Yes, I suppose that after the flood of pale imitations we’ve suffered through in recent years, it was only a matter of time until somebody dug up the body parts of the actual Master Of Orion series and tried to reassemble them into a modern game.

This new Master Of Orion is a more literal take on the common practice of graverobbing the final resting places of much-loved classic games for their licences than I’ve seen in the past, however.  Usually whoever’s taken (or has been handed by a publisher) the license keeps the theming and subject matter but otherwise ends up making the game that they (or the publisher) want to make, which often ends up being a shooter of some kind. It would be difficult to make a shooter out of Master Of Orion — you don’t bring that license back unless you fully intend to make a space-based 4X of some kind — but I was expecting it to be ultimately just as superficial a relationship as the Syndicate FPS had to the original 1993 corporate murder simulator. I was therefore rather surprised to discover that this new Master Of Orion really is a faithful attempt to remake Master Of Orion 2 for modern audiences, using an almost Frankenstein-like approach of trying to bolt together the original game’s constituent parts together fully intact. Prior to actually playing Master Of Orion I thought this was an approach that would have stood a fairly decent chance of producing a worthwhile game. Unfortunately I can imagine Doctor Frankenstein thinking much the same thing about his creation, and look how that turned out.

Let’s try and short-cut the tedious part of the review where I explain basic mechanics. Do you have an interest in space 4X strategy games? If no, then you probably weren’t that interested in the mechanics anyway. If yes, then have you played Master Of Orion 2? I’m going to proceed with this review under the assumption that you have, but on the offchance that you haven’t please go and buy it on GOG and give it some hours of your time, since even after twenty years it’s still arguably the best game the genre has ever produced. Anyway, everywhere you look in the Master Of Orion remake — colony management, research, ship design — the mechanics are almost exactly those of Master Of Orion 2, to the point where it’s going to be far quicker for everyone involved I just explain what’s different about them.

As with Master Of Orion 2 you can pick your race from a selection of pre-built ones, each with its own baked-in advantages and disadvantages like being monsters in ground combat at the expense of being crap at research. All of the available races are returning favourites from MOO, and I emphasise “favourites” here because the shit ones like the Trilarians did not make the cut. This is probably because of one of the few things the MOO remake gets right: each race is portrayed by a fully-animated and voiced representative that serves to give it a great deal of character, just as in the original – but the drawback is that this sort of thing is pretty resource-intensive, and so they’ve focused their resources on just 12 races here rather than the 20-odd that were in MOO 2. This is fine and understandable, especially considering that every race also gets its own custom ship visual designs and even little population pieces on the colony management screen (although the latter are drawn in a way that makes them look pretty indistinguishable from another anyway). If none of the pre-built races takes your fancy the option to build a custom race from a selection of positive and negative traits also makes a return, and again it works just the same as it did in MOO 2.

Once you’ve picked your race and started the game, you’re confronted with a starmap containing your race’s home system plus the surrounding ones. As with MOO 2 you start with just your homeworld and a fleet containing one frigate, one colony ship and two scouts, but it’s after this point that the MOO remake starts to diverge slightly from its source material: rather than having these ships be able to travel to any star in range (with said range and the time taken to travel it being dictated by your stardrive and fuel cell technology level) the various stars in the galaxy are instead separated by the now standard set of static warp lanes that are very handy for creating strategic chokepoints between systems. This is a concept that MOO takes to heart as a big part of the game is fortifying the warp points leading into and out of a system; doing so will allow you to control access in peacetime as well as defending your borders during wartime. Travelling along the warp lanes isn’t instant and takes a fair number of turns to get from system to system to begin with, and it’s this that’s reduced by your drive technology. The interior layout of the star systems themselves are now physical spaces on the map that you ships also traverse, although in this case getting from point A to point B within a system always takes just a single turn; this change makes exploration a little more interesting as individual planets must be visited by your ships before you know their climate/mineral abundance and whether or not they’re going to be good places to settle.

