Master of Orion Reboot

[Highlord Laan]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/09/ ... -wargaming

Wargaming (WoT, WoWP, WoWS) is working on a new MoO. My gods, between this, Fallout 4 and XCOM2, I'll have no time left.

[AniThyng]

I hope it's more MoO 1 and less MoO 2 tbh. MoO 1's relative simplicity also lends itself to an AI that truly feels like it's playing the game with you while still forging a strong 4x narrative.

[The Romulan Republic]

I never played the original, but I am familiar with its reputation. I'm torn between gladness that this is being done and concern that it will be another game I can't run on my computer.

We need more good space strategy games.

[AniThyng]

The problem is many new space strategy games are that so far as I can tell they are designed to appeal to purple, trading playability and elegance for endless numbers

I kid.

[Purple]

In my eyes the ideal 4X game would be designed so you can automate away everything but you have to manually do so for each single thing. Nothing is automated by default but if you want to just be an observer watching the AI play your game for you be my guest. And as far as the automation goes it should simply be using the in game AI set to "medium difficulty" to do things for you. No better and no worse. That way you could still have a fun and easy game with full automation if all you want to do is play on easy vs the AI. But you could only ever get the perfect, optimal build needed for competitive multiplayer or higher difficulty AI games than you need to crank out the spreadsheets.

That's the key really. The game needs to be perfectly fun and playable for the casual player. But it also needs to come with a framework for rewarding those willing to put in the time and effort to properly master it.

[Simon_Jester]

Master of Orion II was good for getting across the idea of each ship and each planet as a unique thing that could be crafted lovingly into exactly what you wanted it to be.

Master of Orion I was good for getting across the idea that you are a galactic emperor who commands the fate of trillions, you have so much wealth and industrial might that you have accountants to keep track of the accountants who keep track of your accountants. Lose a hundred ships taking an enemy fortress world? Meh, wait ten turns and things will be back to normal.

The biggest issue I see is that Wargaming's prior experience is with tactical combat games. They'd probably do a pretty good job of modeling starship combat a la the MOO II tactical map. But strategy games are not normally something they do.

Moreover, their business model is geared toward real time combat games, not standalone sit-on-your-computer strategy games. So my concern is that this may end up as "Worlds of Starships" or some such using the Master of Orion intellectual property. Not that this would annoy me too badly; I enjoy the space combat in Star Trek Online and that's basically a real time version of Master of Orion II with MMO conventions overlaid onto it.

[Purple]

Master of Orion II was good for getting across the idea of each ship and each planet as a unique thing that could be crafted lovingly into exactly what you wanted it to be.

Master of Orion I was good for getting across the idea that you are a galactic emperor who commands the fate of trillions, you have so much wealth and industrial might that you have accountants to keep track of the accountants who keep track of your accountants. Lose a hundred ships taking an enemy fortress world? Meh, wait ten turns and things will be back to normal.

Why can't a game do both? Why can't I be a galactic emperor who commands the fate of trillions and has so much wealth and industrial might that he has accountants to keep track of the accountants who keep track of his accountants who also happens to have taken a personal interest in the fate of a particular starship captain or crew?

After all, the point of accountants is not to have them do all the work for you, just the work you don't care to do.

[Imperial528]

I just hope that the world of warplanes team stays right and far away from it.

[Borgholio]

I will be excited once we get in-game footage.

[Purple]

I will be excited once we get the system requirements.

[Vendetta]

Why can't a game do both? Why can't I be a galactic emperor who commands the fate of trillions and has so much wealth and industrial might that he has accountants to keep track of the accountants who keep track of his accountants who also happens to have taken a personal interest in the fate of a particular starship captain or crew?

Because they're incompatible design goals.

The player should be involved the most in the thing which makes the difference between victory and defeat, that is the point of playing the videogame after all. So if the actions of individual spaceships make the difference between victory and defeat then there is an upper limit to the number of them that can be around, because the player is being required to manage them and life is too short to click on that many doom stars.

Which necessarily means that you are not managing a hugenormous space empire with gigafleets of doom because your level of simulation cannot be that.

If the actions of individual spaceships are not relevant, then the player has no business with them because they should be focusing on the things that do matter (which if you are building gigafleets will be things like fleet composition and the industry to get the fleet built and in the right place).

[The Romulan Republic]

I think that is a terribly simplistic approach. I think of games as being interactive worlds you can explore as much as something to win. I mean, winning's fun and all, but the other stuff matters too.

And think of it this way- An individual ship might not win a war, but it could tip the scales of a close battle, at least if its a capital ship. And that battle could decide the control of a solar system, which could cause a shift in moral, numbers, and resources that could affect the course of a war.

Chain reactions. Its all about chain reactions.

