Master of Orion
filfre.net
filfre.net
Remnants of the Ancients: https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
(though I've historically been more of a Moo2 / MOOII fan :)
Of course, like frogcomposband, I find it a lot more fun when I figure out how to attach a debugger and the source code and hack the underlying values...
Size 1000 homeworld that is both Ultra Rich and Artifacts?
Add 40 technologies to be discovered upon entering a system?
Set your empire reserve to 99,999,999?
Remnants is such an impressive work of love though. The artwork in ROTP alone is worth the download.
Strangely, as a java programmer I've done far more custom code modifications to the frogcomposband (C code) fork. It is a guilty pleasure with open source games hacking their code to do fun things. Also strangely, it was easier to compile frogcomposband than RotP.
MOO2 bogged you down in micromanaging colony buildings, etc. and other 4X games made since have added far more complex systems. The results feels like chess where each piece now has bolted-on RPG stats that have to be individually micromanaged. The game becomes more complex, but not in an elegant way. I don't want to manage maces and chain-mail and morale. I just want to play chess!
I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement?
> I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement?
Such a game would probably fail to achieve commercial success in today's world. It would be criticized for lack of depth.
But it's possible that it no longer overlaps with the market of self-selected 4X gamers.
So you adjust all the settings for each, say, city in the first few rounds; then, when you have several countries, you click that box in each of the cities and from then on set it just for each country; later, click it in each country and just set for whole planets. If later you want to micromanage some specific city or country, just uncheck the box only for that one, and let all the other cities in the country / countries on the planet keep following the settings of their parent level.
That's for geographical entities. But perhaps something similar could be set by inventing hierarchical levels for more abstract concepts like technological / economic / military / research strategies. Or maybe it doesn't even need to be invented; maybe they are already bundled together in sub- and sub-sub-concepts in some games?
I don't know, I haven't played any games of this kind for... Since Civ 1 or 2, maybe mid-nineties. This came to mind because I've been thinking about doing something like this in a (totally unrelated) piece of software I'm designing in my head.
[Edit: Tpyo]
Something I still really enjoy is Deadlock by Accolade, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock:_Planetary_Conquest
You can get it off gog for $7! I recommend that version over the Steam version. It can be finnicky, but again, I play it on the XP Virtualbox!
I understand why nobody's done this (it's hard to do & requires having AI for each subsystem as well as the whole) but it'd make the whole genre much more fun. Right now almost all 4X games just stop being fun mid-game when their mechanics and flow just bog down in endless notifications.
Shadow Magic in particular is probably the best game in the series and also a cult classic.
I am not too excited about the remake. It will be more polished, but the AI will be terrible and the game will be less fun than the original.
It's a pity that with a large budget and 20+ years of tech evolution, game studios still have a hard time matching the fun of the original game.
... and he wiped the floor with both of us, silicoids are OP, please, nerf.
Great games and happy memories from childhood. Moo1 was better in feel, but moo2 was better at actual gameplay.
Another one I always went with was to pick Repulsive (no diplomacy) since you’ll end up at war with everyone anyway.
And the strategy guide mentioned is available on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/MasterOfOrionStrategyGuide
I think I was on a Macintosh Classic II. I miss the 90’s.
just spy, sabotage missile bases to 0 and then send troops.
As another commenter said, Stellaris is a great newer one. A bit rough on initial launch, but well shaped up after patches and dlc.
The Endless X series is another one, but personally they never clicked for me, feeling oddly soulless and empty.
There's even a darned good FOSS implementation of Civ5 called "Unciv" that I got extremely addicted to.
Age of Wonders. All excellent games, but AoW 2: Shadow Magic is the most excellent one, with incredible depth of gameplay. Right up there with those classics.
I've played all countless hours (except MoM), and I can say Stellaris is right up there with them.
Enjoy!
It's not the same kind of game or as grand in scale, but I really enjoyed Into the Breach because each turn you only have a limited number of choices and units each turn, and each choice feels important.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War is enjoyable too -- it's quite simplified (the space marines can only build the one city, as appropriate for a 40k game there's zero diplomacy, etc).
Warlock - Master of the Arcane is a Master of Magic spiritual successor, and I found it a lot less taxing than Civilization in the late game.
I suffer from the same problem. I love these games. I've played Civ 1-5, Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion 2, Master of Magic; all quite extensively. Every single time I get bogged down in the late game. I automate my bases/cities/planets with all of the available automation options and then try to wrap things up as quickly as I can but it always takes longer than it should.
I agree with you that the number of choices you need to make in the late game is overwhelming, and many of these choices are trivial, but there's an additional problem: you are often so far ahead of the computer AI opponents that it feels like you'd have to make some huge mistakes to give them any hope at all. It can then feel very frustrating that you're so far ahead but must still go through the whole song and dance to finish the game.
What these games really need is a diplomatic option for you to demand they surrender to you completely and become a client/puppet of your empire. Furthermore, the AI should always accept this offer if they can see they have no chance at defeating you in a war.
It’s nice when games acknowledge it as the article mentions - and some have a “victory” screen with a “keep playing” option.
