Forum Overview :: Master of Orion 1-2-3
 
The only review that matters. Unquestionable. by fabio 02/29/2016, 5:06pm PST
Long story short: this is 95% the exact...same...game as MOO2, except it's missing a lot of functionality, requires more strategic micromanagement busywork, and introduces a couple...questionable changes.

When I say exact, I mean EXACT. Same planet setup, same population management, same buildings, etc. They could have used this opportunity to iron out some of the balance issues from MOO2, but since all the stuff is the same all the same issues are present. Who the fuck would forgo battle pods to pick fighter bays?

Missing? Tooltips for half the stuff. Half the races. Customization. Leaders. Boarding parties. etc. This is the area I'd forgive the most since it's early access.

More strategic busywork. Pollution is back, but instead of automatically cleaning it, it builds up over time and you must shift planetary production queue to "cleanup", which works like trade goods in that it goes indefinitely. It will continue to go even after pollution is reduced to zero and it will not notify you of this. You must remember to check back. Very annoying. Another micromanagement nightmare is how population transfer now works. Remember how MOO2 had an abstracted freighter pool and you could automatically transfer population from the empire screen as long as you had the available freighter capacity? Now you must construct a "civil transport" which will subtract 1 population to give you a ship, which you must manually move to the destination planet, then select "deploy" once it reaches the planet to add one population. You must do this for every single population. Who thought this was an improvement? It's a nightmare and it can't be explained away with "early access". It's just horrible design.

The new changes are questionable. Combat is now RTS, but has no functionality. Hardly any difference between participating in combat and auto resolve. MOO2 combat was only a problem once fleets passed a certain size; it was just fine for early to mid game. I guess larger battles will run faster but you have shit control the entire game.

There are now "star lanes" connecting stars you must follow, creating chokepoints and doing away with range and the ability to deepstrike if you had better range or were able to set up a forward base. It's debatable if this is a good thing.

The game now simply ends after a certain number of turns with winner determined by score. There is no way to turn this off. The council vote screen leaves out vital vote information.

I'm not sure if it worked this way before, but diplomacy will now constantly bombard you with dumb requests like trade star maps and vital tech in exchange for a paltry number of credits. Your relations will degrade every time you turn down these ridiculous offers until they issue an outright tribute demand and then declare war on you. This "entropy diplomacy" feels stupid.


So right now it's an incomplete version of MOO2 with no promising innovations in sight and a few changes for the worse.
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The only review that matters. Unquestionable. by fabio 02/29/2016, 5:06pm PST NEW
 
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