It’s so beautiful, I must have one.
Still the best strategy guide I’ve ever read. It is available used for $2.99 on Amazon. I picked up a copy for nostalgia value.
I agree, which is why I rationalized that I might need more story-driven experiences, and by that I just mean that they have a story/campaign. It doesn’t even have to be good. But I’ve had a really difficult time getting motivated to play an RTS since WarCraft 3, which at least had a story, but I was disappointed with it after loving the original StarCraft. I finally played my first RTS since, which was Company of Heroes 1, which I played last year, even though as a single player game, it’s pretty lame. All strategy games seem pretty lame as single player games, because the AI is terrible and therefore either unchallenging or doesn’t play by the same rules in order to make it more competitive. That was definitely the case with MOO (and Civ 1), at least, but hopefully things are better since.
I am going to try to give this one a go. I really wanted to get into most of the previous games in the Club, but work is always really crazy this time of year and I have too many new games I have been playing. I did grab the setup and installed it from GoG last night, though, and brought the manual to work today to read during lunch so I can give it a go soon.
I am a huge 4x fan now, but back in the 90s I was busy with sports and RPGs and never did give them a try. I should rectify that now while others are playing and try this one for the first time even though I have owned it on GoG for a few years now.
I still consider MOO one of the most well-designed 4X games out there to this day. Sliders instead of buildings, a random tech tree, spies that are actually useful, ship design that doesnt overwhelm you with options, fun tactical battles that last only a few minutes each, many diplomatic options. I love it.
A few tips for the newbies
- Erratic leaders will randomly declare war on you no matter what deals you have or how happy you make them. Best to set your spies upon them to steal techs!
- During peace-time you can exploit the ship sliders by designing a very large, very expensive ship and then clicking the slider up once or twice. The goal is to not actually build the ship, but to ‘store’ build points while you research. When someone attacks, you can create your latest and greatest design and have an instant mini-fleet the next turn.
- There are hotkeys that make the aging UI a lot easier to deal with, such as ‘select next incoming attacking fleet’
My first trial game last night ended pretty quickly when I sent my colony ship out to a rich tundra planet, all excited to colonize it… and then couldn’t figure out how to colonize it. Wasted a bunch of turns, etc, etc. Looks like the problem was that I can’t colonize tundra planets from the start. Really? Tundra’s that harsh? Anyway, gotta give it another try tonight.
Right. Anything that’s “hostile” requires the appropriate technology and a more advanced colony ship model (add a different colony module in the special module section). There’s an order to the harshness of the environments: barren < tundra < dead < toxic < inferno < radiated. So e.g. with the toxic colony module you can do the first 4, but not the last 2.
This is one bit that could’ve been simplified further without losing anything. The cost/size differences between different colony modules are usually irrelevant, so requiring a new colony ship design to settle the next tranche of worlds is just busywork.
Hmm, I may have to jump in on this. Man did I play a lot of MoO and MoO2. They are both amazing games, but the first one definitely has a simplicity that’s intriguing.
This was also the case in MoO2 if you were Uncreative! Creative meant you could get all the techs, Neither meant you had to choose one to get, and Uncreative meant that the game chose one for you.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll find some time to fire this up.
Snagged one on ebay for a slight bit cheaper since the shipping was free! Yay!
And the incredible depth of the guide speaks thoroughly to the depth of the game itself. It is a whopping 11MB (at least according to the gog download) and yet the amount that the devs crammed into those 11megs is unreal.
Ohhh, I forgot that not only did GoG make a Mac-based installer for Moo 1 and 2, but I already installed them on my laptop. I know what I’m doing for lunch today!
Heh, nice! I got up to page 21 of the manual during my lunch break!
I haven’t played MoO in ages. That is, I’ve played MoO2 much more recently.
Yes, MoO2 had hotseat. We used to do this quirky thing where we designed races for each other, which was its own fun little minigame.
So yeah, I think I actually have a MoO disc around somewhere, back from one of those “strategy collections” that I grabbed from a bargain bin in the early-2000s.
Oh yeah, I should read that huh? ;)
I’m surprised you don’t have it memorized. What the hell.
(Installing GoG Moos now)
Heh, I actually confess I’ve barely played MoO1. My first MoO game was MoO2, which I played the fuck of back in the day, but when the first one came out, I wasn’t yet into strategy games so I missed it. Time to make up for it I s’pose.
Is there a way to make DosBox games scale bigger? The window is tiny!
Edit: <alt> Enter changes to full screen
You can scale it up to 3x with algorithms that generally give much nicer looking results than naive pixel-doubling/tripling: Scaler - DOSBoxWiki
Interesting, thanks!