New MoO announced

[Sirian]

In addition to building/rushing the same buildings on every new world, the One Right Choice is to send pop to the new worlds from those at the cap.

This hasn't been my experience.

The order in which a colony gets a Research Center from me varies greatly -- probably more than any other building. Early colonies, it's a much higher priority for me. As the colonies pile up, I find it taking a back seat to growth-oriented buildings. This is just one example. Hydroponic Farms first vs Automated Factory first is a question I answer differently depending on the relative strength of food and production cells on a given planet. Poor planets have the Crust Prospecting option, but not until it's been unlocked. Harsh biomes have the Fungal Farm in the mix. Good biomes have the Deep Sea lab in the mix. Different growth rates require Morale buildings at different times in the order, while planets' strategic exposure may mean defense bases are needed sooner rather than later.

As for Civil Transports, I haven't found the value that you imply. Each Civil Transport built requires both a production investment and a population regrowth cost. When regrowing the population, you could slow boil it but you may see 30 or more turns between transports -- and you also have to build new colony ships from somewhere. If you add population to food to regrow the population more quickly, you have to pull them off research. This means both a production and a research cost, net net, to move a population point -- which the new home might be able to grow by itself in 8 turns or less. I generally prefer to build another colony ship rather than a civil transport. Two colonies are better than one with 2 pop points in it.

Strong biome world can grow its own second pop point in a flash. Why spend for a civil transport to there?

That leaves weak biomes. If mineral rich, they can build their own buildings quickly, so what help do they need? If poor, what good does adding another population point really do anyway? The colony only starts with 1 food income, so to even support a second population point on the worst-case biomes, a food building has to be built (or bought) first. These low biome worlds have better-than-average odds of a Dark Crystal resource, which would mean a second population point is only speeding up production by a third or so. Also, what is the rush? This planet is going to cap out at 3 or 4 or 5 population.

Every colony type has a path forward. Strong production can churn its own buildings quickly. Strong food can grow a second then a third pop point quickly. Weak food or production won't benefit as much from incoming population, and meanwhile they have extra buildings they can build that will help get them going without much extra delay. ... The planets that most need help would benefit the least from it. The planets that would benefit from help can grow their own given a few more turns.

Building two colony ships instead of one and a civil transport seems like the better answer to me -- so much so, I don't even bother with the transports. My capped out worlds are busy building war ships and teching up my civ.

It's possible that your management is that much stronger than mine, and I'm overlooking something here. We'd need parallel games -- an Imperium, more or less -- to determine for sure. The game's AI isn't ready for that yet, though.


The one place I could see bringing in Civil Transports is invasion. If bio-weapons are used and you can resettle the planet with its buildings intact, busing in some extra workers sounds like a splendid idea.


Finally, I want to say, MOO1 economy was pretty bland. Its best trait was its smooth scaling through the course of the game. Other than that, it was pretty thin -- yet the game was grander than that. I disagree with the notion that fleet was everything. I often had little fleet in play, relying on massive missile-base buildup to protect my assets. Missile bases upgraded over time while ships grew obsolete, so one only built ships to go on offense (or under dire pressure), and they were a "use them or lose them" investment. Obtaining a winning fleet was the ultimate military objective, but I often won games without one.

What really made MOO1 shine was the built-in mechanism to give the AIs fatal flaws: ship engines stuck on slow, shields stuck on Class I or II, missile types stuck on Hyper-V... There were a hundred ways a civ could be lacking in something critical, giving the player a lever to work with, something to exploit, adapt around -- for a limited amount of time. Then the window would close, but perhaps another would open.

The quality of the AI opposition -- supported (or not) by the quality of the game design and balance -- is the ultimate determinant of fun in single player. The AI for this game is still a work in progress, and until work on it stops, no one will have an accurate verdict on the quality of the game.


- Sirian

[Ray F]

Finally, I want to say, MOO1 economy was pretty bland. Its best trait was its smooth scaling through the course of the game. Other than that, it was pretty thin -- yet the game was grander than that. I disagree with the notion that fleet was everything. I often had little fleet in play, relying on massive missile-base buildup to protect my assets. Missile bases upgraded over time while ships grew obsolete, so one only built ships to go on offense (or under dire pressure), and they were a "use them or lose them" investment. Obtaining a winning fleet was the ultimate military objective, but I often won games without one.

