!
-Tom
I can understand missing the MOOs. But you never played any of the HOMM games? Never played MOM? None of the AoW games? None of the Endless Space or Endless Legend games? Never played Fallen Enchantress, Legendary Heroes? Never played any of the Civilization games? Never played Warlock, Master of the Arcane?
If you’ve really never played and gotten into any of those 4X games then yes, please turn in your gamer card at the front desk, lol. :-)
Reading the names thrown here, I guess 4X isn’t a genre but just englobes games that just won’t stop and keep on going for hours.
!!
-Tom
I played for about an hour the other night, still in the tutorial, so there is more left to discover, right?
The first two tutorials seemed boring to me, but understand that I have to learn the mechanics.
…For Tom (to get 3). I never played any games before.
Something about boardgames being boring time wasters.
How about that it’s OK to play fast and loose with board game rules.
Master of Orion 1 is still one of the finest space 4X games ever made, and is very playable even today. Check it out.
Thanks grabbed it, you should cross post it in the bargain thread also. :)
I picked this up in the steam sale. Here are my thoughts:
It’s fun! It’s a neat little game, that is certainly not something I’d call a 4X and more of an optimisation puzzle. There are very few choices that rely on thinking more than one turn ahead. Most choices are very much ranking one of two or three options right now. That limits the depth and the difficulty - I’ve beaten the rabbit campaign on the first try, and I’m doing well enough with the bees so far.
Much of the game relies heavily on the momentum of earlier successes, meaning you’re either coasting with little difficulty (nicely offset by the crisis events) or in deep, deep trouble.
The campaign mode is a nice rogue-like aspect, but the fact that rewards are static mean you never ‘miss out’ - the choice you make is order, not deciding if you want this thing instead of that thing. This means you never really have the urge to attempt risky missions for flashy rewards - you basically just due the missions in order of increasing difficulty and best reward. That’s a bit of a flaw.
It does get a bit repetitive, and I wish I could skip some of the animations and play the game about twice as fast as I currently do. (Or an auto-resolve for combat when I’m swimming in money in the end game). The factions could have used more variation - arguably even more variation in their decks of cards, perhaps.
Overall it’s a good game, with more depth than appears, and I’m sorry it didn’t sell better.
If you lose a mission, your commander / general / whatever they’re called gets wounded and suffers -20% hps to all forces.
So you’re supposed to switch to your other commander / general / whatever.
Except at the start of the game, you only have one.
So the game punishes you for losing a mission by making it harder for you to succeed going forward.
Terrible game design.
Chess also punishes misplays by deleting pieces and making it harder to win! Terrible game design
Yes, chess, that masterpiece of single player video game design.
I think it’s supposed to be a soft penalty, rather than losing outright. It feels superfluous to me; you can only lose a few times anyway before the senate wins.
Not sure what the relevance of chess being 2 player is. Space Tyrant without the debuff for losing missions would render the mission selection decision much less consequential. Some people do not like punishments for making mistakes in games, but it’s generally preferable to being coddled.
Then say that instead of talking about a game that has nothing to do with this
This statement was generalized enough to make it poorly reasoned without clarification, which is the reason for the comparison:
Unless he’s implying this was somehow an oversight, in which case it still wouldn’t be poor game design, but rather kind of a goof: