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[Robsoie]

Alpha 3.05 is now available, with some more good fixes :
https://remnantsoftheprecursors.com/2017/04/12/alpha-3-05-has-landed/

[Robsoie]

I got my first endgame with the Silicoids, after a fast expanding as usual with them in MoO1, i started to see my systems getting into rebellions one by one and with how atrociously slow the Silicoids pop increase , it made it near impossible to take back systems with assault transports, as i was then running out of soldiers to populate my reconquest war plans.

I guess the extremely poor computer level i had (wasn't lucky in the techs coming, something very bad for a Silicoid) and the atrocious pop increase (meaning less researches points) really showcased how much of a problem it is to be way behind in the galactic electronic warfare, i guess all those tons of spies from my "friends" around the universe were having a field day in inciting rebellions.

And as expected i got a very bad ending, i had managed to expand to  near to 10 systems, being the largest empire at that point, was on top of the election (though not having the 2/3 majority unfortunately) and all of my systems rebelled one by one.


1 point

[TheDarkStar]

Two things:

First, I've been having extreme difficulties starting the game. So far, I've tried to start the .jar directly, start it with a batch file, and start it with the command line. I can't figure out how to get it to work. Does anyone have any advice?

Second, I did once get it to start (but I'm not sure how - I just noticed that the game was open a while after I had tried to open it) and I played a Psilon game for a while. I had to end my game early when I quickly clicked out of a battle screen and ended my next turn but the UI disappeared and I was stuck between turns without any control over the game at all. I ended up having to kill the process with the task manager to get the game to close.

That said, the game appears to be pretty accurate to MoO1 with a few QoL inprovements. Once I can get it working I'll definitely play it some more.


Edit: I found a workaround. It appears that the .jar file works if its renamed "RotP.jar" rather than "Remnants.jar".

Also, I triggered the issue with advancing turns again. I got the game stuck on "Advancing to year x" and it just stays there.

[Robsoie]

First, I've been having extreme difficulties starting the game. So far, I've tried to start the .jar directly, start it with a batch file, and start it with the command line. I can't figure out how to get it to work. Does anyone have any advice?

I assume you're on windows
In the same folder in which you have the Remnants.jar file , create a new text file, in it type (copy/paste)

Code: [Select]

java -jar -Xmx2g Remnants.jar aaato have more 2gb memory allocated to java (replace -Xmx2g by -Xmx1g if you want to allow only 1gb of ram)

Save the modified text file , then rename
whateverfilename.txt into whateverfilename.bat

Now double clicking on whateverfilename.bat will launch the game correctly

[RayFowler]

Second, I did once get it to start (but I'm not sure how - I just noticed that the game was open a while after I had tried to open it) and I played a Psilon game for a while. I had to end my game early when I quickly clicked out of a battle screen and ended my next turn but the UI disappeared and I was stuck between turns without any control over the game at all. I ended up having to kill the process with the task manager to get the game to close.

My apologies. This is caused by a bug I mistakenly introduced in 3.05.. it's been fixed in 3.06

Edit: I found a workaround. It appears that the .jar file works if its renamed "RotP.jar" rather than "Remnants.jar".

Also, I triggered the issue with advancing turns again. I got the game stuck on "Advancing to year x" and it just stays there.

That's the bug fixed in 3.06. Sorry! I had to rush 3.05 out because I was going to be late for work, and that bug slipped past me 

The "RotP.jar" issue tells me that you played the alpha last year when it was named RotP.jar. A lot of people have been having Windows configuration errors where their Java is apparently explicitly configured to run "RotP.jar". I'm glad that renaming the jar file fixed the problem, but there's probably something about how Java is configured on your system that you might want to look into at some point.

[TheDarkStar]

The "RotP.jar" issue tells me that you played the alpha last year when it was named RotP.jar. A lot of people have been having Windows configuration errors where their Java is apparently explicitly configured to run "RotP.jar". I'm glad that renaming the jar file fixed the problem, but there's probably something about how Java is configured on your system that you might want to look into at some point.

The thing is that I haven't ever played this before. In addition, I reinstalled Java just in case that was causing problems (but yeah, my system is a little odd about Java).

