Master of Orion Reboot

[U.P. Cinnabar]

I found cheats for MoO2 only, while searching online, one of which unlocks all tech, while another gives you infinite cash. There are, as far I could tell, no cheats available for any of the other three games.

And, to be fair, when I played it honestly most of the time I played MoO 2, mostly either Human dictatorships or Human unification governments(my best successes came with the latter combo, which MoO3, piece of shit it was, didn't allow, but I don't assimilate conquered alien species anyway ), with the couple times I used the cheats was screwing around playing Elarian unification governments(so I have a weakness for space Amazons, sue me)basically annhilating the shit out every race they came across(killing Gnolams*, after making alliances with them, was especially fun).

Long story short: Don't play Master of Orion the way I would.

*Having the Antarians exterminate the conniving little bastards was one of the two things MoO3 got right.

[Simon_Jester]

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So... basically the same as in MoO 2? Or is it going clear back to MoO 1, where you have to scrap all ships of one of your five existing classes in order to make room for a new one?

You have to scrap one of the blueprintgs (ship designs) to make room for a new design but you don't have to scrap the ships themselves. So you can feel free to erase and create new blueprints and your existing fleets will remain undisturbed. Plus they brought back the option of upgrading, so if you refine or update an existing design, you can refit your existing ships to the latest tech and not have to worry about replacing the entire fleet with the new design. Oh and I just now discovered that you can have more than 5 blueprints at once...I guess it goes up as you get more tech. I am up to 8 available blueprint slots now.

So... basically MoO 2's system, only with slight modifications (more blueprint slots)

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and reminds me heavily of Master of Orion 2. It really depends on the economic balance. If a fleet of cruisers is comparably expensive in resource cost to a Doom Star, ideally said fleet of cruisers should be a credible threat. On the other hand, there are other advantages to the smaller ships (a swarm of cruisers can be subdivided to fight multiple battles at once, a lone doom star can't; a swarm of cruisers can be replaced more quickly by many worlds operating in parallel, while a lone doom star probably can't). So all else being equal, a doom star should be noticeably preferable to its 'weight' in cruisers, or there isn't much reason to bother building one in the first place.

That's pretty much it. You have set number of command points with which to assign to ships. Small ships like frigates may only use one command point each, while Doom Stars use 15 (you can only have one Doom Star per race at the moment, so you'll have one Doom Star and a bunch of Titans). Each Titan is 10 command points and so forth. You get more command points by building starbases, battlestations, or star fortresses, and through various tech advancements that provide bonuses. If you go over your limit of command points, it costs a fair amount of money in upkeep. It's similar to the system in Civ 5.

So... basically MoO 2's system, only with slight modifications (different point costs).

However, in this case the modification is highly significant, because in MoO 2, each ship size cost only one command point more than the one below it. This meant that it wasn't just a question of "bigger ships have economy of scale." The situation was comically beyond that. There was effectively no reason to ever even think about building destroyers if you could afford cruisers; the cruiser was three times tougher and had drastically more firepower, and you could have two cruisers for the command point cost of three destroyers. Granted, two cruisers probably also cost more than twice what three destroyers cost, but it was very much worth it.

It sounds like they've increased the command point cost gap, which means there's more room for the strategy of using numerous smaller ships to counter a single large one.

Also, one of the new features is you can park a ship at the exit of a starlane (called a warp point) and physically block it. So you can park a single large ship at the entrance to your star system and literally nothing can get past unless they destroy you first. So you really don't need a huge fleet of ships unless you have huge borders.

Okay, that's new, Or rather, it wasn't in MoO 1 and 2, in which ships could travel freely throughout space, and a fleet that entered a given star system could attack the planets in that system at will. The defending fleet would fight a battle at the planet, it didn't get to shoot up the attacking fleet the moment it entered the system.

Now, don't get me wrong, massive million-ship fleets are cool. One catch, though, is that back in MoO 1 they actually took care to balance the massive swarms of light ships by explicitly designing multitarget weapons that could chew up swarms of relatively lightly protected vessels. I don't know what the equivalent of that would be in MoO 4 because I haven't played it (and am unlikely to do so soon; I've spent money on enough games lately). Maybe they'd need area effect weapons, or a cheap but effective quick-firing gatling laser or something...

They do have area-affect and rapid fire weapons for exactly that purpose. In fact, I fit my ships with lots of phasers instead of a few death rays or mauler devices, and the overall DPS is much higher and I can chew up smaller ships like it's nobody's business. You can fit several racks of weapons if you like, so you can fit a few big guns for the big targets, and some smaller ones to take care of the smaller ships. You can also set specific firing arcs to take up less room (so you can fit more guns but they are fixed to front, back, sides, etc...) They also have black hole generators and lightning field generators from the older games.

