Master of orion 4

PhilBowles said:

No modern space 4x has tactical combat, but several have unit design.

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Sid Meier's Starships does.

BvBPL said:

Sid Meier's Starships does.

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Is that a 4x? I'm not very familiar with it, but I thought it was essentially a phone game.

PhilBowles said:

Is that a 4x? I'm not very familiar with it, but I thought it was essentially a phone game.

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Starships is a mobile game that was ported to PC. While, it does have some 4X elements, it is primarily a turn based tactical space ship combat game. The 4X elements are extremely bare bones and really only serve to set you up for the next tactical battle.

I do think that MOO4 should have turn based tactical combat. I realize turn based would not be able to have the fluid cinematic feel that the devs want but turn based would add a lot more strategy to the combat part which is very important to have in a strategy 4X space game. And when done right, turn based tactical combat can be very intense.

Well whatever combat they decide on it just better be more explained than moo2. Moo1 you could pretty much figure out how stuff worked, it wasn't that complex. Shields reduced dmg, engines increased the level of roll to hit, battle computers decreased the roll to hit etc, all straightforward.

I still don't really get armor and shields and how they work in moo2, I just know to build a bunch of mirv nukes or mercs or get some auto fire mass drivers and call it a day! I don't actually know why they are effective.

I think where space games may lose detail is cus they are trying to do everything on a grand scope. Instead of founding a few cities you are colonizing entire planets so they want the improvements and management to be more broad in scope. Also no terrain, space you can fly any direction right? So having strategic depth there is hard. In an earth based game like civ or homm or endless legend or whatever there's water in the way, mountains, you might need ships or airplanes, different unit types. Space everything flies, you just get different components for your ships.

How is the ground combat done in 4? Is it still just dice rolls with +modifiers?

SupremacyKing2 said:

Starships is a mobile game that was ported to PC. While, it does have some 4X elements, it is primarily a turn based tactical space ship combat game. The 4X elements are extremely bare bones and really only serve to set you up for the next tactical battle.

I do think that MOO4 should have turn based tactical combat. I realize turn based would not be able to have the fluid cinematic feel that the devs want but turn based would add a lot more strategy to the combat part which is very important to have in a strategy 4X space game. And when done right, turn based tactical combat can be very intense.

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The strange thing is, it is turn-based - shields regenerate between turns, firing is calculated on a shots per turn basis. The description for torpedoes even specifies that they fire once every two turns. There are just no pauses between the turns, making it functionally real time.

Given the way the system operates now, it should probably adopt a system similar to Endless Legend, where you assign orders each turn and then have them executed in real time. This should be workable as an option when you start the game - either have turn-based or pausable 'real-time' combat.

This should be implemented alongside a system of stances or orders. Either do what Distant Worlds does, and for each ship design set a default behaviour (aggressive, defensive, evasive etc.), or have an orders menu similar to RTS games where you can set the same stance. That way you won't have bombers racing in to attack the enemy unless you manually call them back, and ships with displacement devices won't automatically warp into the thickest fighting (which is probably where you want them if you have several, but not if you only have one - which won't be uncommon as they're not really small enough to put on anything less than a cruiser). The latter could be achieved the way Sins of a Solar Empire does, setting as default either automated or manual control of each activated ability.

Sadly, we will never again get to enjoy the thrill of manually moving each of our ships a cell or two a turn, with the breakneck pacing of entering combat five turns after the round begins. I love the first two games' combat systems, but "intense" is not the word to describe them and they weren't terribly tactical (especially when a game objective was 'point all your ships at this single large monster and keep shooting').

I think where space games may lose detail is cus they are trying to do everything on a grand scope. Instead of founding a few cities you are colonizing entire planets so they want the improvements and management to be more broad in scope. Also no terrain, space you can fly any direction right? So having strategic depth there is hard. In an earth based game like civ or homm or endless legend or whatever there's water in the way, mountains, you might need ships or airplanes, different unit types. Space everything flies, you just get different components for your ships.