These changes to travel and exploration are not unwelcome and seem to have been reasonably well thought-through, for all that they “improve” something that wasn’t particularly broken in the first place; unfortunately that is probably the only time I am going to write those words in this review, as everything else is either practically unchanged from MOO 2 (and thus feels a bit dated) or else has been changed for the worse. Take research, for example. All of the technologies and improvements you research are word-for-word identical to the ones in MOO 2 and serve the same general function (although their precise mechanics have sometimes been changed to accommodate new game systems) so I don’t really have any complaints as to the content. However, the research system has been made a little less interesting by ramming everything into a traditional tech tree and having most techs give you static payoffs. MOO does sort of import MOO 2’s system of mutually exclusive choices between invention A and invention B, but this doesn’t apply to all technologies and is usually accompanied by a guaranteed reward of invention C. This isn’t an outright bad change, it just allows for less variance and fewer interesting choices because the amount of stuff you can’t get on a single run through the tech tree is drastically reduced. I definitely noticed much more convergence in ship technology and empire infrastructure when comparing the various empires in the two games I’ve played, and while I’m sure the move to a conventional tech tree simplified and balanced the game it also made it somewhat less compelling.

A similar approach has been taken with colony management: it’s largely the same system as in MOO 2 with only two substantive changes, but those changes ensure it’s a step down from the original. First is that you can no longer stick an unlimited number of population units into production, research, farms etc.; now you only have a limited number of cells for each based on your planet type and your infrastructure, and the cell system suffers from diminishing returns where the first two cells give three production per population unit, the next two cells give two production per pop, and the last three cells give only one production per pop. This system is now basically saying to me “Don’t bother adjusting your pop distribution” as it’s fundamentally set up to discourage situational min/maxing; you could easily make an AI that finds the optimal distribution to maximise your resource income per population unit — and in fact the game has this built in and turned on by default, meaning that this decision space has effectively been removed from MOO entirely.

And just in case you did find a way to supercharge your production capacity – by far the most valuable of the three resource types — the new pollution mechanic will step in to make your life a living hell. (In fact it’ll do this anyway since it starts to kick in the moment you start producing more than seven or eight hammers per colony.) First, to compare and contrast, MOO 2’s pollution system effectively functioned like corruption did in old Civilization; if you didn’t have pollution suppression buildings then a certain percentage of your production would be eaten up by pollution, and this percentage scaled with your total amount of production. It wasn’t a great system, but it was approximately one billion times better than the pollution system in the remake, where excessive production instead fills up a pollution meter. It can fill at the rate of up to 4-5% per turn, and once it gets to 100% the climate of your planet gets downgraded by one level – from Terran to Arid, and from Arid to Desert and so on. This is a huge deal – think about how much time you spend finding decent planets to colonise, only for this pollution mechanic to potentially fuck them up if you don’t pay attention to it. Of course you can terraform them back up the climate scale, but this takes time, and so your choice is either that, or to waste production time on a Trade Goods-like production option called Clean Up Pollution which empties the bar by about 10% per turn.

Not only is this a clumsy and frustrating mechanic to deal with, but I find it particularly offensive because it flips pollution from something abstract that you tried to passively minimise to something that you have to spend time actively managing – and it is 100% downside; there’s nothing good that happens if you keep pollution to a minimum beside your planets not getting fucked up. While pollution downgrading your planets is a nice idea thematically it’s just a ton of make-work when you put it into practice, and it really throws a spanner in the works of the colony management. The same is true of spying, where you have to up your security rating to defend against enemy spies because otherwise they can pull off some truly devastating espionage like making a core planet secede from your empire for twenty turns. I’m all for spies being powerful, but anything that powerful in a game needs to be linked to some deterministic cause and effect that you can protect yourself against, not a bloody RNG that you can only influence. The only upside with spying is that you can be just as much of a dick to the AI with your own spies – but then again the computer can’t feel frustration or rage when the hundredth spying attempt slips through and screws you over, so you’re still getting the worse end of the deal here.

