This was a really fun game for me, and I'd love to play another SG, but I think I'd pass if we play in another 100+ star galaxy. Managing an empire of dozens of worlds in a way I enjoy is too time-consuming for me (I really like getting to know our planets individually) - and as haphazard points out, it just seems weird or wrong, after colonizing or conquering over seventy stars and literally winning the game, to still be missing contact with a full third of our rivals in the galaxy!
Also, I'm with Dp101 on skipping the Xilmi AI: At one point, I vaguely wondered if Thrawn would want to lead an SG against Hardest Xilmi just to see if we can beat it on our first try, but having learned more about it ... it honestly just doesn't sound like fun. Xilmi AI is beatable, as rgp151 has demonstrated repeatedly, and losing can be fun anyway, as any Roguelike player will tell you, but playing against the Xilmi AI sounds like it narrows the options and the interplay between "characters" too much in several different ways.
(If we want to play a variant game in a smaller galaxy, I have a couple of ideas, including the one we used in my very first MoO SG: A variant called "Big Brother" in old Civ parlance that I called, "The Power Behind the Throne," my original idea was to play as the Darloks, make sure there were Mrrshans in the game, and so arrange matters that the consensus weakest race Mrrshans would win, without ever growing so powerful as to be nominated ourselves! Alternatively, and more simply, I'd be game for a game where we're not allowed to attack anyone else's colonies unless they first declare war - but given the AIs' penchant for eating each other, I think to be manageable without serious diplomatic manipulation, this would have to be done in a smaller galaxy....)
And finally, on tech spending: Beware; spoilers are because this is going to get long!
(May 27th, 2024, 23:13)haphazard1 Wrote: The tech spending distribution is definitely different in RotP than it was in MOO. (At least if I am understanding correctly.) In MOO there was no penalty for focusing heavily on one tech, and the previous investment bonus effect could make it a very effective approach.
Actually, MoO's prior-investment bonus absolutely encourages continuous spending in all six fields - even if you can only spare a few BCs! The only times it makes sense to zero out a whole field in MoO are:
1) When rounding errors would eat up the profit from slow-running research (i.e. when your research budget is small, especially near the beginning of the game) and a tech in the field in question just completed (or hasn't been started yet, again at game start) so you aren't actually losing ground on the investment you've already made.
2) In the extreme endgame, when you no longer expect to finish another tech in that field before you win.
3) When there's a tech need so urgent that you need to squeeze every drop of research into it from everywhere you can get it. Note this also is most likely to apply early in the game, usually to Propulsion and Planetology. (The bugs and maybe Meklar can arguably add Construction as well, at least in certain circumstances, conceivably.)
Item 3 happens more often than you might think since the benefit of running a little bit of research into a tech you won't need for a long time to come yet is comparatively small, but generally once my research budget gets into hundreds of RP, I want to have all six fields running continuously ... but not equally. RotP is a whole different case: There's almost no advantage to choosing a specific slider setting, but huge advantages to choosing the right time to zero out research, either for a given field or even empire-wide! For instance, in MoO, opening Planetology on the very first turn of the game is a valid and indeed usually very strong option among many. In RotP, you should never open research until you've gotten a significant start on factories.
Quote:In RotP you miss out on the potential bonus for even research distribution, so there is opportunity cost even if not direct costs to doing so. Unless there is an urgent need (range tech early, etc.), I do not see much reason to not go with an even distribution of research.
I would argue that there's a range of different urgencies to different needs, but I'll try to quantify it a little: The "25%" figure is technically accurate, but misleading unless you understand what it's a quarter of. This is how the RotP research bonus actually works:
- For every 24 research points produced by your planets, each of the six fields in which you are spending at least one sixth of your research budget gets +1 bonus RP.
(If for some reason you're spending more than 0 but less than 1/6 of your budget on a given field, you get a proportionally smaller bonus, but there are only two valid reasons to do this: To micro-optimize your odds of getting a timely breakthrough in a field that's in the percentages against speeding research in other fields, or to avoid messing with the sliders if you know there's one particular tech or field you want to emphasize at the expense of one or more others but don't feel like going in to the tech screen to change your sliders any more often than you absolutely have to.)
So if you hyper-focus all your research into one field, you're getting 25RP for every 24 that comes from planets. If you spread research evenly among all fields, you're getting 30RP for each 24 that comes from planets. That's a decent, but not spectacular, 20% increase - but the most-important field in which you're most hoping to get results is getting just 5RP for each 24 you spend: A fifth of what you'd get for it by concentrating on it alone. Those are the numbers behind exactly what you said about an urgent need. But even I never concentrated research in just one field that way this game, and I sometimes did just split research completely evenly (which was probably a mistake on most of those turns, but not a bad one). When there were a few fields of interest to me, I would typically equallize research, then choose the one field I considered least important at the time (cough-forcefields-cough - showing my bias, but in a real game, the choice does vary) and the field I considered most important to complete (highly variable, depending on circumstances, but coughpropulsion I am an Alkari at heart I suppose) and temporarily lock other sliders to dump all the research from the least-important into the most. Doing this with just one field means we're getting 29 total RP for every 24 our planets produce, including 9 in the "most-important" field I chose, and zero in (uh, for instance) forcefields. The bonus for equalizing research instead of doing it the way I did is thus 1/29th: Less than 3.5%!
