Remnants of the Precursors is a Fan Remake of Master of Orion 1, a space turn-based 4X game.
The creator and programmer is Ray Fowler, a retired programmer, who, tired of waiting for a company to remake the game, decided to do it himself with his own money. So far, he has paid more than 40 thousand dollars for all new artwork, lore, UI design, music, translations, and other things.
Long ago there were two Precursor races. War is inevitable, and they wiped each other out, the details lost to time...What is more relevant to leaders of fledgling interstellar empires like yours is the fact that those two races have left Artifacts on various worlds and one race's homeworld, going by the name of Orion, remains mostly intact, an incredible world full of Lost Technologies.
However, Orion is guarded by the Guardian, an incredibly advanced ancient war machine that will fire it's incredibly powerful weaponry on whatever interloper dares enter the star system.
The game provides examples of:
- Anti-Armor: Stream Projector technology is effective against heavily armored ships.
- "Ass" in Ambassador: How races less concerned with politeness talk to you if they don't like what you are doing. Some don't even pretend to be peaceful and outright threaten to kill you if you don't stop whatever it is you are doing.
- Asteroid Thicket: During the course of a space battle, you may see asteroid tiles. Ships cannot pass through them and they have the potential to confuse missile guiding systems. Luckily, or unluckily depending on the circumstances, those asteroid tiles disappear as the battle progresses.
- Biological Weapons Solve Everything: If the victim doesn't have antidotes, biological weapons can kill the population of an entire planet in one click, leaving all factories intact.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The Silicoid race has one. This means they can ignore any and all ecological concerns but they breed at half the normal rate. This also means they flat-out cannot use certain planetology breakthroughs.
- Blob Monster: The Space Amoeba. This gigantic monstrosity consumes everyone and everything, including ships and planets. That said, it might just be good news if you are losing the game to another empire. It can also be turned off if you are so inclined.
- Boring, but Practical: A way you can design your ships. New weaponry takes up a lot of space and often you get more firepower if you put old weapons in their place due to the miniaturization mechanic.
- Crystal Spires and Togas: Psilon architecture. Apparently, the first sketches were based on the the Emerald City.
- Death Ray: The Ancient Weapon of the Precursors. It is the only technology in the game that cannot be researched normally or received from an Artifact planet. To acquire it, you must defeat the Guardian (who uses this type of weapon) first. It fires one powerful beam that can deal up to 1000 points of damage to a single ship, which makes it Awesome, But Impractical, as that wouldn't be that effective against a fleet of hundreds, or thousands of fighters.
- Defenseless Transports: Played with. While your transports do not have any weaponry, they are not fragile at all. They receive the most advanced armor technology you have at launch.
- Deflector Shields: You can equip them on your ships as well as on your troops (if you have the needed technology). Ship-based shields apply a flat minus to all damage hitting the ship. If the amount of damage inflicted is less than or is equal to the class of the shield it is considered deflected.
- Disc-One Nuke: Getting a powerful technology from an Artifact world early on can be this.
- Eat Dirt, Cheap: The Silicoid race is lithovoric.
- Enemy Exchange Program: Completely and absolutely averted. Genocide and removing an empire are the same things in this game. In a planetary invasion, it is not a few soldiers who fight, but the planetary population itself.
- Fantastic Racism: Certain races are predisposed to dislike one another. For example, the Alkari and the Mrrshan have terrible starting relations with one another, and almost everybody hates the Darloks. The Humans avert this trope and have base relaxed relations with every single race.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: Averted at first as during the very beginning of the game your ships travel at light-speed but this trope will happen as soon as you get your second engine technology.
- Final Solution: Removing an empire and a race are essentially the same things. Ground combat will continue until one side is completely exterminated and a planet is considered owned by the enemy as long as there are population units of their race on it.
- 4X: The game uses the words standing for 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) in the Systems interface.
- Game Mod: So far there are two mods availaible.
