[MoO] Master or Orion 4

[vmxa]

What you say has some merit, though I would say SE4 is not that easy to learn and I barely played V. I have all those game, except Sins of a Soloar Empire. Currently stumbling around in SoTs another game that is slow to learn.

I am not sure any of the games are just pick up and play and have fun, more that we have learned them over time. Games like Diablo are jump in and have fun and that is why I go back and play them from time to time. Just mindless bashing.

Anyway very gald to see you are still hanging in on your game and the best to you on it.

 

[Cmcastl]

My goals for that game is: Easy to pick up, fun from the first turn without having to read a manual, but deep and complex enough so veteran players can develop advanced strategies.

Not a bad summation, Zeraan.


Horses for courses, Zeraan, as the saying goes. Games should, above all, be fun. Or, as I put it, you keep thinking as you press the turn bar yet another time deep into the night when you have to get up for work in the morning, "one more turn and I shall go to bed".

Would it have been worthwhile, I wonder, to improve MOO2 with enhanced graphics? As was done with Civ II.

Good luck with your game. I should certainly be interested if you end up producing an alpha version.

 

[Zeraan]

What you say has some merit, though I would say SE4 is not that easy to learn and I barely played V. I have all those game, except Sins of a Soloar Empire. Currently stumbling around in SoTs another game that is slow to learn.

Sorry if I implied that SE4 was easy to learn, it had some tricks that you need to know. Such as how to design ships properly, I once designed a ship that couldn't fly anywhere But once I got into it, it was fun. But compared to other games, it was easy to learn, at least for me.

Anyway very gald to see you are still hanging in on your game and the best to you on it.

Thanks! I hope to have the galaxy screen mostly done by end of this month. Then I'll have a new alpha version out for you guys to test.

Would it have been worthwhile, I wonder, to improve MOO2 with enhanced graphics? As was done with Civ II.

Good luck with your game. I should certainly be interested if you end up producing an alpha version.

If MoO 2 was improved with better graphics (it already have decent graphics) but nothing else, it won't really improve the game for me. What I'd like to see is ability to create a construction template and have all planets follow that, so I don't have to tell a new planet to build this and that, then go to the other new planet and have it build the same things in the same order. This would minimize the micromanagement. Also, I'd like to see improved AI. Those two will make me come back to the game.

About the alpha version, if you go back to older posts in my blog, you'll see that I've released an version where you can colonize planets, build ships, and explore. But it's quite outdated and the construction logic is different now. But if you want to give it a try, be my guest. Please follow the instructions in the post to get the game running (requires SlimDX to run)

 

[Cmcastl]

I have all those game, except Sins of a Solar Empire.

Be advised that I can't get Sins of a Solar Empire to work to work VMXA.

In trying to find a solution, but not having done so as yet, I have never found so many threads for people having problems making a game, any space strategy game, work and yet it is proudly advertised as "Games for Windows."

Live long and prosper.

 

[vmxa]

Yeah I have no plans to get it, but you never know. It could show up on GamersGate for a couple of buck and I would take a shot. I got SoTs for 7.99 from Impulse.

Zerran you know you can queue up items on Moo2 for the planet to build, right? Stars! had a template that you could setup and then kick it off on new planets. That was a lot of years ago.

I have to run DosBox running windows 3.1 to run Stars! on Win7. Talk about a pain to setup. It was quite a riot to fire up the old windows file manager. I thought I had forgotten it.

 

[Zeraan]

Zerran you know you can queue up items on Moo2 for the planet to build, right? Stars! had a template that you could setup and then kick it off on new planets. That was a lot of years ago.

Yes, I know you can queue up multiple items for a planet. However, if I just colonized 3 new planets in the same turn, I have to go to each planet, queue up the items in the same order in each planet. MoO 3 had "Development Plans" where I can specify the general construction process for different types of planets. That was what I wanted in MoO 2

In MoO 1, this is an non-issue since everything is abstracted away, I can just slide the industry slider to build more factories that increases research, industry, and military output. Or I could slide the ecology to do terraforming.

 

[scratchthepitch]

Yes, I know you can queue up multiple items for a planet. However, if I just colonized 3 new planets in the same turn, I have to go to each planet, queue up the items in the same order in each planet. MoO 3 had "Development Plans" where I can specify the general construction process for different types of planets. That was what I wanted in MoO 2

In MoO 1, this is an non-issue since everything is abstracted away, I can just slide the industry slider to build more factories that increases research, industry, and military output. Or I could slide the ecology to do terraforming.