I totally agree about the MOO1 economy being thin. I think that's a function of 1993 PC memory limitations and simply the state of the 4X world at the time.

But turtling strategies only worked because the AI would not exploit that. That allowed for cheesy wins that would never work against real players. Laying low and playing nice until you could build your "glass the universe" fleet is just a function of a bad AI.

What really made MOO1 shine was the built-in mechanism to give the AIs fatal flaws: ship engines stuck on slow, shields stuck on Class I or II, missile types stuck on Hyper-V... There were a hundred ways a civ could be lacking in something critical, giving the player a lever to work with, something to exploit, adapt around -- for a limited amount of time. Then the window would close, but perhaps another would open.

I dunno. These are also significant AI flaws that provide an open door to winning on Impossible mode. And by "significant", I mean immersion-breaking. There's no way an AI should be using Warp-1 ships 50 turns after learning a faster technology. It's essentially game-breaking.

The quality of the AI opposition -- supported (or not) by the quality of the game design and balance -- is the ultimate determinant of fun in single player. The AI for this game is still a work in progress, and until work on it stops, no one will have an accurate verdict on the quality of the game.

I totally agree here. I'm not a proponent of the idea that the AI needs to be the best possible player. It just needs to be good enough to give an average player a challenge. And by allowing sub-optimal play, there's a lot more room to vary the AIs by personality and make them feel different from each other.

Attacking a pacifist world and it has planetary shields? Check.
Ruthless fleet is using spores? Check.
Ecologist worlds have maximum planetary improvements? Check

There will always be knobs for hardcore players who think that the standard AI is not challenging enough.

[Sirian]

But turtling strategies only worked because the AI would not exploit that. That allowed for cheesy wins that would never work against real players. Laying low and playing nice until you could build your "glass the universe" fleet is just a function of a bad AI.

I disagree. The military balance favored defense by a wide margin. Bases were cheaper than ships, more powerful, and were upgradable through time at low cost. Ships were costly, and had to be scrapped when obsolete or left to fight against newer models at a disadvantage. The only disadvantage the defenses had was their immobility, requiring a high amount of defense at every location, and being wholly unable to go on the attack.

The AI would break through that defense when they could -- and they certainly could, as they did it to me many times. But they had to get two generations ahead in technology to do that, so if you could manage to stay close enough, to keep your defense wall viable, the late game was purposely designed to see the combat system break down to some extent, so that games would not go on forever in a stalemate condition. If the AI let you hang around until the end of the tech tree, it was doomed. But I hardly call that cheesy. Keeping up with a dominant AI well enough on tech required successful spying and/or picking up techs in invasions of weakly-defended AI worlds such as mineral poor ones or very small planets with fewer bases.


I know you're assembling your own spiritual successor to MOO1 and you have your own ideas. But subjective judgments like "cheesy wins" seem narrow in scope to me. I played the game for 11 years. That's far longer than the shelf life of any game, and in that time I learned almost every crack, wart and missed opportunity in the design -- and still kept playing, because other games just weren't as good.

In all the time I played, I saw the end of the tech tree only a handful of times. I won when I could, often at low tech levels. A runaway AI could overrun defenses with enough of a tech lead -- bombs too strong for your shields, engines too fast to let your bases get in enough hits, etc. Stack it up and the defenses would fall. The balance was so good I still consider it a fine ambrosia, even though I haven't had any more taste for the vintage in over a decade now.

How you could dismiss all of that with a wave of the hand and label it bad AI is beyond me. Point me to a better AI?


Civ5's AI is smarter, with more ability, than Civ4's AI -- but because Civ5 tactics are so much more complicated than "stack of doom", the net result is a weaker performance. ... You can likely come up some AI examples that have abilities that the MOO1 AI does not, or lack flaws that it does have, but finding an overall game experience with a more successful AI performance would be a tall order. An AI is only as good as its ability to manage the game it is designed to operate.

These are also significant AI flaws that provide an open door to winning on Impossible mode. And by "significant", I mean immersion-breaking. There's no way an AI should be using Warp-1 ships 50 turns after learning a faster technology. It's essentially game-breaking.

