It has worked quite well for Heroes of Might & Magic and King’s Bounty, too! It’s an older way of handling tactical combat, and one that seems to have fallen to the wayside in the pursuit of “moar realism” [sic]. I miss it.
I loved HOMM, but I can’t say I miss games where I have to worry about 900 archers stacked together to create a massive killing machine - where if they have the initiative you’re screwed.
I thought of HOMM3 too. If you can’t get the AI to play the map perfectly, just give them stacks of doom.
There was a response to that review as well.
http://www.quartertothree.com/columns/geryk_analysis/MOO3_1.shtml
I came here looking for the moo4 thread and saw this and immediately was OUTRAGED. I was going to reply that THOSE PEOPLE are crazy and moo2 is the best 4x space game ever made. I then read the thread and it made me want to try moo1 again. I recall playing it after moo2 and not liking it but that was a long time ago. Moo2 is one of the rare games I continue to play to this day off and on (like Sacrifice and PS:T).
Is the GoG Moo1 fine for modern PCs? I vaguely recall reading the moo4 Collectors Edition actually had the old versions included as remasters or are these basically the same as the GoG/Steam versions?
Finally, what is a modern equivalent of moo1 if any? I feel that moo4 is close enough to moo2 that, that itch has now been scratched.
Some people seemed to think that the recently Stars in Shadow was more inspired by MOO1 than MOO2. And apparently being able to finish a full game in a single evening was an explicit design goal. This is all hearsay though, it still hasn’t got out of my backlog.
SiS seems to take ship combat and design mostly from MoO2 (individual ships, facing, PD, etc) mostly from MoO2. IMO, the economy is also like MoO2, but fairly simplified (limited building slots and building types, don’t assign population to specific tasks). So it’s like MoO1 in that doesn’t take a lot of econ micro, but the way it gets there is different (and not as satisfying IMO).
I found that the version that came with NuMOO was fine. It’s not a remaster though, so if your eyes bleed at old graphics, well…
http://dominusgalaxia.com/ seems very close to MoO.
We talked upthread about some dosbox tweaks to get MOO1 running well. Search thread for dosbox, it should pop up.
Thanks everyone, will take at all of these… after I win a game in moo4 with my space-drow.
For those that are interested I scanned my copy of the official strategy guide and uploaded it to Archive.org.
The thing weighs in at over 400 pages and unoptimized the file size is around 600MB. I used Nitro Pro to optimize it down to 135MB with some degradation in visual quality but it’s still good enough to read on your favorite e-device. Now you can read the strategy guide on the go or on the throne.
It’s a no frills scan with no table of contents hyperlinks because I ain’t got the time to do all that. This thing is almost like an undergraduate economics textbook with lots of graphs and tables to digest.
https://archive.org/details/MasterOfOrionStrategyGuideOpt
If you would like the unoptimized version I can throw it up on OneDrive.
(If it’s not kosher to share a link I’ll remove it)
Thanks for doing this :)
Yeah, thanks!
Holy crap you are awesome
Glad someone appreciates the effort. I’ll probably do the same for the MOO2 strategy guide I got from the same eBay seller who played the smoking doctor on BSG. I tried the baking soda + ziplock baggy trick and it helped somewhat but there’s no way to get rid of that cigarette odor unfortunately so I had no qualms about sacrificing it the greater good of humanity.
The MOO Strategy guide, as well as the Master of Magic and Civilzation ones by Alan Emerich and others are the best strategy guides ever written for any game. Of course, this pedigree is what made Alan Emerich the go-to person to design MOO3. :sad trombone:
Wow. Nicely done. Thanks.
Thanks for the mention! I would like to point out that the latest alpha, a free download, was made available yesterday. You can read more about it and get it here:
I suspect it is piracy, as long as the the owners/publishers did not give consent for you to freely distribute it. It is kind of like the abandonware (non)-argument: even though you are not making money off it, the IP still belongs to the publishers and the authors, and AFAIK they did not agree to this distribution, and so you are violating their property rights.
And I suspect you can’t use the “fair use” defense because it sounds like it is a pretty substantial reproduction of the guide.
Prima Publishing is still a going concern, so if they find out I suspect you may get a nice cease-and-desist letter from them in the best case, or simply got taken down by archive.org and no more. Worst case is they take you to court.