CraigM
6529
I think it is a perceived need for additional complexity/ depth. MoO is, at core, a fairly simple game. Not a ton of interactions and actions. MoO2 has a lot more going on.
Sales in the market, however, favored games with more going on. And sometimes that is great, and exactly what is warranted. However there is a time and place for simple.
Europa Universalis 4 and Unity of Command are both top 10 games for me, and both represent this dichotomy. However if you go simpler and streamlined, you really need to nail the polish and balance of it. As any jank is more easily discovered/ ruinous to the experience.
Tiles on the planets, too much fiddling.
The limitation on fleet size.
To name a few.
Well, just found out that Redout: Space Assault will debut on Apple Arcade, with a PC version to “come later.”
Pretty much how I feel about it:
Ugh. Frankly, I wish they’d just made a proper Redout sequel (love that game), but this is just adding insult to injury.
So many developers don’t want my money these days. It would be a real problem if I weren’t absolutely buried in stuff I want to play already.
I have to admit, this kind of sucks. Unlike the Epic Game Store, I can’t just install an Apple store on my PC and play it through that.
Excepting my understanding is the Apple arcade exclusivity thing only covers phones. The choice of not releasing a PC version is probably over other concerns.
You could install an iOS emulator…
Sorry, LOL.
Grifman
6536
Why do you say it doesn’t “work at all”. Seems to work fine for me and many others.
“Doesn’t work at all” is a bit of hyperbole. But the design choice does have downsides, downsides that people have become increasingly tired of after 20+ years. E.g. as the game goes on and empires become larger, it means more and more planets where you have to do essentially the same, simple mini-game of building mines, then hydroponics farms, then research lab, etc. etc. So as the game progresses managing your empire gets progressively more unwieldy and less interesting. There is an undeniable dopamine hint from slightly growing each settlement with new buildings and tiles, but it’s often a sort of flabby, just-kind-of-sufficient enjoyment.
As a counterpoint to this design choice, look at some of the most beloved strategy games of the last few decades: MOO1, Sword of the Stars, and Imperialism II. These games all take the approach of radically simplifying the per-settlement management. In MOO1 and SoTS they reduce each planet to a few simple sliders. In Imperialism II, you essentially have one giant settlement. Each of these games holds up well even after decades, and I think part of that is because they have removed busy-work and so have excellent pacing.
Unrelated note: the Space Elves got their own fan comic!
https://well-of-souls.com/outsider/
I checked it a few years ago and kind of liked it?
Grifman
6538
Oh, I agree it has it’s downsides as I much prefer the way the economy works in MOO1 or SOTS. Just didn’t think that the term “didn’t work” was very accurate.
Hello my wonderful friends, and welcome to another week of spacey gaming! This week, in our game of the week, we’ll return to Descent: Freespace, specifically Silent Threat Reborn, because I was basically begged to. With nothing really new having coming out, I couldn’t say no. ;) We also have a preview of Undercrewed, and more videos coming throughout the week.
Moving on from pre-recorded content, here’s this week’s streaming schedule (please remember all times are Pacific). As you can see, we’ve moved things around a bit, with a 9 AM starting time for the mornings and a 4 PM start time for the evenings. You can read all about why I’m making this change here. Now here’s the schedule:
- Monday - 9:00 AM-12:00 PM, Tachyon: The Fringe stream.
- Tuesday - 9:00 AM-12:00 PM, Close Combat: The Bloody First stream. 6:00 PM - Everspace 2 podcast!
- Wednesday - 9:00 AM-12:00 PM, Encased stream.
- Thursday - 9:00 AM-12:00 PM, EF2000 stream. 4:00 PM, Deep Rock Galactic LAN Party broadcast.
- Friday - 9:00 AM-12:00 PM, 3030 Deathwar Redux stream.[/list]
You can see all of our planned upcoming streams and events on our calendar, as always!
You can watch any of these streams on Twitch, YouTube, Mixer and Steam.
Finally, in terms of written content, this week’s discussion topic is the list of best starting space games I came up with for those new to the space game genre. This week’s gaming check-in has me gushing about an old, yet amazing flight sim. Finally, last week’s news digest was a pretty busy one.
That’ll do it for what’s coming up this week, my friends. I hope to see ya in a stream or in a comment. Thanks for being awesome!
JoshoB
6540
Let me say then: it doesn’t work for me. As @RothdaTheTruculent wrote, it’s interesting for the first few planets, but once you have a sprawling empire, going to every colony and setting the build queue is not exactly riveting, since for the most part you’re just trying to turn your colonies into economic power houses to fuel your war machine, so for the most part there aren’t many surprises. There also isn’t a lot of useful difference between planets to make choices you make very interesting (they’re obvious for the most part), so I’d rather focus on the large scale rather than the small (i.e. this planet is great for research, so let’s pump production into that, not: shall I build the Auto-Labs now or later?).