When set against catastrophically awful pieces of design like spying and pollution, it’s probably a mercy that the ship design and combat is merely very bad. All of the design elements from MOO 2 return in the remake — weapon mounts like Heavy and Point Defense, and subsequent improvements in technology keeping earlier weapon techs moderately viable by miniaturising them, allowing you to cram more onto a ship — but the ship classes now have a much more dramatic impact on the design process thanks to each class having a number of set weapon slots. If you want to put bombs onto a frigate, for example, you’re out of luck – frigates don’t have bomb slots. If you want more than three different variants of beam weapon on a destroyer you’re also going to be disappointed since it’s only got three main weapon slots. Now, I have rarely wanted to have more than three different variants of beam weapon on a destroyer, but this feels like a rather artificial limitation that scales back the ridiculous flexibility of the MOO 2 ship designer and replaces it with something that, again, is just a little less interesting to deal with compared to the original. Maybe if they’d wanted each class of ship to have discrete roles in combat (picket ships, bombers, carriers etc.) then I’d see the point, but Titans and Battleships can do everything Frigates and Destroyers can, they’re just a bit slower when moving around the map. It feels like a restriction that’s present because they had to change something about MOO’s ship designer, and so this is the change that was made purely for the sake of it.

Still, it’s not a huge step down from what was in MOO 2. No, the real problem with MOO‘s ship designer is that the payoff for it is to be found in the game’s tactical combat segment, which takes the predictably terrible decision to plump for real-time and consequently dissolves into the same incoherent mess that Stellaris’s ship combat did. It’s very difficult to see how effective your weapons and designs are being at a glance, and this makes the ship designer far less satisfying to interact with since the consequences of all your design fiddling aren’t visible at all. What orders you can give to your ships feel like they’re only being obeyed half the time — beyond focus-firing enemy ships down one at a time there are no tactics possible, and it’s all very much out of your control and not satisfying to engage with at all. Given the consistent failure of real-time tactical combat in space 4Xes¹ and the difficulty of making a turn-based system that wasn’t completely broken in terms of balance (which MOO 2’s rather enthusiastically was), I’m starting to think Endless Space’s approach of intentionally hands-off, cinematic combat was the right approach; I certainly found it tense to watch despite my lack of control – or perhaps because of it. Certainly it was better than giving me the command equivalent of Maggie’s toy steering wheel from The Simpsons title sequence.

I guess the overarching theme of this review is that the MOO remake attempts to balance MOO – but it does so in really unfulfilling ways, and this is a serious problem when half the fun of MOO 2 was that it was seriously unbalanced. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: having a game that’s inherently unbalanced isn’t a problem as long as there are multiple viable strategies that all feel powerful to execute. This remake tries to bring balance to the mayhem of MOO 2’s colony management, research, ship design and combat, but while it arguably achieves some degree of success in one or two of these areas it destroys what was interesting about those systems in the process. Combine this with a seriously misguided attempt to provide flavour – leader talking heads aside, your main information channels in this game are the criminally unfunny news androids and a selection of race-specific advisors that nevertheless all seem to communicate solely via tired internet memes — and you end up with a game that’s curiously bland and flavourless considering the unusual amount of effort that’s gone into infusing the races with some personality, and whose most memorable moments and mechanics are the bad ones. I’m not sure I’d call Master Of Orion itself outright bad since even at the worst of times the mangled features of MOO 2 are still just about visible underneath all of the botched surgery that’s been carried out in an attempt to update it for the modern era, it’s just incredibly mediocre and forgettable, and really not worth your time.

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This review is going to contain several comparisons to Master of Orion 2. Some of them will be good. A lot of them will be bad. The fact that I’m making the comparison at all speaks rather favourably of Endless Space’s quality. However, while it does nail the space empire game far better than any title since MoO 2, it’s still riddled with a number of flaws which drag it down and serve to blunt its effort to usurp the space 4X crown.

Writing the not-review a couple of months back has put me in a bit of a fix here since I’m going to end up repeating myself at length if I’m not careful. In a nutshell, Endless Space is a 4X (read: Civ-like) strategy game set in space with all the sci-fi wackiness that entails; a veritable smorgasbord of exploration, colonisation, terraforming, research, ship design and space battles. It pulls all of these things off quite well. Admirably so, in fact. Most concepts in the game have some sort of analogue in Civilization, so if you’ve played any iteration of Civ you’ll be familiar with the process of developing your empire to the point where you can murder all your neighbours and your neighbours’ neighbours. With that in mind I’m not going to waste my time outlining the basic gameplay elements of Endless Space. Instead, I’m going to focus on the areas where it makes use of its space setting to depart from genre norms, as well as the bits of the game that perhaps don’t work quite as well as they should.

