Re: Three Moves Ahead: Lost in Space
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 9:02 pm
To Win MOO2:
Racial picks - +population/production picks. Stuff like: unification(always), tolerant, subterranean, rich/large homeworld, +pop growth +production with -spying, ground combat, accuracy
Strategy - Sell your starbase on turn 1. Save up your money as you make a beeline for Automated Factories, then use your extra cash to buy them early. Start colonizing any decent planet nearby. Make a couple 1-shot MIRV-nuke ships that fire then jump out with an unarmed scout or two hiding at the back of the battlefield until the missiles hit to destroy anything up until mid-game. If you run encounter an enemy, send in your MIRV ships to trash his forces, bombard his people to nothing, colonize. Build bigger ships with more and more 1-shot MIRV-nukes. Repeat. Win.
I grew up on MOO2 and my buddies would spend whole weekends running 4-player hotseat games, shuffling into the closet where his parent's computer lived to take our turns.
The closest thing I had played before MOO2 was Lords of the Realm II and some New World conquest game that I can't find the name of but had chess-board style combat. In a side note, LotRII was neat since rather than just making soldiers, you'd make their weapons and armor. When you had the proper equipment, you could take some conscripted peasants, throw the right equipment on them and, viola! Men-at-arms or archers or whatever.
Back to MOO2, the main things we liked about it was the array of race customization options. Later, we found out many were traps and several were generally pretty optimal but until then it was neat seeing how different custom combinations worked out. There's also a fairly optimal path through the tech tree, but until we figured it out, it was neat seeing how different tech choices effected your game.
Essentially, it was an optimization puzzle that was fun until you found the top couple paths, then there was little reason to play any more.
Another fun game from around the same time as MOO2 was Imperium Galactica II. My favorite parts (from probably-flawed and somewhat idealized recollection skewed by time and nostalgia) were, in no particular order:
• Part of a government instead of running it the whole thing. You were a local governor given one planet and a couple fleets to manage. If you managed to survive and complete the quests your government sent you, they'd reward you by giving you a couple more planets and more fleets to manage and your challenges would get correspondingly more difficult. In a semi-related aside, the general 4X tech and population growth rates always seemed to fast to me - having a population double in 10 years or advancing tech so fast that your most recent upgrade was obsolete by the time the first ship carrying it was finished building always bothered me.
• The quests were neat. You might have a quest like "this freighter of yours has an alien virus on it, if it reaches its destination planet, the virus will kill millions - and the captain refuses to turn around". Stuff that made it feel a bit more lived-in and like you were actually part of a government rather than the usual omniscient dictator floating across your empire of slaves whose only form of self-will was dropping your morale %.
• Building ships was cool. Each ship size simply had a few slots of particular types. A cruiser, for example, might have two turret slots, two defense slots, and engine slots, and a miscellaneous slot. A cruiser MKII would cost a lot more, but add another turret slot or something.
Once you built the ship hull, you'd have to build the stuff to put on it separately, then drag it onto your new ship. It made refitting neat as you would just send your ships back, drag their Laser Turret MKIIs off and put your new Fusion Turret MKIs on. Then you had to decide to sell those old lasers or keep them in case there was a sudden pirate invasion and you needed them to throw on the corvettes you'd scrap together to fight the pirates.
• Because of situations like the last one, you might have situations where you had your Top of the Line battlefleet that had powerful ships with all the latest weapons, defenses, and sensors, then a couple back-water reserve or back-up fleets with equipment that was two-generation-old hand-me-downs from your main fleet since you could afford to build all new ones.
• Sim-city style planet building. This was cool as each planet had a unique terrain map and structure limitations that prevented you from just building identical copies of all your other colonies. Also, when your planet was invaded, the map was the battlemap your units would fight on and buildings would take collateral damage from the tanks fighting in the streets.
• Slow(ish) tech advancement. Tech was focused pretty specifically and there were tough decisions even within tech areas. Do I take Lasers to MKIII so they are cheaper and incrementally more powerful or go for the crazy-expensive but vastly more powerful Fusion MKIs that will make the two cruisers I can afford to equip them on almost unstoppable? Do I upgrade my Arena buildings to Stadiums to help with my morale issues or go for the better Weaponry Research Labs to help get better weapons for the looming conflict with my neighbor?
• Never enough money to do everything you want. There was always more stuff to build and you never had enough cash to do it all. Hard decisions like "Do I upgrade the guns on my back-up fleet or upgrade the power plant at the planet they are protecting so I can build more stuff" was always coming up. I think these sorts of brutal hard both-right (or both wrong but have to pick one!) decisions are my absolute favorite moments in gaming in single player games - multiplayer have the "pulling off some crazy and/or incredible plan your opponent never anticipated" moments that can be as good or better, but they aren't really a factor in single player.
With all the cool stuff, there were a few big limitations that severely limited the game, the worst of which were:
- Pre-scripted plots. While there were a few small random events, the main campaign for each race had the same challenges come down from your superiors in the same order. The first time you played the campaign it was great, but there was little-to-no replayability.
- Space combat was lame. You could have no more than 6 stacks of ships (I have never liked stacking units as I want to see my 100 cruisers blasting away instead of a cruiser with 100hp shooting) and there was pretty much no maneuver. They'd just start in battle range and start blasting. Early game when you only had a handful of ships in a fleet it was fine, but late game the battles just never felt epic.
- Sim-city style planet building. With a few planets it was neat. When you had 12, trying to remember which planet you were putting the Civic Research Labs on and which one was the one that had the food shortages or needed a new generator was a drain. I'd have a couple sheets of paper just keeping track of what I needed on which planet.
- No "open-universe" games. The campaigns were scripted and there was no "non-scripted" option. While there was some variability in replays, the it was never enough for me to complete a campaign more than once.
