Remnants of the Precursors (MOO1 modernization) is complete!

[Ray F]

I just want to let all of my fellow MOO1 grognards know that ROTP is finally done. So much artwork, writing, translations, etc that it took forever. It also includes a game manual written by Tom Chick!

If you haven't tried it yet, I think you will be very surprised. It's free for download at: https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

I'm pretty sure that some of you are already aware and have played it, but this is a good chance to get the official released version. There will, however, be a small 1.01 update in a few days and then I'm taking a well-deserved break.

Next on the list will be a published sourcebook full of all of Petar's amazing artwork with some backstory/lore for each race provided by Jeff, who wrote all of the text in ROTP. But that's a long way off.

[RefSteel]

Of course this is a two-year-plus necro, but while I'm still working through the black hole of my current schedule (and hopefully with light on the horizon so I can finally pick up that 39A game again soon) I was wondering if anyone here plays Remnants and has an opinion (or even a report?!) of the game. It seems to have some subtle differences from basic MoO - and apparently greatly upgraded AI strategy - but otherwise to just be a modernization of MoO with the same basic rules. I haven't had a chance to look into it much since its release but I'm curious about others' experience.

[Dp101]

Well this is a neat coincidence, I visit RB for the first time in a few years today, and I played rotp for the first time in a year or so just 2 days ago, so I'm weirdly well-placed to answer the questions. I can report a run if you'd like (haven't done so before for MoO or rotp before, and I'd probably do it in a separate thread regardless) but figured it would be easier to talk about various differences offhand first.

On a basic level, it's definitely a fixed MoO 1 with the serial numbers filed off (every races' name is different but it's abundantly clear which they are), but you're right in that there's a number of mechanical differences. Firstly just in terms of map setup, you can run much larger sizes - I've tended to run on the larger of the two "Average" map sizes with 150 systems, since the game reckons you can fit 9 AIs + the player on it, meaning you get to have every race represented, but you can go higher. 225, 333, 500, 700, 1000 (hitting the cap of AIs at this point, 49), 1.5k, 2.25k, 3.33k, 5k, then up to 10k at "Insane" size, 100k at "Ludicrous", and finally 686640 at "Maximum" size, which I assume is the max number of systems by technical limitations. I believe I tried a 1k game at one point, but lost the will to live clicking through the endless contact messages following the first council (though now that I think about it I probably could have just held escape to close out of all of them) but it's really not a good idea, and I think the only dubiously-sensible way to experience these sizes is with the "autoplay" advanced option turned on, which lets you watch an AI play through, but it's still not exactly fast. I just tested this with a 1k game, and I constantly got out of memory warnings, and couldn't zoom in without lag once the empire I was spectating crossed about 200 planets. Here's what that looked like (and yes, the backup race names for ones that appear multiple times are highly amusing) (also warning for large images, I already shrunk them but you lose some of the terrifying scale if you go too far):

These images should also indicate how good the AI is now at coordinating attacks. Anyways, with that silliness out of the way, the last couple setup notes are this: There's various options for differing galaxy shapes, galaxy and ellipse are both options that can be customised further, but the real important bit is the advanced options. The only one I regularly poke at is nebulae, disabling them since I find them quite frustrating, but there's plenty more options.

Note that "allow rebels" option - if the player wins a council vote to end the game but they're at war, there's a chance (not entirely sure how it works) that the empire they're fighting will reject the ruling and enter final war, just as if a player rejected the ruling.

As for changes within the game itself, beyond the bugfixes and QoL (you can toggle seeing all range rings from any planet you select! You can set a default number of missile bases for planets! The game will automatically adjust sliders to do the exact right amount of terraforming once factories are maxed, and then switch back to factories after! (though this part works less well, because any excess it'll have assigned to build bases, and it won't take from there to go back into the factories, so you have to step in to avoid trying to build both at once)) there's a fair few important ones. Unarmed ships can coexist on planets, meaning the player cannot simply stand their ground with scouts and have the AI's scouts flee from their terrifying might. When you get a spy hit, you can see details for what you can get by picking any field, and this'll be more than just a list of techs, but instead a list based off of the quality of the spy hit, so you can know how advanced you're able to get and thus pick the right category based on what you want at various tiers. There's no need to have a toggled-off missile on ships to be able to move after attacking, you can always do so automatically. There's probably other changes, but in general it's almost all just UI stuff that feels so transformative as to almost trick you into thinking it's new, but instead it's simply nice. Part of why I'm thinking of doing a report to illustrate things more (beyond the fact that you, you know, asked for it) is because it's been so long since I last played the original MoO that I can't quite remember which bits are changed/new and which aren't, so going over it slowly might help.

