm trying to bomb their planets out but now they are bombing me out at about the same rate and its getting pretty sketchy. Its basically a race to bomb out the opponents planets.

[williams482]

- The AI is willing and able to absolutely swarm your planets with transports in the late game. I really hate being completely unable to protect my worlds, so I set it so that the "Combat Transporters" tech cannot be researched by anyone. Other techs which can be limited (or guaranteed) to the player, AIs, or both include Cloaking, Atmospheric Terraforming, Hyperspace Comms, and the maximum range, environmental colonization, and factory cost techs.

Yeah, I'm playing Fusion now, with Harder - Hybrid AI. I've done pretty well so far, but but at this point its just me and the Silicoids and at this point they are using 100% cloaked fleets and I think I may give up. I'm trying to bomb their planets out but now they are bombing me out at about the same rate and its getting pretty sketchy. Its basically a race to bomb out the opponents planets.

Shutting off cloaking devices does help with this. It's beyond hopeless trying to play defense if you can't see their ships. 

The other thing that's a huge benefit is to try to anticipate these stalemates developing and hit the AI first, to try to establish a spud world DMZ that's mostly the ruins of *their* former planets, not yours. I can usually catch them off guard and blow up a couple strategically significant worlds while they are still mopping up a dying third empire. Infinite range can put a real wrench in that plan if they get it in time, but in my games they usually don't. 

One strategy that works well with rough fleet parity in the warp 6 era is to target their slightly scattered fleets with a locally superior concentrated fleet of your own best ships. They will usually retreat instead of fight if they perceive you to have an advantage, and retreating ships can't be used offensively until they reach a home base. In practice this means that once you get any significant detachment of their ships running anywhere that takes multiple turns to reach, you can usually chase them and keep them on the run, either invading or blowing up and resettling the worlds you drive them off from to extend range and push the front lines further and further from their core. Once a planet is bombed out it becomes much easier to keep a few cruisers in orbit to chase off colony ships, and once you are hitting their worlds without immediate retaliation, you should now be able to build more ships than they can and maintain that advantage.

Of course that only works if you are 1) equal or better in fleet strength, 2) comparable in industrial capacity, 3) at least as fast as their ships, and 4) move first to chose your preferred engagement zones. If they are meaningfully bigger to start out, or they hit you before you're ready, good luck.

[rgp151]

I just lost a Normal Hybrid to Klackons. The map was very imbalanced. Everyone was squished onto the right side of the map. Everyone was practically on top of me, while literally half the map was open to Klackons who were on the far left on the starting points, about in the middle of the map. I was on the far right, up against the right edge of the map, with races on all sides of me. I was able to start attacking the humans, who had the highest pop, pretty early and started taking over their world before the Klacons had launched war on anyone, but while I was doing this they were just expanding out peacefully. Once I had mostly taken over the Human's 5 planets, the Klacons had already expanded to about 60% of the galaxy. I may try replying this from an early save and seeing if going after teh Klackons first would have changed things. I was Psiolns BTW and had tech lead.

Here is the map from right before I launched war on the humans.

   

Actually I messed up in taking that shot, there are 6 more planets to the left that are out of the frame.

[rgp151]

Ok, yeah I attacked teh Klackons first instead of the humans and was able to win the game. Allowing the Klackons to expand unchecked was an error the first time around. This time I stayed on good relations with the humans at first and took on the Klackons instead.

[rgp151]

On a side note, I think Silicoids are better in RotP than they were in MoO1. Also, I think using the Fusion Mod helps the Silicoids be even better by doing a better job managing their pop growth, which was always apaid to try to really micro optimally.

[williams482]

Silicoids do get a slight advantage in RotP relative to MOO1 in that they can do soil enrichment terraforming. They don't benefit from fertility improvements, but that does let them make their planets a bit bigger in the late game.

[rgp151]

I've played Silicoids with the Fusion Mod several times now and they do really well. I attribute this to the automated population management which does a lot to mitigate their population growth penalties, since in reality the biggest problem with Silicoids was never their growth rate, but micromanaging their development to address their growth rate. Because with the Silicoids you can just allocate some spending to growth to make up for the lack of natural growth and if you do this correctly then their slower natural growth rate is mitigated and in fact you have production left over. But in practice this presented a problem for the human player because manually optimizing the growth rates was just too much to do to really make the Silicoids work well.

So with Fusion the Silicoids kick butt.

[rgp151]

I think my conclusion on Xilmi and related AIs is that they are definitely worth trying to beat at least once, but they aren't any fun to play against, for a number of reasons. For one they are just annoying and very difficult to defeat. But more importantly, even against Hybrid in Fusion (which has diplomacy) there ends up being very few fights, because the AI knows if it can win or not and if it can't then it won't fight, it will just flee. So either no fight happens at all, or they may take a few shots and then retreat. so I've played out several games against Hybrid where there are fewer than 3 fights against ships in which I can win in the whole game. There may be more if I'm on the losing end of the fights. Secondly, the AI is just too ruthless against itself, so one AI will quickly dominate, wiping out the others. There ends up being very little meaningful diplomacy, even though technically diplomatic relations exist.

Its just more fun to play when all of the AIs remain somewhat competitive and the AIs aren't wiping each other out. It also helps to prevent run-away AIs that grow to big too fast. Yes, Xilmi is challenging, but not really in a good way. It certainly make me appreciate the difficulty and nuance of developing a good AI for 4X games. And it makes me think that one of the best ever developed is the one for Caster of Magic.

[williams482]

I definitely agree with your conclusions about the Xilmi AIs, and that drove me to mostly play against Rookie AI for a while before giving Hybrid another go. I feel like Hybrid is the right "base" to build an ideal AI opponent around, but there are definitely very frustrating elements to how it plays right now.

I'd like to see a Hybrid AI which:
1) puts more emphasis on the AI personalities and exaggerates their effects, a la the "Character" AI
2) places slightly more emphasis on "how much damage can I do" relative to "how much damage will I take" when deciding to take a fight or retreat from them
3) invests more in fixed defenses

#1 would make the diplomacy somewhat more interesting and somewhat more meaningful, while #2 and #3 would produce more battles and (in my estimation) make AI vs AI wars slower to conclude and more likely to lead to a treaty instead of outright destruction. I think the AI tends to favor tactics over strategy when attacked by a superior enemy, ceding entire planets to avoid an unfavorable battle until they eventually have nowhere to run, instead of inflicting attritive damages on an invader to slow them down.

Do you have any thoughts along similar lines for what tweaks might improve the experience against Hybrid AI?