[Purple]

I think that is a terribly simplistic approach. I think of games as being interactive worlds you can explore as much as something to win. I mean, winning's fun and all, but the other stuff matters too.

Quite. Just because I am the galactic emperor of the empire of empireness that controls all of known space does not mean I should not have the opportunity to mess with Joe the janitor by sending hired goons to spill hard to clean stuff on his freshly mopped floor ten times a day.

[Vendetta]

I think that is a terribly simplistic approach. I think of games as being interactive worlds you can explore as much as something to win. I mean, winning's fun and all, but the other stuff matters too.

You say it's a "simplistic approach", but "where is the player's attention and is that the most valuable thing to do" is literally the hardest problem for a 4X game to solve. It's the whole reason people still say with a totally straight face that MoO2 is still the pinnacle of the genre (despite also not having a good answer to that problem), because most other games have gotten it so far wrong. (Even now I tend to bounce off allegedly "good" space 4X games because the consequence of streamlining out the late game micromanagement that bogged MoO2 down is an early game with little to no player input)

4X games don't actually have a lot of "exploration", the way they express discovery is in the mechanics. When you find out that the system next door has an Ultra Rich Huge Gaia planet that's not the majesty of stellar cartography being expressed but the mechanical expectations you have for that planet type and how it's going to interact with your empire. It's not finding out what's there, it's finding out what you can do with it or, as you gain more experience with the game and know the possibility space better, figuring out how to optimise the position you have found yourself in.

And think of it this way- An individual ship might not win a war, but it could tip the scales of a close battle, at least if its a capital ship. And that battle could decide the control of a solar system, which could cause a shift in moral, numbers, and resources that could affect the course of a war.

However, the larger the engagements the less regular and significant those individual contributions are going to be. This still doesn't solve the problem that if the player is expected to manage each and every one of many hundreds of ships then that turns into a massive time sink which is going to be monstrously repetitive and dull, even when the mechanics work at a smaller scale (again: Master of Orion 2. Late game combat is horribly dull because there are simply so many ships involved in each fight and there's no actual tactics involved, you won when you built the right combination of weapons and systems and the enemy never even gets to move, but early game combat requires much more variation because the scale is smaller.)

Automation doesn't really help either. Either the automation is good enough that the player never has to interact with that level of the game (in which case it shouldn't be there and the bits the player does interact with should be developed better), or the automation isn't as good as the player can manage by manually doing it and so is a disadvantage to use*. This is why the "autoresolve" button is basically the "lose this easy fight" button.

The systems and mechanics to successfully deliver on the management of ships as individuals inherently make the game worse at being empire management.

Why do you think Paradox games don't even try to simulate combat beyond watching some bars go down? Because that's not what they were ever trying to do and doing it would make them worse at what they were trying to do given the scale they aim for.

* This happens because the developers hadn't actually explored the possibility space by playing competitively and so the AI values what they dartboarded as having "value" not what actually shakes out. (Examples of that possibility space exploration are the way David Sirlin balanced SF2 Turbo's HD remix. If people in the testing team came to him and said "X is OP" his response was "OK beat me with it, or at least make me fear it". Also in the design of Castevania SOTN, a boss design wasn't finished until the person who designed it could beat it without taking damage)

[Purple]

Automation doesn't really help either. Either the automation is good enough that the player never has to interact with that level of the game (in which case it shouldn't be there and the bits the player does interact with should be developed better)

And that's where you are wrong. This quote exemplifies everything we disagree about in your approach to this. You see the game as something that should be "won". We see it as something to be played. So from your perspective automation serves to make wining easier. Where as from our perspective automation serves to remove those parts of the game you dislike leaving those that you like. The player should not be interacting with the "bits that make him win" but with the bits that he enjoys. Wining is secondary if at all required.

[OmegaChief]

Have you considered the sheer size, in terms of assets, code and production that a game you describe would require Purple? It's all well and good to say you should have a game that perfectly replicates a galaxy spanning empire down to the individual citizen, but it's just flat out impossible with what we have to work with.

Thus you pick and chose what kind of scale you're going to work with and build the game around that, it's much easier from both a design perspective and a player perspective, since you don't have to make ten billion assets or learn how to control a ten thousand ship fleet on a turret by turret level.

Have you considered how unmanagable it would even be if you had to/could work on the scale of individuals? Sure you could make a compelling game about that if it were a single ship, because you could focus on making it fun, interesting and adding enough variety without consuming space you need for other assets. But that approach just won't work with a massive empire running game especially if you're going for the galaxy spanning scale. So that's why you pick and chose a scale to focus on and work from there.

[Purple]

Have you considered the sheer size, in terms of assets, code and production that a game you describe would require Purple? It's all well and good to say you should have a game that perfectly replicates a galaxy spanning empire down to the individual citizen, but it's just flat out impossible with what we have to work with.

Have you perhaps considered that my janitor example was a hyperbole?

