Forum Overview :: Mischief Maker's Maker's Mark
 
Stars in Shadow by fabio 07/16/2017, 11:28pm PDT
So this game sets out to be a better MOO 2 sequel than the MOO remake.

It half succeeds. It's closer to the strategic aspect of MOO 2, and the combat is mostly lifted straight from it (with visual and feedback improvements).

It keeps some of the bone headed mistakes though. Like transports can be assigned to a pool to abstract the carrying capacity of your empire, but it only works for transporting food. To transport colonists you must take the transports out of the pool and manually ferry population around. Why wasn't this abstracted like in MOO 2? In fact where's the empire planet summary screen? Oh right they forgot that like the remake did.

The interface is really poor. Windows will pop up and a wrong click can advance something behind the window. Windows cannot be closed by right clicking or any other way but clicking on the 'X' in the top right corner like it's LITERALLY Windows (TM).


Production is weird. Along with food and money you must mine metal, which is used to build ships but not planet buildings. I don't get it. Why not just have ships limited by production? You can have a billion factories but can't build ships if you don't have enough mines producing metal. Who felt this was another step that needed to be added to industry? Why is it only for ships? MOO fleets were always limited by production and upkeep. As far as I can tell there is no ship upkeep here. It's limited only by having enough metal to build them in the first place.

They also retain the 4X feature of assigning production to income/research, but instead of a portion of your production being converted to that resource, it doubles that resource. A planet with 100 research but 1 production will become 200 research 0 production. A planet with 1 research but 100 production will become 2 research 0 production. Huh? That means factories literally do nothing except reduce build time; the production cannot be converted and ships are limited by metal which is produced by a building other than factories. The best thing to do with factory production is to to queue up an infinite number of transports which cost no metal or upkeep and assign them to your pool (each surplus transport point produces some money).

This could be a great MOO 2 successor if they cleaned the thing up.
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Stars in Shadow by fabio 07/16/2017, 11:28pm PDT NEW
    Re: Stars in Shadow by Ice Cream Jonsey 07/17/2017, 6:55am PDT NEW
        Transports actually do cost metal! by fabio 07/17/2017, 9:59pm PDT NEW
 
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