MOO3 Revisited

[Zed-F]

Most people seem to far prefer Civ4 to Civ5 (or other iterations of the Civ franchise, for that matter.) Personally I never really got into Civ4 because the Civ franchise has historically been heavy on the micromanagement and I didn't see much indication that they were addressing that for Civ 4; in the end, mods only added more detail to an already overly detail-oriented game.

Civ5 could have been a breath of fresh air for the series if they had bothered testing and balancing the game rather than releasing while it was still only half-baked.

 

[vmxa]

I preferred MOO3 to Civ4. But not by much. kind of like:

What would you rather have? A sharp stick in the left eye or in the right?

That's not totally fair. Since I did buy MOO3, blindly, without reading a few write-ups first, there was some incentive to at least give the game a few evenings. I did play some of the mods for MOO3. I don't own a copy of Civ4, and my test playing the demo, and the full game at a friend's, precluded any desire to own the game, I never played the mods for it. It could be mods made Civ4 a playable game. That's something I wont find out unless the game goes on sale for a couple of bucks.

I played Moo3 and Civ4 for a month or two intensely and found Moo3 to have too many problems and Civ4 to just not be for me.

BTS and mods did not change that much for Civ4. Strawberry and the 125 patch and a number of tweaks made Moo3 a game I could play once a years or so, but not great.

It is just that there are so few Space games that I hold on to all of them.

 

[vmxa]

Most people seem to far prefer Civ4 to Civ5 (or other iterations of the Civ franchise, for that matter.) Personally I never really got into Civ4 because the Civ franchise has historically been heavy on the micromanagement and I didn't see much indication that they were addressing that for Civ 4; in the end, mods only added more detail to an already overly detail-oriented game.

Civ5 could have been a breath of fresh air for the series if they had bothered testing and balancing the game rather than releasing while it was still only half-baked.

When I want to avoid MM, I play Diablo.

 

[Zed-F]

Pretty sure there is room for both micro-heavy and micro-light games in the strategy genre.

 

[scratchthepitch]

Pretty sure there is room for both micro-heavy and micro-light games in the strategy genre.

Both could even be in the same game, if a developer wanted to put the effort in.

 

[Zed-F]

Perhaps... could be a tall order though. Most games that successfully reduce micromanagement do so by virtue of abstracting away unnecessary details; instead of having tons of controls with little individual impact (meaning coming from aggregating many many small but ultimately similar decisions) they focus on building game systems with few but relatively more impactful controls with different shades of meaning depending on how the player tunes them.

I'm not sure how a developer could marry those in the same game. Building a game with lots of fine tuned controls under the hood and then simply hiding them in some fashion for the 'micro-lite' version wouldn't really work that well, and neither would handing over the MM burden to an AI, because both those options just result in a game where player agency is compromised, i.e. the player doesn't feel fully in control of their own empire. IMX a good micro-lite game which feels deep without feeling fiddly has to be designed that way from the ground up.

 

[scratchthepitch]

Perhaps... could be a tall order though. Most games that successfully reduce micromanagement do so by virtue of abstracting away unnecessary details; instead of having tons of controls with little individual impact (meaning coming from aggregating many many small but ultimately similar decisions) they focus on building game systems with few but relatively more impactful controls with different shades of meaning depending on how the player tunes them.

I'm not sure how a developer could marry those in the same game. Building a game with lots of fine tuned controls under the hood and then simply hiding them in some fashion for the 'micro-lite' version wouldn't really work that well, and neither would handing over the MM burden to an AI, because both those options just result in a game where player agency is compromised, i.e. the player doesn't feel fully in control of their own empire. IMX a good micro-lite game which feels deep without feeling fiddly has to be designed that way from the ground up.

Not being a game programmer, I'm not sure how true that is, but one way around would be to design the game as 2 games. A macro and a micro version. They could be together when the game starts and the player would pick the version they want to play at the beginning of a game set-up. I see no trouble fitting 2 versions together as most of the game components would be the same for both versions.

 

[Zed-F]

That makes twice the work for the devs... why wouldn't they build and sell them as 2 games then?

 

[scratchthepitch]

That makes twice the work for the devs... why wouldn't they build and sell them as 2 games then?

Many "complete" versions of games are more than one game bundled together. Civ3 is 3 games, for example. It would probably be cheaper to bundle the 2 versions together. For boxed games, the cost of the packaging costs more to the manufacturer than stamping the cd/dvd does. They could also sell them separate, and people could buy the one they think they would rather play.

It doesn't really make 2x work for the developers, since most of the elements of the games would remain be the same. Most of the graphics (minus the several pages of displays), details about units, combat and a lot of other things would all be the same. The main difference would be in some parts of the core programming and the graphical interface with the player.

 

[Zed-F]

Sounds to me like you're underestimating the work involved, but since neither of us is a game developer... *shrug*