And you can perfectly well have a game where you control a galaxy spanning empire and yet can order each of the 1000's of ships around individually. As long as that ship actually exists in the game the game has to model it somehow. And thus giving you control over it is a relatively simple thing since it's already there.

[Vendetta]

And that's where you are wrong. This quote exemplifies everything we disagree about in your approach to this. You see the game as something that should be "won". We see it as something to be played. So from your perspective automation serves to make wining easier. Where as from our perspective automation serves to remove those parts of the game you dislike leaving those that you like. The player should not be interacting with the "bits that make him win" but with the bits that he enjoys. Wining is secondary if at all required.

Having a win condition is literally the difference between a game and a toy.

Also, you're wrong about my position on automation in these games. The point of game design is to make the player make interesting decisions (in the context of presenting a problem they have to solve). If a system can be automated to the degree that the player need never interact with that system that means that there simply weren't any interesting decisions in that system and so the system shouldn't have been there, the other systems which do have interesting decisions should have received the extra time and effort.

[Vendetta]

And you can perfectly well have a game where you control a galaxy spanning empire and yet can order each of the 1000's of ships around individually. As long as that ship actually exists in the game the game has to model it somehow. And thus giving you control over it is a relatively simple thing since it's already there.

Not at all.

The "individual ship" could simply be a number in a box somewhere that says "empire contains X number of these".

eg. convoys and escorts in HoI2.

[Purple]

Having a win condition is literally the difference between a game and a toy.

A video game is just a computer toy. Or rather a way to make your computer a toy.

[Simon_Jester]

Master of Orion II was good for getting across the idea of each ship and each planet as a unique thing that could be crafted lovingly into exactly what you wanted it to be.

Master of Orion I was good for getting across the idea that you are a galactic emperor who commands the fate of trillions, you have so much wealth and industrial might that you have accountants to keep track of the accountants who keep track of your accountants. Lose a hundred ships taking an enemy fortress world? Meh, wait ten turns and things will be back to normal.

Why can't a game do both? Why can't I be a galactic emperor who commands the fate of trillions and has so much wealth and industrial might that he has accountants to keep track of the accountants who keep track of his accountants who also happens to have taken a personal interest in the fate of a particular starship captain or crew?

After all, the point of accountants is not to have them do all the work for you, just the work you don't care to do.

Because you'd have to program two separate games and make both of them good for that to happen.

The problem here is that if you have thousands of ships or colonies to rule, commanding ALL of them individually is humanly impossible. And singling out only one to command is pointless because nothing you can possibly do in your one ship or colony will have an impact comparable to the actions of the thousands of ships or colonies in the part of your empire under AI control.

It's the same reason that there aren't a lot of military strategy games that have you play a commanding general who personally gets into the trenches and guns down enemy soldiers FPS-style. Even if you can make your general the second coming of Rambo, he's not going to have a significant impact on a battle between thousands of soldiers on each side.

So either the game focuses on simulating and 'making good' the decision-making process of the general, or by simulating and 'making good' the life and death struggle of the individual soldier. There's no point in making a game where, in order to succeed, you have to do both.

I think that is a terribly simplistic approach. I think of games as being interactive worlds you can explore as much as something to win. I mean, winning's fun and all, but the other stuff matters too.

The main problem here is that simulating an interactive world on that scale is vastly, exponentially complicated, and most of the computing power you'd need to run it is wasted because the human user is only experiencing a tiny tiny fraction of it at one time.

Moreover, while the competitive impulse and desire to 'win' may not be a big deal for you they're a big deal for a lot of other people.

So it's natural for game designers to focus on the question "which parts of this gameplay are going to make the greatest difference between victory and defeat?" And to then say "okay, focus our computing resources on making the experience of those parts of the gameplay great."

And think of it this way- An individual ship might not win a war, but it could tip the scales of a close battle, at least if its a capital ship. And that battle could decide the control of a solar system, which could cause a shift in moral, numbers, and resources that could affect the course of a war...

It could, but 99% of the time it won't.

Games that revel in the drama of making you commander of a single spaceship or infantry squad or whatever usually respond to this by deliberately scripting the plotline to throw very excessive amounts of violent action at that single ship or squad. Everything depends on you, you just happen to be present at all the decisive battles of the war, or the decisive meetings that control the peace.

Thing is, in a large scale strategy game there's no way to do that. There's no way to guarantee that the hero-ship the player likes to follow around will JUST HAPPEN to be on the scene when the neighboring empire launches their sneak attack. No way to guarantee that the supersoldier the player likes to play will JUST HAPPEN to be on the right planet to foil the enemy spy plot. Because to do that you have to control the plot of what major events are occurring and when... and in a strategy game those major events are controlled by the player, not the programmer.

Chain reactions. Its all about chain reactions.

