My willpower must be weaker than I thought because this thread just caused me to order a used copy of that MOO strategy guide on Amazon. They had one for about $25 with prime shipping. Should arrive on Friday. Supposedly it’s in “very good” condition, but who knows until it actually gets here…
Oh yeah MOO2 is great and all, but the original is better for the reasons stated above by several people. I’ve always enjoyed games that have a bunch of individually simple mechanics that interact in complex ways without falling into the trap of being too esoteric or awkward to use. Ignoring a dated UI of course since we’re taking about games that are over 20 years old now. That’s probably why I’ve always loved Paradox games on paper, but have a hard time really getting into some them in real life (Crusader Kings II I’m looking at you).
There is room to argue over the correct level of detail (sliders versus Civ style buildings), or how much detail you want in the tactical layer. In both, I find MOO to be the better game, FWIW, but there is room for debate.
However, the thing that makes MOO the better design is, as was mentioned above, the randomized tech tree. Some techs may never even appear in the game in any given match. Unlike MOO2, you cannot have a planned build order (research this, then that, then that), because what is available to you and what you have to counter will shift from game to game. And it is this brilliant design decision that gives the game such a lasting depth.
Alan Emrich was also the designer on MoO3. I can’t find it anymore, but I distinctly remember that Emrich writing at one point that his original proposal for MoO3 was more like MoO 1.5. It kept more to the original game and tried not to have too many moving parts. They felt, however, that players wanted more stuff, and ended up going in a direction of making the game mechanics super complex and detailed.
I can’t say that’s how it really went down, but if true it’s definitely a tragedy. Probably a mistake a lot of game designs have made.
Based on forums and social posts and such, the players who want more stuff (even if it’s vestigial nonsense that the game would be/is better without) are really freaking loud even today.
If my memory serves me right, Emrich left the project before completion because of the design issues. In case people wonder why there was no MOO3. And there is still no MOO3 today.
I will be loading this puppy up as soon as I’m over my Horizon Zero Dawn addiction. I just hope it’s readable/playable on my display as a lot of older games don’t translate well to it. But I am really, really excited to give it some major play :)
You may well need to do some DOSBox config futzing to get it running well and looking good, but I’m sure I’m not the only grizzled veteran of the Emulation Wars here who can help you out if that’s the case.
(I recently fired up a fresh d/l of MOO off Steam and had to manually set CPU cycles, resolution, and scaling in the DOSBox config file - the defaults were pretty awful/unplayable. But it’s not hard to do.)
What map size do people like for MOO? I’m on my 3rd game at large and it may be just a bit too large. I’ve been doing much better this game - getting out ahead with production and technology. I don’t think I had enough espionage defense though because I noticed that we are all about the same tech level now.
Also health. He suffered from some sort of palsy and had hafl his face stuck for a bit. Sucks.
I typically go huge. I like to play space games with as much. . . space as possible. But differnt sizes can provide different experiences especially if you tweak the # of enemies in the game. Speaking of which, are you just accepting the defaults? That’s certainly fine, but if you lower it, it will definitely make the map feel much larger.
I usually play 4x like this with < the recommended races for the map size, myself. Not always, of course. The exception was SMAC. Always 7 factions (and almost always the originals) in that one for theme, flavor, and full experience.
Medium maps all the way. Why play a single large game instead of two mediums? (The small ones are a bit too random, since half the time you just get stomped by an AI with ridiculous starting bonuses before getting your own economy up to speed).
Yep, I just accepted the defaults which I believe were 5 enemies on a large map.
One of the other races won the vote and I said i didn’t accept the results so now I have to fight the remaining 4 (I already killed 1 of them and almost another). I think I will eventually get overwhelmed though.
