New MoO announced

[Sullla]

OK, it is weird if my first impression from that video was... mostly positive?! Let me be clear: the game on display had nothing to do with Master of Orion's gameplay. It's a completely different game that has much more in common with MOO2 / Master of Magic in the colony system and research setup. And yes, the starlanes are silly and should not be present.

But with that said... I kind of liked what I saw here! I like the goofy, cartoonish aesthetic. I'm tired of every space strategy game trying to be super serious and "realistic." The colony screen looked decent to me, and is probably about as close as we'll ever get to the sliders from classic MOO from a major developer. I really liked the way the planetary classes were handled, simple to understand and with a lot of variability.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just contrasting the MOO reboot to Galactic Civ 3, which has been heading directly away from everything that I enjoy about strategy games. I thought that the MOO reboot actually looked kind of fun to play in that video? At the very least, it's been upgraded from "no way" to "wait and see" in my eyes.

[Athmos]

My sentiments were mostly positive as well after seeing another LP yesterday too. Sure, it pays more homage to MOO2 than to MOO1, but that was to be expected considering how many people played (and loved) MOO2. I was expecting much worse. As it is, while it is clear that the game ISN'T a MOO1 remake It felt like quite fun as is, so the finished version might be a good game.
Even if the colony setup Is more like MoM/MOO2 , the principle of splitting your "planetary output" between research, food/grow and production is still there. In fact, my first reaction while watching the stream was to see it as a very grainy slider, which it essentially is (that's the link between MOO sliders and MOO2/MoM "citizens"). This base principle is kept and i wasn't expecting it, nor did I expect to see some mutually exclusive benefits from science and even if I wish it would concern more techs, the research aspect did not feel completely botched.

I'll admit I came in with pretty low expectation, which is probably the main factor in being pleasantly surprised. But I might have got some hopes back for this project.

[Psillycyber]

I like the aesthetics. Man, how awesome MoO1 would look with that production value! The interface looks good too.

Unfortunately, though the gameplay does not appeal to me at all. The problem: too much mechanical complexity, and not enough emergent situational complexity.

MoO1 was perfect in this regard: dead-simple mechanics, but emergent complexity and the potential for immersive storytelling stemming solely from the situations you'd find yourself in.

With MoO1, I found myself understanding 95% of the mechanics and winning my first game on impossible (with the Psilons, but still...) after watching one Sullla livestream. MoO1's mechanics would have been even more newb-friendly if it had had a better interface. For example:
1. Being able to browse the tech ladder (with in-game descriptions of each tech visible at any time) and have the system explained to you in game of how you can advance to the next rung. I would not have intuited that without Sullla's demonstration.
2. Having a graphs screen to see how your production and whatnot are increasing over time. (And just sharper-looking graphics and interface in general).
3. Having a short tutorial to explain how other non-intuitive mechanics work like planetary settlement (not intuitive that it works like a rung rather than needing specifically a Tundra base ship to land only on Tundra planets), attack rating vs. beam/missile defense determining evade, ship component tech level miniaturization, and sigmoid population growth.

If MoO1 had had those things, I bet even my wife (someone who has had hardly any experience with 4X games, or any computer games at all for that matter) could learn how to play it in less than half an hour, and enjoy doing so.

I understand that Java MoO is probably going to have a lot of these polishing improvements. Can't wait!

With this MoO reboot, though, the nitty-gritty of the mechanics just look daunting EVEN TO ME. Do I really want to spend hours of my life having to learn how a new tech tree works...especially one as long and complicated as this one, with multiple paths in between techs, and MULTIPLE BONUSES conferred by each tech? Yes, I know that this is the Civ model. Even my beloved Civ4 had this sort of tech tree. That's okay for Civ. It works for Civ. History is complicated. You'd be doing short-shrift to history if you replaced the various in-city buildings with something like a MoO1-style "defense slider" or "public works slider." The complicated tech tree approach even worked for Alpha Centauri (although it wasn't the complicated SMAC tech tree that really drew you in, but rather the atmospherics and flavor that was truly the biggest draw). But those sorts of games have been done to death by now. Civ5 felt completely unnecessary after Civ4. But discovering MoO1, with its different and ingenious simplicity, was a huge breath of fresh air.

I also have a sneaky suspicion that this MoO reboot is going to be micro-intensive by the endgame. Did I see correctly from that video that waste cleanup is now a production item that you have to insert into your queue occasionally? You can't just lock the slider and forget it until the game prompts you with a waste-cleanup tech (in which case you can still choose to auto-adjust at all of your planets) or until you need to purposefully grow pop for an invasion? And you've got to check the population unhappiness each turn to make sure your people are about to go on strike? Ugh! (I liked how MoO1 handled this: occasional rebellions that you were clearly notified of, that could be caused by RNG or enemy spying--rare for the AI to instigate them from the way the AI happened to be programmed, but possible in theory).

