There are two main recognition aspects I use when designing new ships and when scanning the map to find and identify them multiple times per turn. These are the ship's model icon, and the Ship's Name. The lack of these two ship identifiers make the Fleets Management screen are non-intuitive and largely non-useful for me. I appreciate that ships do have insignia rank symbols which are shown, but I don't readily recognize these. They are typically so small and dense that it is hard to recognize them on a shrunk ship in passage, and are particularly difficult to distinguish when drawn in a dark color such as blue on the black-ground of space.Even so, what I really want to know most when playing is which named version of my Frigates are out there so I can find and upgrade the older ones as new credits allow. Only way I have found to do that is to scan the map for every one of them without the aid of the Fleets Management screen - which ironically is even more difficult to do for individual ships when they are combined into fleets.Thanks for letting me vent!Edited by Roph, 27 April 2016 - 10:02 PM.
I used to love Masters of Orion II; I would play as the Psilons, get a ridiculous technological advantage, and produce massive death-star like Dreadnought ships that could vaporize any target or planet in one mega-beam.The game had a flaw, though. The AI opponents would mass up hundreds of zergling-like very weak ships, and they would EACH get a turn in combat. So my 4 dreadnoughts would wipe 4 of their ships, then 296 enemies would fire individually and miss onto my mega-shields.then they'd be down to 292 after my turn.then 292 misses.and I'd leave the game for 3 hours until the battle finished.
I enjoy taking the opposite approach. Advanced start, impossible, Elerians, or any race with full negative picks plus telepathy.
Rush out some cheap ships with no shields and piles of MIRVing nukes. Straight to the silicoid or sakkra (anyone with a good species and weak government), blast their starbase and mind control the colony. Immediately start shipping the population around using freighters, and the impossible difficulty works in your advantage, since you know have a super-species under your control. Properly managed you can outgrow anyone now. Keep the momentum up and steamroll anyone else who you can't be friends with and keep harmless.
Don't forget the advantage in negotiations, too. It's basically charismatic without the leader recruitment bonus. It also lets you control ships (including star bases) after you capture them, making a battleship full of assault shuttles often enough to take a whole planet. Just the mind control of the planets alone would be worth at least 6 picks, and it's buffed on top of that.Yet still, many players happily spend 8 picks so they don't have to choose between planetary missile base and automated factories. I also enjoyed playing as the Psilons.
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It's probably nostalgia, but there is still stuff I miss from more modern games like Stellaris, that I think MOO2 did right. It was really only the late game that became tedious.There were tons of way to get cheap wins in the game. I vaguely recall there being tech (possibly from the Orions), that allowed you to cloak your ship.
Enemies could not even target you while cloaked. There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had). With a single ship, you could attack, then cloak, and avoid all damage. Another cheap trick: in late game after unlocking terraforming & Gaia transformation tech, you could turn any colony into a Gaia world apart from a colony on a toxic planet. I used to do a variation of that in Armada 2525.
Neutron stars always had very bad planets. I would put a colony there, drop enough work units to build a self destruct, then blow the planet.
Artificial planet, now I had a good planet around the neutron star-and every ship built around a neutron star had double defenses. Once I had one such world I used it for as much of my shipbuilding as possible as the ships would almost never be destroyed.
I would then go for the other neutron stars, both to increase my building ability and to keep the AI from building such ships. Once I had them all the game was won.
I think I have more than 10,000 hours on MOII. It took me literally years to understand the spy system (without googling it out).I've won in every possible combination: fully industrial feudals military, super rich charismatic weakling diplo win, techno-antares, custom ship building.The game has an amazing amount of design flaws for today's standard, but what a game. I think the only rival in complexity and replayability is Heroes of Might & Magic 3, one where I've put in 3x the time and each time I play it I discover something new. The game had a flaw, though.Yeah, the game (and the original) has a number of flaws that can make winning pretty easy. I've adjusted my play to intentionally avoid them. You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly.But when I want an easy win in MOO2, what I tend to do is to amass a large enough force that I can start just destroying planets. Because the number of ships you can have depends on the number of planets you have, and the AI is stupid, you can bring even the most overpowered enemy to its knees by avoiding direct fights with their forces and destroying their planets.
