Remnants of the Precursors: Master of Orion, but modern, free, and smart

Screenshot of my current campaign progress building the Bulrathi empire in a spiral galaxy:

Below is the tale of the tape vis a vis the other races.

Current strategy is to keep the Silicoid empire (the green planets to the east on the other screenshot) at bay by consistently pumping out additions to the fleet while dedicating as much resources as possible to research to gain firepower superiority. Oh, and next take out Pisilon empire (white planets at the bottom) as a reward for helping me take out the Mrrshan who until recently existed in between us. ;)

edit: and Ray, don’t know what it takes to defeat a space amoeba, but in two turns my empire and another both lost an entire planet development to one of these things. And I had more than a few of my best ships defending, just wasn’t enough.

I always kill the Psilons last or not at all, because they have a greater chance to research technologies that you might not have access to.

At the same time, I always, ALWAYS kill the Silicoids first. So that’s what I would recommend you do as well. As long as you can land on their planets, they should fall easily to Bulrathi racial bonuses.

Re: the Space Amoeba; the trick is the best possible engines, the inertial stabilizer, and heavy beam weapons. Or just lots of another type of weapon-if you have 5 maneuver plus 100 auto blasters that will work fine, even though it’s range 1. . There is also a counter intuitive trick regarding the Amoeba and missile bases.

Yes, design intent for the space amoeba is a highly maneuverable fleet that can keep its distance so they don’t get eaten as the amoebea splits. Range 2 weapons really help.

However, it also turns out that missile weapons are effective as well, but you still need to keep your distance.

Thanks for the responses. I’ll keep the ship design elements you mention in mind for dealing with it.

I saw news that it has moved on to attack another race again, and that made me start to wonder about a new concern: does this thing just keep roaming the galaxy destroying planets until someone kills it?

I probably should have but in a spiral galaxy like this one the point I encountered them they were already ahead of me. So I took out the two races at the bottom of my starting spiral as they were targets of opportunity I felt like I had to move on before heading to the middle of the galaxy. Otherwise I invited a multiple front war and these ships don’t move across the galaxy terribly fast so I would have gotten myself stuck building ineffectually a fleet to fight on two fronts (and you know what they say about that).

Silicoids are dicks. Xenophobic expansionists don’t typically make the best neighbors.

Unless that’s all just Polish propaganda.

Is there a way to slow down the damage animation during combat so that it is easier to see the damage numbers? They fly by so quickly I cannot see them. That makes it hard to tell how effective the weapons are unless I check the number of units in the stack and/or hit points prior to each shot.

I am planning to make a thorough pass over the ship combat animations and the ship combat AI once all of the text-related changes are done (deadline for that is 4/1) and once I get a Macbook Pro (they are having combat animation issues).

It’s not an excuse, but the game is still in beta. The ship combat is still in need of a serious passthrough.

From the MOO manual I take it the answer to this question is yes:

Space Monster: An enormous space monster invades the galaxy and
threatens to destroy your colonies. Until defeated by your star fleet, the monster
will go from system to system, destroying all of the colonies within. The space
monsters are terrific adversaries and will take quite a number of ships to defeat.

So the follow up question is this: does every engagement with it leave it w/ lasting damage?

No worries. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing a setting somewhere.

Only if it has multiple engagements on the same turn. The monster heals up before leaving for its next planet.

With not one but two space monsters exclusively focused on destroying my planets every couple of turns I’ve come to the conclusion it was a mistake leaving this on. ;)

Perhaps when the game releases the manual can include a section that makes at least broad recommendations about effective strategies for dealing with each of them. That way you’ve got something to plan for and build towards in preparation.

These two destroyed one empire and are now destroying mine. As a result a campaign I had a fairly good handle on is now headed down the drain. So having a bit of a hard time seeing the fun in space monsters. And yes I realize you can set it to off, I guess what I’m trying to understand is why anyone would turn it on? I mean unless they know what to build in advance to deal with them.

edit: btw got an answer on strategy for handling space crystals on reddit I’ll give a go. Suspect my main solution is going to turn these off though.

The monsters are beatable but they often arrive a time when you are not quite ready for them. As a pure game mechanic, they work to slow down the snowball effect. As a mid-game challenge, they can punish you in ways that the AI can’t.

Everyone hates them the first time they arrive unexpectedly and ransack their planets. But once you realize they are part of the landscape and often hurt the AI more than the player, they don’t feel so unfair.

And when you beat them, you get a nice diplomatic bonus with all of the other races.

Yeah, I get the idea behind them, just frustrated by it at the moment because I’m losing a planet to each one every about 4 or 5 turns. Two of them at once are doing a pretty good job of dismantling my empire!

Just so I know, how many of these things are there?

Two! :)

Version 2.16 is now out. Details:

Thanks, Ray!

Almost all of the really cool stuff added in the past 6-8 weeks has come from player requested features. So I should be thanking you guys!

Is there a way to see the turn number? I know we can see the year, but I like to keep track by turns.

Click on the Year display and it toggles to Turns

Awesome, thanks!