When the AI invested several dozen times my entire civ's GDP in to one of these slow models, there's logic to not erasing that investment too quickly. (I've seen the opposite, when the AI had a winning fleet with slow engines that they disbanded on the eve of declaring war, so they could make way for a newer design. ... Woops!) The AI could have handled this special case better, having "slow" and "fast" fleets, where it had some fleets with none of the slow ships in them, but that's the type of thing the genre should have been iterating on over the last 23 years. Instead we've had a long, dark pursuit of complexity and realism, and a slew of bad and mediocre games.

Of course you could write a clinic on the flaws of the MOO1 AI, from the perspective of someone who played the game for many years and had access to others who pointed out the flaws that they found. No game can stand up to that level of scrutiny, though. So what would be the point? ... That's ultimately when I retired from MOO1: after running the Imperia and discovering that the game had more cracks in it than anybody suspected -- more than Civ3 or Civ4 did. After that, it just wasn't quite the same, but that doesn't invalidate the years of fun I had with it prior to seeing the game exposed to that level of scrutiny.


All games end. A player will, sooner or later, exhaust the fun potential of a game. Even a beloved game that a player is willing to replay with no new experiences or discoveries grows old eventually.

However, just because a game has grown old for a given player does not mean the game has gone bad, or that it must suck, or that the list of negatives that grew over time while the positives faded away from over-use should be the final judgment on the game. (I hate Civ1 with a passion now, but that hate was earned slowly over years of playing through its flaws until every ounce of its wonders and goodness was experienced and experienced again, and utterly exhausted. Play a game too long and your love for it may turn to bitterness, because you "can't go home again" and can't abide its flaws a second longer, not even to try to recapture one more experience with its brilliant parts. ... I wonder if you haven't reached that point with MOO1 now, where I stopped playing it *before* I developed a hatred for it.) Others may have played a game less, have different "buttons" and tastes, and still be having fun with it even when for someone else it is long dead and buried.

MOO1 deserves respect of the highest order -- at least from me. No other "4X" game had legs to match it. I retired all the others sooner, with fewer hours played, and kept playing MOO1 without ever reaching that "overplayed" point of coming to hate it. Others see it differently. Some may have played it until the hate arose. Some may still be playing it today. Your mileage may vary.


- Sirian

[Ray F]

But turtling strategies only worked because the AI would not exploit that. That allowed for cheesy wins that would never work against real players. Laying low and playing nice until you could build your "glass the universe" fleet is just a function of a bad AI.

I disagree. The military balance favored defense by a wide margin. Bases were cheaper than ships, more powerful, and were upgradable through time at low cost. Ships were costly, and had to be scrapped when obsolete or left to fight against newer models at a disadvantage. The only disadvantage the defenses had was their immobility, requiring a high amount of defense at every location, and being wholly unable to go on the attack.

The AI would break through that defense when they could -- and they certainly could, as they did it to me many times. But they had to get two generations ahead in technology to do that, so if you could manage to stay close enough, to keep your defense wall viable, the late game was purposely designed to see the combat system break down to some extent, so that games would not go on forever in a stalemate condition. If the AI let you hang around until the end of the tech tree, it was doomed. But I hardly call that cheesy. Keeping up with a dominant AI well enough on tech required successful spying and/or picking up techs in invasions of weakly-defended AI worlds such as mineral poor ones or very small planets with fewer bases.


I know you're assembling your own spiritual successor to MOO1 and you have your own ideas. But subjective judgments like "cheesy wins" seem narrow in scope to me. I played the game for 11 years. That's far longer than the shelf life of any game, and in that time I learned almost every crack, wart and missed opportunity in the design -- and still kept playing, because other games just weren't as good.

But what I am talking about being "cheesy" is that the AI would not exploit your turtling defense even so, as you know, it had the huge technological and production advantages to do so. We've all seen the games where the AI builds a fleet that could glass the galaxy and end the game, but it just sits in orbit at one of your destroyed colonies, waiting for a warp-1 colony ship to arrive in 6 turns. But when a player builds that fleet, he finishes the game.

Maybe exploiting that kind of AI behavior is necessary for Impossible, but it is still very immersion-breaking from me. It's one of those "flaws" that make me dislike the game and want to do better. Almost all of these flaws are in the AI, which is what makes MOO1 such a great game.

Instead we've had a long, dark pursuit of complexity and realism, and a slew of bad and mediocre games.

I agree completely with this. The problem with computer-based wargaming (which is what 4Xs emulate) is that players expect that all of these minute details that are impossible with a boardgame are possible, and desirable, with a computer version. So we end up with increasing complexity and obfuscation of the basic mechanics that made the games enjoyable in the first place.