Starting with the good, early game exploration is genuinely rewarding and exciting. Endless Space’s map is divided up into anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of star systems, with fleets only being able to move from star system to star system. Each star system contains up to six colonisable planets, and there’s many different types of each. Three of them are colonisable from the very beginning of the game: Terran, Ocean and Jungle. Arid and Tundra planets can be colonised after just a few turns’ worth of research.Arcticand Desert planets become available in the mid-game. And Lava and Barren planets, along with asteroid belts, can only be colonised after proceeding a long way down the expansion tech tree. All these different planet types come in a range of sizes from Tiny to Huge, which dictates how many colonists you can cram onto the thing once you’ve got it colonised, and planetary anomalies – both positive and negative – provide a final wildcard element to what you’ll find when your scout ship reaches a new system. A lot of the time you’ll strike out, only discovering  a couple of gas giants or a bunch of planets you don’t have the technology to colonise yet, but that just makes it all the sweeter when you find a six-planet system with two Terran worlds and plenty of room for future expansion.

These bonanza systems are the priority targets for colonisation, but the developers have added in a brake to stop you from gobbling up every single colonisable system you find, and it’s the same one Civ V uses: happiness. Expanding too far too fast will incur a sizeable happiness penalty on every star system you own. Thankfully the implementation here isn’t quite as hamhanded as it is in Civ V and it seems to work more-or-less as intended thanks to techs in the expansion tree which gradually remove this expansion penalty and ensure that it’s only a factor in the early- to mid-game; the upshot of it is that you need to pick the first few systems you colonise very, very carefully because it’ll be a while before you can get any more. Of course, you might suddenly run into an alien empire which is making googly eyes at one of your future expansion sites (the AI gives no fucks about expansion penalties) and have to rush out a colony ship to ensure that you can swipe it first, securing the colony but eating the subsequent happiness penalty before you’re really ready to deal with it. It’s not ideal, but I have to admit it is fairly well balanced.

Colony development is… somewhat lacking, I feel. 99% of improvements you build are system-wide and affect every colonised planet inside it; the planets themselves provide more lebensraum for your population (although you probably shouldn’t expect people to be too happy about living on the lava planet) and base bonuses for each colonist depending on planet type and anomalies, but the only thing you can do to directly improve that is by building a single “exploitation” building per planet which basically reinforces its specialty – money for the money planet, research for the research planet and so on. In rare cases you’ll build farms on a planet that doesn’t specialise in farms in order to get a brand-new colony off the ground, but the inherent bonuses the exploitations give to planets that already favour that type of resource make it a no-brainer to eventually switch to the correct one. This makes development kind of boring because you’ll want to build most things in a system eventually, and the maintenance costs you have to pay don’t really provide much of a disincentive to do so. You end up just disinterestedly clicking at things in the improvement pane to give the colony something to do, with the best-case scenario being prioritisation of industry and food improvements for a new colony.  Even worse, there are a couple of improvements that give you (for example) a flat bonus of six money while making you pay two money for maintenance. Why not just have it give you four money instead? While Master of Orion suffered from the same problem (arguably it was worse because you could only queue up five things at once) I was hoping that sixteen years of progress would have resulted in less-hamfisted development mechanics.

Anyway, you’ll colonise a few systems and build a few ships and deal with a few pirate raids and eventually run into one of the AI empires. Diplomacy in Endless Space is pretty much the stock 4X “what will you give me for this” silent trading, with an interesting deviation being that you can’t just offer the AI a peace treaty straight off the bat. They don’t trust you that much to begin with, and your default state of existence with them is that of a cold war scenario where you can attack each other’s ships and blockade each other’s colonies. It’s only after a protracted period of not blowing each other up that relations thaw to the point where they feel comfortable offering a peace treaty. I think this is a more nuanced way of dealing with diplomacy, but it’s a technical advance that’s nullified by the mechanical soullessness of talking to the other players. When you call the Horatio or the Sowers or the Pilgrims up on the batphone the diplomacy interface you see will be exactly the same as every other race’s diplomacy interface, with the sole difference being that the tiny 200 by 200 pixel portrait in the corner will be different. That’s not enough to communicate any sense of personality or character, and this is a problem which is compounded by the master diplomacy screen showing a set of blurry holograms that I honestly had to squint at for a bit to figure out who was who. Not to carry on beating this drum or anything, but Master of Orion was a game that gave making a call to Cthulu an appropriate sense of gravitas.

