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Hydro
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Winfield, IL, USA
Jun 1999
time: 05:29
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SE4G had some interesting concepts, but it gets seriously bogged down in micromanagement h*ll by mid game. I don't think I ever finished any of my many games. For all its faults Moo3 at least tried to address this issue, although the lack of player feedback (or wrong feedback) on what was going on is (in my opinion) a serious negative design issue.
TB games seem to face a serious dilemma in the mid and late game tedium that develops as the games spiral out of control. It seems our choices are to ultra-streamline and simplify like GalCiv or to automate like Moo3. Gal Civ boiled their game design down to a few key social/military elements, which is fine except it gets a bit dry for me (and lacks feedback on what the bloody things do). I want ship design, and more than old Civ I-style combat. Heck, the Gal Civ combat is worse than Moo2 or SE4. Moo3 offers more depth, and with the patch you get some vital info on what you are doing. But, there is so much information that even if you hit TURN it can be overwhelming.
In my opinion Gal Civ made a nice try but it doesn't advance the TB game idea. Perhaps Moo3 tried to do too much, and suffered the consequences.
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krait23
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As far as micromanagement is concerned (which is indeed one of MoO2s weak spots in late game), I would have liked to see an improved MoO2-approach. Where all the buildings are still built individually on planets, but the automation is not just 'auto build' but something akin to MoO3s dev plans, which allows you to build (and modifiy) custom build queues, and on the planet screen, if you put it on auto you select which queue to use for this planet. And if a new building is researched, you can stick it into the dev plans where you want that building built, leave it out of the others, and its put into all current queues for the affected planets in the position you assigned to it. So instead of having to modify the build queue for every research capable planet when you get the supercomputer, you just have to modifiy one or three dev plans.
That would be how MoO2.5 should handle micromanagement imo...
Lata
Krait
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Hydro
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Winfield, IL, USA
Jun 1999
time: 05:29
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Krait - you are correct, but your approach is for a more sophisticated gamer. I am almost sure that Moo3 was targeted at the more casual gamer who wouldn't know a dev plan it if hit them on the head (more people/buyers = more $$). If you are going after a larger market then you have to automate more, which is what Moo3 did.
Still, I would have loved to see your approach so the stupid governors could be finally lobotomized.
On possible problem is that your plan would be much like Gal Civ, which largely does away with planet types, sizes, and limits terraforming options. Again, you are sacrificing depth for ease. So, while Moo3 aimed at the casual gamer they also provided enough detail so that anal retentive types like me could delve into its (purposefully?) obscure depths, while allowing the casual folks to handily ignore it. The result was frustratingly opaque system which satisfies no one since the casual gamer has no idea what is going on (even at a macro level) and the more serious folks can't quite understand what the latest factory improvement really does, and why they should care.
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Spectrex
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Arlington, VA, USA
Nov 2000
time: 05:29
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The problem with MOO3 has never been that QS implemented a bunch of crappy features, but that the end result was poorly designed and unpolished. I would even venture to say that the entire affair was amatuerish - inexperienced coders led by inexperienced management. See Ion Storm and Daikatana. At least outwardly, the two parallel nicely: a development company with little or no prior history attempts to create a revolutionary game, and in the process undergoes significant staff and design changes, and several release date extensions. The final product of all this turmoil is, perhaps unsuprisingly, crap.
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krait23
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I still think MoO2 is a whole lot closer to MoO1 than MoO3 is to MoO2... There is a certain mesure of departure, but not nearly as radical. Kinda the golden median between progress and conservation (probably since the changes were based on a tried and true system, not something completely revolutionary and new)...
MoO3 is a good (or rather bad) example of too much progress and the C&C series (at least as far as I played it) would be a good (or rather bad) example of too much conservation...
Lata
Krait
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Bored
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Latvia,Riga
Sep 2002
time: 07:29
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quote:
Yes, SE4-Gold can really be great XXXX game, but i dont think that it'll be better than Space Rangers. The genre really needs some refreshing, but not MOO3-like refreshing |
AFAIK, Space Rangers isn't TBS (there are some elements like turn based space combat though). It is mix of RPG/Adventure (because there are quests,exp. points, skills, classes and so on) and gameplay very similar to Elite (i.e. free space trade,pirates,police,aliens and so on).
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wilebill
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columbus, ohio
Feb 2003
time: 05:29
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MOO3 was the first MOO I encountered and I put about 25 hours into it before complete frustration set in. Then I discovered MOO2 and realized why everyone was so upset. Now after patch 1.2.5 came out I gave MOO3 another shot and find it playable and even fun, although still baffling frequently and often. I am really curious about Space Empires IV Gold after all that has been said about it and might try that too.
One upcoming game seemed appropriate to mention here, even though it is not turn-based, because it might have some relevance to players of MOO2 and to some extent MOO3. In MOO2 I think one of the neatest graphics is the colony ship squishing down on its air shocks, a much neater graphic IMHO than the colony ship breaking into four pieces and drifting down in GalCiv (which I also like). Then as the colony builds out you see all the iconographic buildings like in the Civ series, and those graphics were very well done for their time, which was when the 486 was still the big processor! But what was life like in those colonies?
Maybe someone else wondered the same thing because Firefly Studios, the people who did Stronghold and Stronghold Crusaders, are coming out with a new program this fall called Space Colony. Reason I bother to mention it here is that in looking at the screenshots I found myself being reminded of the graphics in MOO2 of the space colonies, although Firefly's colony components are obviously much neater and more detailed. Space Colony looks like a combination of rather perverse Sims and colony building, skirmishing with aliens, and so forth. RTS game I think, might be totally trivial and then again might not be. www.fireflyworlds.com or screenies at your favorite game site. Sort of like MOO freaked out on mind altering drugs?
