23-01-2003 18:14									#31
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quote: Originally posted by Grumbold I will also never forgive it for automatically upgrading all your ground batteries and space stations to the weapons which have no effect against space monsters and Antarrans just because they are higher in the tech tree than the other weapons you've researched. Duh!!

That always annoyed the hell out of me as well...

the worst weapon upgrade of ALL TIME is to get the Ion Pulse Cannon from a random event or artifacts world Then you're STUCK with beam weapons that do nothing to monsters (and do next to nothing to shielded or properly armored ships)

	24-01-2003 06:03									#32
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MOO was a great game... MOO2 was pretty good too though it was far different from the original. Same goes for the Civ series. Out of all the recent games, I like SMAC the best.

Still I remember the good ol' days of Empire. That was a great freakin' game! And I remember too the days of playing Civilization when it was a board game. I must be getting old.

Going back even further, I recall playing Imperium Galactum on the Commodore. And all those great old wargames like Eastern Front, Clash of Steel, Carrier Strike. Ah... the memories.

Pacific War by Gary Grigsby... now there was a loooong game for ya. And if people think the MOO3 development is a tough process, does anyone remember waiting for the computer game version of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to come out? What a deal!

Sorry... what were we talking about?

	24-01-2003 07:37									#33
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quote: Originally posted by viciouscycle Still I remember the good ol' days of Empire. That was a great freakin' game! And I remember too the days of playing Civilization when it was a board game. I must be getting old.

EMPIRE! I LOVED THAT GAME! I had a copy on my old Atari ST, which we bought back in 1986! I remember playing the oldschool Empire in 4-color graphics on my Atari ST... that machine had 1 whole megabite of RAM!

Civilization the Boardgame... I STILL play that with friends when I have people over It's still a great game, even now. If you have a bunch of people over and about 4-5 hours to burn, it's a good thing to do. We eventually bought Advanced Civilization and the Western Expansion, both of which I like using better than the original game.

I'm glad others enjoy it as well. You aren't THAT old

quote: Going back even further, I recall playing Imperium Galactum on the Commodore. And all those great old wargames like Eastern Front, Clash of Steel, Carrier Strike. Ah... the memories.

Imperium Galactum was a decent game. The others I never played, but a friend of mine owned them.

I still own our old Atari 800, bought in 1981

quote: Pacific War by Gary Grigsby... now there was a loooong game for ya. And if people think the MOO3 development is a tough process, does anyone remember waiting for the computer game version of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to come out? What a deal! Sorry... what were we talking about?

I never really got into the Gary Grisby games... too d--- complicated for my tastes. That said, I did buy Gary Grisby's Pacific War for my friend because he wanted it... then he never played it... go figure

	25-01-2003 11:57									#34
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quote: I would add that I never felt that a single ship strategy was all-powerful. Go for a big ship strategy and you could be defeated by the 2,000 strong scout force armed with bioweapons because you couldn't shoot them all before they reached your planet.

Repulsor Beams, baby, yeah!

Big ships WERE Uber, if you knew what you were doing. Or at least, if not uber, certainly the strongest overall option. And as for BHG's... 95% of my games didn't last that long in the tech tree. Just win before they get to those, that ends that problem.

Sometimes it was fun to play a small ship strategy for the extra challenge, though. Smaller ships were still quite viable, just suffered more attrition and carried less effective specials.


There were two things about MOO1 not mentioned yet:

* NO SCORING! This was the best. No points, no hall of fame, no records. Just play for the sheer thrill of it. Last race standing wins, or... if you weren't in the mood for playing it all the way out to the last shred of completion, take your victory by domination from the vote. Of course, you could also win a true diplomatic victory from a less than commanding position. A win was a win, and you knew when you had won, and SO DID THE GAME. That, I loved. MOO1 was fun in large part because there were no Civ3-style "sluggish late game" aspects you had to slog through to get the game to notice that you had kicked its ass two ages back. The game could end (or not) when you had a winning position. It was brilliant. They were smart enough to say "no scoring system can measure the results of this game, so we're not going to score you, just play and love it." And we did.