Before anyone says that automation can be solution when managing individual colonies becomes too boring/time-consuming: if there are parts of your game design that you think would be better if the player could just automate it, I’d argue that that particular part of your game is flawed and should be improved upon. The Civ games tried to solve this by making individual cities more important (by penalizing creating a very expansive empire) and by enabling better specialization. Sorcerer King, the Stardock game, does an even better job to give cities more character, and streamlines a lot of the process thanks to cities “levelling up”, and unlocking far too many structures than you could ever conceivably build, forcing you to really think about what you want each city to do.
Another reason why the MOO2 model doesn’t work for me: the city-approach doesn’t scale to the size of a planet, creating this cognitive disconnect between the idea of setting the production of an entire planet and the actual visuals of plopping buildings down in a settlement that looks barely large enough to qualify as a town. MOO1 avoided this by allowing you to set sliders to pump out missile bases and factories, instead of the situation in MOO2 where you build what looks like a single Hydroponics Farm or a Barracks. MOO1 just feels larger, more expansive (see also: ships/fleets); MOO2 feels like a step back towards the Civ-model that doesn’t really translate well to space (IMO).
Grifman
6541
Ok, what you really meant when you said it didn’t work was that you didn’t like it, not that it did not work within the game as expected. Sorry for the confusion on my part.
JoshoB
6542
Well… Obviously a lot of people are just fine with that system. Aside from not liking it, I also feel it doesn’t really work, for reasons stated above. The city improvement system works fine for cities in smaller scale games (i.e. games where you don’t pretend to be a Space Emperor), better if it gives options to specialize (so you agonize over every decision instead of just building the Temple everywhere), and so on. For a galaxy-spanning empire, I think the MOO1 system is simply better when it comes to colony management.
Redout released on the 5th.
Grifman
6544
I prefer MOO1 too, but you’re still talking preferences. When someone says something “doesn’t work”, I take it to mean that it literally doesn’t work, that there’s a bug in it somewhere so that it doesn’t do what you expect it to do.
I personally don’t mind that aspect of the game. When you’re playing hotseat, it’s true that if you don’t set the rules before-hand, that portion of the game could get bogged down. But that’s why you set the rules down before-hand. Turns can’t take very long in that portion, players have to automate most of their colonies and only setup manual queues at their most important production/science centers. Everything else is on auto, otherwise you’d never get through a game.
And it works out fine with those rules in place. If you’re small enough, those rules don’t apply and you DO need to fiddle with each colony as you’re expanding. And later when you’re big enough that the rules kick into place, you really don’t need to fiddle with them anymore, so automating them is fine. There’s no real conflict there except people’s own OCD and need to fiddle with things even when they don’t need to. And the game does provide that option for you, in case you’re one of those people.
Bluddy
6546
I also find the whole Civ-style city-by-city micro to be tedious as heck, and a big flaw in that whole sub-genre. I always thought Civ should have a mechanic whereby you start out managing individual cities, and once you have a certain number, you form city groups which can be managed as a unit.
I never enjoy handing off the city to an automated AI either. If those decisions aren’t really that important, why are they there at all? They should have been removed from the mid-game onwards.
MoO1’s coarse planetary decisions seem unsatisfying and crude for the early game, but their ability to scale up means they’re more suited to a long game.
They are important early on, that’s why they’re there. And they are removed from mid-game onwards, by you hitting the automate button, so you’re the decision maker on when that point is for you. Some people will be more comfortable giving up control earlier than others.
Bluddy
6548
At the very least, it’s inelegant design. I can give you a game with 1000 decisions - way beyond your capacity - and then have AIs to automate whatever you don’t want. It’s a design strategy, but in my opinion it’s not a good one.
Additionally, I would say that the big question is, do you retain any sense of control as you scale up? In Civ, after a certain number of cities, my experience is that they blend together. Using the ‘governors’ to automate them doesn’t make things much better. Sure, I don’t have to make the little decisions anymore, but additionally, because I never though through those decisions, cities develop in generic ways and blend together even more than they did before. I would also suggest that I’m left with no good way of controlling the direction of cities in aggregate, unless I take back that micromanagement workload. All of this again suggests deficient design. The design should allow me to control things at a global scale, and that suggests the need for a different UI and design than just automating the low-level elements, so that I can focus on larger trends.
