Incline Remnants of the Precursors - Merry Christmas, bitches

[rezaf]

I did. But it had no or very few factories after the invasion. The problem sorted itself out after researching the next tech raising the factory limit.

The game has since been abandoned since a crystalline entity wiped out the Bulrathi. Then the Silicoids, or most of them. Unfortunately, I had a border with the Silicoids...

I amassed my entire fleet in the targetet system ... and the crystal just wished them out of existance, no shit given or shot fired.
I remember those space monsters being a challenge, but were they really this ridiculously OP in MOO?

 

[Tanaka]

Great work! This is probably known but when you select races for a game the Klackon portrait is the only race that does not show a portrait? Also is 2560X1440 screen size not possible?

 

[RayF]

The Klackons are a hive mind. There is no notion of the individual.

The game plays in a window with a fixed 8:5 aspect ratio. You can shrink or expand the size of that window with the "Expand-Shrink" options on the top left of the opening screen.

 

[RayF]

I amassed my entire fleet in the targetet system ... and the crystal just wished them out of existance, no shit given or shot fired.
I remember those space monsters being a challenge, but were they really this ridiculously OP in MOO?

The monsters were pushovers in MOO1. They are mid-game threats in ROTP. You need highly mobile ships to beat the amoeba. You need large/huge ships to beat the Crystal.

 

[rezaf]

I don't know. Or, let me rephrase that, I definately don't like this change.

If the monsters were pushovers in MOO and you reinterpreted them to unstoppable juggernauts, you kinda failed to stay true to the original.
At the very least this should be an option you can toggle at game start.

As it is, at least the crystal is FAR too strong. I had the strongest fleet in the universe, consisting of ONLY large ships with midgame tech, and 75 ships just disappeared within 2 rounds. As I wrote, the crystal wiped out most of two other races. There's NOTHING the player can do, except staying out of the way and hoping for the best. Terrible game design decision in my book.

 

[TigerKnee]

If the monsters were pushovers in MOO and you reinterpreted them to unstoppable juggernauts, you kinda failed to stay true to the original.

A little late for that since he's gone on the record to note that ROTP isn't just a 1/1 clone of the original with a better interface / new art - I brought it up earlier.

 

[rezaf]

Yeah, it's pretty evident that it's not a 1:1 clone. But clone or not, putting the player (or even the AI) in a situation that can potentially end their game outright just because RNG jesus had a bad day and spawned the crystal in one of your systems, that's just not cool.

The space amoebe is still massively overpowered, but if you know what's about to happen, you can defeat it with a reasonably powerful fleet as soon as you're out of the very early game (and have a resonable combat map speed).

The crystal? It doesn't even have to move, it teleports to your fleet and destroys it. No attack, no fight, no opportunity to realize you're in over your head and flee, just flat out wipe.
And even if you could flee, it destroys the planet it attacks, clears all population and leaves a size three husk of a planet behind. And moves on to the next planet.
Easiest solution IMO without changing anything with the crystal itself: Have it start with a 5%/turn chance to "leave this sector of space" and disappear. For every 10 million units of population consumed, increase this by 1%. For every x ships (for example 1 huge, 10 large ...), increase this by 1%. For every planet consumed increase this by 10%. Done.

 

[rezaf]

Another bug report: If you have a fcombined fleet of slow ships and fast ships that's enroute to a planet, and scrap the slow design, it will update the ETA, but the fleet will not actually start going faster but still "obey" the low speed of the slow design no longer actually part of the fleet.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

aw man I saw the title and thought this was going to be related to precursors

 

[RayF]

Another bug report: If you have a fcombined fleet of slow ships and fast ships that's enroute to a planet, and scrap the slow design, it will update the ETA, but the fleet will not actually start going faster but still "obey" the low speed of the slow design no longer actually part of the fleet.

That's interesting. The arrival time is set an launch and should not changed. Scrapping designs in mid-flight is an edge case that I'm not super concerned about.