As an example of how little micromanagement there is in the original MoO1, I recently played a game where I wanted to get up to tech level 99 in every field to see if I could build a single huge ship that could single-handedly defeat the Guardian. (The answer, by the way, was yes.) After I had subdued the last AI race and confined them to 1 planet, how long did it take me to flip through the remaining years until my research had reached level 99? About 10 minutes. That's right. I played over a hundred ENDGAME turns in about 10 minutes. I had 40+ planets to manage. Huge fleets. Didn't matter.

The only thing that really took any time was when the last AI race would send out colony ships or other pathetic fleets to challenge me. I just set the surrounding planets to plow a trickle of their production into missile bases and forgot about them the rest of the game. Problem solved. I didn't have to keep inserting missile bases into any build queue, or worry about upgrading them. The only thing that took any substantial time was when the AI sent out its pathetic attacks every turn or so (with its free colony ships plus whatever other trash it scrounged up), I would have to wait for the battle intro animation to come up, get to the tactical battle screen, and just hit "auto" to have each battle over with in about 5 seconds. Of course, having to do that a hundred times added up to about 10 minutes...but still, merely a blink of an eye compared to the endgame of most 4X games, where you have about 50+ cities/planets/bases/unit stacks asking for orders each turn, and where you are afraid to turn on the AI governors to handle that stuff because they will undo everything you have going. With MoO1, you don't have to hand things over to some squirrelly AI governor who might, for example, switch over your whole research slider into building pointless high energy focus nuclear missile fighters or whatever other dumb **** the MoO1 AI would probably dream up. No. You just click on the sliders, set it, and forget it. Brilliant.

I'm still waiting for Java MoO. This official MoO reboot holds no appeal for me.

[bjg]

Why do you keep saying it looks like MoO2? It doesn't. On an abstract layer - it's rectangular where MoO2 was round (ships design/designer, buildings) and round where MoO2 was rectangular (ships movements). They even put scientists on the top, and farmers on the bottom (not a big deal, but shows the total disregard).

[Psillycyber]

One more thing I don't like about the Master of Orion series from MoO2 onwards: the inclusion of multiple planets per star system. One planet per system was just fine. Simple, and one could make-believe that only one planet would be in the habitable zone around any particular star, so the planet that the game was showing you was that one habitable planet among other totally uninhabitable ones.

Or rather, the idea of multiple planets per system could have worked, but they would have needed to do it differently. I don't care for how the new MoO reboot is handling it either (not to mention the problem with starlanes...)

Here's how I would handle multiple planets per star system:

1. No extra clicks to view the individual planets. In MoO2, you had the galactic view, and then clicking on a star brought up the view of that solar system. No good. Too cumbersome. Any time you have to bring up sub-menus, and leave the main game screen, it's a bad sign. From what I hear, Civ5 had a particularly bad problem with this. Remember folks, before computers grand strategy games were originally played on game boards on tabletops. Most of the action should take place right on the main game map as if it were a tabletop board game. A good litmus test to tell if there are too many complicated sub-menus in a game is whether the game could be theoretically translated into a visually-appealing tabletop board game. Instead of sub-menus for viewing planets, my proposed solution would be to make it so that one could scroll with the mouse wheel to zoom in on a star system seamlessly to see the individual planets. That would work.

2. Stars should not be nodes. Instead, each planet should be its own separate "node." Separate planets should be treated in the same way that separate stars were in MoO1, with the only exception that....

3. Travel times to planets in the same star system should always be the same number of turns. (So if it takes 7 turns to get across the galaxy to one planet in a particular star system, it should take 7 turns to get across the galaxy to another planet in that same star system). Furthermore, travel time between planets in the same star system should always be 1 turn.

As far as how to handle individual planet scouting, there are two ways one could do it:

4a. Reveal how many planets there are around every star from the very beginning of the game. Then, when you order your scouts to explore a star, you have to order them to explore a particular planet in that star system.

4b. Don't reveal how many planets there are around each star from the beginning of the game. In this case, for unexplored star systems, you would only be able to target stars with your scouts. Then, when your scout arrives at an unexplored star, it by default arrives at and scouts the largest planet in the star system first. (In reality, the way the game could process this is that the game would understand that you were "targeting" by default the largest planet with your scout, except the user interface wouldn't show you that. That's how you could get around the issue of programming stars to act like nodes when unexplored, but then to not act like nodes once they are explored). At that point when you arrive by default at the largest planet in a star system, how many other planets there are in that system are revealed, and you then have to send your scout to each one to explore them (although, like I said, the journey between planets in the same system would always only take 1 turn). And after that point, you then have to specify which planet you are sending your ships to. You can't just send your ships to the star. You have to send your ships to either the planet you have already scouted, or to one of the unexplored planets.