In summary, the game is basically exactly what you described, and I've enjoyed it a lot. These older games (the original is a few years older than I am) are often a bit more micro-intensive than I'd like, so anything to cut down on that is nice, and it allows the excellent gameplay to shine through. I don't dare to brave the higher game difficulties/alternative AIs though, I remember marching in trying to try this on Impossible-equivalent (difficulties are expanded into 3 tiers of easy, then normal, followed by 3 tiers of hard culminating in hardest) right away and getting swiftly smacked-down, but I'm sure someone who's actually good at the game would have a far smoother time lol. And feel free to specify anything you'd like me to show off in a playthrough regarding race/setup/strategy.

[RefSteel]

Oh, wow - cool! It looks like a lot has been updated since I playtested it during the alpha phase, with new options and interface improvements among other things. (I've never actually played a game of Remnants all the way through, mostly for technical reasons: My home computer when the game was in development was an old XP box that couldn't run the game's prerequisite Java runtime environment, so I had to do all my testing for the game on breaks at the library! By the time I got my current Linux machine, I was involved in other projects - as I guess I still am!)

I'd definitely love to read a detailed play-through of the game to see what it looks like now and how it plays out - uh ... hopefully with a much more manageable number of stars than the Ludicrous setting! - and if you do, I'd say to just go with whatever you'd most enjoy reporting. For me, that would probably mean using the smaller of the two "Average" maps, with an incomplete but significant subset of the available races, maybe in an eliptical galaxy with no nebulae to see how that differs from MoO's typical galaxies (and so you don't have to deal with the nebula annoyance factor) - and maybe playing as the Psilons to see how their power holds up against the Remnants AI. Many thanks for the screenshots and discussion; I'll have to give the game another look! (Well ... after the EitB LVII map is finished and I finally get back to OSG-39A, but eventually!)

[Dp101]

Well, reporting was delayed by Imgur partially going down, but I wrote up the first 60 turns of my run here.

[Ray F]

The only one I regularly poke at is nebulae, disabling them since I find them quite frustrating, but there's plenty more options.

aaaah, but there is sort of an Easter egg with regards to nebulae to make them less of a penalty. At the center of every nebula is a Rich or Ultra-Rich system (depending on the nebula size). You'll know which system it is because it is the name of the nebula (i.e. "Xyz Nebula" means the center system is "Xyz")

Now... sometimes you start inside of a nebula, right? So guess what happens if it just so happens that your homeworld is the center of the nebula? (hint: happy fun game)

[rgp151]

Okay, I've played enough rounds this game to officially say you did a great job! I'm not big on remakes, because I actually like playing the old DOS games, but this is really good. The space monsters are a bit much, I do disable them sometimes. They have come in pretty early in some of my games, when there is no hope of defending against them. It does seem like the AI is not aggressive enough, not like it was in MoO. I've been playing Modnar/Harder. I also do really miss the MAX indicator on factory production, which I mentioned in the other thread.

I wish you could hold down the clicker instead of having to click it, that would be nice.

The one thing that seems to be a downgrade is the graphics in the battle screen. I miss all the diverse animations of MoO. Seems like beams are just little lines and all have the same basic sound. Although I don't miss not having the sound of Mauler Devices, I always hated that sound! But yeah, the battle animations could be better. But still, amazing work for such a small team.

[rgp151]

A couple more things: 1) In MoO I'm pretty sure you can Escape out of stealing if you want to. So when you Spy and you get an option to steal, you aren't forced to steal, you can hit Esc and cancel it to avoid the potential of getting caught if it doesn't seem worth it. I would think this should be a part of RotP as well. 2) It would be really cool if you could restart a map with a different race or difficulty. There are times I've played game and though, Oh man this would have been good to play as X race, or to wan tot try the same map, but harder, etc.

[haphazard1]

I agree with rgp151's second item: that would be a very cool possibility to have. It would allow for some fascinating comparisons of AI races and their capabilities. Plus you could do some neat variant scenarios, similar to some of the variant Civ4 games that have been done here at Realms Beyond in the past.

[Ray F]

I love all of you guys and this community (I am a massive MOO1 fan obviously), but my work on ROTP is complete! I spent maybe 7 years working on it as a hobby and probably 6 figures for all of the artwork, writing and translation. Long story short is that I am not working on it anymore (I do have other hobbies and 2 young children to raise lol). However, I made the game open-source and there is an active modding community that would consider user requests.

Here is an invitation link to the discord where the modding community lives: https://discord.gg/YPfJ572vy8