Quote:Huh. Spreadsheet puzzle. I've heard that said about MOO3 and Endless Space with their sterile interfaces, but never the original MOO1. It's very anti-spreadsheet. The UI is old-school and only gives a table list of data in one spot.. the Planets listing.
Maybe I am misunderstanding. By "spreadsheet puzzle", are you instead meaning that you bring up your own spreadsheet in order to calculate optimal values and beat the game?
Indeed, I think a "spreadsheet puzzle" type of game would be one where you could effectively sandbox large parts of the game with a spreadsheet and quickly converge upon one optimal development path for every game.
Unmodded Civ4 had this problem to a certain extent. The main question when settling a new city was always "granary or monument?" (or rarely, walls). In my own private mod, I gimped the granary to offer only 20% food storage rather than 50% to help address this problem. In some cases, it might now make sense to build a library first, or a colosseum (+1 culture in my mod, in addition to the usual happiness bonus), etc.
SMAC also had this problem to a certain extent, especially because some of the later-game facilities were basically carbon-copies of earlier-game facilities, except more expensive (under the assumption that one's cities would have more production later in the game, and thus the time to build later facilities would be roughly similar with build times from earlier in the game). The problem, though, was that it was ALWAYS a better idea to build, for example, a fusion lab first (+50% econ and labs, 12-mineral-row cost) and then a quantum lab (+50% econ and labs, 24-mineral-row cost). I hear that Civ5 has this problem REALLY bad.
This problem didn't crop up too much in SMAC, though, because there were still enough different qualitative growth strategies to make it interesting (children's creches first for pop-booming? Recycling tanks first for well-rounded growth? Terraformers first to improve terrain? Supply crawlers first to take advantage of already-improved terrain? Energy banks to take advantage of ECON social-engineering per-city bonuses? Empath rovers to start gathering up native life? Command centers to start popping out elite impact rovers? The tradeoffs of each of these strategies were not straightforwardly calculable--more qualitative and heuristically-apparent than quantitative. That's what made it fun. To see what would work, you had to actually play it out. There was no way to tell by spreadsheet whether one strategy in a given situation would be optimal or not.
Compared to other 4X games, MoO1 was "missing" a lot of game features: city/base/planet facilities, complex terrain to improve, varied terrain improvement options, and social-engineering/civics options, so it could have very easily become a simplistic "spreadsheet puzzle" with only a couple of predictable optimal gameplay paths. There were three main things that kept MoO1 from becoming a "spreadsheet puzzle" 4X game:
1. Random tech tree
2. High-stakes diplo from the very early game onwards (a chance to lose from about 2374 onwards through the galactic council)
3. The fact that MoO1 is more of a game about fleets than planets
1. Random tech tree
Sure, if you had every tech available in every game, then I could probably describe an optimal growth path for MoO1: Improved Eco Restoration --> Improved terraforming +10 --> range 4 or 5 depending on needs --> controlled X environment depending on needs --> Improved industrial 9 and 8 --> nuclear engines (to speed colonization) --> better range, if needed --> better controlled environment, if needed --> improved robotics 3 (now that the initial horizontal colonization is complete) --> more improved terraforming --> more improved industrial --> more improved robotics --> atmospheric terraforming --> soil enrichment + whatever military technologies might be needed to be interspersed at various points to fend off the AI.
But what if you don't have improved eco restoration? Better hope you can get the sad cousin to improved eco, reduced industrial waste. What if you don't have that? Better change priorities...
What if you don't have the right controlled environment techs? Espionage, perhaps? What if you don't have improved robotics? TO WAR! What if you don't have any decent engines or weapons, though? Better figure out something clever!
A game without auto-repair plays entirely differently from a game with auto-repair. A game without good missiles, or beam weapons, or engines, or shields plays entirely differently from a game with those things.
2. High-stakes diplomacy
Not only can the AI crush you in the early game on impossible if you aren't careful, but the council votes starting coming about 75 turns into the game. It is rare for any 4X game to give you an opportunity to lose the game within 75 turns of the start. MoO1 had balls like that. If MoO1 came out today, I bet so many players would be complaining that, "I lost on the first council vote and didn't even get a chance to do anything about it! I demand a refund!" Yeah, there are some silly times when that happens. Still, better to be screwed by the RNG like that early in the game rather than later. In any case, though, that is the occasional price that one must pay, I think, to get the sort of high-stakes early game that MoO1 has.
