Comments on: Thoughts: Master Of Orion

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 13:23:05 +0000

See, I always thought that spying in MOO2 required way too much time. Yeah, it was basically fire-and-forget when actually assigning spies, but you almost had to have multiple planet queues dedicated to just cranking out spies if you wanted them to actually achieve anything.

By: ilitarist

ilitarist — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 13:04:56 +0000

MoO1 was quite different in following: it only had races you see in MoO2016; it had no leaders; tech “tree” missed some techs for every race and there was no choice between techs.

The most important thing was planetary management. You had no buildings, you could only move sliders of spending on research, production, building new factories, ecology etc. So it had little to no micromanagement in that regard; developed planets only switched between production and research.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:59:51 +0000

Well that’s kind of the problem with spying; like pollution, it used to be something you paid fairly passive amounts of attention to — occasionally you’d crank out some spies and put them somewhere if you had nothing else to do, but it never felt like you were suffering too much by not micromanaging them. While mechanically neater, the new system impacts the game way too much for me to call it an improvement.

Agreed with the rest of it though – although, I think the Silicoids don’t need food in this remake? The Meklars definitely don’t eat 50% of their production, though, and the I think the Silicoids do care about pollution, which doesn’t make much sense when their ideal world type is Volcanic (not that the planet display reflects this, showing it with a climate rating of 1 out of 5). Basically the racial traits have been toned down in line with the overarching desire for balance, which gives them far less mechanical flavour.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:54:07 +0000

Actually the Psilons (and the Creative trait in general) weren’t the powergaming option since it’s a really expensive trait and you can always trade for the tech options you didn’t pick. The best options were Unification government (bonus food and production) and even more bonus production, as it’s incredibly difficult to build anything larger than a destroyer until the mid-game otherwise.

I think it having a Civ V feel is kind of a problem, to be honest. It doesn’t have its own sense of character and feels rather generic as a consequence. It’s lost many of the mechanics that gave it character (leaders, Antarans). This could be any space 4X, really. I’ve seen that it’s supposed to be a remake of MOO 1. Having never played MOO 1 I can’t say how accurate that is. If true, though, then MOO 1 and MOO 2 were so similar that that it could arguably be a remake of either

Also, I always liked the combat in Endless Space! Or at least I never hated it. The sequel looks like it’s doing a spin on the same idea, where instead of cards you instead pick which ships are in which battlegroups and pick a path for those battlegroups to take through the map, and then push play.

By: ilitarist

ilitarist — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 14:11:58 +0000

You strike again. I sort of liked this new MoO but didn’t want to launch it and now you’ve ruined it. Still.

1. Devs insist that this game is MoO1 remake with fan favorite parts of MoO2. It’s bullshit. But this way they only use races of original MoO1 (plus evil humans).

2. I say MoO2 is overrated and partly loved because of it paradoxically wasn’t much of 4X. More like sandbox games a la recent Stellaris. Race balance made it more like a balance between France and Austria in EU4 than from Civilization. Psilons are always well researched and win late game, Sakkra will always expand, Darloks gonna dark etc. MoO2016 is more of Civ5 offshot and it’s quite obvious from UI, planet management, diplomacy and pacing.

3. It’s generic, it’s simple, but it has a good AI and it’s nice. It doesn’t have rough edges apart from maybe spam-inducing espionage system.

4. Now you see that Endless Space system was the best one all along. Good.

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:39:26 +0000

Hey, I liked the Trilarians! And I think they nicely demonstrate some of what’s wrong with the race-selection side of this remake. In MOO2, there were all sorts of unusual benefits. The Trilarians could always move between stars and, being aquatic, could treat watery planets as a tier higher in quality, both subtle but useful advantages. Silicoids didn’t need food at all, but any “food” requirements were removed from production, and could ignore pollution as a mechanic.

There’s nothing like that in the remake. The Silicoids still need food. The Meklars don’t “eat” 50% of their production. Creative and Uncreative are nearly meaningless. The Gnolam weren’t included, and so the game has no faction with any kind of money-generating bonus.

They’ve made a fairly well-balanced 4X with great production values and a ton of aesthetic personality, but they’ve stripped down the mechanics so that all the quirkiness that made MOO2 so memorable has been removed.

In the spirit of saying something nice, I think the espionage system is probably an improvement over MOO2′s “build a million spies and send them out en masse and hope for the best” system.