The point of rapid-firing weapons in MoO 1 wasn't to improve DPS (or rather, damage per turn). The scatter pack missiles and gatling lasers and so on had absolutely terrible damage output against heavily shielded battleships. Where they excelled was in chewing up fighters and scouts and so on that were lightly shielded. Because shields acted as flat damage reduction. So doing five points of damage four times a turn was great for sweeping the sky of fighters with 4 HP and no damage reduction, but absolutely pants as a way of damaging a ship that had 200 HP and three HP of damage reduction on all incoming shots.

MoO 2 more or less neutralized this feature because there was rarely if ever any incentive to equip ships with anything other than the best available shielding- shielding still counted as damage reduction, but damage reduction was uniform across the board for all ships at a given tech level. On the other hand, MoO 2 also took away the truly massive swarms (hundreds if not thousands) of small ships, so it removed the problem at the same time it removed the solution.

Oh, and point defense works properly! Holy shit it works. Fit lots of point defense weapons and they actually do a splendid job of taking out incoming missles or fighters (unlike in MOO 3 where it was dumb as bag of rocks).

Point defense was pretty good in MoO 2 as I recall, as long as you used it correctly and didn't do something dumb like fire it at enemy ships so it wasn't ready to defend your ship.

[RogueIce]

It seems like they nerfed the Creative Trait hard - it no longer lets you research all the tech in a given branch as it did in MOO2. Maybe it was a necessary nerf, but it annoys a tech completionist like me.

Anyway from what I played of it, it really does feel like MOO2 with a shinier interface and some updated mechanics. Which is not a bad thing to me, but I can see where some people might be disappointed because it's essentially a remake.

[Crossroads Inc.]

It seems like they nerfed the Creative Trait hard - it no longer lets you research all the tech in a given branch as it did in MOO2. Maybe it was a necessary nerf, but it annoys a tech completionist like me.

Anyway from what I played of it, it really does feel like MOO2 with a shinier interface and some updated mechanics. Which is not a bad thing to me, but I can see where some people might be disappointed because it's essentially a remake.

At the end of the day, this was always what the game was supposed to be about.
Back when it was still in the works, the developers stated they wanted to remake the game for "a new generation". They said Moo3 turned people off the game, and they wanted a fresh start.

People currently botching about the game being "too easy" or "just moo1 with better graphics" obviously have no idea what the purpose of the game was supposed to have been.

[Borgholio]

moo1 with better graphics

They could have gone for an ultra-grand re-imaging of the game and fallen flat on their ass like what happened with MOO3. Instead they went the safe route and it came out looking very nice indeed. This complaint mirrors what happened with Episode 7. If the biggest complaint is that the remake is too much like a prequel that is beloved by gamers and consistently ranked as one of the best games of all time despite it's age...I'd say they did something right.

[wautd]

Update - MOO 4 has been officially released. Reviews have been positive so far, so I picked up a copy on sale at Steam (bundled with copies of MOO 1, 2, and 3) for $30. I've been playing MOO 4 for 10 hours straight...I'm going to go to bed and sleep until noon now.

Let's just say that MOO 4 is good. Very good. It's not perfect...it does have it's flaws, a few glitches here and there, and there are certainly ways it can be improved. But it definitely beats the hell out of MOO 3, and it actually captures the feel of MOO 1 and 2 while still playing like a modern game. The graphics are great, the AI is decent, and the voice acting is superb. So yeah...the MOO series has been reborn for me. I'm hooked again.

Installed it yesterday but didn't had the time to play it yet (well... I had the time but World of Tanks happened ).

My only concern is the AI which wasn't challenging at all in the early release version. Has it been improved/can the game be played on hard now?

[Borgholio]

I haven't played the game on hard yet, I started with very easy to get a feel for it. But from what I've seen, the AI is at least decent. They will make deals with you and won't backstab you just for the hell of it. They recognize when you make a better trading partner than an enemy. They also will gather their fleets and attack with overwhelming force if needed, they won't attack a large enemy force with individual ships that can be taken out one at a time. Oh and the combat AI is the same. It's not mind-blowing but it's good enough. It will form up smaller ships into groups and attack in waves, and it will attempt to keep it's ships at their optimal weapons range instead of just wandering mindlessly or charging straight to point blank range.