 

[RayF]

A little late for that since he's gone on the record to note that ROTP isn't just a 1/1 clone of the original with a better interface / new art - I brought it up earlier.

I've been on the record with that since the day the project launched. The issue is that the game is nevertheless so faithful to the original game that people start assuming it's an exact clone, which no one really wants when you realize what that entails.

So much of the MOO1 gameplay experience involved exploiting a bad AI and also not realizing how hard the AI cheated. How do you think people would feel if I wrote code showing the AI insta-creating ships in order to create a challenge for the player? They'd go mental, call the game terrible and then 3-4 years later go back to wishing someone would just make a clone of the original game.

The space monsters and the guardian are tuned to the "Impossible" difficulty setting in MOO1, so they are close enough to canon. The key difference is not the difficulty level, but how they are implemented. In MOO1, the space monsters were just re-skinned ships shooting an "Crystal Beam" or "Amoeba Stream" beam weapon at the player.

It was dumb, so I made them play differently than ships just to give players some variety since they are supposed to be monsters, not ships. And based on feedback, players seemed to really like them. The difficulty is easy enough to get past once you get tech and/or know how to beat them.

Within a week, people were already complaining that they were too easy.

 

[rezaf]

That's interesting. The arrival time is set an launch and should not changed. Scrapping designs in mid-flight is an edge case that I'm not super concerned about.

Fair enough. I thought I'd report it anyways.

And about monsters, maybe it's me then - enlighten me, what is this surefire way to defeat the crystal easily that I'm so ignorant about?

Finally, I like most of the choices you've made here. There's still quite a bit of room for polish, especially the UI is a bit wonky at times, but by and large, seeing a project of this scale through to the end and enabling players to have a complete gameplay experience (in this case reasonably close to the original game) is a massive achievement in and of itself.
With that said, there's always going to be people finding stuff too easy while others find it too hard. Why not make this something the player can adjust by himself when setting up a game? Or even just tied to the general difficulty setting chosen?

 

[TigerKnee]

Let's play Devil's Advocate, since there's certainly elements of the original that I don't particularly miss (like the research interest exploit) - if the execution of the gameplay was beloved years ago, then why wouldn't a direct clone be just as well-liked today, cheating AI and all? The QoL updates are there to facilitate entering your decisions into the system much more smoothly, but at its core the gameplay, balance and all its implications should in theory be the same as the original if one agrees that it was working as intended there.

But let's say you believe that you can do better than the originals - well, it's clear that the Space 4X genre has no shortage of games that believed that it could surpass the genre kings and most of them are in graves now. In the RPG genre, there's a lot of hubris of modern developers thinking they could "fix the old, broken RPG gameplay" which led to the sad state of the industry today. It's a very dangerous route to take which requires a lot of self-awareness to not fall into the same traps.

 

[RayF]

Fair enough. I thought I'd report it anyways.

And about monsters, maybe it's me then - enlighten me, what is this surefire way to defeat the crystal easily that I'm so ignorant about?

The Crystal's only attack does a random 1-1000 points of hull damage to ship stacks. Which means if you have a ship with >1000 health then you will survive the initial assault. Now all you need is enough weapons in that stack to do 7000 points of damage before the Crystal's next attack.

That means a stack of huge ships. Not cheap, but certainly not impossible. Small and medium stacks will melt immediately. Large ships maybe can survive if the RNG is nice to you on that 1-1000 damage. But a huge ship will always survive long enough to strike back

 

[RayF]

Let's play Devil's Advocate, since there's certainly elements of the original that I don't particularly miss (like the research interest exploit) - if the execution of the gameplay was beloved years ago, then why wouldn't a direct clone be just as well-liked today, cheating AI and all? The QoL updates are there to facilitate entering your decisions into the system much more smoothly, but at its core the gameplay, balance and all its implications should in theory be the same as the original if one agrees that it was working as intended there.

