New MoO announced

[Sirian]

Someone's bound to spot my name (and Soren's) in the credits eventually. Guess it's time to let the Mrrshan out of the bag. ...

I'm not authorized to engage the community or answer questions. The game is going in to Early Access, not final release, but that does mean players have the chance to weigh in with feedback and requests and perhaps have influence on the details of the game. You might not want to limit your feedback to just this corner of cyberspace, but if you do, at least I will be watching.

* ...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'm not sure "Civ in space" would be my description, but the marketing folks have been emphasizing that this game is more in the vein of Orion 2 than Orion 1, and Orion 2 had lots of Master of Magic mixed in to it -- which derived a lot from Civ. An attitude of letting this game be something new and taking it as that might offer the best chance to enjoy it.

* I also really like the colonization system in the MOO reboot. More planets seems to be always better (yay! no Civ5 penalties for expanding!)

Yay.

So yeah, that Low Grav Toxic Small chunk of rock in the corner of your system, it doesn't have to sit there unused all game, cluttering up your screen. Send some (very) unfortunate souls over there to live without losing 5x their value somewhere else. At least, that would seem to be something you could do. Might not want to do it with the FIRST colony ship, though.

Again, reminds me more of Civ4 than classic MOO but that's not the worst thing in the world.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts after playing it some. And from any other RBers who decide to take the plunge.


- Sirian

[Sullla]

Ha, well that is very good news for the MOO reboot! I'm glad to hear that Soren and you have had some design input on this one. Please feel free to let me know if there's a forum or some other place where I should be posting feedback. Although things have changed a bit from a decade ago when I had all day to test these games, I'm happy to pass on my thoughts. Here's the list of what came to mind from today:

- This game is a lot of fun to play, at least while I'm still learning things. I've only played the very early stages of two games, but a Bulrathi opening (production heavy) and a Sakka opening (population growth heavy) felt noticeably different, that that's a very good thing indeed.

- Research/Food/Production colony bars: they show very nice tooltip information on mouseover, and the fact that this information can also be seen from the galaxy screen is very helpful. However, I would really like to see the actual numbers for these projects: how much food does the colony have now and how much does it need to grow to the next pop point? This information is not displayed anywhere in game. I can derive it but I shouldn't have to do. (It's like not knowing how much food is needed to fill up the box in Civ.)

- It would be really nice to have some kind of visible indicator of scanner range. I have no idea where my ships/planets can see and where they can't see.

- There needs to be some kind of list of the structures that have already been built on each planet. The planet visuals look kind of nice but are very impractical in terms of presenting the information cleanly. I can't imagine that players are intended to scroll around and highlight every single one of them individually in the late game!

- I'd like to see more information about what causes population to start revolting at low morale. I can see the revolting people very nicely, however I don't know why hitting 80% instead of 90% suddenly makes them unhappy. Why that number and not another number? It feels completely arbitrary right now.

- Love the easy ability to scroll between colonies on the colony management screen. That's a huge win in my book.

- For future options: I would like to see the ability to turn off Tech Trading and turn off the minor factions (which aren't even in the Early Access build). I'm also assuming that a random opponent option will be added at some point; it's kind of weird right now how the player can only pick opponents, therefore always knowing who they are ahead of time.

- The planetary resources need more tooltip information on what they do. For example, I'm looking at a new colony with "Dark Quartz" that says it provides a bonus to production. What is the bonus? How does it manifest itself? Am I getting flat production, a percentage bonus - what's the deal? This is true for all of the resources, more information needed about their benefits.

- Is there a way to change the name of planets? Minor detail but I haven't been able to find it.

Thanks Sirian. I'm looking forward to seeing how this game evolves over the upcoming months in Early Access.

[Sirian]

Morale is a simple mechanic, but has an unintuitive aspect -- and so far an inadequate explanation.

Imagine your population points each represent a block percentage of your population. Let's say you have 3 population. Each of those represents 1/3 of the total, or 33.3%. Now let's count up. First population point is numbered at 0. Second one is numbered at 33.3. Final one is numbered at 66.7

Only the starting value counts, as shown by my numbers there. If the starting value of a pop point is below the Morale number, that pop point works. If above, that unit strikes.