Each planet that gets destroyed results in multiple enemy ships that go away because they can no longer be supported.The best way to play either of the MOOs, though, is against real life human players. They aren't stupid. Especially in the days when these games came out - the machines they were built to run on were absurdly under-powered by today's standards. When MOO1 came out in 1993, a high-end desktop PC would have had a single-core 80386 CPU running at a blazing 25MHz, and a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM. DOS was a single-tasking operating system, so at least your program didn't have to share those limited resources1, but still your entire program had to fit within those constraints. That didn't leave a lot of room for AI.1 Well, technically it was a single-tasking operating system, but there were hacks like TSR programs (see ) that people used to run multiple programs at once. So that was an additional wrinkle you had to deal with.
The problem I think is that the cheater AI is unstoppable cheating - his cheating becomes almost independent of his state within the game (true independence is the behavior of actual cheating), such that your path to victory really ends up being complete and total domination. I have played a tactical strategy game called tanks of freedom where the enemy was blatantly cheating.
Even though the enemy has the same amount of capture points as you do he seemingly has an endless army. What happens is that the fog of war is filled with pre-spawned units which means you are stuck at a choke point feeling helpless but if you play long enough the AI will run out of his starting advantage and suddenly you overwhelm him. The game became more and more grindy the closer you were to the end. Yeah, the zerglings were a problem. However (hopefully I'm getting it right, it's been a long time), at max tech with the psilons: Stellar converter x8. Top computer (you need initiative), the tech to increase damage once you burned through their shields, increased hull space, the double shot tech.
Note that to fit all this in you have to weaken the defenses, but it doesn't matter. This ship gets 16 shots that hit with full power all the way across the battle map-the zerglings almost never can do meaningful damage from their starting position.
If they don't have Antares tech dreadnaughts die with two shots, anything else dies with one. A full Antares-tech design can take 5 hits before dying-but note that you have 16.In practice a fleet of 8 of these can take on anything the AI will ever field, losses will be extremely rare. Be careful with planets if you want to capture them, it's very easy to kill them by accident.Once I can build those I didn't even worry about the council. Maybe someone here can help with this. Back in the late 80s in the days of BBSing games of Trade Wars and Tele-Arena.
I have a faint recollection of playing an entirely text-based space adventure game with my brother.The first computer my brother and I ever had access to was a Wang, I have no idea what operating system it ran. I was 6 or 7 at the time. I'm pretty sure that's the machine we used to play this game, as well as our own instance of Trade Wars, when we weren't logged into Argus BBS over the 1200 baud.OK, so this game we played. It was like a explore and conquer game, there was a list of worlds I think they were named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. You could choose to send different types of ships to try to capture and control the various worlds, in which case it would contribute to your overall production.
I recall there was a way to send spies as well, that would relay information about what kind of units were present on an enemy territory. I recall it being similar in some ways to Galactic Empire, except it was purely turn based, there was no real time component.I can't for the life of me remember the name of the game. I'm half convinced I dreamed the whole thing up.
Any chance this rings a bell for anyone? Despite the similar setting, Stellaris is a very very different game, almost a different genre. MOO focuses on almost Risk-style gameplay and combat and does an excellent job at it. Stellaris focuses on roleplay and economy management (and some mid-late game issues prevent it from being great IMHO).It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions. See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate!These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on.
That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course!Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement.
R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering - my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time:).
Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give 'general directions' for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers were also automatable in this way. It works pretty well for casual play, but playing higher difficulties still requires micromanagement.
Since you can micromanage, you can zoom in on the nitty gritty as desired.For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.
The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like 'use a worker to rush production' or 'plan improvements to coincide with tech advances'. The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game.When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach.
But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses.The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.
See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate!Basically, it's a game emphasizing and focusing on roleplay. The early game is absolutely brilliant. I didn't know that.
I knew that Cololsi gave wargoals but didn't connect the dots that they are total war goals. Never bothered buying Apocalypse, because it didn't seem to offer that much I cared about. Perhaps that was a mistake on my part.I should have also mentioned that Stellaris has some DLCs which are de facto mandatory, which is just the way Paradox does things. Utopia is all but officially required. Apoc I guess I should have bought. Leviathans is IMHO very useful too.