[RogueIce]

At the end of the day, this was always what the game was supposed to be about.
Back when it was still in the works, the developers stated they wanted to remake the game for "a new generation". They said Moo3 turned people off the game, and they wanted a fresh start.

I can certainly respect that, and when it goes on sale I'll likely buy it.

That said I'm still going to be salty over the Creative nerf.

[Borgholio]

At the end of the day, this was always what the game was supposed to be about.
Back when it was still in the works, the developers stated they wanted to remake the game for "a new generation". They said Moo3 turned people off the game, and they wanted a fresh start.

I can certainly respect that, and when it goes on sale I'll likely buy it.

That said I'm still going to be salty over the Creative nerf.

MOO 4 is currently on sale if you buy the bundle with it and MOO 1 - 3.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I haven't played the game on hard yet, I started with very easy to get a feel for it. But from what I've seen, the AI is at least decent. They will make deals with you and won't backstab you just for the hell of it. They recognize when you make a better trading partner than an enemy. They also will gather their fleets and attack with overwhelming force if needed, they won't attack a large enemy force with individual ships that can be taken out one at a time. Oh and the combat AI is the same. It's not mind-blowing but it's good enough. It will form up smaller ships into groups and attack in waves, and it will attempt to keep it's ships at their optimal weapons range instead of just wandering mindlessly or charging straight to point blank range.

It is worth noting that, when it comes to AI's for games, such "Basic Strategy" for us, is, like grand master chess champion when it comes to past 4x Game AI's. I mean, given what we have had in the past, the advancements to the AI in Moo4 are pretty much working at a genius level and deserve a fair bit of recognition!

On another note...
Since I got the "deluxe" edition with all previous games. I decided to dust off MoO3 and give it a whirl... Yes I AM a Masochist.
For anyone who doesn't remember, I played a MoO3 game where I Conquored the WHOLE freaking Galaxy up to turn 1000 just to say I had finally "won" the game...

Well two of my biggest (of the many MANY ones) gripes from the game, was what I dubbed the "Missile Paradox" and the "Research Rot"

The Missile Paradox was based largely upon the near uselessness of MoO3's Point defense.
Late in the game, the enemy would send in huge fleets of missile ships, launch ALL missiles, and then warp out before you could shoot down a single ship... This naturally led to your defending fleet Always loosing a large chunk, turn after turn...
I'll be honest, this actually seems to have been fixed!

I've played a game up to the turn 500, and so far I've been able to shoot down missile swarms a good 80% of the time, contrasted to the original game which was pretty much 50/50.

Unfortunately... The second bug seems as bad as over.
The "Research Rot" basically happens late game, and I blame upon the funk way research is calculated with two different research "resource" points... Basically what happens is as you are researching something... it will get down to just 1 turn left to research, and then "freeze" there.
Five or six turns pass with it saying "One Turn Left" and then... It resets, going back to "20 turns left"
In my recent game, I played to turn 550, where it took me 50 turn to research ONE tech, because I basically had to research it 5 times over before it finally went through. Keeping in mind you can't research ANYthing else till it goes through..

So...Yeah....
Compared to stuff like that,
moO4 is freaking perfection ;P

[Borgholio]

I never experienced the research rot, but I did often encounter the "Shoot and scoot" tactics of enemy ships. I would counter by using the game's broken mechanics against it. First, I would outfit my ships as carriers, and nothing else. They would hold large numbers of fighters, which would launch and take out some of the missiles, before heading towards the enemy fleet and attacking (if the enemy didn't run first). Furthermore, fighters were unlimited. The enemy could keep killing them and more would magically appear in your hangar bay. They were way more powerful than missiles due to their unlimited reloads.

Secondly, I would fit ultra spinal mount Lightning Field Generators. That may sound crazy, but it allowed the broken point defense enough time to actually work by giving the LFGs range to cover other ships nearby instead of just themselves. So even though the enemy missile ships were annoying...they were at least manageable. And when I encountered non-missile ships, my fighters would chew them up.

[wautd]

Well I'm happy to say that the game on Hard seems more challenging so I'm a happy puppy.

I miss the governors or fleet admirals from MoO2 but for the rest the game seems to be spot on

[AniThyng]

I dunno...I tried it out for the past 2 hours and maybe it's because i was playing on normal to get the hang of it but i just don't feel drawn in to it. I just kept clicking next turn and the ship design just feels unnecessary. I actually think Endless Space might have done it better( and i really am waiting for Endless Space 2)

But maybe i'm just cranky.