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There's a lot of scope for things that space 4xes don't really handle - supply and communications are more important on the scale of a space-based game than in a terrestrial empire, you might have greater levels of corruption due to the difficulty administering a widely-despersed empire, differences in racial composition of planetary communities (which was nominal in MOO 2 and is in 4 - in part because assimilation, while supported by a tech upgrade, is not yet implemented; there isn't even a period of disorder after capturing a planet. Only Distant Worlds really tries to reflect racial differences in populations). Trade, immigration etc. become important (again a focus in Distant Worlds). Founding a settlement on a habitable planet is a fairly straightforward affair of plonking down a settler - that should never really be the case in a MOO-scale game (but always is - MOO 3 implemented an outpost system, but given all the issues with that game no one knows whether it was any good). Hostile planets may lack key resources or food that you have to ship in from elsewhere, ships may have fuel limitations. Pretty much all of this is to a greater or lesser degree in Distant Worlds; a little is in the first two MOO games but was dropped from successors. Quite a lot is actually in MOO 3, but hidden away behind the fact that the game wasn't playable (Distant Worlds is basically the game MOO 3 - as implemented - wanted to be but wasn't, down to being real time). Also - though not really a strategic issue - the system is much more open to exploration as a feature given the setting, where Civilization games constrain you to things you can plausibly discover from small tribal villages (such as nuclear physics). Civ V's archaeology system is tailor-made for a space 4x to adopt.

Given that planets act as surrogates for cities in Civ games, and obviously have a lot more real estate, there's a great deal of potential for implementing the same sort of tile yield and worker system as those games, instead of MOO 2 and its descendants' simplified approach of assigning each citizen to produce one type of tile yield. You could have a tile improvement system, perhaps building mines on rich deposits rather than having the entire planet be mineral rich etc., with resources like artifacts specific tile features that can be improved or worked. Galactic Civilisations has a version of this approach, but it's very rudimentary. Worked areas of the planet ("city radius") could be improved by founding outposts away from the main colony, etc. etc. Any given city in a modern Civ game - and most Civ clones - has resources like commerce, faith, culture, tourism that are produced in several different ways. Space 4xes resolutely stick with the Big Three of food, production and research - most also have currency/commerce as a fourth 'workable' resource. MOO, like MOO 2 before it, does not - BC are obtained exclusively from taxation, buildings, and the gold planetary resource.

So the opportunity exists, it's just not a direction space 4xes have ever really tried to go. MOO games were mostly about using colonies to support the cost of a fleet, then going and wiping everyone out - even the science victory involved combat (beat the Guardian in MOO1, beat the Antarans in MOO2), with a bare minimum of planetary management.

How is the ground combat done in 4? Is it still just dice rolls with +modifiers?

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It's a direct port from MOO2, without the graphics - although while all the same techs are there for upgrading marines, it's not clear that the modifiers are actually implemented in combat at this point. If so, the interface needs improving to show that your forces have neutron rifles, personal shields, powered armour etc.

Armor Barracks exists - I haven't built one yet to determine whether armour is implemented (as there are a lot of buildings and upgrades that exist in the tech tree that affect features not yet in the game - the Alien Management Center for assimilation, several things that affect espionage/security, warp dissipators although the ability to retreat - I've now checked - is not currently available).

It would be interesting if a 4x space game tried to implement planetary development on a level such as civ, like how drastic would it be if on a single planet you could found multiple cities? I think the issue though is how much would you actually gain? What's the difference between one planet in moo1, vs multiple in a system in moo2 vs multiple cities on a planet? Really it's just distance and feel of the game. It feels different but they are still just resource producers. And micro management gets tedious sometimes. I think an extensive trade system would be a great boon to any 4x game, other than just the big 3 resources like you said. Have resources you can trade, production modifiers, food modifiers etc. Why not trade stuff like medicine around? But at some point you have to cap it or it's just getting detail for detail sake.

I also don't like a ton of simple +1 modifier and quantitative systems, ala civ5. Every single resource or system they keep adding just becomes a collect x resource for y benefit. Faith, it became a currency you spend on benefits. Culture was a currency you spent on policies. I have barely touched brave new world and the tourism stuff, but again it looks like something you just collect. I guess they tried to branch of policies and have you choose kind of live civ4 civics. Civ4 was really interesting because everything was a tradeoff and you could leverage civics into specific stuff. Want to build a ton of cottages? Ok, free speech and universal suffrage are for you. Have a bunch of rivers? Go state property. Want to build great people? Philosophical and representation. It seemed simple but there was a ton of depth to it. I haven't found any 4x game that has done it like that since, including civ5.