[Psillycyber]

You make some great points, Sirian, about the interesting decisions in colony management for MoO: CTS. Perhaps there is more depth there than I thought!

Finally, I want to say, MOO1 economy was pretty bland. Its best trait was its smooth scaling through the course of the game. Other than that, it was pretty thin -- yet the game was grander than that.

Part of MoO1's grandness might have a little something to do with the sheer numbers of ships you'd be dealing with at times. It is an important part of the flavor that the game tells you that you are sending tens of millions of soldiers on transports and directing thousands of fighters. MoO: CTS's flavor seems to be scaled smaller. Even though MoO: CTS is scaled consistently, I can't help but feel that things feel "small" when a large fleet in MoO: CTS is one with half a dozen ships in it, and where a planet with 12 workers is a "large" planet. It just doesn't feel the same. It feels more like a puzzle game like chess, and less like an epic slog of civilizations.

I think this is one reason why people still remember those gargantuan middle-to-late game wars from Civ2 and SMAC so fondly, despite the fact that there were so many unbalanced and cheesy game mechanics that could be manipulated, in hindsight. One thing was for certain: there were LOTS of units. Civ4 too. Those late-game SODs might have not been very subtle in their gameplay, but they certainly had a feeling of heft to them.

As long as there is good user interface to simplify the movement of large numbers of units, I see nothing wrong with having a large number of units in the late-game per se. Where it becomes annoying is when there is no good user interface for grouping things together, and you end up having to issue dozens of orders each turn. (SMAC, of course, did NOT have this sort of interface. Civ4's stack grouping features were a godsend in this respect!)

One advantage to older game design was that a game designer wasn't automatically expected to individually render each ship in nice 3D graphics (and, to be fair, the ship designs in MoO: CTS do look exquisite!). Instead, a small bit of pixels with a number in the thousands attached to it was all you needed to both inform you of the necessary in-game information and provide fuel for one's imagination to run wild. I don't know, I guess something like MoO1's approach (which was borne out of the hardware limitations of the time) would not fly for this generation of gamers.

I disagree with the notion that fleet was everything. I often had little fleet in play, relying on massive missile-base buildup to protect my assets. Missile bases upgraded over time while ships grew obsolete, so one only built ships to go on offense (or under dire pressure), and they were a "use them or lose them" investment. Obtaining a winning fleet was the ultimate military objective, but I often won games without one.

Okay, fair enough. Maybe I haven't quite hit the nail right on the head in diagnosing the difference between MoO1 and MoO: CTS (and other recent space 4x games). Let me try again.

I still think MoO1 is, at its heart, not a colony management game. It is a space empire game. What's the difference?

For example, let's say that, as a game designer, you wanted to include an economic improvement mechanism in the game that would provide additional research proportional to each unit of citizens. In MoO: CTS, there are colony buildings for that. There is perhaps some interesting strategy about when to build these buildings at each planet. Fair enough. But these are more decision points with individually less oomph. In any case, it makes MoO: CTS feel more like a colony management game. In MoO1, this mechanic would have been implemented as a technology, in that as soon as you researched the technology, it would automatically be applied to every planet in your empire. It's a different level of abstraction.

In MoO1, once you research the technology, it is assumed that your governors will do what they need to do to make use of this technology. We see this in other things in MoO1. For example, missile bases automatically upgrade as long as you are feeding a trickle into the DEF slider. No need to go into a "missile base production window" and redesign your missile bases. Also, waste cleanup techs. They automatically get applied. No need to build "Improved Ecological Recycling Centers" at each planet when you research Improved Eco Restoration. That said, some things in MoO1 are kind of built like planet facilities: you can choose when to terraform your planets, when to build stargates, when to build factories, etc. But it is all abstracted to a very basic level. There's not some special terraforming building for each level of terraforming. There's just one slider, and Improved Terraforming +20 is qualitatively the same thing as Improved Terraforming +10. The third set of factories that you build when you research Improved Industrial Robotics III are just built with the exact same slider as all of your other factories (albeit they cost more). And the game even gives you the option of auto-building this stuff with 0%, 25%, 50%, or 75% of empire-wide planetary spending. Little things like this make MoO1 feel more like a space-empire game, I think.

