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Master of Orion 1 + 2
If you've never played them before, Master of Orion 1+2 are now available together on gog.com for $6. Pretty sure they're not on Steam at all. MOOII is pretty much the best space Civ game ever. Think of the original as an added bonus to learn some history.
Man, remember at RIT when MOO 3 came out? That was exciting for about a week before we bailed. Still, I've wasted more money on less.
Man, remember at RIT when MOO 3 came out? That was exciting for about a week before we bailed. Still, I've wasted more money on less.
Comments
$6 is basically free. I predict sleepless nights for me.
In a lot of ways it is just not as good as MOO II. Graphically speaking, interface-wise, etc. It''s an old DOS game, so what do you expect?
However, there is one aspect in which I think it is way better than MOO II. It abstracts production on each planet into six sliding meters. Allow me to explain.
MOOII tried to copy Civilization. You have to assign each unit of population on a planet to either farming, working, or researching. Farmers make food, scientists make research points, and workers make production. Then you have a build queue on the planet, and the planet can only build one thing at a time. All the production that is made by the workers goes towards building whatever is in the build queue. That includes structures for that one planet, and also ships. You can't build a ship and a building at the same time. The result of this is that you have to micro-manage each planet.
MOO I does not have that. Instead, each colony you have has six sliders. They are Ship, Def, Ind, Eco, and Tech. You can see them on the right side of this screenshot.
The meters are limited by your production and population. You can't just put them all the way up. If one goes up, another one must go down. No build queues. No micro-managing farmers, workers, and scientists. You just configure it straight up. Want a planet that just farms? Eco all the way up. Want a planet that will research like crazy, but you also need to defend it? Put those both at half and everything else at zero. I hope you have food being shipped from another planet
The best part about this is that not only do you not have to micro-manage each and every time you want to build a ship. Yes, you have to manage ships once they are built, but no sooner. Simply design a ship, select that kind of ship for the planet, and turn up the ship meter. The planet will start spewing out the ship you have selected. Put in enough points, and you might even produce multiple ships in a single turn from a single planet.
I like things from final fantasy tactics like the job system, I like how shining force makes things really direct and doesn't take a ton of time to do everything, I like fire emblem's sense of permanence, I like chrono trigger and chrono cross's battle systems, the advancement scheme that's in burning wheel and the concept of 'let it roll'. Also the advance wars series mechanic of 'this is what is going to happen, there is no mystery, but if you aren't careful unforeseen things will screw you up'.
The scalability aspects are really difficult to do right in my opinion though, otherwise you run into the problem of 'it's better if I just do it manually'. I think a way to scale something like that kind of game is to make it progress from an individual based game, into a squad based game, and eventually into an army based game, where each level teaches you things you need to know for the next step up. So you learn what different classes do at the individual level, then you learn how to build a balanced army at that level, then you spend most of your time building armies to defend different fronts based on the previous knowledge.
Another neat concept would be playing with a group of other people and assigning them to be commanders of armies or squad leaders as you build your way up from foot soldier to emperor, with the turn based nature it could allow for some really cool stuff to take place if set up properly.
X-Com, in my opinion, is not an example of a game that handles this will, but in fact an example of a game that is severely weakened by failing to handle it well.