So idk, it would be nice if there were some alien relations policies or something. We'll see though. I'm still completely fine with a moo2 clone with enhanced graphics, it's a good game I still play. I just won't pay more than like $15 for it

civvver said:

It would be interesting if a 4x space game tried to implement planetary development on a level such as civ, like how drastic would it be if on a single planet you could found multiple cities?

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A city in MOO wouldn't be equivalent to a city in Civ. Imagine a planet more like either a city or an Endless Legend province (potentially complete with native villages akin to the latter), with varied terrain, exploration rewards and resources, with accessibility affected by such things as planet type (so, while MOO has ditched colony pods, instead it may just be difficult to expand your 'colony radius' on inhospitable planet types or to extract certain types of resources). You wouldn't found new cities (too short a timescale) but would seed outposts that work something like boroughs in Endless Legend, unlocking new workable territory. As for other resources, even Sins of a Solar Empire has a culture system and that's an RTS rather than a 4x.

All of this is already done for every city in a game like Civ, so it's no micromanagement nightmare.

I think the issue though is how much would you actually gain? What's the difference between one planet in moo1, vs multiple in a system in moo2 vs multiple cities on a planet?

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It's not about numbers of cities/planets, it's about applying the same resolution to planets than Civ games apply to cities.

Consider the converse situation: how drastic would it be if Civ VI got rid of the tile system and just had buildings and specialists (similar to Endless Legend, though that still has tile outputs), and happiness was managed just by choosing which level to set global taxes? It would hugely simplify the game (as EL is hugely simplified compared with Civ).

It would certainly have great gains for the feel of the game, and could be used to add variety to planets beyond biome, mineral richness, size and resources (the big weakness of Distant Worlds is simply its sheer scale - it sticks faithfully to the MOO formula for types of planet, phenomena and exploration reward, and while it has much greater variety in resources and resource richness, trying to stick MOO-scale solar systems into a far larger galaxy means that it's not very long before you've seen everything and obtained every useful resource, and then it's just a slog to accumulate enough of X to meet a victory condition. Which is why I've yet to actually complete a DW game). Resources would need to be actively exploited rather than having everything on an entire planet magically available when one population unit sets foot there. Exploration systems beyond 'scan this planet' could be added - like archaeologist units that could visit and excavate tiles, or exobiologist units that could do the same with indigenous villages (rather than just getting a 3 pop bonus for having native inhabitants on a planet).

Really it's just distance and feel of the game. It feels different but they are still just resource producers.

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And how you produce resources, and how you specialise resource production, is one of the defining elements of strategy in a 4x game. Sticking everyone on the food production row until the planet's full then moving them back to production isn't much in the way of specialisation (and without a supply system such as freighters, there's no incentive to specialise in food production past that limit unless you're using that planet to build colony ships or transports. That already makes the tech tree awkward, since there are several mid-game food buildings that just aren't that useful).

I also don't like a ton of simple +1 modifier and quantitative systems, ala civ5. Every single resource or system they keep adding just becomes a collect x resource for y benefit.

Faith, it became a currency you spend on benefits. Culture was a currency you spent on policies. I have barely touched brave new world and the tourism stuff, but again it looks like something you just collect. I guess they tried to branch of policies and have you choose kind of live civ4 civics. Civ4 was really interesting because everything was a tradeoff and you could leverage civics into specific stuff. Want to build a ton of cottages? Ok, free speech and universal suffrage are for you. Have a bunch of rivers? Go state property. Want to build great people? Philosophical and representation. It seemed simple but there was a ton of depth to it. I haven't found any 4x game that has done it like that since, including civ5.

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The way resources are used isn't necessarily related to the resource collection system. Whether or not what you could do with the resources was more varied Civ IV had a more basic, purely quantitative way of actually accumulating resources into buckets than Civ V does - practically everything was either a +X bonus or a multiplier to your X production, and specialisation was just a paint-by-numbers exercise for whatever resource you preferred, and without even building maintenance costs to constrain what you could build. Though to continue your analogy, the space 4xes don't even offer you the option to build cottages, let alone choose civics.