What really made MOO1 shine was the built-in mechanism to give the AIs fatal flaws: ship engines stuck on slow, shields stuck on Class I or II, missile types stuck on Hyper-V... There were a hundred ways a civ could be lacking in something critical, giving the player a lever to work with, something to exploit, adapt around -- for a limited amount of time. Then the window would close, but perhaps another would open.

I think that MoO1 would work even without these fatal AI flaws. The difference would be, you would have to play on "average" difficulty instead of impossible. But the same principles would apply to make MoO1 a fun game. It would still be about sniffing out weaknesses and coming up with clever counter-measures. A competent AI that doesn't get production bonuses wouldn't be able to race ahead in the tech tree so easily. They wouldn't be able to cover every weakness at once. The trick would be to engage in consistent scouting and see what the AI passed up on researching. Maybe the AI would use its existing technology to full effect, but at a lower difficulty level it would have less technology and more tech holes in the first place that it would not be able to compensate for, no matter how optimal its ship design algorithms were. That's how one would have to play if the AI were significantly better. And I don't think it would be any less fun.

[Alhazard]

Good point on that the planet characteristic really determines your build order, which I have to think about more. However, I would like voice 2 other problems with this version.

So far, I don't think research, food, or production overflows. Why is this way? Seems like it just adds more annoying micro.
No option to change blueprint on civilian ships except when you research a new speed. In my current game, I researched advanced space factories then planetology so I can build new planets in 10 turns, not 20. Turns out they still are 20 turns because there is no way to update the blueprints. I am a sad panda.

[HansLemurson]

Production and Food do spill over, but it's not obvious to see since the numbers aren't shown. It's hard to tell that the first turn of production on your new project is 20% wider than it should be, especially with nothing to compare it against. Look at the production on the second turn and you will see that the bar is shorter than what you accumulated on the previous turn.

However, there IS a bug where when you rush-buy, all spill-over production is lost. On the very first turn of the game, all your production will be wasted because the colony ship was pre-bought. There are even some edge-cases where if you rush-buy an item with 1 turn left, you are actually paying money to destroy production.

[Alhazard]

Yes I take it back. There is overflow although I wonder why it is not evident until the 2nd turn.

[Sirian]

You make some great points, Sirian, about the interesting decisions in colony management for MoO: CTS. Perhaps there is more depth there than I thought!

Adding depth without increasing complexity is a basic design challenge. Sid is a master of this technique. That's how Railroad Tycoon and Civilization spawned whole new genres. He showed us all the way to layer simple vectors one over another to create interesting webs.

Some of the depth you find in the new MOO comes through my influence on the game. Certainly, adding depth is a general goal of mine in any project to which I am contributing.

In any case, it makes MoO: CTS feel more like a colony management game.

The decision to have the new MOO follow primarily in the footsteps of MOO2 was made (and even announced to the public) before I joined the team. So the Civ-style "improvements" at the settlements was baked in to the new design.

I always felt that in MOO2 there really was little reason to vary the build order of colony improvements. So any depth present in the new game's colony improvements system would represent an innovation.

Granted that if a given player hates to manage production centers, this game might not be their cup of tea. But the colony management is very Civ-esque, and as far as I know, pretty much everyone hanging around these parts is a fan of at least one Civ title. ... This game is not MOO1 reborn, but it's not an MOO2 remake either. It's a fusion of the old MOOs, the modern push for increased accessibility to expand the audience (and try to follow Civ5's footsteps as a sales blockbuster), and its own particular individuality, in what new it brings to the genre.


In game design, there are always compromises that have to be made. Some are imposed by hardware limitations (such as Civ5 having to live within a 32-bit architecture to sell its game over Steam in 2010, which dramatically shrank the game's ability to be played on larger maps, among other things). Some are directives from owners of the franchise IP, such as in this case the IP owners deciding the new MOO would follow MOO2 in some key design aspects. Some are marketing realities, such as the fact that poor graphics will hurt sales, or that future-oriented games have a smaller market than past-oriented games. Some are mechanical limitations, in that design problems have a range of solutions but every solution known to be possible comes with its own drawbacks: pick your poison; there is no ideal solution.

If one has too much idealism, it will put them on the sidelines, where they have little or no influence on games -- or on anything else where large teams of people are necessary to produce an outcome. (Politics comes to mind.) But just because a developer learns to manage the art of what is possible, so as to stay in the game and be part of the action rather than retire in protest, doesn't mean the fires of idealism have been snuffed out.