So in the example, if morale is 70%, the highest starting number is 66.7, NO pop points on strike. If Morale is at 60%, the highest starting number is above that, that unit strikes but the others do not.


That's probably enough for you to get it, but I'll offer another example. Let's say you have Morale at 85%. This is a common number to have if you set 2BC tax rate and have one morale building built. At size 6, your worst starting number is about 83, still under the number. You won't get your first striker until size 7 and your second until size 13 or 14, I forget which.


The percentage number is listed correctly, but the ratio of unhappy people is actually the converse: 100 - current morale = % of strikers, but a pop point has to be WHOLLY in the anger zone to go on strike. No fractions.

In practice, it is easy to manage once you get the concept. Base morale is 80. Homeworld / Capital gets a bonus. Other buildings offer bonus. Each BC of tax above 1 hurts morale by 10%.

In practice, if you keep default tax rate of 3BC per pop, all but your homeworld have 60% morale and will get striker at Size 3. Build first (cheap) morale building by then and you're good until size 4. Get too many size 4 worlds going and it may be better to reduce taxes to 2BC per than to sustain all those strikers, as the second morale building is going to take some time to obtain.

At 100% morale, no strikers no matter what size pop you have.


Now if you can condense this explanation on to a tooltip, I'm all ears.


- Sirian

[Psillycyber]

I don't mean to keep being a negative nancy about this game, but that morale mechanic sounds heavy on the math and micro when you might have 30 planets to keep track of by the end of the game.

Is there any quick summation that the game does for you to tell you how many citizens empire-wide you are losing out on due to morale? That would be one way to quickly assess, "Okay, if I lower the tax rate by 10%, which translates into 20 less BC per turn in taxes, I get to work 7 additional citizens empire-wide."

But then you would still have to individually assign all of the newly-employed citizens to food, production, or research at each planet. That right there would almost encourage me to fiddle with the tax rate very infrequently. Whereas it sounds like optimal play would be to fiddle with it every turn to squeeze every little bit of advantage out of it. Any time that the player knows that he/she must make a trade-off between micromanagement and optimal play, it is frustrating because you know that you are either wasting some resources if you don't micromanage or wasting your time IRL if you do micromanage.

MoO1 actually has a similar problem with the espionage slider. Every time you change your espionage spending, you have to go around to each planet and re-check the eco waste sliders to make sure none of your planets has gone over to being unhealthy. So it encourages me to just not bother with the espionage slider that much (or, if I am changing the espionage sliders, then making sure to keep the overall espionage spending the same while re-allocating it between different races), even though that might not be the optimal policy a lot of the time. It would have been very easy, though, for MoO1 to automatically re-adjust the eco-sliders at every planet every time the empire-wide espionage spending was changed. (Perhaps the "totally-not-a-remake-of-MoO1-in-Java-game" can address this problem?)

[Sirian]

I don't mean to keep being a negative nancy about this game, but that morale mechanic sounds heavy on the math and micro when you might have 30 planets to keep track of by the end of the game.

That's a fair concern.

There are several simple mechanics that overlay to prevent me offering a quick answer.

* Taxes are empire-wide and dial the morale up or down by 10% per click.
* Buildings offer morale boosts at individual worlds that construct them -- if you have them unlocked via research.
* Population units occupy "cells" on your planet screen. A striker doesn't work like in Civ3 (for instance) where they are removed from the board and have to be put back manually. Instead, they stay in their cell, but simply become unproductive and offer no yield. So for example, you could dial the taxes up to 5BC per population (from the empire screen) and then glance over planets to see how bad the strikes are hitting your planets, then dial the taxes back down to where you had them before, and the strikers simply go back to work. Nobody has been moved around by the tax-change and strike mechanics.
* Food and Industry are generated mostly from workers operating food or production cells on your planet. These cells have a diminishing return, and any strikers will of course be assigned to the weakest cells in use, so having 20% of your population on strike does not usually translate to losing 20% of your output.
* No more than half your planet's maximum population can be assigned to industry, and no more than half to food. The food and production are separate and mutually exclusive. Science gets whatever isn't on food or industry. You can run maximum possible food and industry outputs, but that planet will have nobody left to put on research.
* Dialing up taxes past the point of what your morale infrastructure can erase comes at a cost. That cost will be different at each world, and can be managed differently at each world. Strikers can hit food, production, or science, but the value of these things will be different at different worlds.
* Because a maximum of half your population can be on industry, this means you can fiddle the tax rate / morale setting a couple of ticks without having any impact on the industry output of a filled up planet, if you choose. So by the time you actually have an advanced morale infrastructure, you could dial the taxes up and pay all the cost from your science rate -- which is an effect similar to the slider from Civ1-4, but you also have the option at a given world to pay from some from industry.
* Filled up worlds won't need to run surplus food and you probably don't want them to starve, so taking from food would only happen at worlds growing their population.