5. Needless to say, no starlanes. You should be able to go directly from any one planet in the galaxy to any other planet in the galaxy (assuming adequate range tech). All should be treated equally as direct nodes. No nested nodes, in terms of having to travel to the star first, and then getting a sub-menu to decide which planet in that star system to travel to. Too cumbersome.

[Ray F]

I think the new MOO looks interesting. I am not wedded to the notion that it needs to be an iteration on an existing game in the series... none of the others followed that model. OK, so we now have a simplified version of MOO with starlanes and real-time combat. Might be fun. It doesn't take MOO1 away from me.

I understand that Java MoO is probably going to have a lot of these polishing improvements. Can't wait!

Just FYI, at the request of Wargaming.net, I've changed the name from "Java MOO" to "Remnants of the Precursors".

The dev blog has moved from java-moo.com to remnantsoftheprecursors.com .

I've also "branded" it under a studio called "Pretend Studios". I've set up pretendstudios.com as a clearinghouse for information about the game.

The twitter feed has also relocated from @JavaMOO to @PretendStudios

[Sirian]

OK, it is weird if my first impression from that video was... mostly positive?!

Really?

"Wait and see" is about the best they could hope for from a hardcore fan, considering the last installment in this franchise.

I checked Steam and initial reviews were at 90%. An hour in, that can only speak to a limited slice of the game, but they must have done some things right. Various grumblings seem mostly to center on the combat, but of course no 4X space game has ever delivered a 5-star combat experience, MoO1 included. ...

Wait and see, and keep an eye out?


- Sirian

[TheArchduke]

I was close to taking it early access to see how things are with this.

From the looks of it (quill18), it is trying to please everybody.

Considering it, I have not been disappointed this year with my games I bought so far.

[Sullla]

Some more thoughts after reading more articles and watching some people streaming the new MOO game on Twitch:

* I think Psillycyber's points are completely justified. This game doesn't play anything at all like the original MOO gameplay. It feels more like a Civilization game set in space, to be honest. The tech tree is a Civ tech tree, the colony management has structures AKA the Civ buildings, and moving the colony population around is much like swapping tiles in a Civ game. I also concur that this game tilts more towards Civ-style micromanagement as opposed to classic MOO-style macromanagement. Some of the gameplay systems are a bit silly, like the implementation of pollution and the way that population will revolt if morale gets too high. (Although it's not as bad as I first thought, since apparently only individual pop points will revolt and not the whole colony as in the pre-Civ4 days of Civilization.) And yes, the starlanes are a poor idea, and there's no reason to have 50 stars with 1-3 planets per system when you could simply have 100 starts with 1 planet each. All of those points are completely valid.

* At the same time, if the MOO reboot is essentially a version of Civilization in space... well, I kind of like the Civilization games! As long as I treat the game this way and not as a Master of Orion sequel, I think that I'll find myself enjoying it. I've looked through the tech tree, and while it's Civ tech tree and not a MOO variable ladder, I've liked what I've seen thus far. The designers really have incorporated a lot of the classic MOO features in there, like improved scanners and ECM and Battle Computers, obviously reconfigured somewhat for a different gameplay engine. But a surprising amount of the old concepts are still around in new forms.

* I also really like the colonization system in the MOO reboot. More planets seems to be always better (yay! no Civ5 penalties for expanding!) and they all have individual sizes, terrain types (like in classic MOO), poor/rich status, and gravity ratings. Some of the races prefer one type or another, and planetary specialization looks like it will be a major aspect of this game. Again, reminds me more of Civ4 than classic MOO but that's not the worst thing in the world.

* Apparently you can also transfer population between planets, which is a huge plus for me. Population-growing farm worlds, anyone?

I think it comes down to expectations. If you're looking for another game that's true to the classic MOO gameplay, this is not going to satisfy that. Fortunately this game doesn't have to be just like Master of Orion - we can always go back and play classic MOO if we want. And this game was never going to be a true sequel, as I explained in that editorial I wrote last year. If you're coming at this from the perspective of looking for a decent empire-building strategy game, well, it might be able to satisfy that. I think the MOO reboot just has a lower bar to clear for me. I'm not really expecting that much so I've been pleasantly surprised thus far.

This discussion also hammered home how much I want another solid empire-building game to play. The last few contenders that I've tried have left me feeling disappointed. I mean, as great as it is that we have people here at Realms Beyond still playing classic games from decades ago, how much fun has it been to have this thread and discuss something that's actually *NEW* for a change? I miss that.

I've seen enough that this is worth the $50 asking price for me, especially since I can get the game through GOG and not Steam. I'm going to try it out and do some streaming over this weekend; hopefully that will give everyone else some more information to ponder over. Let's hope this game holds up well to closer scrutiny.

[bjg]

If this is not MoO, why call it MoO? Just because they can (bought the name)? Sort of putting them on the "dark side".