Not sure if anything else can be called mandatory? I actually think that Apocalypse is the weakest of the main DLCs. Other than the Cololsi there aren't really any big features in it. Synthetic Dawn is mandatory if you want to play as a machine empire (which are THE meta right now.)TBH other than Utopia all the 'big' Stellaris DLCs have felt rather lackluster to me. I'd much rather have Distant Stars or Ancient Relics or even the Lithoids species pack than Apocalypse or Megacorp. Of course I've bought them all except for the Humaniods pack anyway on sale because I absolutely love Stellaris and have put a massive amount of time into it.
Even with all of its flaws and quirks it and KSP are still my favorite PC games. To me, the biggest limitation of physical games is that at a certain point (much like real state/warcraft), it becomes impossible to manage the sheer volume of properties and game pieces.Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors.
I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. Imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming.It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out.
When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff! I loved playing Civ 1. I hear a lot of times people say, oh kids should be taught money management in school. To me, playing a strategy game where you have to manage your own money supply was the best education in this sort of concept. If you save up your resources, you'll be able to do more powerful things in the future, which requires the tough emotional work of foregoing something you want now.
But, sometimes that thing you want right now really is important, and you need to think hard about the difference. Master of Orion was notable in that it was the first game I remember with 'meaningful' NPC interactions. Even though interactions were quite limited (make/break alliances, espionage, trade, etc), early alliances could determine the final outcome of the game. But more importantly, it felt emotionally compelling. I found myself getting angry at certain factions when they spied/voted/etc against me. They also took the time to illustrate dispositions IIRC, so you could see when a race was happy or angry with you.
I love Master of Magic. One of my favourite games by far. I loved taking 11 death books and starting with wraiths! Damn, once you summon your first unit of wraiths you could nearly conquer an entire plane! The free undead garrisons they left behind were just the cherry on top!Then later on you get death knights and it’s all over. They are ridiculously powerful!Another one I love is to pick Myrran and fill the rest with death books. Start with trolls and work your way up to war trolls.
Cast death channel on elite war trolls and you have some truly formidable units!Or go with halflings and life magic. Cast heroism on slingers and just laugh at the enemy as you pelt the heck out of them!MoM has millions of different strategies to try and they’re all very interesting!
This game is extremely great, still influencing game design and space strategy games. Strangely, despite so many years and advances in technology, no other game could quite capture the charm of the great original Master of the Orion.Ironically, the closest was Master of the Orion 2, which had nice features - I most liked that I could capture enemy population instead of extermination, converting them to be my citizens and creating a diverse empire (long before it was cool!!) - but it kinda lacked the sense of surrounding mystery, great black dread, where the snarks lurk to prey on my tiny empire of three sols. I played MOO1 for the first time a few years ago, and it's by far my favorite 4x game. The sliders cut down on a lot of busywork present in MOO2 and Civ, the random tech tree is spicy, and the AI is much more interesting than the usual friend-foe modifiers system (major differences are ignoring friend-foe if someone is an easy target, dogpiling the leader, and undeclared early game border disputes).Highly recommend if you like strategy games and haven't played it.
I like it so much that I've tried writing a clone a few times (but the latest attempt got sidetracked and turned into a game about interplanetary rail networks.). I also like MOO the best because of the lack of busywork. In a way, it feels a lot like a Euro board game, with sliders instead of meeples working the planets. Well, like a Euro except for the glassing your opponents' planets part; genocide is kind of rare in cardboard.
But it is possible to play and win without doing that, in most games anyway. And then you're playing a game where if you collect enough 'points' from your economic engine - population from terraforming - you win the game.Now can you offer further explanation of this 'interplanetary rail' thing? Is it Galaxy Express 999 style? I loved Moo2 as a child and I played a lot of hours with a friend of mine back in the DOS days - was one of the only hotseat playable games back in the day (and Worms of course).Later when I became a programmer I was also fascinated by the fact that there were several 'community patches' - patches that enhanced gameplay (larger galaxy sizes etc.), added new artwork and such without the availability of the source code - people reverse engineered the game and wrote binary patches that would contribute a lot to overall gameplay. To this day I can't fully understand how they did it - i get the theory, but not what tools they used, and how they got the motivation to do machine level changes to the game. Overall, good memories.