Now, combine all of that, and you get some interesting choices to make. You can be free of strikers at mature colonies by the middle game, if you choose. If you want or need more revenue, you have to trade strikers to get it, more so the more tax you squeeze out of your planets -- and this will take some micromanagement if you want total control over which cells go on strike, so you may want to change your empire tax policy infrequently. Dialing the taxes up is where the work lies. Dialing it down simply means everybody goes back to work.

Morale, early on, is still a question of tax revenue. You can dial your taxes all the way down to 1BC per population, however, and be free of most morale micromangement even in the early game, if that is your preference. Whatever additional tax rate you desire, or feel compelled to engage, has to be paid for via lower morale and the managing of morale mechanics.


In practice, this works out smoother than my Sirian-length explanation might indicate. Perhaps Sulla can weigh in after playing with the morale mechanics first hand.


- Sirian

[Ray F]

Not going to lie... managing morale through taxation was one of the things I never liked about Civ or GalCiv, and I was always glad that I never had to deal with it in MOO1.

Typically morale varies by city/colony, which means you have to manage it at the city/colony level in order to maximize efficiency. Empire-wide controls like the tax rate are inefficient because you end up under-taxing some cities/colonies to avoid morale problems at other cities/colonies.

In MOO1, happiness was essentially abstracted into your ECO technology level. As your ECO rose, your citizen productivity rose. The only time you had to do with actual "unhappiness" was when rebellions were caused by sabotage. Those happened infrequently and used an existing combat mechanic to fix.

[Sullla]

Some video footage from my game yesterday for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45DsPkrd6QU

I've found the tax / morale thing to be a relatively minor thing in practice. In my two games thus far, I ran the 3 BC tax early on, then swapped to the 2 BC tax after about 30 turns, and eventually changed permanently to the 1 BC tax (which has no morale penalty at all). It's not a slider that you'll be changing very often, since your planets will be configured under the assumption of a default tax rate. Or another way of looking at it, the higher tax rates are to provide money until your economy is able to become self-sustaining through infrastructure, at which time it's best to dial it down and get rid of the morale penalty. Honestly, it works pretty well in practice from what I've seen. The issue here is more with the tooltip help being unclear, less so the gameplay mechanic itself.

By the way, the Galactic Council is back from classic Master of Orion, and it works exactly the same way: top two in population are nominated, everyone gets to vote or abstain, 2/3 pop needed to win. Your votes = your population. The only difference is that now votes are 30 turns apart instead of 25 turns (and by the way, the interface really should tell you when the next election will be held!) That's my only small gripe about this, mostly I'm extremely pleased to see the Council come back in the same form. That bumps the MOO reboot up from "pretty good" to "good" all on its own for me.

Sirian, my biggest question is about how ship upgrades are supposed to work in this game. I cannot seem to get a faster engine onto any of my ship designs! I selected the "upgrade" option for my colony ship and troop transport ships when new engine tech came in, but it doesn't seem to have done anything. I also don't seem to be able to design a new colony ship myself, only military ships. I must be missing something here - can you point me in the direction of additional information? (I think the ship editor can become pretty good with some more work, but it's clearly not finished right now and lacking tooltip help.)

[Sirian]

(I think the ship editor can become pretty good with some more work, but it's clearly not finished right now and lacking tooltip help.)

Ya. The auto-update on ships is a WIP, obviously.

One thing the auto-update does not (yet) do successfully is upgrade parts of custom designs. The auto-update will undo your stuff and put in its stuff. It won't upgrade your custom work: it will replace it. Unless you trust it to do everything you need, you will have to customize everything yourself. You can skip auto-updates, in practice, by clicking on the auto-update button (which you can't avoid) then go to Done without actually upgrading any ship classes.