But there's no practical way to force those chain reactions to occur without stripping the player of his control over the strategic level.

[Purple]

Because you'd have to program two separate games and make both of them good for that to happen.

Yes and? How is the fact that making the kind of game I describe would be difficult matter when addressing the merit of such a game from a player perspective?

The problem here is that if you have thousands of ships or colonies to rule, commanding ALL of them individually is humanly impossible.

No it is not. It's perfectly possible. Tedious and time consuming but possible. Especially if the game is turn based with no time limit.

And singling out only one to command is pointless because nothing you can possibly do in your one ship or colony will have an impact comparable to the actions of the thousands of ships or colonies in the part of your empire under AI control.

And again we come back to this. Impact. What is impact? Impact does not matter. Impact is not relevant to having fun.

It's the same reason that there aren't a lot of military strategy games that have you play a commanding general who personally gets into the trenches and guns down enemy soldiers FPS-style. Even if you can make your general the second coming of Rambo, he's not going to have a significant impact on a battle between thousands of soldiers on each side.

And yet such a game might be fun. And fun is the object of any game.

So either the game focuses on simulating and 'making good' the decision-making process of the general, or by simulating and 'making good' the life and death struggle of the individual soldier. There's no point in making a game where, in order to succeed, you have to do both.

And again this focus on success. Can't you people understand that no argument you make which hinges on "success" being important will work on me because I do not value success the way you do?

Moreover, while the competitive impulse and desire to 'win' may not be a big deal for you they're a big deal for a lot of other people.

How is this relevant again? I mean, if you want to agree to disagree and concede that the kind of game you'd want to play is not the same kind we'd want to play and that because our tastes differ we can newer agree on what kind of game is good, I think we can both agree on that.

So it's natural for game designers to focus on the question "which parts of this gameplay are going to make the greatest difference between victory and defeat?" And to then say "okay, focus our computing resources on making the experience of those parts of the gameplay great."

Only if their target demographic plays for "success" as opposed to "fun". If not, than they go the other way around and you end up with stuff such as Dwarf Fortress.

[Vendetta]

Yes and? How is the fact that making the kind of game I describe would be difficult matter when addressing the merit of such a game from a player perspective?

It's not just "difficult", the act of putting the two games together would actively make both of them worse, even if the two were independently good, because they have fundamentally conflicting design goals. The things that make managing one level engaging and fun actively make the other level worse just by existing in it.

No it is not. It's perfectly possible. Tedious and time consuming but possible. Especially if the game is turn based with no time limit.

Psst: If things are tedious and time consuming you remove them from your entertainment product. I mean this is basically the exact reason why it doesn't work, because it's tedious.

And again we come back to this. Impact. What is impact? Impact does not matter. Impact is not relevant to having fun.

Impact is critical to having fun in any kind of strategy game. Because the "fun" of those games is the fun of solving the strategic problem they present. If the player has no impact on the strategic problem, they have no fun, they might as well do something more interesting instead.

And again this focus on success. Can't you people understand that no argument you make which hinges on "success" being important will work on me because I do not value success the way you do?

You aren't the target audience though, you're as much of an outlier on this as you are every other sphere of human behaviour. The vast majority of people actually do want games that hinge on success, we know that because they keep buying them in vast numbers.

So it's natural for game designers to focus on the question "which parts of this gameplay are going to make the greatest difference between victory and defeat?" And to then say "okay, focus our computing resources on making the experience of those parts of the gameplay great.

Not even computing resources. It's about focusing the available human brainpower of the designers on the useful bits.

[Terralthra]

This conversation is hilarious.

"This distinction is literally the single key difference between a game and a toy."
"Games are toys, there is no distinction."

Yeah, there is, and Vendetta put it the most succinctly I've ever seen it put. Games have win/loss conditions. You may not care about the difference, in which case your desired game may not emphasize the win condition (or loss condition) very much, e.g. I dunno, The Sims?

The reason people keep returning to the idea of the player having an impact in games goes back to that central definition of games as having a win or loss condition. If the game can be won or lost, but none of the decisions or actions the player makes matter to winning or losing, e.g. Mario Party, Chutes & Ladders, then the "game" isn't really played. There was no way for the player to win when the dice said they lose. The winning player also did nothing to cause victory: no strategic failure on their part would've made them lose.. So, a good game designer (rather than a good toy designer) will look for areas in which the player's activities have no contribution to winning or losing and either alter them or eliminate them.

You don't value any of that? Fine. By no means do you have to. But acknowledge that you don't actually like games, you like toys. There is a distinction between the two.

[Purple]

You all insist on using the definition of game that refers to stuff like Chess and actual physical games. This is not the proper definition to use here. We are talking about "computer games". And in regard to "computer games" the definition is simply "software designed to provide interactive entertainment to the end user".