The 4x games are almost between normal games and pure simulations like the city builders - where the simulation can become the fun.
It might be fun if the goals of the game turned upside down when you're winning. The AI players surrender and you're the newly crowned Galactic Emperor, congratulations! Everybody works for you.
Now comes the second half of the game where you try to keep your empire together while it decays into bureaucracy. In a thousand years, a Hari Seldon appears and you have to decide whether to exile him...
Try Stellaris then; vassalizing your opponents is a great strategy (even more so now that they have fixed a few things). Another strategy is to force your ideology on them, changing them into an empire with ethics more like your own who can become an ally.
> there's an additional problem: you are often so far ahead of the computer AI opponents that it feels like you'd have to make some huge mistakes to give them any hope at all. It can then feel very frustrating that you're so far ahead but must still go through the whole song and dance to finish the game.
Stellaris has an interesting innovation here too. As the end of the game approaches, there is always a Crisis which is more powerful by far than any of the AI. A good human player can beat the crisis head–on in most cases, but it is definitely a challenge. In fact, the whole game can be seen as an escalating series of boss fights built into the 4X framework, with the crisis as the final boss.
However, it achieves this by eliminating the combat, the opponent AI, and ways to revise your decision-making, instead making it more of an economic logistics puzzle with immense numbers of dependencies to consider on every turn, which makes some players used to having a build strategy to exploit and an enemy to beat up accuse it of being "not a game", always a good sign that you're on to something new and different.
It's originally a PICO-8 game, which gives some idea of how compact it is. You can still play that version right now: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30978
1) You didn't have to manage individual buildings, they were just priority bars on planets...
2) Ships of the same class stacked.
meant that scaling up the empire wasn't the kind of tedious nightmare we see in more civ-style 4X games. Sadly Moo2, while a superior and more polished game than Moo1, moved away from this innovation into more conventional construciton and ship management.
Way too many mechanics that seem complex on the surface, but as far as game impact are actually irrelevant, so it feels like busywork. As opposed to MOO, where 1 slider early game can change the outcome of the entire game.
Stays relevant until the very end.
I tried a few other 4X space games, but none scratched the itch that Stellaris did. It's the only 4X space game I play now. And Paradox keeps adding content!
At that point you're strong enough that you can beat all the other empires but then an extra-dimensional invasion happens that's just so much stronger than anything else you've encountered and it works really well to spice up the late game and make everything relevant again.
I remember finding the limited demo on one of those "101 games!" $1.99 CD-ROMs, and then tracked down a full version at some remote Circuit City. Still have the installer and the key, and occasionally load it up on a VM (plays fine, only needed like 32mb of RAM :P )
A great game, but another one which suffered from the burden of overwhelm in the late game stages, and was hampered by the un-expected and abrupt limitation that you could only have 255 fleets (or some such thing). I read a breakdown that the cause was due to the designers only using an 8 bit integer for the FLEET_ID, so once you had that, the game would just discard any additional fleets you made.
Ahh, nostalga.
There's dozens of us, dozens!
I had a game key for a while and then lost it. So any time I dust it off to play it's the shareware version. The shareware version has pretty high limits so you can just get to "unmanageable endgame".
One of my pet peeves, especially later in the game, is there's no way to upgrade fleets. So if you've got a long lived fleet it'll be way below your current tech level. Woe follows if you forgot it was the only defense for some far flung yet important planet.
Those are two games that AFAIK haven't been re-released through the normal Steam/GoG channels. Seems like only Civ3+ are available, not sure why.
For the life of me I can't remember what this game was actually called. Does this ring a bell for anyone else? Would love to look it up again.
I wonder how feasible it is to play an old DOS game like this on a modern Mac...
My real favorite is Space Empires 3 though. Anyone else?
The multiplayer for that one is especially great. A few friends and I still play it to this day, it's a blast.
I'd definitely recommend playing against humans if you can, I never found the computers quite as fun to play against.
Which may have helped me avoid that issue, by the time I ever played against a computer they were pretty easy just because I'd played my friends a lot.
If there's any big advice I'd give though, it's just definitely focus on expanding your production and planets as quickly as you can near the beginning.
In Master of Orion I you could have huge fleets of warships roaming through the space.
In Master of Orion II (significantly less successful if you ask me) there were a mechanics of "control" or smth along these lines, which limited you from having a large number of large warships by ramping up upkeep. I guess you could live with that.
Ascendancy is nice, but: You can only have N+1 ships, where N is number of your planets. This means you need to spend 90% of time developing planets (pushing "next building") with no ways to utilize your industrial output when not building a ship replacement. Boredom of managing insignificant colonies by hand is what ruins many 4X games.
It would be an understandable limitation if Ascendancy was a board game, but in a video game it's just a sign that game designers could not balance the gameplay.
Otherwise, great game. The music and the races are awesome. Tech tree is very funny.
It always fascinates me how Steve Barcia managed to balance so many different game mechanics, traits and science paths into a single game.
[0]: https://moo2mod.com/
> that Civilization‘s inclusion of global warming as a threat to progress and women’s suffrage as a Wonder of the World constituted some form of surrender to left-wing political correctness
... ick.