[Robsoie]

About this odd Remnants.jar can't launch but RotP.jar can (but note that i'm not a coder at all so i may be completely wrong), i found the following :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7657288/rename-jar-package-name

I have a jar file but unfortunately I lost source code due to my disk crash. I just want to change its package name to some meaningful name.

Is there any way that I can change package name of jar file and of course I need to update this package name in class files.

And curious, i opened with notepad++ the file named RoTP.class located in ...\Remnants.jar\moo\ , though i'm not even sure that's the actual class file that matters in the problem, but still found this :



Could it be the explanation of why Remnants.jar can't be launched (without having to use the cmd line/batch file) but renaming it to RotP.jar will actually work , because it's still the jar name referenced in the class file ?

[RayFowler]

Man, you guys are finding all of my bugs! Awesome!

So the file used to be named RotP.jar, but I renamed it Remants.jar this time to avoid confusion with the previous alpha.

However, there is code within the game for it to restart itself (via command line) if the OS is not giving it enough memory. That's the string you are seeing in the log output and it is indeed still calling the old name RotP.jar! I've never stumbled across this bug because it was put in to deal with Windows memory allocation issues and I develop on Linux now.

Let me remove some egg from my face and I'll upload a patch (3.07) to fix this. Thanks again!

edit: 3.07 is uploaded and addresses this.

[Robsoie]

Thank you so much for those updates, finally got my hands on 3.07 and got a game completed.

Leading the Darloks, i finally launched the last act of my war against the Alkaris (they started it , they got it coming ) with a planetary invasion of their throneworld Altair , several assault transports landing and my brave elite troopers going to destroy the cowardly enemies.
http://i.imgur.com/KVPP8Gd.jpg

And Altair finally become a part of the Darlok empire.
This action led my empire to finally  become the largest one, bigger than the Bulrathis that had eliminated the Psilon from the cosmos decades earliers and were waging wars in other sector of the cosmos.

I was preparing now my troops for an unavoidable showdown with the warmongering Bulrathis with all my spies ready to incite rebellion around their systems to try to cripple their empire, a tactic that seemed to have worked very well against the treacherous Alkaris.

But it wasn't needed, because several years later, all of the races remaining (minus the Bulrathis due to them trying to win the election) decided to vote for me as their galactic emperor, laughing at the Bulrathis that had bullied them for so long.

And so it was, 1 Darlok to rule them all !
http://i.imgur.com/tqH7Wdp.jpg

Such a fantastic MoO1 remake, i miss a bit the manual space battles as some of the automatic results had my ships retreating when i think they shouldn't have (especially considering the enemy was retreating too) , but everything else is really top notch.

I was a bit annoyed by the need to setup my missile bases for every new planets before assigning defense sliders to build them, i think this should be optional in my opinion, as i don't remember in MoO1 having forgot to stop the defense slider when i didn't needed them, probably because i was never playing on the largest universe size.

And a question : as i never found it in my game, is Orion (and its guardian+supertechs) in the game at that time ?

[RayFowler]

Such a fantastic MoO1 remake, i miss a bit the manual space battles as some of the automatic results had my ships retreating when i think they shouldn't have (especially considering the enemy was retreating too) , but everything else is really top notch.

I was a bit annoyed by the need to setup my missile bases for every new planets before assigning defense sliders to build them, i think this should be optional in my opinion, as i don't remember in MoO1 having forgot to stop the defense slider when i didn't needed them, probably because i was never playing on the largest universe size.

And a question : as i never found it in my game, is Orion (and its guardian+supertechs) in the game at that time ?

Ship Combat and Orion are planned for the next Alpha.

For missile bases, each colony allows you to specify exactly how many bases you want to build on it (the default is 1) -- please note that there are little up/down arrows next to the missile base count on each colony. This allows you to set defense spending and forget about it until the game reminds you that you've hit your limit.

In the original MOO1 there was no way to set a limit so what often happened is that you'd forget you were spending on defense on a colony, then suddenly look up and realize you had 200 extra bases on it.