Racial picks - +population/production picks. Stuff like: unification(always), tolerant, subterranean, rich/large homeworld, +pop growth +production with -spying, ground combat, accuracy
Strategy - Sell your starbase on turn 1. Save up your money as you make a beeline for Automated Factories, then use your extra cash to buy them early. Start colonizing any decent planet nearby. Make a couple 1-shot MIRV-nuke ships that fire then jump out with an unarmed scout or two hiding at the back of the battlefield until the missiles hit to destroy anything up until mid-game. If you run encounter an enemy, send in your MIRV ships to trash his forces, bombard his people to nothing, colonize. Build bigger ships with more and more 1-shot MIRV-nukes. Repeat. Win.
I grew up on MOO2 and my buddies would spend whole weekends running 4-player hotseat games, shuffling into the closet where his parent's computer lived to take our turns.
The closest thing I had played before MOO2 was Lords of the Realm II and some New World conquest game that I can't find the name of but had chess-board style combat. In a side note, LotRII was neat since rather than just making soldiers, you'd make their weapons and armor. When you had the proper equipment, you could take some conscripted peasants, throw the right equipment on them and, viola! Men-at-arms or archers or whatever.
Back to MOO2, the main things we liked about it was the array of race customization options. Later, we found out many were traps and several were generally pretty optimal but until then it was neat seeing how different custom combinations worked out. There's also a fairly optimal path through the tech tree, but until we figured it out, it was neat seeing how different tech choices effected your game.
Essentially, it was an optimization puzzle that was fun until you found the top couple paths, then there was little reason to play any more.
Another fun game from around the same time as MOO2 was Imperium Galactica II. My favorite parts (from probably-flawed and somewhat idealized recollection skewed by time and nostalgia) were, in no particular order:
• Part of a government instead of running it the whole thing. You were a local governor given one planet and a couple fleets to manage. If you managed to survive and complete the quests your government sent you, they'd reward you by giving you a couple more planets and more fleets to manage and your challenges would get correspondingly more difficult. In a semi-related aside, the general 4X tech and population growth rates always seemed to fast to me - having a population double in 10 years or advancing tech so fast that your most recent upgrade was obsolete by the time the first ship carrying it was finished building always bothered me.
• The quests were neat. You might have a quest like "this freighter of yours has an alien virus on it, if it reaches its destination planet, the virus will kill millions - and the captain refuses to turn around". Stuff that made it feel a bit more lived-in and like you were actually part of a government rather than the usual omniscient dictator floating across your empire of slaves whose only form of self-will was dropping your morale %.
• Building ships was cool. Each ship size simply had a few slots of particular types. A cruiser, for example, might have two turret slots, two defense slots, and engine slots, and a miscellaneous slot. A cruiser MKII would cost a lot more, but add another turret slot or something.
Once you built the ship hull, you'd have to build the stuff to put on it separately, then drag it onto your new ship. It made refitting neat as you would just send your ships back, drag their Laser Turret MKIIs off and put your new Fusion Turret MKIs on. Then you had to decide to sell those old lasers or keep them in case there was a sudden pirate invasion and you needed them to throw on the corvettes you'd scrap together to fight the pirates.
• Because of situations like the last one, you might have situations where you had your Top of the Line battlefleet that had powerful ships with all the latest weapons, defenses, and sensors, then a couple back-water reserve or back-up fleets with equipment that was two-generation-old hand-me-downs from your main fleet since you could afford to build all new ones.
• Sim-city style planet building. This was cool as each planet had a unique terrain map and structure limitations that prevented you from just building identical copies of all your other colonies. Also, when your planet was invaded, the map was the battlemap your units would fight on and buildings would take collateral damage from the tanks fighting in the streets.
• Slow(ish) tech advancement. Tech was focused pretty specifically and there were tough decisions even within tech areas. Do I take Lasers to MKIII so they are cheaper and incrementally more powerful or go for the crazy-expensive but vastly more powerful Fusion MKIs that will make the two cruisers I can afford to equip them on almost unstoppable? Do I upgrade my Arena buildings to Stadiums to help with my morale issues or go for the better Weaponry Research Labs to help get better weapons for the looming conflict with my neighbor?
• Never enough money to do everything you want. There was always more stuff to build and you never had enough cash to do it all. Hard decisions like "Do I upgrade the guns on my back-up fleet or upgrade the power plant at the planet they are protecting so I can build more stuff" was always coming up. I think these sorts of brutal hard both-right (or both wrong but have to pick one!) decisions are my absolute favorite moments in gaming in single player games - multiplayer have the "pulling off some crazy and/or incredible plan your opponent never anticipated" moments that can be as good or better, but they aren't really a factor in single player.
With all the cool stuff, there were a few big limitations that severely limited the game, the worst of which were:
- Pre-scripted plots. While there were a few small random events, the main campaign for each race had the same challenges come down from your superiors in the same order. The first time you played the campaign it was great, but there was little-to-no replayability.
- Space combat was lame. You could have no more than 6 stacks of ships (I have never liked stacking units as I want to see my 100 cruisers blasting away instead of a cruiser with 100hp shooting) and there was pretty much no maneuver. They'd just start in battle range and start blasting. Early game when you only had a handful of ships in a fleet it was fine, but late game the battles just never felt epic.
- Sim-city style planet building. With a few planets it was neat. When you had 12, trying to remember which planet you were putting the Civic Research Labs on and which one was the one that had the food shortages or needed a new generator was a drain. I'd have a couple sheets of paper just keeping track of what I needed on which planet.
- No "open-universe" games. The campaigns were scripted and there was no "non-scripted" option. While there was some variability in replays, the it was never enough for me to complete a campaign more than once.