Not to put words in OP's mouth, but I'd guess the weirdness is in a couple of things:1) Jimmy can go deep on some extremely obscure corners of the industry (e.g. Interactive fiction movements that maybe only a few dozen academic acolytes are even aware of).2) The occasional deep tangent. For example, I don't think a month-long mini-biography of Edward Mannock was really necessary to appreciate the Amiga game Wings. But then again, I loved that tangent, so it's the kind of weirdness that I can personally embrace. I'm guessing the Analog Antiquarian is going to end up ultimately absorbing that energy anyway. Maybe it's on the Internet Archive somewhere?I'll set up an XP VM and extract it and upload it.
It's shareware, so I don't see the problem with repackaging it and distributing it unaltered. I thought I might have a copy where I'd done that but I guess not. Edit: from toTo be honest - I think the shareware game actually has better play than the full version. Having a fairly shallow tech tree, limited to light cruiser sized ships and no super OP weapons, without any of the stellar manipulation or planetbase/battlecruiser tier endgame ships is actually a pretty fun ruleset for casual play. It's a more arcadey game than SE4 (with just one 'construction point' instead of 3 materials) and cruising around with big fleets having pew pew battles of massive task groups and crushing each other's planets really suits it well.I dunno if the guy who wrote it is still attached to it at all. Apparently Strategy First bought Malfador in 2006?Erm, confession time. This was one of the first games I ever 'cracked', in a stunning triumph of sysadminery for 8 year old me or whatever.
Malfador originally used the 'send me a check in the mail' business model. Then it suddenly popped up on a publisher's site - called Crystal Interactive or similar. They offered a '30 day free trial' that (in hindsight, surprisingly) actually worked and installed a legit key, then presumably was going to pull it when the trial expired. I pinned down where it was writing the key with registry editor and exported the key, then just used it with the normal game. I actually found that og.reg file a few months ago, it is probably the single earliest file that I've got saved.(I also learned to use the 'Executor by ARDI' macos 7 emulator so I could play escape velocity by Ambrosia Software on my windows PC.
Executor had a 30 day trial. But you could delete the registry key and reinstall and use it forever. )(Executor is actually a very interesting 'hybrid emulator' that attempted to replace the MacOS rom/mac toolkit with a windows native reimplmentation in native C and is now open source if you'd like to take a look - )To this day I don't know if Crystal Interactive was legit or not - was that a legit indie publisher providing a framework for licensing and CC services (a not-trivial burden in the years before Steam) or did they pirate these games themselves and resell them?
The registration had the legitimate username 'REGISTERED USER', and they disappeared into the ether very rapidly, like within 6 months every trace of them on the internet was gone.I'd gladly buy a copy, but I don't think there's a way to get it anymore either. I thiiiink you might be able to track down a copy of the Space Empires Collection disc? That one was registered out of the box.Malfador eventually ended up with Strategy First, who was a legit indie publisher and sold their stuff for a lot of years. Again, it looks like Strategy First bought them in 2006, but he continued developing more stuff after that.Space Empires Starfury is actually an interesting Escape Velocity/Starfleet Command kind of crossover. It is the tactical mode for SE V turned into an open world game. From what I remember it plays better than the actual SE V. Again, weapon mounts are cool, the actual gameplay sucks and is way too slow.
Even SE 4 really needs a 'move ships faster' mode.FYI if anyone else ever played Warlords 3: Darklords Rising, that game is now available on GOG too.Also while I was looking on Archive I found this Turkish clone (lol) of SE3 from 2003 with an Apple II aesthetic? The space opera setting hit a sweet spot in terms of complexity/depth at that time: strategy game world models had to be quite simple back then and space aliens were an ideal setting for allowing the player to fill the gaps with imagination. While historical setting always have a sore spot were the necessary simplifications cause a mismatch with reality, in a sci fi setting whatever the game rules are saying is canonical world building. If a garrisoned spaceship equivalent of a phalanx unit can occasionally kill the spaceship equivalent of a bombarding stealth bomber, then that's the unquestioned reality of that world.But today we can have much deeper, more detailed world models. CK2 is awesome because it populates a simple civ-world of obtainable and upgradeable cities with thousands of simulated courtiers to meaningfully interact with, EU4 because it so carefully maps out all the socioeconomic forces that shaped the world when political interactions first started to become truly global.If you add similar details to a sci-fi setting it just feels arbitrarily burdensome.