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Craig P.
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quote:
Originally posted by Spectrex
See Ion Storm and Daikatana. At least outwardly, the two parallel nicely: a development company with little or no prior history attempts to create a revolutionary game, and in the process undergoes significant staff and design changes, and several release date extensions. The final product of all this turmoil is, perhaps unsuprisingly, crap. |
Last I knew, QSI did not have little or no prior history. I recall playing Castles back in the mid-'90's when I was still in school, before even MoO2 came out.
Contrast that with Ion Storm, who were formed to create Daikatana.
I won't argue that the development of MoO3 might make one think they'd never done it before, but that's simply not the case.
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marc420
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Oceania
Jun 1999
time: 05:29
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Hi,
I recently found MOO3 for under $20, and figured it was time to give it a shot.
After playing it for a week, (using 1.2.5 patch and now with MegaMod), I'd have to give it a mixed review.
I tend to like very large and complicated games. So in some ways MOO3 appeals to me. There's a lot I like in this game about the way a galatic empire is modeled and presented to a player.
After having read for awhile had bad the UI was, I'm really wondering what all that was about. I'm having no trouble moving around in the game. I had a little bit of trouble finding the build ques, but blame that on the manual that was a waste of trees instead of the UI design. It also took be awhile to find the little >> link that takes me straight to the que from the planets screen.
But the thing I like about the UI is that it appears to be consistent. Once you learn how to move around in it, its easy to find your way.
Like I said, I happen to like very deep and complicated games. To me, it comes with the territory that everything won't be one click away from the front screen.
There are few things I'd change. The one that comes to mind is that I'd like to be able to learn more about ships I have in a TF. Currently I have to note the name, and go to the shipyard to examine the ship. But that's a minor thing to me.
What does bug me is the sense that even after the game is well after its release and been patched, that the game is still unfinished. There are things in the game that either apparently don't work or no one knows how they work. I spent half of last night looking through the Atari boards trying to find a difinitive answer on ECM /ECCM. I never could find what I was looking for, and was left with the impression that most of the posts were wrong.... which probably means I'm wrong and I don't understand it yet.
And what it really means is that no one is sure if this even works in the game, and it certainly isn't well documented ... even in forums.
Also, the combat system bugs me. I don't care that I don't have detailed control over every move and shot. That fits the scale of the game and the player's role as emperor and/or fleet admiral. What really bugs me is that as the admiral of the fleet, there is no one who can tell me a darned thing about what just happened to my fleet. Any navy is going to have a system of collecting information about its combats. This game leaves you staring at the movement of dots on the screen, that can't be slowed down, paused or replayed, and then from that you are supposed to be able to know why it is your fleet won or lost the battle.
So all in all, I'd give this game a mixed review. There are parts of it I really like. There are parts of it that seem incomplete, never finished, or just poorly done.
I do get the sense that between QS and Atari, the management of this software project was seriously screwed up. I suspect for software managers out there, this could be a case study of how NOT to design a game. But with the work on the patch, it seems to be getting something close to a decent game.
The scary thing is that after the patch the game still feels incomplete in places, and that the word is we'd be real lucky to get another patch.
One last question, everyone seems to be talking about MOO4 and who has the rights to the game. What I wonder is, what does the name of the game matter? That's all MOO really is. If some company wanted to sit down and make a good 4x space game, but didn't have the rights to call it MOO, would people buy it. Personally, I don't care if its called MOO, but I'd love to see someone take the concepts that were tried in MOO3 and use them in a solid, finished, and polished game.
Atari and QS then could cluster around and stare at their lawyer's agreement that they own the rights to MOO, and the rest of us could play a great game.
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Gandalfgris
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Just got my copy three weeks ago, and haven't finished yet a single game, hadn't lost any either.
It has a very step learning curve, and haven't even reached the way to create a strategy that makes sense. Actually I don't think I fully understand the way it works, but as a friend of mine told me, "finally you got a game that makes you use your head, weren“t you looking for that"
And that's true, I've never run into a game that made me think so much about it. Even do the interfase is not as friendly as it should, and I don't like the senate, and think the battles are confusing, and some other buggy things like that, I'll keep on trying and write a review later on, perhaps in a month or two.
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dexters
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Vancouver, Canada
Nov 2001
time: 05:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Grumbold
Civ3 is almost the antithesis of Moo3. Lots of features trimmed down, cut or simplified to make a leaner game that the AI can compete capably at with relatively few cheats, but governors who I wouldn't trust to run a hot dog stand. A collaborative project could bring very interesting results. |
Yeah, like I said, the planet viceroys in MoO3 is far superior to the one is Civ 3 and there would be some room here for growth in Civ 4.
The problem with Civ 3's AI though is because unlike MoO, where territory is really just a bunch of dots on a starmap, the AI is really taxed, calculating movement on all those land tiles.
MoO3's AI can still probably mount a better invasion than the Civ3 AI, which, still appears to have no clue how to handle a naval invasion.
Also, MoO3 has a working Senate, as opposed to the UN in Civ 3. And Civ3 fans have been asking for something like the MoO3 sentate for ages, still, no sign of it.
Credit though has to go to Firaxis who has released a combined 5 or so patches now, for both Civ3 and PTW and the AI in the latest build is really much shrewder now compared to the old unpatched Civ3 AI.
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Nightmyre
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it does have problems, but i love the game. completely different experience than playing other games.
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04-07-2003 00:18
Humans!
So are you gonna listen to my show? [points at signature] 'Cause if I can be this funny on the threads...
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