You think civ4 was more quantitative than 5? I mean 5 has global happiness, one giant number where your total pop takes away and you add to it on a global scale. At least 4 was localized per city. Idk, it's just stuff like that I feel made 5 very straightforward and gave 4 flexibility. But I don't want to digress into that.

But it would be good to apply some of those principles. Actually if you ever played the schaffer mod for civ4 the space on, final frontier? I don't recall the name, or going waaay back to civ2 fantastic worlds expac (might have been a different one, there were two) there was a master of orion scenario. You could found colonies anywhere in that one on any tile iirc, but the planets had different tile yields. You could totally do something similar in a space 4x, have different tiles to work within a planet and work neighboring asteroids, moons, even other planets within the system as tiles.

civvver said:

You think civ4 was more quantitative than 5? I mean 5 has global happiness, one giant number where your total pop takes away and you add to it on a global scale. At least 4 was localized per city.

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Scale isn't relevant to whether it's quantitative - Civ IV had more hard thresholds like happiness and health that were just busywork - get to number X, and you have to manage it, with penalties for not doing so, no rewards for doing so, and a restrictive suite of options for actually managing them. Civ V's system in this regard is more dynamic; you don't automatically suffer a penalty when you hit pop 6, 10, or the next threshold. Civ V has a lot of that, but BNW varied the way resources are collected a great deal - in particular its trade rather than yield-based commerce management was much improved over earlier versions and previous Civ games.

I have enjoyed what I tried of Master of Orion. I had so far played humanity, the Greys and the Skywalkers. I also like the goggles on the bird adviser.



Having not played the originals I have taken the chance to try them and find 2 kind a galaxy of awesome intrigue indeed. I wish the system naming ability was in the reboot like in 1 and 2 but hopefully they might bring it back. I hope also the Trilarians come to the reboot, just for their peaceful sea music and the fact they are pacifist Cthulu.


Link to video.

I'd forgotten the Trilarians - I remember the Gnolam and the Elerians from MOO 2, but I still think mainly of the original races when I think of MOO.

The bird advisor is downright annoying in game - it's nice that they retained some of the humour and cartoonishness of MOO, and indeed went one better with the GNN droid's portrayal in this game, but the 'comedy' voice is grating and his catchphrases irritating.

Well, that was humbling. Giant battle with the Psilon main fleet, which was nominally balanced (though slightly favoured) against mine saw displacing flying saucers wipe out my entire fleet in a few seconds of pulson missile spam - I got all but one of the enemy destroyers in response, but he still had most of his frigate fleet - fast, heavily shielded missile boats that can wipe an outpost without even taking hull damage. With my fleet gone, the Humans and Mrrshan promptly declared war.

Clawing back was enjoyable, though again something of an indictment of a passive AI and/or one that doesn't build troop transports and doesn't blockade planets. The bashed up enemy fleet withdrew and just sat in Psilon space - after a while I had two new fleets, each led by a battleship. I wiped out his remnant fleet and now have one fleet blockading Mentar and the other launched a feint against a nearby system that drew the new enemy fleet away while I bring up reinforcements.

you don't remember the trilarians cus they suck jk some people love aquatic trait, not my fancy though.

I think the best space strategy game ive ever played is Sins of a solar empire. Granted that is more RTS. But I think they got the whole economy and culture type of thing. The combat was also well done.

My own preference for combat would be for them to adopt something that is similar to a heroes of might and magic system with the option of auto resolve. That way you could have meaningful customization options unlocked via research. Not too sure how it might look though.

sherbz said:

I think the best space strategy game ive ever played is Sins of a solar empire. Granted that is more RTS. But I think they got the whole economy and culture type of thing. The combat was also well done.

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Sins was a great experiment - it was a shame it never really worked as an RTS because of its scale (sure, you can play vs. AI, but the AI was overly predictable) and the real-time constraints prevented it being as strategically detailed as a 4x (it was, at heart, a very traditional RTS that disguised its bases as planets to give the appearance of a space 4x). The best thing it did was its Forbidden Worlds DLC, which added more variety to planetary exploration and planet characteristics than space 4xes. Sins falls into my category of one of the best unplayable games I've played.

