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So it looks like Atari inked a deal with GOG. Master of Orion 1 AND 2 are for sale in a single combined pack for $6. Better yet, MOO2 is updated to the fan 1.4 patch. Outcry is also for sale. Master of Magic is soon to release. This is freaking awesome. I've wanted MOO for a very long time.

MoO has superior UI elements in many ways, but it's so fuck-ugly and primitive I'm not sure it's really worth playing compared to modern games. At least MoM offers something most new games don't (and Age of Wonders specically failed at).

Fan 1.4 patch? I never patched the game at all on my many reinstalls. What'd they change?

Loads of details on it here Vympel. Click on the Patch FAQ for more info.

So what are you waiting for? It's two groundbreaking games for the price of a 2-hour DLC quest!

Do I sense a snipe at BioWare?

Good memories of these 2 games (there's no nr. 3). For this price I'm sure to check this out.

wautd wrote:Good memories of these 2 games (there's no nr. 3). For this price I'm sure to check this out.

Yeah, I don't know why people say there's an MoO3, because if that game DID exist it would have been a completely awesome and immersive experience and NOT a tired-out piece of shit that was so terrible three years of fan-patching couldn't fix it.

Dammit, 5 bucks gone on impulse buying.

I must have gotten old and wiser, because I do not remember a large galaxy game on average AI taking 1.5 hours to win when I last played MOO2 in 2000...

I wasn't even playing optimal or paying much attention. .__.

Hmm I see Outcast being there released as well. I remember that as a belgian, we were almost required by law to play this game

Over the years, I've kept MOO3 around (because I rushed out and paid so much for it when it first came out), and reinstalled it once or twice, saying to myself, "It just can't be as bad as I remember it."

It always is.

jegs2 wrote:Over the years, I've kept MOO3 around (because I rushed out and paid so much for it when it first came out), and reinstalled it once or twice, saying to myself, "It just can't be as bad as I remember it."

It always is.

Same story, but in my defence for rushing out was that for some reason this... game got fairly high reviews when it came out. (like 9.2 on IGN or 8.9isch in a game magazine I used to buy). It's the only game I know where reading the manual was much more fun than actually playing the game. That and it had nice species design.

That said, I lost the best part of my evening playing MoO1 last night. Fucking Orion Guardian. Fucking squishy organic races. Why can't they just accept that the galaxy should be under enlightened Meklar rule?

Why am I not surprised people playing MoO are using the broken races? Next you'll say the Sakkhara are pretty good too.

At least in MoM the different races had tradeoffs, instead of 'useless bonus' 'useless bonus' 'useless bonus' 'game breakingly powerful bonus'.

I beat MoO2 with every standard race on hard or impossible at least once. Its fun with the silicoids, cuz you can wipe out every other living being in existence.

Uh, that's because MoO2 is totally broken, with retarded AI?

Next you'll say you made a custom race with telepathy and had an easy game!

The fun of these games is not in the challenge (because there isn't any) but in the ludicrousness and the simple flow. If someone made a not fuck-ugly flash game with MoOs featureset it's be a great iphone game, but all those giant wasted screens of no information and that horrible font and the crippling resolution just make the ideas clunky. At least you can have 150000 bombers though.

That's what the MoO2 mod tools are for Stark . Start game, save, make all the other buggers Creative on Huge Ultra-Rich Artefact Homeworlds or what-have-you, load save game & play.

Or I could just play an actually good game to start with? You can't make the tactical battles not horrible rapefests or the diplomacy less braindead, either.

MoO2 was extremely boring to me. I never finished a single game in the 8 years I had it. Something about the games presentation made it very dull to play.

jegs2 wrote:Over the years, I've kept MOO3 around (because I rushed out and paid so much for it when it first came out), and reinstalled it once or twice, saying to myself, "It just can't be as bad as I remember it."

It always is.

yeah, I know...

fuck I hate that game, and still reinstall it every so often...

You guys are crazy. MoO3 was a shit game which I played once, uninstalled, and never went back to. No amount of fixing it was going to work.

MoO and MoO2 were the shit, back in the day. The problem is that day has passed. Maybe someone needs to look into making a MoO4 and learn the lessons of the previous three games. Each had their problems, but only MoO3 was truly terrible. But I doubt MoO4 will ever be made.

Since GalCiv2 has everything MoO had except hopelessly unbalanced tactical combat - and piles of modern features almost no other 4X game has - it's clear that all people really want out of MoO is a one-sided shitkicking.

That said, the Elemental beta is starting to look more like an actual replacement for MoM now; hopefully someone will quickly make a mod to replace Stardock's horrible fanfiction garbage with 'here are the MoM options but in realtime 3D kk'.

Stark wrote:Since GalCiv2 has everything MoO had except hopelessly unbalanced tactical combat -

Wasn't combat in GalCiv2 more like Gratious Spacebattles? (in where you're watching a screensaver rather than commanding your ships). Certainly I found it more boring than MoO2 where the angle of your ship mattered or could even board other ships. Granted, the turn based became an ass when you were fighting dozens of ships (eg assault on Antares) but overall I preferred it over GalCiv2.

GalCiv2 ship design also was pretty fucking bland (or at least how I remember it). Yes, you could go wild on how your ships look like, but options in types of weapons and modules were pretty meagre.

Some ideas of GalCiv2 I liked though. Didn't it have some kind of culture zone which neatly showed your empire's territory.