Because it's not 1993 and player expectations about what the AI can or can't do have changed drastically. In 1993, no one cares that the AI cheated. It was expected because there was no concept of a computer with enough processing power to give a player a challenge. But that doesn't exist today.

But let's say you believe that you can do better than the originals - well, it's clear that the Space 4X genre has no shortage of games that believed that it could surpass the genre kings and most of them are in graves now. In the RPG genre, there's a lot of hubris of modern developers thinking they could "fix the old, broken RPG gameplay" which led to the sad state of the industry today. It's a very dangerous route to take which requires a lot of self-awareness to not fall into the same traps.

I 100% agree with everything you just said. It's a tightrope walk of how rewriting a game, even with the intent of being no changes, will create changes. So how do you do that without breaking the old formula?

For some reason, no one seems to have a problem with the gigantic maps available. in ROTP but those change the gameplay vastly more than anything else listed.

Even just streamlining the interface changes the game. Suddenly the game plays a LOT faster because there's far less friction in the interface. You can play 50 turns in ROTP in 1/10th the time it would take to play 50 identical turns in MOO1. That creates a different set of expectations from players about how the game should work. And suddenly UI conveniences that didn't even exist in MOO1 are suddenly not streamlined enough in ROTP.

 

[rezaf]

The Crystal's only attack does a random 1-1000 points of hull damage to ship stacks. Which means if you have a ship with >1000 health then you will survive the initial assault. Now all you need is enough weapons in that stack to do 7000 points of damage before the Crystal's next attack.

That means a stack of huge ships. Not cheap, but certainly not impossible. Small and medium stacks will melt immediately. Large ships maybe can survive if the RNG is nice to you on that 1-1000 damage. But a huge ship will always survive long enough to strike back

Thanks. But this isn't really a plausible scenario, imo. If you play on the huge map sizes, it may be feasible in the later game to field a fleet as powerful as you describe, but on a reasonably sized map, it's just not possible to field a fleet that can easily do 7000 points of damage. Maybe in the very, very late game, but before that, it's a lost cause.
And a case in point is that the AI is utterly unable to cope with this space monster as well. In my current game, both the amoebe and the crystal spawned in the territory of the Alkari. The amoebe eventually plotted a course through Bullrathi territory and ended up in my space, but given a mobile enough fleet - doable by early mid-game - it's reasonably easy to defeat, you just have to write off that one colony if the battle takes place in your own space. The crystal completely wiped out the Alkari and then departed into Meklon space, it's still rampaging on there. Had it crossed into my space instead, I'd have abandoned the game.

I repeat my question one final time: Why don't you just introduce a way for players to influence monster difficulty at game start?

 

[RayF]

Thanks. But this isn't really a plausible scenario, imo.

It's not meant to be plausible when they arrive. They are meant to be stronger than you or the AI can deal with when they arrive. If they target you, you need to survive long enough in order to build the ships necessary to kill them or until they drift into another empire. You survive by building colony ships to recolonize and by evacuating transports. It can be done.

And a case in point is that the AI is utterly unable to cope with this space monster as well. In my current game, both the amoebe and the crystal spawned in the territory of the Alkari. The amoebe eventually plotted a course through Bullrathi territory and ended up in my space, but given a mobile enough fleet - doable by early mid-game - it's reasonably easy to defeat, you just have to write off that one colony if the battle takes place in your own space. The crystal completely wiped out the Alkari and then departed into Meklon space, it's still rampaging on there. Had it crossed into my space instead, I'd have abandoned the game.

I've wrestled with the idea of the AI beating the monsters. They are intended to be significant events for the player to overcome. If they show up and the AI beats them on the other side of the galaxy with minimal losses, then the entire event is anti-climactic.

I repeat my question one final time: Why don't you just introduce a way for players to influence monster difficulty at game start?

The source code of the entire game has been opened up. Something like this is completely moddable. I don't know what more I can do to make the game moddable so players can adjust it to suit their needs.

