Sometimes you just want to blow spaceships up. I mean, sure, it’s fun to shuffle colonists between mines and farms, do a little diplomacy with a picture of an alien, pore over a tech tree’s fork in the road between neutronium beams or quantum fusion, make the adjustments to boost a -2Cr income to a +4Cr income, and decide which planet is going to build the Interstellar Moon Mall wonder of the universe. But when it’s all over, what you remember are the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and the c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
To me, more than any other 4x in recent history, this game evokes the feel of playing a Master of Orion Game. I’ve really enjoyed playing it. I’m glad Tom reviewed it and likes it. It needs more love than its been getting.
Agreed, I feel because it invokes the original Master of Orion so well, that it’s really one of the better 4X games out of the recent machine gun barrage of game releases.
Yeah. My opinion was a great MOO successor badly in need of an improved interface.
Even something as simple as “load up all present transports with colonists/troops from this planet” button would be a massive quality of life improvement.
Is the combat interesting for long? I last played this quite a while ago in prerelease, and balance seemed quite a bit off there (I recall one weapon time basically being the finger of death), though it looked like it had potential.
I haven’t seen anything too ridiculous. The only thing is I don’t get why you would ever bother with any other direct fire weapon but lasers. The kinetic weapons require one extra tech for the equivalent level, and they don’t offer anything but shield piercing which the lasers can get anyway.
It’s also weird that bombers cost a lot more than heavy fighters, but on paper (and performance), the heavy fighters are flat out better in every regard.
In my current game I just got the Primary Beam Artillery weapon and boy is it fun. I’m playing as the isopod bugs (I always rename my home planet ‘Orkin’ for those) so I get these small gunboats as a racial perk that have a single heavy weapon mount to fit one in. Talk about your cheap firepower. Of course I have to put 3 black hole generators in each ship just to power that one weapon and there’s none left over for shields but as cheap glass cannons they’re great. I found a hive world early on that has a pop max of 31 and had native labor so I built all factories there. I can churn out 1 gunboat a turn there and a dreadnaught in only 4 turns.
They’ve gradually made quite a few balance adjustments. I haven’t seen anything really crazy as far as weapons go.
Nice to see a heavy-hitter with some years behind him give this game some props. I used to write for Game Informer all the way back when MOO2 was new.
I think it’s fair to call it Moo-centric. I know because MOO2 is installed on this machine and every machine I’ve had since '96ish and I’ve probably binged at least once a year since then.
If any of you were hoping for MOO2+ at some point, I promise you, for realz this time, this is the one. It’s not perfect but it’s more of the winning formula without quite being exactly the same. That’s an all-around-yay from me. Super-yay when they finally add mods to the later game weapons.
I’ve been playing since pre-release and my experience has been good. And I am still learning things about the game, like I did not know you could pull transports out of the pool and restore them to troop carrier duty.
For what the developer intended to create he has done a fine job so check this game out and tell your friends.
Revamped the Loading and AI Turns wait animations, and made changes to the graphics library so that star/planet/map animations will continue in the background (instead of freezing) during wait times.
Revamped the Load/Save dialog.
Increased the base resource yields of most alien native populations.
Reduced the cost of Bombers by one-third.
Increased the cost of Strike Fighters and added Antimatter as a prerequisite for the Multirole Fighters tech.
Increased the cost of Heavy Railguns and halved damage.
Deflector screens now absorb 50% of kinetic weapons damage, while Battle shields now absorb 70%.
Decreased the damage of Neutron Beams.
Ashdar Colonials fighter squadrons now have one additional fighter per Hangar module.
Increased the damage of Pulson Launchers from 35 to 50.
The technology ‘Energy Torpedoes’ is now called ‘Plasma Projectiles’ and requires Plasma Focusing.
Increased the research costs of all late game technologies.
Adjusted the wording in various resource descriptions to help clarify the distinction between the resource names (Labor, Science, Coin, Metal, Food) and the associated activities (Production, Research, Trading, Mining, Farming).
Fixes
Fixed a bug in the tactical weapon selection UI that prevented the first item in a ship’s weapon list from being consistently selected when selecting a ship.
Fixed a glitch in the planet farming/food description text.
Fixed a few description text errors.
Added new UI scaling rules for very high resolution monitors, and changes to avoid blurriness on high DPI monitors.
Made improvements to GoG Galaxy achievement/stat error handling.
Updated the Visual Studio runtime libraries to the 2017 versions.
The ‘simplified graphics’ rendering mode is now enabled by default for all Intel HD 3000 and Radeon HD 7800 Series cards.
Been playing around with this game for a bit, and see what I think is an important difference between this and most other games of the genre.
Admittedly, I’m having trouble getting a handle on the tech tree. Maybe I am missing something, but I don’t think you can bring up the big picture, just the current options, each with links to future techs that would be opened up… So, I may be overlooking available techs down the line, I haven’t exhaustively followed every string on techs.
But it appears to me that this tech tree has rather little to offer in terms of improving your productivity or research. Your species is pretty much what it is. If you are not all that productive or whatever, you cannot counterbalance that by emphasizing technological advances in that area. For the most part, what you are doing is researching ship parts and weapons. If you want more productivity or metal or research, you need to expand so that you have a larger base to provide these things. Possibly expanding to incorporate other species with particular abilities.
I have no opinion yet as to whether that makes for a better or worse game than MOO, but I am curious as to comments from those who have been playing the game extensively. Do I have it more or less right?
From what I remember, that sounds about right to me. Planetary development is much more limited in this than other 4xs. Tech is mostly about ship parts.
You’re definitely missing something! There’s an button with, I think, an icon of a tree or list format that toggles whether you see the full tech tree or just a list of your available choices. You can manage tech entirely from the tree if you like.
No, you’re definitely missing something here too. The game has tech you can research to improve both of those and more. Off the top of my head, you can research improvements to turn factories into mega-factories and research labs into mega-labs. You can also research something that allows you to turn labor into food. There’s actually quite a bit of this stuff and it’s a lot easier to find by scrolling around in the new tech tree view mentioned above. A lot of that kind of infrastructure stuff is towards the southern part of that screen.