Stark wrote:Since GalCiv2 has everything MoO had except hopelessly unbalanced tactical combat - and piles of modern features almost no other 4X game has - it's clear that all people really want out of MoO is a one-sided shitkicking.

Totally. GalCiv 2 has everything you need, although it is single player only. There is something to be said for playing a game like MoO with a friend and totally wiping him off the face of the galaxy with your fleets of doom.

That said, the Elemental beta is starting to look more like an actual replacement for MoM now; hopefully someone will quickly make a mod to replace Stardock's horrible fanfiction garbage with 'here are the MoM options but in realtime 3D kk'.

I never finished playing the GalCiv 2 campaign. I got as far as like, the second mission, I think? Or maybe the third? And then I went 'I could just play a random galaxy map like I'm supposed to.'

wautd wrote:Wasn't combat in GalCiv2 more like Gratious Spacebattles? (in where you're watching a screensaver rather than commanding your ships). Certainly I found it more boring than MoO2 where the angle of your ship mattered or could even board other ships. Granted, the turn based became an ass when you were fighting dozens of ships (eg assault on Antares) but overall I preferred it over GalCiv2.

The combat in neither was particularly good, although GalCiv 2 gets misunderstood. It's just a ship viewer. You get a degree of satisfaction watching your ships trade fire with other ships after you built them and designed them. The real strategy comes with outfitting different classes and combining them in a fleet, or tailoring your ships with weapon systems to counter the enemy's defences. If they've got shields, go for missiles or guns; if they've got armour, go for beam weapons etc.

So the tactics are there, just in a different place. In MoO you just need to stay ahead of the tech-curve - which is frankly easy to do (duh pick Psilons so the Computer can't be them, and then you're all set). All your ships will kick ass simply because they have the best tech-whatevers than the other guy. That, and how many ships you could have in a fleet was virtually unlimited. Hell MoO1 had a thing where you could put a mass driver onto the smallest hull (basically a fighter) and build like a thousand of them in I don't know, about a dozen turns? Then you can take that fleet and go kill the Orion guardian.

I like how you can have huge fleets in MoO but there's a point where you've got a huge fleet and nobody else does, because the AI is stupid. And can't do anything about your fleet dropping antimatter bombs onto their daycare centres and lost puppy homes.

In GalCiv2 I liked how the philosophy in the game design was to counter this by bringing in - shock, horror - logistics. Which is the dirty word nobody wants to speak of in these sort of games or even these sort of genres (sci-fi space operas). The fact that it didn't just matter what tech-curve you were at in comparison to your adversaries but rather what specific systems you had versus what defences they had, and vice versa, was a more interesting and better way to do combat in a 4X game.

GalCiv2 ship design also was pretty fucking bland (or at least how I remember it). Yes, you could go wild on how your ships look like, but options in types of weapons and modules were pretty meagre.

Ships are there for business. What matters is what engine it has, what weapons it has, and what defences it has. Everything else is fluff bullshit. Some ships have special qualities, but by and large these are for different aspects of the game like colonisation and trade and so on.

I remember you could put in gadgets and gizmos onto your ships in MoO2 which did change how tactical combat worked. I'm guessing things like interdiction devices, I remember a teleport thingy, and space marines being the most memorable. Bear in mind that in GalCiv2 you could build a military starbase and load it up with modules to help assist your forces in fleet actions. This added a dimension to the combat in GalCiv2 that's probably being overlooked. If you're going to plan an invasion it might help to know where your forces can expect to face stiff resistance, or counter attacks, and plan accordingly. So it's not just ship design that matters, but the big picture strategic disposition of forces.

If you plan well, it makes that ship viewer combat more meaningful and enjoyable to see your ships vanquish enemy forces. Besides, the 'tactical' aspects of it would be down to the individual ship commanders. So if you want to role play it you can pretend to be like the Admiral of the Fleet and/or President/Emperor Badass, but you're not giving orders in real-time to your ship commanders in that scenario - you're just putting the best tools in their hands.

Some ideas of GalCiv2 I liked though. Didn't it have some kind of culture zone which neatly showed your empire's territory.

Yeah, and culture starbases which were basically deep space party towns.

'Come over to our side - you'll have a good time.'

Sorry, I thought I clearly said 'except tactical combat'. I must be going crazy.

Like I thought I just said, people who value a shit one-sided tactical system over the rest of the game actually working simply reveal that all they want is a complicated way to win, not a challenge. MoO2 sucking at pretty much everything it does is like people loving the atotal War games, because most people live landslide tactical wins.

Meaningful ship design and excellent diplomacy and UI = where is my hopelessly imba tactical combat lol

Space empires 3 tactical battles > everything else.

It had

- non cheating AI
- dangerously cunning tactical AI that used its ships to full effects.
- a balanced choice of ships and weapons.
- you could lose to an enemy with weaker ships using superior tactics.
- meaning that tactical battles are a whole new exciting game by themselves. Rather than a turn based video of a battle whose outcome was already decided by which side has x amount of hitpoints.

That's the critical thing - AI that can use all the features. In MoO2 the AI was very poor at using many of the modules or abilities (let alone design). By contrast in GalCiv2 the price I can get selling ships varies depending on what design is appropriate to whoever the buyer is attacking.

Oops, AI that can make decisions? Not in my MoO