This is why there is still magic in the small development team, especially the one-man project. They have the freedom to ignore some of those compromise pressures and aim their game for a smaller market niche, if they wish.

Even though MoO: CTS is scaled consistently, I can't help but feel that things feel "small" when a large fleet in MoO: CTS is one with half a dozen ships in it, and where a planet with 12 workers is a "large" planet. It just doesn't feel the same.

Except, MOO1 labeled its citizens as "millions" and the new game is scaled to have a citizen represent a billion.

How many people can Earth sustain? Ten billion? Eleven? Twelve? ... The new game sets up Terran Medium planets at 11 billion max. That seems pretty fair to me.

If you can abstract, in your mind, that one ship graphic in MOO1 with a number next to it is actually multiple ships, why not make the same leap here? You pointed out that graphical rendering of the ships imposes a hard limit on the number the game can show, but does that have to mean an empire's entire navy consists of a dozen ships? I think there's close to a dozen ships in one carrier group, in the US Navy. How many total ships do we have? How many tanks? Infantrymen?

If the relative scale is right, then use your imagination to abstract to how many actual units one of these "unit icons" represents.

I get what you're saying. MOO1 presented its abstractions in a more persuasive way. I even agree with that. But truly, one of the new game's pop points is a billion people, not one person -- and each ship is a fleet group, not a lone ship. Etc. The abstractions just bring it all down to a manageable scale.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

But what I am talking about being "cheesy" is that the AI would not exploit your turtling defense even so, as you know, it had the huge technological and production advantages to do so. We've all seen the games where the AI builds a fleet that could glass the galaxy and end the game, but it just sits in orbit at one of your destroyed colonies, waiting for a warp-1 colony ship to arrive in 6 turns. But when a player builds that fleet, he finishes the game.

The AI not choosing to glass the whole galaxy could have a moral aspect to it. Not saying that it DOES, but it could. A civ might feel justified in taking over a planet -- through destroy-and-resettle or by invasion -- out of pressure to expand their own territory, but not make the leap from there to wanting to exterminate everybody.

You're presuming the AI's job is to win the game, but perhaps that isn't true. (Here is some food for thought.)


The AI sitting around a few turns waiting for a colony ship to arrive is not a bad thing to do. Perhaps its whole fleet isn't needed, but that would vary according to the map and game particulars.

There is no doubt that "Hot Potato" mechanics in MOO1 are flawed, but this is something it took me some time to unravel, to understand in detail, as to how and why the AIs could become paralyzed in to incessant fighting over one planet. This is one of those cases where "simple" AI rules turned out to be inadequate. ... Once again, however, this is less of a design flaw in MOO1 and more of an opportunity to learn from a game and improve on it in future designs. Until we saw the Hot Potato mechanic unfold in game after game of MOO1 played on high difficulty, nobody realized this trap existed for the AI.

This is (again) the kind of thing the industry SHOULD have been iterating upon and improving on over the last quarter century, instead of running off in to the ditch of individually-rendered combat ships and getting stuck there, never progressing the genre. But it is what it is.


Yes, the AI should not become obsessed with attacking the easiest target. Yes, its obsession with these hot potatoes harms its overall performance, and yes this can be rightfully cited as an AI flaw. However, not every game ends up with multiple AIs trading hot potatoes back and forth. Given a situation where a runaway AI stomps out rivals completely, and there is nobody left to steal back the potato and restart the cycle, the AI is capable of conducting a winning 1v1 campaign.

So the AI has a flaw with running ships with old engines -- mostly in games where the AI suffered gaps in its engine options on its tech tree. Not every civ has that gap in every game. The AI is a much more fierce beast when it gets several engine upgrades in a row and doesn't get too heavily invested in to a huge fleet of slow-moving ships. I recall plenty of examples where the AI fleets were buzzing around with speed 3 or 4 engines and posed a considerably more formiddable threat.

Again, I wonder if you aren't stuck on the negatives to the point of forgetting the positives. That the MOO1 AI sometimes performed spectacularly should not be forgotten. ... If you need reminders of how it sometimes did remarkably good things, you can re-read my spot reports from 2004, on my final run through the game before I retired from it for good.

Sirian's MOO1 game reports


- Sirian