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[x2yzh9]

So, good games. Anyway, discuss em here!
Speaking of wich.. stuff.. erm, Free Orion just exits midway or at the end of generating.. any ideas guys? what info do i need to provide? The masters of orion III demo just quits on me as well.

EDIT:Deleted the probs i've already/just solved.

[Toady Two]

I couldn't get MOO2 to work on my computer...  Win XP compatibility problems. Free Orion seems mostly unfinished. I acutally enjoyed playing MOO3 for a while.

[cerapa]

Use dosbox.

[Christes]

I acutally enjoyed playing MOO3 for a while.

So did I

[IHateOutside]

DosBox can be used to play multiplayer MoO2. Which is my favourite MoO. I saw the third in a games shop the other day and laughed. I haven't gone back there yet but when I do i'm expecting it to still be there.

[ChairmanPoo]

Use dosbox.

dosbox is SLOW. Isnt there a workaround? It used to run in windows-based systems.

[DJ]

MoO II works fine for me on XP SP3, no compatibility mode required.

Anyway, I've never played MoO III, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it. Just how did they manage to ruin it?

[IHateOutside]

MoO II works fine for me on XP SP3, no compatibility mode required.

Anyway, I've never played MoO III, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it. Just how did they manage to ruin it?

I haven't played it much, but they basically automated most of the game. And made the rest opaque.

[E. Albright]

I acutally enjoyed playing MOO3 for a while.

So did I

I actually preferred it to 1 or 2

Anyway, I've never played MoO III, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it. Just how did they manage to ruin it?

I haven't played it much, but they basically automated most of the game. And made the rest opaque.

They turned it from a micromanagement game to a macromanagement game. I.e., they made it feel like you were actually running an empire - your normal decisions involved high-level stuff like diplomacy, where to send the fleets, and general research directions rather than what each of your 80 planets were building and which citizens had which jobs.

It wasn't really opaque, even if you wanted to micromanage. It was just less simplistic than MOO2, but that was okay because the AI generally did a fine job micromanaging the more involved bits. I actually would generally trust the AI well enough to even let it handle colonization - but then, I very much cleaved to MOO3's design philosophy. I expect most people wanted MOO2 with updated graphics and a few new shiny doodads tacked on.

[IHateOutside]

I suppose it wasn't that bad, it's just people expected more of the same. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It didn't really feel like the same game.

[Il Palazzo]

(IMO)MOO3 was no longer the fun alien-bashing game as the first two. Instead it became the ultimate bereaucracy simulator. Playing it felt like running the European Union from behind a commisar's desk, only on a galactic scale. Even the Antareans stopped being the-Evil-Dudes-to-Whack, and became some high ranking officials of the galactic council that you had to oust by becoming a even higher ranking official yourself.
Like most overgrown beureaucracies out there, it had some great and well meant ideas behind it's conception, but all the good stuff was bogged down by needless overcomplication and artificial constrains. Take the combat - they wanted to make fleets somewhat "realistic" looking, so that all the smaller ships would be still useful, but all they could come up with was forcing the player to assembly fleets according to a schematic which stated that there need to be x "escorts" for y "capital ships" for no reason at all, as those small ships were still useless due to the battle mechanics.
They also took away some of the coolest bits of the previous two MOOs, e.g. boarding, unique racial characteristics, heroic leaders(the last two became just an unimaginative juggling of some stats).
Yeah, the game isn't all that bad, but it's a COMPLETELY different game from what the gamers came to expect from the franchise, to the point where it was just unfair to still call it Master of Orion.

[x2yzh9]

starts crying in a cornerno ones answered my questins yet!

[IHateOutside]

is theres a free orion wiki check on there

[lastofthelight]

Free orion isn't a complete game. You can't actually play it yet.

[E. Albright]

Take the combat - they wanted to make fleets somewhat "realistic" looking, so that all the smaller ships would be still useful, but all they could come up with was forcing the player to assembly fleets according to a schematic which stated that there need to be x "escorts" for y "capital ships" for no reason at all, as those small ships were still useless due to the battle mechanics.

Actually, this isn't true. Ship size never entered into it. You needed X ships that were escort or picket classed, not X ships that were e.g. destroyers or frigates. They could be dreadnoughts, so long as they were classed to be escorts or pickets. And they do serve a useful role, properly designed - cover them in PD and they work just fine to help fend off marauding fighters and missiles, or drench them in ECCM and detection gear so you don't need to waste space on your capital ships for such things. Which is the entire point of imposing armada compositions, if you think about it.