This high-stakes diplomacy means that you cannot just sandbox your spreadsheet empire and ignore what else is going on in the galaxy. Even if you are not at war, you need to be possibly making trades, signing trade agreements, offering tribute, trying to keep yourself from getting diplomatically isolated while also trying to break up rival power blocs. You might even need to go to war and go on some bombing runs, not necessarily because it makes any military sense in the grand scheme of things, not necessarily because you will gain anything from it economically. It might be that you will never be able to invade that planet. It might be that you lose 7/8ths of your fleet taking down their missile bases. But maybe a good bombardment will boost relations with a key race and save you from an early game-losing dogpile...
This brings me to my third point...
3. MoO1 is about fleets, not planets
Most 4X games suffer from what I call the "tyranny of productivity." In most 4X games, the surest path to victory is to make your empire more productive. The economy rules all. Military forces exist to expand and protect your economy.
In MoO1 it is the opposite. The economy exists to expand and strengthen your military, your fleet.
Imagine that half of your empire were suddenly blown up. In most 4X games, that would spell certain doom. In MoO1, though, depending on where you are in the game, it might not matter at all.
If you already have a game-winning fleet, then it might not matter at all if the AI is glassing half of your planets...if you can glass theirs faster!
MoO1 strategic attack speeds improve throughout the game by up to a factor of 9 (from retro engines, warp 1, to hyperdrives, warp 9). Imagine if Civ4 had modern armor that could invade opponents 9 tiles per turn!
By the late game, all you need is a slim window of maybe 10 turns with a superior fleet, and you can jump from planet to planet, wreaking havoc and running away with the game. As a consequence, you can afford to, at a certain point in the game, sacrifice ALL future productivity potential in service of a plan of jumping on some special game-winning tech advantage that you might have over your opponents for a small, but decisive window. There is no "tyranny of productivity" here. The economy exists to serve the fleet, not vice-versa.
And for getting a game-winning fleet, it helps to have a good economy, sure, but it is not strictly necessary. There are so many ways of getting around a production disadvantage. Raw production power does not always win. Sometimes, you get just the perfect synergy to exploit a gap in the AIs tech tree or ship/missile base designs. Maybe they have piss-poor battle computers, or missile tech, or engines, or shields, or only range-1 weapons. And once you spot a weakness, or a potential advantage, you can focus your research to 6 times the normal rate in one field while your opponents are spreading themselves thin on all 6. You can go with espionage. You can trade. You can poach poorly-defended planets. You can design ships with perfect counter-measures to what the enemy ships have. There are tons of ways of evening-out a production disadvantage.
Sometimes you will end up slaughtering the AI a hundred-to-one, or a thousand-to-one due to some key qualitative difference in your fleet compositions. (In a recent game, the psilons had a 5000-strong fusion bomb fighter deathfleet. I got my hands on energy pulsars. A couple of energy pulsar ships later (about 1/200th the amount of production that they plowed into their bomber deathfleet), and that deathfleet was gone in an instant).
Sometimes the AI will come at YOU with an unbeatable fleet that you did not see coming (although you probably should have, if you had been scouting like you should have
), and there is no amount of ships or missile bases that would save you.
I don't know, does anyone get the sense that it is important in New-MoO to scout the AI and deploy different counter-measures that are specific to each opponent and each game? Or is every game a question of: maximize production at all costs (and do so following a fairly predictable optimal routine, to boot)?
Having a game that is fleet-centered rather than economy-centered is great because it is so much more strategic. The key to victory can be boiled down to a few key decisions of which technologies to research and which ship designs to produce, rather than having to go through grinding-out a small economic edge from proper micromanagement of the economy.
It is better to have a few big decisions with huge implications (and to see one's few strokes of genius play out) than to have a lot of tiny little decisions with small, incremental implications, where there's never any clear turning point of where you went right (or wrong) in the game. The former feels strategic. The latter feels tedious.
I can always identify where my MoO1 games hit the turning point. In one recent one, it was when I was able to start building a ship design with ion stream projectors to whittle down enemy missile bases (because they had no way to damage me with their pathetic missiles, and I had no way to damage them with their awesome shields and my pathetic beams and lack of anything beyond fusion bombs in the bomb category). In other games, it was when I got energy pulsars, or repulsor beams, or auto repair, or when I focused all of my empire's resources (to the detriment of long-run productivity) in a gamble to invade and capture one key planet which would start the dominoes falling (techs rolling in, better ships, better gropo, etc.)
Civ4 also had some memorable turning points in most games: getting the economy stabilized in the late-classical era, getting astronomy, getting rifles, getting railroads. But Civ4, much as I loved it for its historical flavor, tended to have the SAME, or similar milestones in most games (unless one were pursuing a totally unorthodox strategy, such as a culture victory). With MoO1, every game truly feels unique.
More and more, I feel like an updated and improved MoO1 would blow even my beloved Civ4 out of the water in terms of replayability and streamlined fun-per-time-invested.