* DEFENSE RULED! That's right. Even massing your whole fleet into one big Stack of Doom could not overcome enemy planetary defenses and fleets if they were far enough ahead in tech. Your weapons inadequate to penetrate their shields, your bombs bouncing harmlessly off their planetary atmospheres. Their repulsor beams keeping your bombers away if you were geared to kill planets but not ships. Their engine jammers clogging your slow-@$$ fleets leaving them dead in space and easy pickings if you didn't have the engine power to close quickly. By favoring defense, it rendered the kind of thing human players do to disintegrate the poor Civ3 AI an impossible task. You couldn't paper cut the AI to death, nor lure them in with a trap, with them foolishing attacking you in direct zombie mode, blindly sending all their forces at the nearest targets regardless of their odds. Sometime even one missile base was enough defense to hold off entire early AI fleets in MOO, buying you some time. But... not if they were much farther ahead of you, then they could overwhelm your defensive advantage. Bottom line, a significant and truly well balanced advantage to defense in the game lifted this game to the heights. MOO1 was the best macro-strategy game of all time for this reason alone. The game would go on with BALANCED empires, none able to nibble away at or swallow others unless and until they managed to gain some kind of significant strategic advantage. This could be a specific weapon, a set of planets that boosted resources high enough, or what have you. The danger was always in pursuing such an edge TOO HARD, leaving yourself too far behind in other areas and allowing an opponent thereby to gain such an edge over you just because you failed to keep up with the Joneses.

MOO1 was brilliant. By comparison, MOO2 was just a pretender. It upgraded graphics, it added complexity to combat, it added complexity to planetary management, it added complexity to races and many other elements. Some of these additions were "very cool" and much better than MOO1, but the big picture was lost. The game balance was lost. Defense was too difficult. Growth became redundant and mindless, with no real choices to make, just you deciding whether or not to follow the predestined "best" set of options available to you, or not. Which race picks you selected had more to do with your chances of winning a truly challenging scenario than any other factors. That's not a test of skill, it's a jigsaw puzzle. Figure out which picks are uber and stick with them? That's not my recipe for strategy gaming. The gap between the strong races and the weak became too wide. Besides your own race picks, your opponents (and their bonus abilities on high difficulty) were the other factor. The same game on the same setting could be three or four TIMES as hard, depending on which opponents you happened to be dealt. That's nice and all if a list of "cool features" on the box impresses you, but if you want a great gaming experience, you're rolling the dice, and too often you would roll craps and just be wasting your time. MOO1 delivered every game, every time, without fail.


If MOO3 gets back to its MOO1 gameplay roots, while still including some MOO2-style "cool stuff", it will be the best game of all time. And if not... it will be one of the biggest duds ever. In just a few weeks now, we'll get to find out which.


- Sirian

	25-01-2003 13:58									#35
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Sirian, you are dead-on-target with that post

	28-01-2003 10:13									#36
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I probably would never had bought another computer game after Moo1 except for one fatal AI flaw. You could always win easily by splitting your forces into multiple fleets and attacking multiple targets. The AI would send one big fleet and take out one target while you would take out three or four.

	28-01-2003 10:40									#37
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jimmytrick,

Yeah, they do that. The problem often being that you were unable to STOP that one big killer fleet from leveling one of your better worlds while you were cleaning out 5-6 of their's.

It depends, though... occassionally, I have a game where the AI has at least decent defenses all around, but throws one huge stack at me which is BARELY able to defeat my defenses at any one given world, where splitting his forces would have doomed him anywhere.

But I agree, the problem is that the AI is pretty consistent on fleet concentration.

	28-01-2003 14:15									#38
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I thought the biggest AI flaw was that they did not defend their newly aquired worlds for at least as long until others who wanted that world were driven away. That could easily cause em to have war with anyone else + these planets were never developed. For example I had a game as Klackons with Silis and Psilons beeing the biggest Empires. Each of the had ~10 planets that keept changing their owner. The Silicoids recolinzed that hostile planets that I could not get because of a lack in tech, over and over again just to leave it undefended for my bombardement.

The inability to divide their forces properly was only of importance in late game when the ships were better than planetary defenses. But I think Moo2 had the same problem even bigger.

I can not say anything about SMAC. I never owned it. Only played it for a short while at a friends. I found the graphics just too ugly and there was too much text to read for me.

From the 4x games I own I like Moo1 and Civ3 the most. Civ3 because it cut micromanement to an amount I can live with compared to prior Civ-Games. Yes, I don't like micromanagement very much... and hope the AI-helpers in Moo3 will do fine doing that for me.

