I agree. Elegant games are most often the best. I still am not changing my opinion yet, though.
I listened to most of SGJ on the way to work this morning. I think I figured it out:
Okay, so I was…12, soon to be 13 when Master of Orion 1 came out (which I played a lot of). When Master of Orion 2 dropped, I conscripted my younger brother and sister into playing hot seat games which we did ad nauseam. It was great, though. Therefore, I am likely dealing with a healthy dose of subjectivism. It goes a little deeper, though…
I like games where there is optional micro. There is an obscure series of SNES titles in the “god game” vein (too lazy to research it right now) where you play as a deity that has to gain worshippers, and the more worshippers you have the more powerful you become and are able to fight off threats better… but you also are able to transmit this ball of energy down to the surface, animate this statue, and now that statue is your “hero” slashing monsters with a sword in a 2D platformer.
It was very simplistic… but I think my ideal game would be that, as a 4X. Master of Orion 2 actually sort of gets close to this, because you can let battles auto-resolve, but you can also command a single ship if you want and have it do crazy maneuvers throughout. Some don’t like that, I get it; 16 year old me thought it was the best. You have your colonists organized into different castes; I get how that can grow somewhat tiresome across large civilizations, but it makes the early game much more interesting.
What I am really getting at is that I like to be able to change my perspective of scale as a player. I think this is really hard to pull off, and while some games go for this as an aesthetic no game has really managed to do it at the scale I hope is one day possible. MoO2 is close, as is Dwarf Fortress (good luck playing that game, though). I want to be able to just sit back and let civilization unwind on its own, or if I notice something interesting going on I want to be able to “zoom in” and take control of a hero, ship, whatever, and do some crazy cartwheels with him/her/it.
The danger of course is that the game just gets so utterly complex that either the CPU can’t handle it or it grows into a UI nightmare. MoO2 strikes a nice balance though, although I totally get what you are saying about MoO1.
There is another really obscure but very simple 4x game that came out for the Mac in the late 90’s I wish I could remember the title of. It was beyond simple, but you could send fleets to other stars, take them over and have them begin producing additional fleets, there were four or five different races with various bonuses (which you could edit at the beginning), diplomacy, and it was turn-based. It was basically MoO1, but even simpler. It’s not on the 4X Wikipedia article (I checked). I believe it was freeware, and definitely indie. It was fun, though.