In fact the only time you really notice the differences between the empires – aside from their colour on the empire map – is when you engage them in battle and you get to see their specific range of ship class designs. The battles are something that really shouldn’t work and yet somehow do, since they’re almost totally hands-off and all you can really do is attempt to nudge things towards the desired outcome by playing  up to three weapon/defence boosting cards. It’s undeniably nail-biting to watch, though, as the fleet HP bars slowly decrease and you pray that their ships blow up before yours do. I think that the ship design elements and the weapon/defence interplay also works pretty well; the only real problem there is that the AI has a tendency to frontload its ships with one type of weapon, making it trivially easy to dope it out with either shields or tactics cards. Speaking of which, the AI doesn’t have a clue how to use those either. I’ve seen it play repair cards on the first round of battle when it was at full health and beam-boosting cards when it was fielding a fleet of ships that didn’t have any beam weapons. I’m not entirely convinced the tactical AI doesn’t just play the damn things randomly.

So that’s a side of the game that could do with a little more work, and the only reason the AI is a challenge at all is because it is an absolutely shameless cheater. Seriously. Not even the Civ games are this brazen about magicking units out of nowhere. In my last game I was trying to stop the Amoebae from winning via an economic victory by invading their empire and stealing all of their sultanas, but while my huge, technologically advanced dreadnaught fleets could easily deal with three or four times their own strength in Amoebae ships, the problem was that the Amoebae had more than that. Far, far more than that. And they didn’t stop coming, either. Even when I took half their empire including their capital I was dealing with incoming swarms of sixty, seventy ships that had to be fought in a series of repetitively tedious manual battles to ensure my fleets survived. Eventually I said screw it, bought twenty more dreadnaughts (yes, you can do this if you have the cash) and blockaded/invaded every single one of their remaining colonies.. Two turns later another forty ships showed up from nowhere in one of the blockaded systems. I really don’t think they built those in two turns, and I don’t think they were keeping them under cover in the system hangar either.  This certainly made  smacking the Amoebae down a tricky business, but it grates with me that this is what they had to do to make it so.

The last thing I should mention is the victory conditions. The game is very, very bad at telling you what they are, and whether or not somebody else is close to winning. First game I played I teched up to the point where I was all ready to start building the wonder improvements needed to win the game, when suddenly a message popped up informing me that the Pilgrims had accumulated more diplomacy funbux than I had (it didn’t say what these were, or how they’d gotten them) and had consequently won the game. In the second game I wouldn’t have had a clue that the Amoebae were on their way to an economic victory if I hadn’t idly moused over the money counter to check my income and nearly had a heart attack when I saw they were 70% of the way to winning already. Even when I had half their empire conquered and the rest under siege their progress had crept up to 92%, so what I took away from that was that even when you notice what’s going on it’s very, very hard to stop it. This is a side of the game that’s incredibly opaque, with victories – both yours and the AIs – coming out of nowhere and feeling unearned/cheap as a result.

Reading this review back now, it all seems almost overwhelmingly negative. This is partly because I already mentioned most of the good stuff two months ago. That all still applies, and added to that there’s a lot of minor touches I haven’t really talked about like the tech tree and the planet anomaly descriptions. I’ve spent twenty hours with the game since release, not because I felt I had to but because I wanted to, so it’s hardly like I’m going to call Endless Space bad, or even mediocre, because it really isn’t. It’s a good game. It’s just very rough around the edges – not to the extent of, say, a Paradox title, but it could definitely do with a substantial period of continued development and support to eradicate the myriad flaws which still permeate the game and which hampered my enjoyment of it. Its attempt on Master of Orion’s title is one which is largely made on the strength of its own personal merit (the dearth of good titles in this particular subgenre are a minor contributing factor), but until those rough edges are smoothed out I’m going to have to say it’s not quite there yet. In six months, maybe. But not now.

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