Another thing about the auto-updater is that it is better with some components than others. Some, it just fails to handle. The AI is (obviously) using the auto process for all its designs, so as the auto process improves, AI use of upgrades will improve a lot too. ... Work In Progress.


There are the military ships, and there are the civilian ships. Go ahead and auto-update the Civilian ships when a new Engine type is opened. I think that's the only way to get them to use the new engine (and then you have to pay a minor cost to upgrade existing ships, which needs a starbase or military outpost to do). Civilian ships don't make use of any upgrades other than engines. Oh, I suppose you have to upgrade Space Factories when you learn the tech that doubles their output.

Military ships, if you are never letting the auto-update touch them, will stay as you have designed them, and you can go in and manually tweak only the details that are new. For engines, click on the engine component and select the fastest. (Is there any reason not to choose the fastest? I can't think of a valid one.) There are some minor space and production costs for better engines.

A ton of stuff about ship widgets is poorly explained. ... WIP. ... For instance, I recently learned that giving a beam weapon the ability to fire on all arcs costs accuracy. It shoots more poorly than one focused to a single arc. How much more poorly? Well, yeah. This kind of info would be useful, wouldn't it?


You asked where else you could post Feedback. I know of three locations:

masteroforion.com forum.

Steam forum for Master of Orion.

GoG forum.

The game says to post at moo dotcom, while the community manager says to post in the forum attached to the service where you bought the game.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

Empire-wide controls like the tax rate are inefficient because you end up under-taxing some cities/colonies to avoid morale problems at other cities/colonies.

Ya. The benefit for empire-wide controls, and why I liked them in GalCiv1 (for instance), is that you can't micromanage them. You pick a macro level that best suits you then move on. You sacrifice some control in exchange for a game that plays much faster.

Obviously, if all controls in the game are that hands-off, there wouldn't be much of a game left. So it's a matter of design focus and priority, where to direct player's efforts and attentions. That comes with costs, but freeing attention for other (hopefully more fun to manage) decisions can be a net plus. It's a matter of taste, so of course not everyone will prefer this vs that system to simplify.


GalCiv1's spending slider, though (for instance), was one where older colonies had nothing useful left to build for their industry, while newer ones still had plenty to do. The prohibitive cost of wasting huge amounts of resources at the mature colonies meant it never made sense to even settle new colonies past a certain point, because they just weren't worth it. You would REX what you could, then be done settling for the rest of the game, shifting first in to "build taller" mode then on to military action. Every game the same pattern.

In the new MOO, there are no mechanics prohibiting new colonies past a certain point. We let the details of a particular map instance set the options for how much is available to settle. As Sulla pointed out, tax revenue is not the only source of income. Other sources open up more as the game progresses, reducing the relative importance of the tax rate. The tax rate is still there if you want to tap it, but what would you do with the money? You could rush buildings at new colonies. You could upgrade old ships en masse. You might try a lot of diplo spending. ... If you have a need big enough, you can dial up the taxes for a while (with or without bothering to optimize each striker) and get extra cash. Isn't the option to do that better than not having the option?

Sulla may dial his taxes down to 1BC but I have yet to do that. Rushing a new building or two at a new colony does a lot for their growth curve, while rushing a starbase may keep a border colony alive in some situations. My thirst for credits is a bit high, I admit.

If not a global tax rate, then individual tax rates at every colony? Right now, it's easy to remember a single tax rate setting. You dial it up or down and know what kind of strikers to expect everywhere. Strikers specifically hit older colonies harder than new ones, so newer colonies aren't punished in to the dirt even if taxes are set pretty high. If taxes were per planet, that would be a lot more to manage and to remember, and for how much real gain? Keeping the system simpler helps keep the game pace moving along smoother.

Players do have control at individual planets, through the morale buildings. If taxes are set to where completing all your available morale buildings erases all (or enough of) the strikers, then it's a matter of suffering strikers only while there are even more urgent things to be building at a given colony.


- Sirian

[bjg]

Guys from mmorpg.su think (in Russian) that this is casual, online/multilayer oriented, or both. They mention a total luck of "intelligence" in AI - this is hard to justify by the "early access", AI isn't something you "add later" (usually). A "dumb Civilization" is a quite good definition, which is actually in line with all people are saying here.