So let's look at this another way: For starters, research poured into a tech does nothing for you until it hits the percentages. In MoO, that wasn't the case: More RP in a tech meant more bonus research available for spending on subsequent turns. In RotP, it's strictly true: You do have to get all those RP into your techs eventually to give them a chance to complete, but if you need say 100 total, it doesn't matter if you get there by spending 20 per turn over 5 turns, or 0 per turn for four turns and then 100 all on turn 5 - which means the latter is always better (when it's possible) as long as you have something else valuable to do with your production in the meantime, like building factories. So, back to tech slider distribution: Oversimplifying a little but not egregiously, suppose that with equalized spending, you'd get up to say a 20% breakthrough chance in each of Propulsion and Forcefields after nine turns. If you instead zero out FF to boost propulsion spending (while leaving the other four fields equalized) you'll hit 20% in Prop after five turns - at which point you can zero out prop spending in favor of FF. This way. you'll get that to 20% one turn late (i.e. five turns after starting, so after a total research time of 10 turns) - but in the meantime, there's a better than 50% chance that the Prop tech will compete before you'd even have gotten it to 20% odds with equal research! Of course, if you want to minimize the time until both techs complete, you should keep things equalized, but if one is a higher priority, even if not absolutely urgent, it's often best to push it first (how high into the percentages you want to push it depends on how urgent or valuable it is, and you can certainly get it to some decent percentage, then equalize to get it up to a better chance while getting some research-with-bonus into your other project, and switch over to boosting the lower-priority one when the higher-priority tech either completes or gets high enough into the percentages that you're better off leaving it there than spending more on diminishing returns.
Which brings us to the other case when it makes sense to zero research in a field: RotP rolls for tech hits for any tech in the percentages, even when you spend nothing on research for it that turn! When you're well into the percentages, this makes further spending a waste unless you need the tech extremely urgently: In my last inherited turn, Cloaking Device - which I didn't plan to use until I got other techs as well - was sitting at 30% after being zeroed. There's nothing wrong with getting it this high (Indeed, in MoO, I'll often push techs to 40%, though I'm more reluctant to do so here since tech tends to be slower-developing) but it would be very expensive to push it up much further, and doing so would just mean I could build cloaked ships - on average - a turn or two earlier than if I let it sit at 30 until it came in. Meanwhile, Ion Drives were my most-desired tech and very close to percentages, so I pushed the sixth of our research spending that I took from FF into Prop instead. (Hence all my feeble attempts at jokes about being Alkari.) Then, once those got a decent way into percentages, I re-equalized and pushed the FF bar into Weapons instead. This last was a mistake though: I wanted the drives and should have kept pushing them instead - even without knowing my spies would obviate all my weapons spending before the tech came in naturally!
Executive summary: You actually just get 1 bonus RP in each field that's at equalization level or higher for every 24 total RP produced by your planets. This is nothing to be sneezed at, but not of decisive importance in comparison with the valuation of the techs themselves. Equialized tech is fine as a default, but you should target techs strategically and spend on them accordingly. And generally speaking, treat the sliders as though there are just "six clicks" of spending available: Equalizing puts "one click" in each field, and then you can move a "click" (i.e. a full sixth of the total) from a field you don't need just yet into one you want to give priority. It's usually best to tech 1-2 things at a time in the early game (e.g. all into Planetology, or 5:1 spending in favor of the most-immediately-important of Plan and Prop - never split research 3:3 like this unless both techs are in percentages and you need both ASAP, with either one alone not good enough) and then vary situationally between fully-equalized research and dropping one (or sometimes more!) temporarily-lower-priority field(s) at a time for a higher-priority one. Or, if like rgp151 you'd rather play fast and don't want to take time to review your research spending priorities from turn to turn, you can add a few points from less-desirable fields to more-desirable ones and just forget about them until something changes drastically.
(But ... rgp, even using that system for the sliders, I suspect you'd beat Xilmi's AI more consistently if you chose research priorities more strategically and intentionally. And focused less on Construction early and fields your race is bad at generally, and more on Propulsion and Planetology and fields they're good at instead. I could be wrong though: Your playstyle is your own, and might not mesh well with techs developing in different ways than you're used to seeing!)