My own preference for combat would be for them to adopt something that is similar to a heroes of might and magic system with the option of auto resolve. That way you could have meaningful customization options unlocked via research. Not too sure how it might look though.

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I haven't played those games, so what do you mean by 'meaningful customisation options unlocked via research'? That's fundamentally what the unit design system is in MOO (and definitely makes a difference - when I upgrade my designs to take on the Psilons again I'll focus much more on anti-missile upgrades, as their fast missile ships have an edge at range over my graviton beam boats).

I'm excited by the availability of this game, but recent reports both on this site and on reading Steam reviews suggest I should wait to purchase once many of these rough spots are evened out and more content is added.

Right now, this essentially sounds like a redo of MOO2. Which is compelling, but I'm not sure I want to pay fifty bucks for a HD remake of an older game.

BvBPL said:

I'm excited by the availability of this game, but recent reports both on this site and on reading Steam reviews suggest I should wait to purchase once many of these rough spots are evened out and more content is added.

Right now, this essentially sounds like a redo of MOO2. Which is compelling, but I'm not sure I want to pay fifty bucks for a HD remake of an older game.

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I haven't noted too many 'rough spots', although the tech tree seems to scale awkwardly (many food structures come late, planet construction techs, terraforming and Gaia transformation too early, and basic economic/production techs fall along a 'government' tech path that seems not to be optimal early, and is unnecessary late) and the way automated ship upgrading is handled needs to be fixed since the AI will default to suggesting suboptimal builds that force you to upgrade everything manually to keep your favoured loadouts. Diplomatic behaviour needs fixing, but many published 4xes have had the same trouble accurately calculating which player is winning or losing a war with more than two participants.

Still, for an early access game it's very well-polished. There's additional content evidently planned for addition, but most of this is just currently-missing MOO 2 features (the remaining races, espionage, probably Antareans based on a teaser in the GNN scrollbar and the fact that the tech victory - which in MOO 2 was beating the Antarean base - is apparently still to be added).

But yes, it is essentially a remake of MOO 2, and the way features like planetary management and combat are implemented suggests to me that it probably won't evolve to be any more - while it may add new features, it's not going to do anything to change the formula significantly. In my playthrough, already management is starting to feel a bit too simple for the length of the game, and until difficulty levels are implemented the AI won't be challenging.

Pray to whatever gods motivate you Human. We are coming for your ships, your planets, your people.

BvBPL said:

I'm excited by the availability of this game, but recent reports both on this site and on reading Steam reviews suggest I should wait to purchase once many of these rough spots are evened out and more content is added.

Right now, this essentially sounds like a redo of MOO2. Which is compelling, but I'm not sure I want to pay fifty bucks for a HD remake of an older game.

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MoO2.5.

And when reading Steam or Gog you Always have the naysayers in abundance, Always.

You have to actually dig for careful thought out responses. Because you will have to wade thru countless "this or that suxs". But there are some good "voices of reason" with good to great posts to be found. And the Devs "seem" to be listening to the better constructive posts.

I bought the EA and have played about 38 hours so far. And I call it MoO2.5.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

MoO2.5.

And when reading Steam or Gog you Always have the naysayers in abundance, Always.

You have to actually dig for careful thought out responses. Because you will have to wade thru countless "this or that suxs". But there are some good "voices of reason" with good to great posts to be found. And the Devs "seem" to be listening to the better constructive posts.

I bought the EA and have played about 38 hours so far. And I call it MoO2.5.

JosEPh

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Finished my first playthrough, ultimately as a score victory (I wasn't colonising or attacking aggressively enough, and while I built the science tech structures there's no science tech victory enabled yet).

On the plus side, playing to time gave a good idea of how well the AI handles teching and game progression well into the late game. On the downside, the answer is "very badly". The constraints the AI is placed under in unit design (as I mentioned in another post, no more than one design per class) hamper it, and it techs extremely slowly. By the final turn, an AI I'd left largely to its own devices and which was the largest other than me should have mastered more than phasor tech. As well as colonising the whole map, building planets, and building large fleets or ships bigger than cruisers, none of which I observed.

I doubt I'll be playing again until difficulty levels above Average are implemented, other than to test any new content (such as espionage or the missing races).