Remnants of the Precursors Succession Game?

[Ray F]

Glad you guys enjoyed the game! With regards to difficulty, there were some competing philosophies about how to do this which is why there is more than on AI option in the game.

The Base AI (which I wrote while developing) is intended to be an immersive AI and tuned for casual players. Difficulty-wise, it should be a challenge for new players but not so difficult to beat for advanced players, or as the new players get better at the game. In addition, the AIs play to their personalities so theoretically they feel like different races instead of different skins for the same opponent.

The Modnar AI is a modified version of the Base AI and should be more challenging.

The Xilmi AI was developed by the same guy who did the AI for Pandora. It is a vastly overhauled AI intended to be a competitive that plays to win instead of being immersive. This means there might be more homogeneity in tactics and some diplomatic options may not be used.

In the Fusion mod, Xilmi has created multiple versions of his AI, including variants that are intended to be more immersive. As this mod is under constant development, my best advice would be to frequent the ROTP discord and get clarification on the current state of the AIs before choosing one.

The Fusion mod also has many other "Quality of Life" features, most notably the governor written by Coder. This gives the player varying levels of control over the AI management of his empire and should reduce management of larger galaxies considerably. The downside of any system like this, of course, is that the governer may not manage colonies in the way you wish although it has lots of options so that's probably not going to be an issue.

The reason I never incorporated the governor into the base game is that I wanted the Base game to not have any AI management of the player's empire. Because of this, it became necessary for me to develop UIs that provided large-scale management features that were not in MOO1. The Systems & Fleets UI are the best examples of this, as is the ability to mass-change spending sliders when you multi-select on the Colonies listing.

The Fusion mod sort of gives you the best of both worlds for these competing philosophies, so I highly recommend it if you feel there is still too much management effort in ROTP (which honestly, has to be one of the lowest management 4X games around).

[haphazard1]

Thanks for commenting and explainging various things during our game, RayF. It has been very helpful. And thanks for developing RotP -- it is a lot of fun, and I have recommended it to my gaming friends who enjoy 4X type games.

I agree with Dp101 about turning off nebulas. While they add some flavor to the game, the slowed ship movement is very annoying and a pain to deal with. Maybe they would be OK in a very small galaxy, but in a larger galaxy the limited movement is a huge hassle.

Playing as the birds with the focus on small ships (other than colonies) could be an interesting variant. You could allow big scanner ships as described, or even limit those; you can always get scan info from your missile bases, after all. Or live without it. It would be limiting, but I think it would certainly be possible to win.

[williams482]

The reason I never incorporated the governor into the base game is that I wanted the Base game to not have any AI management of the player's empire. Because of this, it became necessary for me to develop UIs that provided large-scale management features that were not in MOO1. The Systems & Fleets UI are the best examples of this, as is the ability to mass-change spending sliders when you multi-select on the Colonies listing.

The Fusion mod sort of gives you the best of both worlds for these competing philosophies, so I highly recommend it if you feel there is still too much management effort in ROTP (which honestly, has to be one of the lowest management 4X games around).

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the logic here, and I think the game (modded or otherwise) benefits enormously from all the stuff built to make manual management easier. Have you considered incorporating any of the (non-automated) quality of life changes from Fusion mod into the base game? For example, the various "smart maximize" options are both extremely helpful and consistent with the philosophy described above.

Also, thank you so much for making this game happen.

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.

To play Fusion Mod, you just download the relevant .jar or .exe file (generally from here) and run it, the same way you currently run the vanilla game.

[Ray F]

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the logic here, and I think the game (modded or otherwise) benefits enormously from all the stuff built to make manual management easier. Have you considered incorporating any of the (non-automated) quality of life changes from Fusion mod into the base game? For example, the various "smart maximize" options are both extremely helpful and consistent with the philosophy described above.

No. The ROTP project was always designed to be a modernization of the original MOO1 with QOL features. I think I accomplished that.

I'm not a video game developer... I'm retired... so I open-sourced the game for the community and now work on other hobbies. I am happy, relieved and flattered that ROTP was received well enough that a fairly vibrant modding community has developed around it, and I wholeheartedly support pretty much everything they've added.