I'd play a Fusion Mod succession game. There are a whole bunch of different options, but the game-relevant ones are all attached to the save file itself, so once one person has set stuff up and passed a save, everyone will be playing their turnsets with the same settings.
There are a bunch of different Xilmi-based AIs which offer a serious challenge without being strictly and sociopathically win-optimized. My favorite is Hybrid AI, which bolts on the base AI diplomacy package (the same one you just played against) to the Xilmi AI's empire management. Also availible is the "character" AI, which is Xilmi diplo but is massively influenced by AI personalities over gamestate concerns, and "Fun" which mostly cares about taking down the leader over actually attempting to win. Finally there's "roleplay", which has a pretty sophisticated diplomatic setup with visible modifiers very different from the base AI. I find it plays more like Civ than like MoO1, especially because you are likely to be able to keep alliances you make instead of inevitably losing them as your territory grows and the AI gets less and less happy about it.
A smaller galaxy would be fine with me. Most of my time on the last turnset was spent reconfiguring all the colonies' spending to get the most out of them and it was a little exhausting with how many we had. I'm down for trying the Fusion Mod at some point, although I think the base game has plenty of life in it for us on harder settings - we've only scratched the surface so far.
I play Fusion Mod mostly for the labor saving "smart maximize" and similar options, and I don't want to go back. I usually play 50 star maps these days, but playing big maps is far less painful when you very rarely need to click a slider multiple times to set the value you want. There's also a much less labor intensive way of sending transports and simultaneously regrowing pop. And that's all ignoring the governor, which I don't use but most people seem to like.
Fusion mod can also be trivially configured to use exactly the settings you used for this game, or any other possible base game configuration. And although Fusion Mod is in continuous development, it's nicely versioned and reliably (deliberately) backwards compatible with saves from older versions.
With that said, I'm glad this game happened and I look forward to seeing more from y'all, base game or not.
(June 1st, 2024, 04:23)RefSteel Wrote: (But ... rgp, even using that system for the sliders, I suspect you'd beat Xilmi's AI more consistently if you chose research priorities more strategically and intentionally. And focused less on Construction early and fields your race is bad at generally, and more on Propulsion and Planetology and fields they're good at instead. I could be wrong though: Your playstyle is your own, and might not mesh well with techs developing in different ways than you're used to seeing!)
I usually consider Construction the best economic benefit early on for the research cost. Tech 9, 80% and Tech 8 are all fairly cheap, especially when playing Klackon. Improved Eco is good, but costly. Controlled Barren only makes sense if you find early Barren planets. +10 is good, but not really relevant early until you get to point where you are going to be maxing out your planets.
I do often go for +10 and then Improved Eco, and also I go for Tech 9 and then 80%. Those are the only fields I do that in early on. Of course the Tier 4 & 5 Planetology level also warrant researching multiple techs in a field.
Propulsion always depends on the circumstances. If you can chain planets together then range may not matter much, or it can be critical. So that one is very dependent on circumstances. Once I get those first few techs, then I'll go for Computers to hopefully get IRC3. Typically what I do is once I've gotten my Tier 2 Construction, Planetology and Propulsion techs, then I'll open up Computers and equalize spending across those fields, so researching Tier 3 of C, P &P, while working on Tier 1 & 2 of of Computers. Then once I finish Tier 2 of Computers I'll open up Force Fields and Weapons. I may or may not at this point be prioritizing Propulsion and or Planetology depending on the circumstances, and then once I kind of get past Tier 3 of Propulsion and Planetology I'll set everything equal and then just adjust things by 1 click, typically to put extra clicks into Computers from then on out. If I'm Meklar then I'd like keep extra clicks in Planetology with no bonus spending on Computers, etc. Darloks are of course a different story altogether.
(June 1st, 2024, 16:47)rgp151 Wrote: I usually consider Construction the best economic benefit early on for the research cost.
IT+10 and IER are by far the best economic techs for their research cost in the entire game. RW80 is good to have once you have a lot of factories, but IER (whose base cost is the same as RW80's) does this better while cutting the cost of colships significantly and boosts production from population. (The latter consideration, doubled for the bugs, is part of the reason even their Construction Excellence doesn't justify prioritizing RW80 ahead of IER.) II9 seems like it would be more valuable if teched early, with more of your factories yet to be built, but generally speaking, building more factories first instead does a better job of getting future facs up faster while also offering more flexibilty. The tech's main value in getting up the tree quickly and in speeding up development of new colonies once you have an established research base. I wouldn't recommend it if you're planning to tech RW80, especially if you'll also be getting II8. And terraforming is definitely valuable early: It doesn't just make room for more people when you run out of space, but increases your passive growth rate at any pop level, while (being Planetology) the tech itself also gives a small boost to per-pop production and helps to miniaturize colony bases.