	28-01-2003 21:03									#39
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quote: I can not say anything about SMAC. I never owned it. Only played it for a short while at a friends. I found the graphics just too ugly and there was too much text to read for me.

And red. It was red. Did I mention that everything was red? I don't like red. Stupid red.

	28-01-2003 21:56									#40
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Recently I have become much less skeptical of Moo3, after reading the beta tester posts. Citizen Kane especially strikes me as someone who wouldn't be afraid to criticize the game if criticism were due... I am getting fairly excited about Moo3.

	28-01-2003 22:17									#41
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Of course he would be afraid, he signed an NDA after all. IIRC it's currently illegal for him to criticize Moo3 publically.

	28-01-2003 22:40									#42
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No - they've stated multiple times that they have no obligation to be 'nice' to QS. If the game sucked, i think they'd say so (especially CK). The NDA only covers the actual details of the game, not their opinions of it. They are completely at liberty to say 'this game stinks' if they think it does.

	28-01-2003 22:51									#43
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Betatesters very rarely can criticize a game they are testing. Don't you think in a large group of people, someone would dislike it, no matter how great it is? Isn't it interesting that there hasn't been any substantive criticism of the game from the testers?

I have confidence that the game will be good overall, but there are somethings I know are going to be disappointing and I am surprised to not hear any negative feedback from the testers on these points.

	28-01-2003 22:52									#44
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If MoO3 does suck, then the beta testers will be the second people to get linched. :P

	28-01-2003 23:00									#45
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Actually, it's not all that indicative one way or another about how good a game is by BT's lack of comments regarding how bad it is.

CK, however, has not been mum on it. He has been very vocal in his support on how good the game is. There's a difference, right there. And CK's said he's under no obligation to be nice to 'em.

I still love Chaos Avatar's 'AAR' of an early beta test, where his spies, instructed to go steal toproq tech, instead blew up a bunch of things. That made me laugh hard, and indicated that yes, some things were dumb and have been fixed.

The other reason that the BTs aren't likely negative is simple - every single thing they say gets scrutinized like nothing else, and blown up into epic proportions. I'd be damn careful about saying things either in that case.

Last point is this - there have been plenty of BTs I've read about that have criticized the game before and after it was released. Blizzard's famous for it, for instance. The lack of condemnation makes me shocked, because normally I hear either generic praise (This game is great! and that's it) or very specific likes/dislikes. I have heard very specific likes, and very little in the way of dislikes.

	29-01-2003 01:43									#46
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quote: Originally posted by jscott991 Betatesters very rarely can criticize a game they are testing. Don't you think in a large group of people, someone would dislike it, no matter how great it is? Isn't it interesting that there hasn't been any substantive criticism of the game from the testers?

Remember, that all of the testers are fans of this genre and especially of prior Moo-Games. Of course you would find people who don't like it, if you ask someone on the street to test it. But by letting only fans test it, the likelyness of someone not liking it decreases a lot.

	29-01-2003 02:00									#47
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

There's another likeliness that is decreased: The chance to find exploits, especially in MP. Fans want to play the game like it's supposed to be played, and usually lack the frame of mind to actively try and break game mechanisms.

Then again, I don't know if this experience, coming generally from real-time games, is applicable to turn-based games.

	29-01-2003 03:14									#48
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Errr - the beta testers for blizzard did a great job of testing exploits and issues about things being overpowered. They were competitive, balls-out players who were also fans, and made sure people know how cheezy certain tactics were.

They got fixed.

If anything, the amount of MP testing these guys do would indicate to me that they were specifically looking for exploits. The fact that they changed outposts to be different indicates that they found some.

	29-01-2003 05:36									#49
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Yeah the beta reviews have been very sweet... this game seems to have a strategic complexity. I hope that the AI will make multiplayer strategy games in 6 hour sessions possible. Not having to micro all of your cities sounds pretty good, if it works. I am sure an experienced human who is anal retentive about micro like I am will find ways to better manage planets than AIs will, but it would be a good substitute for fast games.