 

[Lagi]

The source code of the entire game has been opened up.

Sweet Jesus.
You spend years and fortune on making this game. You release it for free and make open-sourced (for the flood of "my Master of Orion 1! with porn") like few days after ?

[Lagi: Lose -13 sanity]

Spoiler

edit: so Im actually more sane now?

 

[RayF]

Sweet Jesus.
You spend years and fortune on making this game. You release it for free and make open-sourced (for the flood of "my Master of Orion 1! with porn") like few days after ?

[Lagi: Lose -13 sanity]

ummmm..... that's exactly why I opened it up. I want to see Mrrshan porn but my wife won't let me hire an artist to do it.

 

[rezaf]

It's not meant to be plausible when they arrive. They are meant to be stronger than you or the AI can deal with when they arrive. If they target you, you need to survive long enough in order to build the ships necessary to kill them or until they drift into another empire. You survive by building colony ships to recolonize and by evacuating transports. It can be done.

Sorry, but that's jumping to unfounded conclusions. When playing on a smaller map size (I like to play the 11 player map and dial down the enemies to 9 so I don't meet any race twice), chances are all planets are taken by that point. There's no "expand out of their way", that's not going to happen. You could be lucky enough to have a suitable target bordering you on which you can declare war and take their planets instead, sure, but that's really an edge case. If a stronger empire is on the other side of the space monster, it'll merrily go it's way while you struggle to survive for a long time and have your best colonies reduced to ruins, and when the dust settles, you'll never be able to catch up to them again.
SimTex understood that those monsters should be a novelty, like the other events are. Not a "wreck your game" style nemesis. You implemented something more aking to Stellaris' endgame confrontations, except not actually triggering them when the game was all but finished but in the middle of the game.
It's bad game design 101.

Fair enough, I'll shup up about it, you're correct in pointing out someone can make a mod and we all can live happily everafter.
I already looked on the source using a decompiler and realized why some of my suggested solutions are rather "out there", the game code is kept very tight (probably a very good idea) and such complicated solutions would neccessitate tons of additional coding and testing, not really feasible at this stage.

 

[TigerKnee]

I don't know what more I can do to make the game moddable so players can adjust it to suit their needs.

I don't know whether you can do it in Java, but is it possible to put a bunch of data (such as racial modifiers, tech stats) into .xml / .lua files that will be read on boot instead of having to recompile the entire game to make changes?

 

[RayF]

I don't know whether you can do it in Java, but is it possible to put a bunch of data (such as racial modifiers, tech stats) into .xml / .lua files that will be read on boot instead of having to recompile the entire game to make changes?

Java is a Turing-complete language, which means you can do anything in it.

Loading up the Java code in an IDE (Netbeans, Eclipse or w/e) and then having complete 100% control over everything the game is doing is far more preferable than building an extra scripting system into the game and then having to support THAT in addition to the game itself. Once the project is created and loaded, it is literally one pulldown menu selection to compile the code and create the executable jar.

Every other game takes the first approach because they are unwilling to release their source code. Instead of paying for a Uber for you to get from point A to point B, I am literally giving you the keys to the car and allowing you drive it pretty much wherever you want.

 

[RayF]

SimTex understood that those monsters should be a novelty, like the other events are. Not a "wreck your game" style nemesis. You implemented something more aking to Stellaris' endgame confrontations, except not actually triggering them when the game was all but finished but in the middle of the game.
It's bad game design 101.

There's a method for all random events that allows you to define the earliest game turn they can appear in. It defaults to turn 50, although the monsters are both set to turn 100. You can change that to 200, 300, or 99999 if you never want to see them at all.

 

[RayF]

woot.. Kaitlin made a trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VusDAxLpJ9I

 

[index.php]

The more I play the less I like the space monsters They somehow feel... out of place. The game would be so much better if they were nerfed.