Quote:Propulsion always depends on the circumstances. If you can chain planets together then range may not matter much, or it can be critical. So that one is very dependent on circumstances.
That's interesting - I haven't played a lot of Remnants, so it could be my MoO experience isn't applicable here: A galaxy in which you don't need early range seems very unlikely to me, but it may be more common here. Generally though, my main suggestion was exactly that the value of every tech depends on circumstances (except IT+10 and IER, which are always great when available unless you're playing a very weird variant or get a more-advanced version of one from an ART world, basically) and that prioritizing them based on present and anticipated future circumstances is one way to improve one's strategy.
Belatedly replying to a question or two about ship design, I posted something in the breakout thread. And on plans for another succession game, can we get a head count? As in:
- Do you want to play? (Me: Sure!)
- Are there conditions you'd require, like when we start or what variant or ruleset or etc? (Me: Only in a galaxy of fewer than 100 stars.)
- Do you have any other suggestions or requests that you think might be fun, for variant rules or settings or anything else? (Me: I made a couple up-thread, e.g. "no attacking unless already at war" which could be softened to "no attacking anyone who hasn't attacked us" but I'm happy to just play a non-variant game, perhaps on Modnar Hardest or against one of the Fusion Mod AIs if others want to try that out.)
(June 4th, 2024, 21:24)RefSteel Wrote: Belatedly replying to a question or two about ship design, I posted something in the breakout thread. And on plans for another succession game, can we get a head count? As in:
- Do you want to play? (Me: Sure!)
- Are there conditions you'd require, like when we start or what variant or ruleset or etc? (Me: Only in a galaxy of fewer than 100 stars.)
- Do you have any other suggestions or requests that you think might be fun, for variant rules or settings or anything else? (Me: I made a couple up-thread, e.g. "no attacking unless already at war" which could be softened to "no attacking anyone who hasn't attacked us" but I'm happy to just play a non-variant game, perhaps on Modnar Hardest or against one of the Fusion Mod AIs if others want to try that out.)
I'm definitely up for another SG. A smaller map is definitely better, much less micro (in personal games I'd be playing the micro looser near the end but in SGs I tend to concentrate hard). Other than that, I've no idea about variants yet.
Great work on finishing out the turns Fenn, spotting the rocks having Atmos. Terraforming and trading it brought the win forward at least one Council cycle. On the Mentarans voting for us, if the game is still using MoO AI voting rules, any AI at war with our opponent but at peace with us will vote for us, relations be damned.
@Everybody, it was a great game to play and I picked up quite a lot of tips to improve my game. The game is close enough to MoO that base game strategies work but there are better ones for this game. In the other Sakkra game, I've played up to a position I can't lose from, it's just a case of finding the extra pop to go over the top in council. Will play it out this week and post a few more thoughts on that one. But it was definitely easy mode.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
I would be interested in another SG. A somewhat smaller galaxy sounds good to me, just to reduce the total length of the game and the amount of management needed. What is needed to play RotP with mods? I have not tried any yet, so I have no idea how much (or how little) set up is involved.
Stepping up in difficulty could work, although this would depend on whether we use a mod or stick with Modnar or whatever. Xilmi does not really sound fun to play against. And we could certainly play one of the weaker races if we want more of a challege. Or we could give the rocks a try, and see how differently they play in RotP. (I have not tried them yet.)
I'd definitely be up for another game. No issues with doing a smaller galaxy, would request no nebulas but not going to insist on it lol. As for other things.. variants seem potentially interesting, no offensive wars is nice and simple, not sure how I feel about the earlier suggestion of trying to make another race win through diplo. I had an idea for a variant but I'm not actually sure if it would make the game significantly harder - play as the birds, and no ship larger than a small is allowed to have guns on it, you *have* to lean in to the swarms of fighters/bombers, with all the drawbacks stemming from it (mounting modern weapons becomes incredibly difficult, no autorepair stuff, shields vs weapons is pain, as are scatter packs) but really I have no idea how it would play out in practice, I could see it swinging anywhere from impossible to barely a variant at all. And note the phrasing of the restriction is to allow not just colony ships, but also unarmed dedicated scanning ships, since I don't think you can fit battle scanners on smalls.
On that note, the only thing that would make me really want to check out the fusion mod at this stage is if an AI in it actually uses smalls again, because the lack of variety in ship sizes is a bit boring, and those make for quite different problems to solve. Otherwise, fine sticking to base game, I think regardless of variant or no variant I'd want Modnar Hardest given how much of a cakewalk this was.
A somewhat smaller galaxy sounds good to me, just to reduce the total length of the game and the amount of management needed. What is needed to play RotP with mods? I have not tried any yet, so I have no idea how much (or how little) set up is involved.