I was never able to get those development plans to work very well in MOO3. I had to constantly "sit" on each planet and correct the AI stupidity. That was one of my major gripes with that game.

 

[vmxa]

The dev plans are ok, but unless you turn Lock the military queue and remove a few designs, it would require hand holding. Stars did it better. set up one or two templates and each time you start a new planet use the one you want.

 

[scratchthepitch]

The dev plans are ok, but unless you turn Lock the military queue and remove a few designs, it would require hand holding. Stars did it better. set up one or two templates and each time you start a new planet use the one you want.

The dev plans never worked for me. I would set one up to build certain items on the planet, but the game built other stuff instead and I would end up with a planet in some sort of crisis. I was constantly having to undo their crap. This got really tedious by midgame. On the other hand, I never let the AI handle the ship builds, those I always micro'd, along with the designs and fleets. That part was enjoyable since designing ships and putting them to a test is something I enjoy most in these types of games.

 

[vmxa]

You need several plans to deal with the different stages. Even then you may need to come in an fire up something or even dump a build and start another. Most frequently I wold want to up my minerial production and lower the food.

This was not on every planet, so the plans worked fairly well, but not perfectly. Enough that I was not having to maually develop every region by hand.

 

[Cmcastl]

Stars did it better. set up one or two templates and each time you start a new planet use the one you want.

Now Stars is a name to conjured with. If only the designers had managed to bring out their follow-up, Stars: Supernova. They even had at one time a website soliciting interest and, of course, finance. They appear to have gone a long way in the development of the beta. But in the end the website disappeared, as, apparently the possibility of the next game in the series.

The one absolutely irritating thing, for me at least, about the original game Stars was that except in the easiest version you had to constantly evacuate your population from your planets because of long-range, and I mean really long-range bombardment, right out there in the stars, whose origin I could never detect. Planetary defences never seemed designed to offer even theoretically the possibility of a complete defence -or at least as far as I go into the game.

As I would put it, perhaps a trifle poetically, the best book is never published, the best song never sung and the best game never finds a developer.

 

[vmxa]

I actually spoke to them at E3 many years back things looked good for Supernova. The site went away a few years ago. Shame really was looking forward to it. They could not get a publisher as I understood it. Had they hung on little longer Matrix Games could have been a possibility.

Yeah they had a slinger that shot minerals that could either be caught and used for resources or as bombardment. I seem to recall that you could build the catcher to defend, but it has been a long time.

 

[Cmcastl]

Many thanks for that information, vmxa. I always wondered what had happened to Stars: Supernova! They had appealed for a publisher but when the site finally went down I figured the appeal had been in vain. A lost opportunity for both a developer and us fans - there was and maybe there still is a ready fan base for a new Stars space strategy game? When you think what inferior space stratgegy games have populated the market over the years!

I wonder if the beta, or almost beta, isn't gathering dust on some one's hard drive and mightn't be revived by a "white knight", as we say here in the UK. But maybe that is too much for which to hope.

This long-range bombardment business; my one bugbear. I don't know whether it was from ships or planets but it was so far out that my scout ships never reached far enough to find out! I could find no way to defend against it! Maybe there was a "catcher" but I just never got that far! I always felt that earlier developments of planetary defence should have been more effective but that is now water under the bridge. As I say, vmxa, thanks helping with the trip down memory lane.

Live long and prosper.

 

[scratchthepitch]

You need several plans to deal with the different stages. Even then you may need to come in an fire up something or even dump a build and start another. Most frequently I wold want to up my minerial production and lower the food.

This was not on every planet, so the plans worked fairly well, but not perfectly. Enough that I was not having to maually develop every region by hand.

That's what I did. Plans for different types of planets, for starting up planet development on new planets, all that. None of the plans really worked very well or did what they were set up to do. For example: I'd have one set up to prioritize food, it would build something else and the people would start starving. It would have been much easier just skipping the plans and developing the planets manually, like in MOO2 or GG2, but I couldn't see how that could be done in MOO3.

One of the ironies of that game was about the time you got the techs to start making the game interesting, all that micro of the planets and stuff reached a level to where the game became too much work to be worth continuing. I never got much beyond midgame because of that.

