I actually think i might quite like this new MOO from what i have seen of it. I am not opposed to star lanes. But like Phil i think fuel cells are a better way of limiting travel.
Disagree with Phil though that freighters in MOO were a good thing. They totally werent. They were just a pain to build when you ran out of them. So you queued up about 3 or 4 of them, everyone on production, 4 turns later you didnt have to worry about them for another 5 turns or so. Only area they were slightly relevant was in blockading, which was a viable tactic if you didnt have enough muscle to actually attack a colony. But you can build something in to the game for a blockade. You certainly dont need freighters.
I am a bit disappointed that there seems to be a limited set of ship customization. I am also a bit disappointed that there isnt turn based combat. IMO its a difficult one. Because literally translating MOO2 combat would be too bland. It was never that good in the original. But mechanically it was part of the game and an updated rehash might have been a good thing (like a heroes of might and magic battle in space). And although i loved the customization options in MOO2, it was totally totally broken. Creative was massively overpowered as a trait; choice in the tech system was an illusion - realistically there were few choices once you knew which ones were decent (automated factories ftw); and ship design in its MOO2 sense was interesting, but a bit too complicated and busy for todays tastes.
I think i might get the game though. It looks like as long as you are not too hung up on the whole nostalgia thing, can take it on its merits, then you might enjoy it. In some ways I dont think they are actually massively helped by the name in the title. When you do that you basically get a load of people who want a carbon copy remake of the original. And when they dont get it, they accuse you of ruining the franchise, betraying the ideals of perfection etc. But on the flip side those people tend to forget how bad certain aspects of the original were and how they might look to the modern player (like when XCOM dropped the idea of time units for a 2 move mechanic. There were some who screamed blue murder).
Actually, it is more or less a carbon copy except for the combat - and later on there are constraints in the tech tree (never the relevant mechanic some are now making out, since you could always trade for the techs you were locked out of) - when you research some techs, mainly energy techs, you have to choose which upgrade you unlock.
They went too aggressively about cutting 'micromanagement', which I always found an odd complaint - at the sole difficulty available in Early Access there's no real need to care about striking workers and the only management you'll need to do is to pollution. Really all there seems to do is spam colonies, mainly because colonies provide space bases that increase your fleet limit (yes, it does exist), and then spam ships. Biggest disappointment so far is that the colony module techs are gone - you can colonise any planet type at any game stage. And while I appreciate the nostalgia of the world types, I've been longing for a MOO game that incorporates more recent ideas about exoplanetary systems.
Had a large combat that destroyed the main Sakkra fleet - with large fleets it gets very confusing trying to see what's happening, and there's not much way to influence it. Also warp dissipators don't seem useful since, unlike MOO, the enemy never retreats from battle if they're losing.
As for freighters, the important thing is that they're a supply system - something both the new game and nearly every other more recent space 4x lacks. I think if you ran the sort of food deficit that required spamming them the way you suggest you were playing very differently from me. The new game's civil transports - which are single-use and are moved as fleets - are more tedious and require more micromanagement, in part because the starlane system requires more involved travel than free movement (if there's a hostile system you need to route around, for instance).
Certainly it would be nice if colonising inhospitable planets was more difficult than landing and instabuilding fungal farms (which may not work correctly, as they seem available for radiated etc. worlds while the tooltip suggests they should only be available on barren, arid and tundra worlds). Blockades in the new game don't appear to do anything except prevent production.
Overall, MOO(4) feels like a MOO game as the races, their traits, and the techs are all there, but it feels more like a simplified version of MOO 2 with an interface lifted from Civ V (right down to the settler icon on the colony ships) rather than a game that's doing anything new. I'm enjoying this playthrough but if its time in Early Access isn't used as an opportunity to add depth it may just leave me pining for Distant Worlds.