[Robsoie]

A bit of a gameplay question for once, when i play as Silicoids i found myself having a hard time to not having half of my systems rebelling on smaller universe and max opponents, so the Silicoid major advantage (not having to research special world environment to colonise them) isn't that big as you quickly run into opponent worlds that block your early spreading, the Silicoids have much more chances on larger universe settings.

Additionally the enemy AI pull out a big spy game in RotP (judging by the amount of caught spies) and so love to incite rebellions, that's helped i guess by the lack of "threaten to attack" option in the diplomacy to calm down the AI in the current version and Silicoids with they difficulty to research (mostly due to lack of people) makes it hard to counter enemy spies due to the difficulty to get to higher computer techs to catch more spies.

Wouldn't be that big of a problem if the Silicoids didn't came with a very low population growth , that make it much harder than any other races to take my rebelled systems back if i don't bombard them a lot to soften the enemy troops (and so losing lots of precious factories, making the system fall backward).

Anything that would be helpful in keeping the Silicoid not losing to massive rebellion in RotP in small universe + max AI opponents ?

The only time i managed to keep the Silicoid from losing mid game is when i was focusing researches entirely on computer and was very lucky that the game had Computer Mark IV available for me, so i managed to stay a bit ahead of mostly every other race in the computer game, helping to catch more spies than usual.

But late game, it was not that lucky as i didn't had higher level computer researchable and so the other races caught up and so i got the rebellions taking over every systems one by one.

[RayFowler]

A bit of a gameplay question for once, when i play as Silicoids i found myself having a hard time to not having half of my systems rebelling on smaller universe and max opponents, so the Silicoid major advantage (not having to research special world environment to colonise them) isn't that big as you quickly run into opponent worlds that block your early spreading, the Silicoids have much more chances on larger universe settings.

Additionally the enemy AI pull out a big spy game in RotP (judging by the amount of caught spies) and so love to incite rebellions, that's helped i guess by the lack of "threaten to attack" option in the diplomacy to calm down the AI in the current version and Silicoids with they difficulty to research (mostly due to lack of people) makes it hard to counter enemy spies due to the difficulty to get to higher computer techs to catch more spies.

I do think that incite rebellion seems overpowered. It works mechanically just like in the original game but I think the Remnants AI uses it more effectively. Seems like it needs to be either toned down or players need to have more visibility and more tools to deal with it, or both. There certainly need to be diplomatic options... I am leaning strongly to making ineffective when at war (in other words, incite rebellion is a cold-war only option).

Anyway, I really appreciate you playing through games and finding balance issues like this. It's exactly the kind of problem that is the most difficult for me to find and the #1 reason I put out alpha versions. I don't want to the game to be feature complete, release it for beta, and then find out it's as buggy as hell and has no balance.

[RayFowler]

.

[Robsoie]

Overall i like the AI being more aggressive than in MoO1 regarding the spying (and i like your 4X AI article ), especially considering what is at stake.

In the original game while the AI was using it, i always felt that the player simply played the spygame better than the AI ever could, so having RotP improving on that area is very welcomed.
And once there are more diplomatic options with war threatening it will be even better.
But it's a difficult area to balance indeed, too much spying and it can be resulting in the Silicoid situation that make them lose mid-game on specific game setting (small universe + all races playing), but spying too limited and Darloks lose their specific advantage making it much less interesting.
 
Now i think that's an excellent idea to have some kind of malus to some of the spying functions when there is an open war between 2 factions, as indeed it must be harder for spies to infiltrate anything when there are so many troops monitoring anything showing around a system or blocking access to anything coming from the enemy systems.

Anyways, thank you for your work, RotP is probably one of the best 4X i played in recent times, the fact it's based and improve upon my all time favorite (MoO1) is probably a big factor too
And i like those visuals a lot, there's ton of "character" to each races , it does not feel "generic" like they did in the best forgotten MoO3 by example.

Good luck with future development, i hope much more people will start to notice and play this masterpiece in the making

[Nirur Torir]

I still sometimes play MOO1, and this looks cool.

UI problem: You have the exit buttons right over the next turn button. This is fine, but please add a 3-5 second delay after hitting exit, before the next turn button can be hit, in case of double-clicks.