[Fenn]

I'd be interested in another SG. Dp's birds with small ships variant sounds like good fun, and Hardest sounds good even with that restriction. Definitely agreed with going one step below 100-star sized galaxy, the amount of micro in the last turnset was a little outside my comfort zone.

As an alternative to small-ships-only, after how much we disparaged them in this SG, perhaps we could play with this rule: no weapons on our ships but missiles, torpedoes and bombs(?). This might live and die by what's in our tech tree, but missiles deserve their day sometime!

[Dp101]

Missiles/torps only seems interesting (though I'm very much in favour of adding bombs since otherwise we basically won't be able to crack equivalent-strength planets anytime between planetary shield V and plasma torpedoes), not sure if it lends itself to any particular race. Cats, to get the accuracy boost necessary to overcome widespread ECM? Or maybe either bots or shapeshifters to ensure we can steal the missiles we need if they're not in our tree, though obviously that's possible regardless. Food for thought.

[haphazard1]

Missiles, missiles, and more missiles. It is an interesting idea, Fenn, and definitely would be a very different approach for me. I agree with Dp101 that we would probably need bombs as well to attack planets, unless we want the variant to be significantly more difficult. It could probably still be done without bombs, but the chance of not having anything in the tech tree to crack tougher planets would go way up.

[RefSteel]

Were we disparaging missiles? I know I was disparaging the AI's missile-laden designs, but the fault wasn't with the missiles; missile boats can be great (though less so when one of the reasons your rivals' ship design is frankly terrible is that they all cram an expensive one-dimensional defense that sort of helps against missiles and does nothing for anything else onto every single ship) - and though it might seem like a long time ago, our first real warships were a fleet of Missile Circle cruisers that worked fine and had the longest run of any combat design we ever built. They didn't take part in the big, attention-getting victories like our three main beam cruisers or our various lines of nuclear and then anti-matter bombers, but that was mostly a matter of timing - and I considered and only narrowly rejected a missile boat design during my own last set. (I have more thoughts on this, now posted to the ship design breakout discussion thread, in case anyone wants to read a lot of theorycrafting on the subject.)

That said, if we play an all-missiles-and-torps variant, I'd suggest the Psilons, since they'll have the best chance of actually getting the weapons we want in our tree. If we do play as Psilons, I'd also suggest forbidding or at least restricting bombs. For instance, for each bomb we put on a ship, it must also mount at least one missile rack of a more-advanced tech level than the bomb.

In the meantime: It looks like everyone's on board with small-ships-only Alkari, so I favor starting that game first and saving the missile game for later unless someone has a definite preference for the latter. (I'm happy either way, but figure we should pick something and get started!)

Settings:

"Small" 70-star galaxy, on Hardest difficulty.
Opponents: The maximum (for this size) of 7?
Shape: Eliptical-1 with no added void in the center? (Allowing everyone to fight over a center and potentially resulting in more contacts earlier, maybe?)
Advanced Settings:
Nebulae: Uncommon? My inclination would be to use this setting (or "rare") and then just look at the resulting map: If we get a supernebula spanning a huge swath of the galaxy, we can always start a new game instead. (I won't complain if everyone prefers "None" though!)
Random Events: Monsters Off? Was that last game's setting, or did we just conquer the galaxy before they turned up? (From what Ray F has said about monsters, I lean toward leaving them off if no one has an opinion, but again I'm happy either way!)
Council Win: Immediate. If we have a chance to win a Council vote when there's any race or combination of races we couldn't beat already, we're going to abstain anyway; letting hapless AIs drag out the endgame for us would just be silly.
Everything Else: Default, I assume.

If everyone's on the same page, anyone can roll a map, start a new thread, and get the game started! Should be another fun game!

[Fenn]

We had Monsters off in the last game, indeed. Fine with keeping it that way here too. For galaxy shape I'm somewhat interested in some wacky 8-armed spiral, but Elliptical-1 is more likely to avoid any stark imbalances in starting locations.

Other settings look fine to me!

[haphazard1]

Proposed settings look good to me. I would be fine with nebula being off, but a map with some minor ones would not be bad.