There's no way you could connect with, say of a dozen of fungoid admirals in the way you connect with a Hanoverian Capet general who learned to respect eastern religions on an aborted crusade and is now wed to a close relative of a recently ousted Czar. There's no way you could connect with, say of a dozen of fungoid admirals in the way you connect with a Hanoverian Capet general who learned to respect eastern religions on an aborted crusade and is now wed to a close relative of a recently ousted Czar.Which is where the licenses tie-in, less as officially sanctioned and more as popular user mods! Set your 4X in the world of Dune! Or of Warhammer 40,000! Star Wars, Trek, Battlestar Galactica!
Babylon Five! And so forth. give the individual designs an identity by accumulating RPG-like bonuses over time so that an outdated but properly 'leveled-up' design can remain a viable option over more modern contendersI'm pretty sure everything from the recent Civs back to the original Starcraft tracked unit advancement. But usually it doesn't translate to RPG levels of immersion. I think Starships Unlimited, an early 2000s indie space 4X, did this fairly well.
Set your 4X in the world of Dune! Or of Warhammer 40,000! Star Wars, Trek, Battlestar Galactica!
Babylon Five! And so forth.Most of those depict a single conflict, hardly a match for the 4X playbook. I'm pretty sure everything from the recent Civs back to the original Starcraft tracked unit advancement.And in some of the Civs (4 or 5) it was so powerful that some of the modern units were comparatively worthless unless they had 'skills' that they could only get by inheritance on the individual unit upgrade path. You'd have a clear separation between core units nurtured through the ages all the way from antiquity and gunfodder whose job was to keep the core units alive. That was all rule-gamey and zero flavor. Also too micro in my opinion and single units are still not important enough to be considered protagonists of the story.Space 4X already come with a ship designer ever since the original MOO. But it's often just busywork to illustrate the tech progress a little.
I think that this is a place that could be extended without feeling pointlessly micro or suffer from faceless genericity, if done right: so research has discovered positron phaser torpedo projectors (aka random generic technobabble). The technology apparently has an efficiency sweet spot at 50m bore length. Should the development branch design a new hull around those dimensions or do we create a less efficient module that fits our venerable, cheap Bounty-class frigate that gives crews +10 morale because of that popular holovid show set aboard the lead ship of the class? (aka random flavor event hull class bonus).
And all the specialty role ships that have been derived from that hull? It would be an interesting game mechanic because you can't fall into a default pattern like 'always go for the biggest, longest range weapons and avoid battles where the enemy might come into close range': even the most module-conservative player would occasionally have to cut compatibility introduce a fully new generation. An echo chamber, where the player is mostly interacting with consequences of her own decisions.
Decisions that are not necessarily better or worse in terms of running but that are meaningful because they shape your future options. That's what I expect from all games that aren't just about eye candy or reaction time. I like the idea better the more I think about it.This could actually be a very nice Stellaris DLC, a boatload of chance event microcontent and a total overhaul of a game mechanic that can be rewritten in total isolation of the others. If only Paradox were into making DLC! (just kidding there of course). Master of Orion is also nearly 30 years old. Stellaris, at least, I expect will be a going concern for another ten years, just because that is how Paradox does things, and they have their die-hard fans.Master of Orion, if I am being honest, feels like it has had much greater legs as a piece of abandonware and through re-release than it ever did in the initial run.
I never even heard of it until many years later, when I found homeoftheunderdogs and abandonia because my computer was too old for what was then available in the bargain bin at Walmart. 4x in space, though, somehow defies the rule that adding 'in space' to anything makes it better.A 4x game on land automatically has to represent terrain. That immediately brings our intuitive associations to the fore: mountains are impassable, hills are good for mining and defense, and you need ships to cross water.A 4x game 'in space' has to do without native terrain, and certainly without terrain that is automatically intuitive. The Plasma Storm Nebula is a creation (or not) out of whole cloth, with no natural rules beyond what the game designers impart.That's a more complicated design space, and at the same time it's not immediately, emotionally engaging for the player in the same way that playing on Earth is. +1, played when I was a kid, picked it up again a few months ago for nostalgia, I must say it holds up really well. It’s feels well-constructed, put together from simple concepts/components, in a way that makes it quite replayable.
Many decisions have big-ish consequences, and there is not too much micro managing, unless you play really big galaxy and want to exterminate everyone. Very tight UI as well for the era. I like it much better than Moo2. I only wonder what would have to be different if there was multiplayer.