Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Gaspa Craftdreams]

After playing Dwarf fortress for so long, I find that other civ/world games just don't interest me that much anymore.  However, I do hold a special fondness for Master of Orion II.

Each game I try to make an effort to:
-Build a Doom Star with a stellar converter
-Transform as many planets into Gaia planets as possible
-Maximize population (combined with the above goal, this means demolishing and rebuilding insufficient planets)
-Enslave all conquered enemy citizens
-Take as many enemy colonies as possible without forcing their immediate defeat, offer back the conquered systems, wait for them to build up their strength again, repeat

I always play on Impossible, in a huge galaxy with 8 players

[DarkerDark]

Master of Orion II is one of those timeless classics. Even being so old, it's still a great game. If you want the game to give you an even greater challenge, make a custom race that takes all those traits most veteran MOO players deem useless.

Master of Orion II is actually the only Space 4x game I enjoy. All the others that have come out seem to base their gameplay more around spreadsheets than fun game mechanics. Though, I must admit, I haven't played any of the Stardock 4x games.

[Krelian]

try sword of the stars
it feels nothing like a spreadsheet

[SeaBee]

I have to agree. MoO2 (and MoO1!) are both excellent, MoO2 being a bit more fun for me. GalCiv 2 always felt kind of ... soulless? It lacked something important. Never really drew me in. Felt like an old version of Excel: just replace Clippy with a generic robot.

Sword of the Stars is okay. I don't dislike it, play it from time to time. I am looking forward to SotS 2, hoping it will be better than the first.

But yeah, MoO2 is a game that's always on my hard drive. It's part of my "must install" package right after a visit to Ninite (when I'm on Windows). I'm starting to think it'll never be truly beaten.

[Majestic7]

Sword of the Stars is fun, but it has too much fighting. You can't use autoresolve, because with autoresolve the big fleet always wins. So the only way to win the fights you should win with a technologically superior, but numerically inferior force is to fight them yourself. Sure it is fun, but the fun gets sucked out when you get ten Zuul/Hiver swarmer fleets per turn to slaughter.

Master of Orion I/II are still the games in my books. It is a shame MOO3 was such failure. I certainly agree with GalCivs feeling soulless. They had some good ideas - like the events, I liked those very much - but the total mix was just...bland. 

[Hanzoku]

I'm one of the minority that actually liked MoO III - but I didn't go in expecting it to be MoO II but better. I really enjoy the fact that I don't need to micromanage every world in my 75+ systems for optimum efficiency, but can focus on designing ships, general colonization plans and launching my three-prong military campaign against the Klackons.

short version: Micromanagement on a large scale annoys me, so I liked the mostly macro-level simulation.

[Toady Two]

I liked MOO3 as well. it wasn't a bad game but it disappointed fans of the originals and that probably why it gets such a bad rep.

Less micromanagement in Moo3 makes the bureaucracy running the empire feel more realistic too. When you play so that you only micro our home system extensively it makes faraway systems actually seems as if they are far away

[Shadowgandor]

short version: Micromanagement on a large scale annoys me, so I liked the mostly macro-level simulation.

I highly recommend Sword of the Stars to you

[Soulwynd]

I didn't like that one much.

I still have to give MoO3 a try.

[Virtz]

I've only ever played MoO3 to any greater extent of time and I have one question. Has it always been such that fleets cannot be engaged while they're travelling between systems? Cause that annoyed the hell outta me. Big time. The AI ended up just fleeing through my systems like a total coward, always retreating from battle. It all just felt like "Logistic Failure: The Game".

[Krelian]

I still have to give MoO3 a try.

please dont
your soul can still be saved



About Gal Civs 2, what killed the game for me was the armor/shield/pd vs balistic/laser/misile thing for the weapons... waaaaaaaaay to much simplicity for me, when for me the most atractive part of these games is designing a ship (as in picking a good set of weapons/defenses/systems)

[Andir]

The problem I had with GalCiv (at least, I think it was Gal Civ.  I must be losing my memory) was that carriers/drones were WAY(!) overpowered.  My friend and I would play all the time and he would only ever build carriers and fighters and he would always be saving my ass.  I decided to try it out and it was night and day.

[nenjin]

Gal Civ II had the same problem that Elemental ended up having, it was balanced to be a sandbox instead of a real campaign. Play a large galaxy, 4+ opponents on easy or medium....and 4 hours into the game you've got so much that there's no tactical reality left. It's just spam planets, spam star bases, spam mining bases, spam your best war ship. Its diplomacy ranks up there with Spore, to be honest, because it has that little of impact on the game.

The weapon/armor/ship/extras balance was simplistic, and the upgrades were of the most boring variety, +1 effectivness in many cases. Coupled with the HORRIBLE writing on that stuff (yes, point to the fact they're shallow, boring upgrades in the flavor text. Someone is simultaneously a comedy AND a gameplay genius), and once you get 50% through the tech tree, you stop caring.

It was a fun game to build up in, just not a fun game to finish. To be honest, much of Gal Civ II's game design is a lot like MOO2, especially the technology....but it didn't move things forward despite being 10 or more years newer....and it just left the game feeling flat, especially when the lore and the races and the writing and the art didn't really support what was there.

It's funny, having played Gal Civ II and Elemental now, I find myself pointing to the same flaws in both games.

[PsyberianHusky]

Space empires Four and Five,
I recommend them.

[Soulwynd]

Yup, space empires is fun.