 

[vmxa]

The very early nothing much going was not helpful to enjoyment. The late game where you had to plow through lots of planets that were sow to be waxed made the end a pain. To avoid the end game you could use the X victory, but that cut off some of the fun part and I did not like that way to win.

I am still sitting on the end of my last game for a long long time now. Just did not want to smash the rest of the planets.

 

[Cmcastl]

On another thread, I talked about the ideal space strategy game giving the choice between imperial delegation and your own micromanagement. The problem with MOO3 is that the plans you set up for planetary development just won't work, at least in my experience, because, I suspect, not enough beta development was done on the automation of planetary development before release. The concept was, I think, good but the algorithms weren't sufficiently tried and tested. Now a lot of good player's Mods refined that game to a point where it became pleasantly playable if not perfect but I never came across any which fixed the basic lack of a viable development of delegation of planetary evolution.

Live long and prosper.

 

[Zed-F]

There were a lot of problems with MOO3 at release, when I played it. Dev plans were not in fact the biggest of them. I had a bigger beef with there being only one right way to play (early and constant warfare to grab samples of every alien race you could) in a game where all the other paths to victory were horribly broken.

At least SotS doesn't pretend that anything other than economic and military imperialism will get you a victory.

 

[TomSawyer]

Eye candy is nice. But if the core of the game blows all the glitter in the world is worthless. I am not going to bash on Moo3 or Civ5. Hate them or love them this is a Moo4 thread.

So what would could one do with Moo4? Spore may have been a flaky project but the way you could zoom all the way out to see the galaxy and then all the way into a single planet could be a concept. Galactic Civilizations 1 and 2 where great in some ways but in others they left me flat. Space is VAST. Within in our own solar system the planets themselves are far and apart. I like the zoom concept to help create that sense of "Wow there is a lot of open space". And then you have moons. If you put a military defense onto an airless moon it becomes in a sense a giant space station.

So for Moo4 here is my concept. I sadly lake the coding skills of some of the greats such as Sid or Fargo so again this is a wish list.

1) Turn based for the main part of the game. Managing your planets and building stuff goes in the master turn system. Once a fleet leaves hyper and enters a system then it still uses the master turn system but once combat is joined then see part 2

2) Space is vast. Take a page from games like Spore and Homeworld. Then take a page from books like David Weber and John Ringo. Around each star is a gravity well. Your current tech level determines just how far into the gravity well you can jump. This makes the inner worlds, normally rocky core, more defensible in the beginning. Your fleet(s) might to attack an inner core world but now they have to travel sub light through a system to reach the target. Meanwhile the defender sees your fleet inbound and scrambles the sublight ships and hyper capable ships to intercept. Now you have a tactical situation. Turns could still go by as the ships have to travel slowly to reach the target. Different tech levels could mean faster engines on side, longer range weapons ect. Using the Homeworld concept the game could create a 3D box with the attackers on one end, the defenders on the other end. Probes could be sent, fast scouts go looking for the other side. Missiles once in range and finally your beam and projectile weapons. Fleets could form various formations, boxes, walls ect. Yes alot of programing but it boils down to math. Using great leaders in the form of admirals could give bonuses or negatives to either sides. Then if the attackers wish to run or maybe the defenders they now have to break through and reach the gravity well limit to hyper out. Makes for a nail biting am I going to make it out it all?

3) Planets. Here I like the concept GalCiv2 tried to do. Each race being different and what they build. But that somehow went flat to me. Even being different they ended up the same. Moo2 actually showed planets with multiple races living together unless you chose to annihilate them. What I would like to see is the concept of each planet having a certain atmosphere, gravity, and temperature. Each race then would have a range they could comfortably live in. Yes Moo3 tried to do this but it could be done better. You could end up with terraform wars. Again this came from a short story, forgive me as I can not recall who wrote it. I believe it was Arthur C Clarke. But the human race was being conquered and the aliens where forcibly changing the earth like worlds to a more sulfur based. I suspect from a Moo point of view the trillians would love to flood the worlds they own while humans would want the green hills ect ect. Strip mining vs planet management. Some races would not care, others would.

4) Races. Give each race a specific codec and special victory they could only obtain. Humans a culture ending, Psilion's a tech victory ect ect. Kilrathi err Marshans could be honor bound ect ect. So many ways this could go

5) Population management. 3 types of members of your civilization. Workers, Scientists and Military. If not hive based then your population can be shifted around. But not like Moo2, people just do not go from Farmer to Factory Drones to Scientists. Give it a delay factor (retraining period). For hive societies they CAN NOT shift. They are born into a caste. Think ant's. But also for hive societies money should not be a factor until they start trading with other civilizations. Once they do start trade they should get a huge penalty until they get the hang of it. Yes this is difficult but once tweaked it could work.