- One is called MOD and makes many changes in several different categories. It also has a version that adds several new races.
- The other is called the Planetary Governor and adds automation to the game.
- Guilt-Free Extermination War: The Final War, if it happens, does not end until one side is completely and utterly exterminated.
- The Greys: Psilons are somewhat based on them, being largely grey, thin and smart.
- The Plague: A random event can happen that will cause a plague on your or someone else's colony. It will slowly kill colonists until scientists manage to create a cure by creating an arbitrary amount of R Ps. While this is happening, transports cannot be sent from that system as a system-wide quarantine is put in place as soon as the event happens. Luckily, the plague cannot kill all population on a colony, 2 million will always be left.
- Healing Factor: Ships equipped with the special devices 'Automated Repair System' or 'Advanced Damage Control' regenerate their hit points over time, though those are big and can usually only be equipped by huge or large ships.
- Homing Projectile: Missiles track their target and only their target. If the ship being tracked retreats or is destroyed all missiles heading to it are considered destroyed as well.
- Hive Mind:
- The Klackon is one, seeing itself as one individual with many bodies.
- Instant-Win Condition: The Galactic Council, if you have turned off rebellions.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: There are only two non-energy space weapons, but they are quite good, halving shields and, in the case of the 'Gauss Autocannon', both halving shields and firing four times like the 'Gatling Gun'.
- Massive Race Selection: There are 10 races to choose from in the game, all being masters of a particular gameplay element. Modnar's MOD adds 6 new races to the game. While visually, they are reskins of existing ones, they are fairly distinct in the gameplay departament.
- Naval Blockade: A non-allied fleet will prevent any BC from trade being gained by the planet it is located in orbit of.
- New Tech Is Not Cheap: Research points that are used to get technologies can only be acquired by spending BC in the research category. The cost of technologies eclipses everything else in the game.
- News Broadcast: The Galactic News Network, reporting such things as empires increasing in size, random events and imminent Galactic Council meetings.
- One-Federation Limit: Each race's government is called differently though usually they are referred to as empires when talking about the different races of the galaxy overall.
- Alkari Sovereignty
- Bulrathi Empire
- Darloks
- Human Triumvirate
- Klackon Hive
- Meklar Dominion
- Mrrshan Khanate
- Psilon Republic
- Sakkra Conclave
- Silicoid Imperium
- Portal Network: You can build one in the late-game if you have the Stargate technology.
- Point Defenseless: Averted, you have many missile defense technologies.
- Powered Armor: The most advanced combat armor available in the game.
- Precursors: Part of the backstory. There were once two precursor races, they fought a big war and both left nothing but ruins and one of them, a Guardian in this galaxy.
- Settling the Frontier: Pretty much mandatory to win the game.
- Single-Biome Planet: Played straight in images for planets, but averted in descriptions and the rotating graphics.
- Space Clouds: Nebulas limit ship travel speed to Warp 1 and render deflector shields absolutely worthless.
- Space Fighter: A way to build ships. Vulnerable to pulsar technologies, though almost all ways to build ships are vulnerable to some technology
- Stealth in Space: Played with. The Cloaking Device makes ships disappear on the galaxy map, but in a space battle, the cloaked vessel can be seen very well.
- Suicidal Overconfidence: Rare, but sometimes happens to the AI.
- Tech Levels: Each technology field has 50 levels (excluding future technologies). On those levels are different technologies. At the start of each game, 50% (or 30% if you are Psilon) of almost all technologies are removed from your tech tree. You will have to either make do with the ones you have, or acquire the ones you don't have from other races.
- Terraform: There are two types of terraforming:
- Atmospheric, which removes the hostile environment malus.
- Generic, which increases the planet size. There is an option to make hostile planets benefit less or not at all from this kind of terraforming.
- We Will Use Lasers in the Future: The vast majority of the weapons are energy-based, with only 2 exceptions.