	29-01-2003 06:24									#50
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Let's not forget that this contest to choose the beta testers magically pulled twenty-five of the stoutest supporters and vocal proponents for the games as exhibited by their posting on the IG forums. Hopefully, they were chosen for their objectivity but I'm a little nervous on that score. Or maybe I'm just a paranoid sore loser who's bitter in defeat.

	29-01-2003 11:44									#51
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quote: Errr - the beta testers for blizzard did a great job of testing exploits and issues about things being overpowered.

Important difference here: Blizzard used 5000 beta testers, drawn (randomly, IIRC) from the real public, not from message board loyalists. How many testers are there for MoO3? More than 50 would surprise me. Such low numbers encourage socializing and discourage attempts to break the game.

And even after this large and extensive and long beta test, Blizzard has now released the 4th balance patch with a huge list of fixes. Given these lessons from the past, the chances for MoO3's MP to be balanced and unexploitable right out of the box are infinitesimal.

	29-01-2003 12:10									#52
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I've playtested a Blizzard game

but no such luck with MoO3. But that's just how it works... the difference is noticable in that there were hacked versions of the Warcraft III beta running around the internet months before that game came out while you'll see no such thing with MoO3.

It's a tradeoff.

	03-02-2003 00:17									#53
	key question... Tired of ads?

hi guys, I am actually an ex-Smacer that was once seen here long ago in another life.

I haven't been reviewing the online literature in careful detail, but I was wondering if those that were could remember is many of the beta testers lavished praise upon the AI?

If all they say must be nice and yet they are saying nothing at all...

	04-02-2003 05:05									#54
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quote: Important difference here: Blizzard used 5000 beta testers, drawn (randomly, IIRC) from the real public, not from message board loyalists.

Blizzard did the random drawing thing, yes, but they also issue invitations to select groups of "message board loyalists". They have a set formula that includes both elements.

I know. I was one of those given a special invitation to test Diablo 2 expansion. As a fan I went into the experience with high hopes and high expectations, and Blizzard was very responsive (initially) to the feedback and reports from the "message board loyalists".

Well, the game turned out to have a lot of issues with it, many more found by us "loyalist" testers than Blizz was leading the public to expect. And... rather than pause and address these issues, they stuck to their firm release date and shipped the game broken. Only some of the issues were addressed, over a month later, in a patch.

In my view, they promised much then delivered little. I had a bad experience with this process. I invested a good bit of my heart into effort to suggest things to make the game better, and every last thing I suggested that they listened to, they only did PART of what I had suggested, and every single one of these changes actually made the game WORSE, not better. I was one of the loudest voices in the test, and had a lot of impact on the community and results, even the game, but came out feeling as if it was all wasted. Wasted! By only acting on part of what I observed -- partially due to their own deadlines -- none of the core problems I was complaining about got fixed, and instead the issues were actually made worse. That was too painful.

When the invitation to be part of the Warcraft III beta arrived, I politely told them no thanks. My faith in their hype and promises, and in their judgement of what makes for a fun game for me, is gone for good. It's more than the expansion beta and rushing an unfinished product out the door, then not supporting it. Blizzard's patch efforts for Diablo II have only gone sideways, never forward. For everything they did fix, they broke something else.


By contrast, I see that Firaxis has stayed with the patching process for Civ3, and actually moved that game forward. Civ3 1.29f is a major improvement over the release version, with a number of loopholes closed, exploits fixed, refinements of interface and control, AI upgrades, smoothing out of the corruption model, improved pacing at high difficulty, and more. Those are the kind of results I expect from patches: for the game to get better, for the bumps to be smoothed out, not just painted over. Firaxis has shown passion and love for their own product. The care is evident. I don't feel as if I'm just a number to them: I'm a customer and a fellow fan of their game.

Quicksilver seems to be on the right track. I'm NOT pleased that they kept offering release dates and estimates that have not panned, but I do prefer they keep the game "until it's done" rather than push a broken or unfinished product out the door. Blizzard built its reputation with a motto of "not until it's done", then made a complete mockery of this concept with Lord of Destruction.

I may never again trust a game company as much as I once trusted Blizzard. I'm more cautious now about getting emotionally attached to a game. I really WANT to get attached to MOO3. I really really do. MOO1 was my fave strat game of all time, so far above the rest it was in a league of its own, but I didn't like MOO2. I'm in limbo, hoping MOO3 delivers more of that MOO1 goodness, but also wary of hype and broken promises.