6) Buildings. Here I like the idea of population equates to what can be built. Very basic idea here, 1 factory takes 5 workers to run. You then need 5 factories on a world to build and Industry Control Center which itself takes 5 workers to run. 3 IDC's to build a Global Control Center ect ect. You could end up with research planets, industry centers, military choke points ect. GalCiv2 kinda did this but not to this degree.

7) Must have galactic wonders. With a cool movie which once you have seen it a few times you can click past.

8) Orion and the Guardian. Have it so that scattered throughout the galaxy are a set of keys, log books, journal notes ect ect that one can find and possibly trade. Each key then could help scale down (turn off) the defensive systems around Orion. Make the Guardian and defensive NASTY, esp on harder levels. After all the Orions where supposed to be on the high end of the tech scale. So you can either key hunt, or build up a superior fleet and take your chances.

Enough for now, this rant is ranty but with StarDock supposedly looking at Moo4 its my own little dream

 

[vmxa]

Stars! you could design your race within some points to spend to determine what planets they could live on. You set the temp/grav and a third item that escapres me right now.

You set how many pop it took to have a mine or a factory.

 

[GoodGame]

Stars! you could design your race within some points to spend to determine what planets they could live on. You set the temp/grav and a third item that escapres me right now.

You set how many pop it took to have a mine or a factory.

Stars! was a nice game. Shame it didn't endure, unlike VGA Planets.


I think Tom Sawyers got some ideas there.

My own development path would be to take what material MOO2 added, and rebase it on the MOO1 engine. I'd then look to GalCiv2 and trickle in some of the innovation while downplaying some of the monkeying around with a planets screen; GalCiv2 only works with the planetary micromanagement because specialiation a la city buildlings in Civ4 is possible. You don't build everything everywhere mindlessly, but you try to capitalize on efficiencies in GalCiv2 building; Moo2 kind of had that with specials, but not enough of it. Special features and chrome would make the game map prettier and more lively, but shouldn't add in extra layers of management and screens, unless it couldn't be done by a mouse-over. Moo3 tried to do that with zoning on planets but did it clumsily with way too much micromangement in terms of itnerface.

Moo1 is genius for having a pretty simple and straightforward interface. That's what makes MOO3 a bear----too much interface to weed through. MOO2 starts the creep to interface overload, and actually fails a bit in design compared to MOO1, excepting that it adds nice graphics and content; some of the interfaces are needed in MOO2 to be fair, such as the hero management screen.

That and I'd go for a pretty eyecandy combat like GalCiv2 does, without much in tactical micro management. Some tactical micromanagement, especially RTS style would be fun, but it should be a mix of fleet command (who you put in charge of the fleet, how (what range, what tweaks) the ships deploy their weapons, when do they try to retreat, etc...) and a little bit of instant mouse-click micro just to keep the player awake and focused (e.g. all ships fire their weapons in supercharged mode at the enemy capital ship).

I used to think Moo3 had too much automation, but really it had too much interface complexity that required automation for the game to be playable. Players should feel like they are directly pawning their planets and ships (e.g. GalCiv2), not mousing through nested charts and what not (e.g. Moo3).

Eye-candy and music, etc.. really is needed for the tactical battle though. Otherwise you're watching the same dumb action movie that you have zero interest in watching. That's why Moo3 is unfun, while an automated battle in GalCiv is at least amusing to watch to see if your research worked.

Also the research tree and tactical balance must be deep but still pretty Easy to grasp. Moo1 has that for the most part (missiles, beams, etc..) as does GalCiv2. The tech tree should convey the themes and diversity like Tom Sawyer says above, which is what the final expansion of GalCiv2 does perfectly. Moo2 seemed to have a little bit of that, but also too many extraneous weapons that don't fit into rock-paper-scissors format too well. Moo3's tech tree is interesting in an intellectual/academic way, but didn't seem very gameable to me or easy to understand.

Orion/Space Wonders/Leveling Super Heroes/Space Monsters, is all chrome. Chrome to the Nth level is great as long as it's toggable (e.g. Civ4) and/or balanced. It's horrible when the game only advances because a special or random event occured. That shows poor game design.