Hello and Mod Questions

[bubb_tubbs]

Greetings! I'm a long-time veteran of MoO2 and purchased the GoG edition of DWU recently, though I've been playing a, shall we say, slightly less legal version for 6 months or so. Stellaris ended up being (to me, at least) a role-playing game with slight grand strategy elements, which isn't really my thing.

I cut my teeth on full manual Extreme (thanks to DasTactic and TortugaPower for ship designbasics and economy tutorials, btw), got my ass handed to me several times, and pushed on.

It only took one game to get sick of the ridiculous jump from improved warp bubble to Gerax, so I was using an older version of RetreatUE. However, several games featured long range rail guns that chewed through even the heavily armoured repair bot designs I was fielding. I'm now using Research Unleashed II, with the inclusion of Icemania AI mod and DasChrome and I'm loving it, but the AI seems weaker than before, even on Very Expensive, strong pirates, chaos galaxy and I'm not sure if it's me improving or the AI struggling with the different tech tree.

I mostly play now as "underpowered" military races or non-Gizurean insectoids because I like the challenge and I'm used to Moo2 - be aggressive, never talk to anyone, only assimilate that which makes you stronger, kill everybody else.

Looking at mod info for both the current versions of RetreatUE and RU2, it's difficult to determine which is more widespread ("accepted", I guess) among the old guard since the threads are fairly aged at this point. I've also looked at Bacon mod, though I probably wouldn't use any of the features except the empire mining ships option and I'm not sure it works with RU2.

Do you guys recommend one over the other, as far as difficulty goes? Not that the game is a cakewalk or anything, but I'd like some more growing room before having to implement house rules or challenge playthroughs.

Fingers crossed for DW2 in the future, and thanks in advance.

[bubb_tubbs]

Rats, I posted this to the wrong forum - dolphin browser doesn't seem to like it.

Can an admin move this to the mod forums when you get a chance?

Sorry!

[Uncle Lumpy]

Welcome to the group. It's been a few months since I last played a game. I use Retreat's mod, to which I added a number of character portraits. That way my leaders, spies, generals, etc. all have individual names and portraits. I typically play x-humans, so they're the only race I've done this with. Hope you enjoy the game!

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: bubb_tubbs

I've also looked at Bacon mod, though I probably wouldn't use any of the features except the empire mining ships option and I'm not sure it works with RU2.

There are other improvements you may find useful. The !note command allows you to set reminder notes on ships so you will be alerted when they finish their current mission. There are UI enhancements to some backgrounds that make the text more readable (or at least less unreadable). Also, I fixed the assault pod bug.

[bubb_tubbs]

Thanks. I'll try out the mod once I'm finished with my current RetreatUE Dhayut empire and Boskara Pirate playthroughs.

The gravity wells feature is really intriguing, but with the AI already having a hard time keeping up by the midgame, I'm wary of handicapping it with poor pathing and ship designs that lack sufficient fuel/thrust for the increased amount of sublight travel.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: bubb_tubbs

Thanks. I'll try out the mod once I'm finished with my current RetreatUE Dhayut empire and Boskara Pirate playthroughs.

The gravity wells feature is really intriguing, but with the AI already having a hard time keeping up by the midgame, I'm wary of handicapping it with poor pathing and ship designs that lack sufficient fuel/thrust for the increased amount of sublight travel.

Well, the initial release has no intelligent pathing but I later added a routine that always tries to choose the shortest path when leaving a gravity well. It works almost always. The exception is when a ship picks a mission and its just outside of the gravity well and it enters the gravity well before the hyperdrive spools up.
As for fuel, there is this setting the the settings file

// If useStarGravityWells is enabled ships will spend more time at sublight speed so they need to burn less fuel
// Sublight fuel burn will be divided by this number
sublightFuelBurnDivisor=3

Lastly, telling the Ai to put more emphasis on engine thrust can be done by editing the design templates. Since that's a textfile change that anyone could do, I didn't mess with those. It might be nice if someone does make those changes that the posted them though.

[Osito]

As the person who wrote RU I and II, I may be able to shed a little light on the differences between the various mods incorporating Research Unleashed.

When I originally wrote the mod, my aim was to tidy up some of the things I didn't like, such as the armour tree and the colonisation tree; I also wanted to slow down the hyperdrive speeds, which is something that interested many people. However, my main intention was to provide additional immersion, rather than difficulty, as I don't generally play games like this for a difficult challenge (although I did incorporate a good chunk of Icemania's AI Improvement Mod, as that was a sensible thing to do).

Mordechai came along and added a lot of extra changes to the economic side of the game, which didn't interest me so much. I think Retreat then made a some fixes and other changes, and also increased the difficulty somewhat.

The purpose of my mod, Research Unleashed, was simply to change the tech tree, although I later added Haree's races and Das's mod, because I wanted to play with them too.

So overall you will find:
1. Retreat UE is more difficult than Research Unleashed.
2. Retreat UE adds a lot of extra bits to the game apart from the Research Tree.

However, note that Retreat UE is based on Research Unleashed I. In Research Unleashed II, I gave the pirates their own hyperdrive track to avoid gimping the pirates in the early game. Not sure if Retreat UE ever addressed this issue. There were also a few other changes in Research Unleashed II, although I can't remember what they were now.

Hope this helps.

[Retreat1970]

RetreatUE is based on Unleashed Extended II which is based on Research Unleashed. Wonderful stuff. The RetreatUE AI is just about as hard as you can make it. Not because I'm smart, but because I minimized the number of steps to get to endgame tech. The RetreatUE readme explains more. Go here for an explanation of UE2.

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