I look at the folks at IGMoo, all worked up, and think back to being in the same place with Diablo II. And I shudder. They're so excited, they just babble, on and on with speculations about not very much, and frenzied chatter amongst themselves to pass the time.

Knowing what I know about Blizzard's beta testing from a somewhat inside perspective, I think QS is on the right track. They SEEM to care about, and be paying attention to, the kinds of things that really matter, that make or break the gameplay. That gives me more hope. Maybe too much hope. Despite myself, I am having a hard time containing my excitement and expectations now. Although trust with individual companies may be shattered, there is always the possibility that someone will come along and do it right. Hope springs eternal.


- Sirian

	04-02-2003 06:03									#55
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Sirian,

on all points.

Moo1 was indeed such a phenomenal strat game that it belongs to a league of its own.... I really really hope that Moo3 can join that league to give Moo1 some competition, but we'll only know that after we play it.

I, too, have playtested a Blizzard game. My experience was far more positive. I think Blizzard has done a particularly fantastic job of responding to tester and fan criticism of early betas of Warcraft III and especially in designing the patches to that game (there are those that disagree with me on that, but that's beside the point ).

As for CivIII, I agree that Firaxis did a good job on patches, but (in almost all of our opinions), absolutely RUINED their solid reputation on Play the World... I own a copy of Play the World and have used it, but will tell you it came out of the box worth less than the cd that came with it - and the patch only makes it worth perhaps $5-$10. I remember CivNET being worse (I've been around that long...), but when you use CivNET as a benchmark for anything, you know you're in troubled waters....

My impression of MoO3 so far is that they are promising that it will join the league of MoO1, but there are disturbing signs from the changes that it will not be. The only way to know will be to play it. Thus the comments of the beta testers that they HAVE are extremely encouraging, but their pool is so small that I honestly don't know what to think yet.

If MoO3 is at least an improvement over MoO2, it will still be one of the best games out there and well worth the price. I'm pretty confident that it will be AT LEAST that good. Whether it will be a true successor to MoO1 like MoO2 SHOULD have been is an open question...

	04-02-2003 06:33									#56
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I have decided to preorder the game. I don't know whether it will be the game to end all games... but I think that it will, at the very least, be a good game.

The large degree of customizability should make MP fun.

They did cut a lot of stuff... but the slimmed down model should retain a lot of complexity.

	04-02-2003 07:33									#57
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Baselope -

The AI has been reported as being pretty damn smart at times. Using flanking stealthed ships to outmanoever some long-range fighter craft, using spies and technology effectively, concentrating on strengths over weakness.

The best example I found was an AI taking advantage of a pseudo-ally's weakness while fighting two fronts far away from the home, and striking hard. The AI lost, but the idea to attack at that moment was a great sign for me at least.

	19-02-2003 16:53									#58
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I love MOO too. I was at one time into use than hex editor to change my planet or planets I was to discover or turn a planetless star system into one that have a planet. I do have written down how to do this it anybody is interested.

	19-02-2003 21:15									#59
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quote: Originally posted by kalbear Errr - the beta testers for blizzard did a great job of testing exploits and issues about things being overpowered. They were competitive, balls-out players who were also fans, and made sure people know how cheezy certain tactics were. They got fixed.

Umm, what game? When people were beta testing the Diablo 2 expansion pack there were many complaints and proven problems with broken skills and ways the game generated treasure, yet only about 20% of these potentially game breaking FLAWS were fixed.

Maybe Blizzard did a better job with WC3, but since I gave up on Blizzard after the D2 debacle I wouldn't know.

	19-02-2003 21:18									#60
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quote: Originally posted by Harry Seldon Let's not forget that this contest to choose the beta testers magically pulled twenty-five of the stoutest supporters and vocal proponents for the games as exhibited by their posting on the IG forums. Hopefully, they were chosen for their objectivity but I'm a little nervous on that score. Or maybe I'm just a paranoid sore loser who's bitter in defeat.

Bzzzzttt!! Wrong!

Not all of the people chosen were vocal fan's of the series. Some, like CK I believe, actually had voiced loud and persistent doubts about the game before becoming a tester.

Just because you weren't picked doesn't mean you can fling mud at those who were and claim they were all "fan-bois".