As I just learned, the legendary "Master of Orion" series, which I personally consider to be a forerunner of Gal Civ 2 and 3, will get a sequel:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-09-wargaming-announces-master-of-orion-reboot
The studio/publisher behind this will be wargaming.net, famous for its "World of Tanks" series.
Big mistake, impossible to live up to the hype and nostalgia.
Would be nice to see but Gal Civ far outdoes any of the Master of Orion 2 or 3. The only thing Master of Orion has going for it is it is about as close to balanced in terms of how you spend your time between turns and how long you need your turns to be to be entertaining as you can get.
Indeed. Also, according to what I've read, Wargaming is only going to publish it. The actual devs are NGD, an Argentinian developer. But when regarding classics like MoO, I'm uncertain if a small studio will be able to handle the extreme weight that will come with it.
If it's just a port, I already have one from GOG. Dismal graphics, but I don't play 4x for graphics.
I'll keep an open mind and hope for the best.
Really? All it needs to do is not be as terrible as MoO3, which isn't asking much to begin with.
Well after Moo3 I'm not going to get too excited until it's out and reviewed. In anycase GC3 is going to be my main obsession for a while yet, but more games in the genre are always welcome.
Moo2 was very unbalanced the creative trait trumped everything, still fun though.
It will be compared to MoO2: Nostalgia Edition. This is Impossible to beat especially if MoO was your first 4x experience.
I'm not a fan of Wargaming, but I'll try to be optimistic about this. I really wish Stardock had won the auction for MoO.
I have little faith wargaming will bring the same experience. Ok, I have some after reading the article. I just have little faith in the dumb down approach to classic games I keep seeing over the last decade. At least stardock has been "keeping it real" per-say. I wish stardock would have got the bid for the copyright over wargaming. I was heart broken.
I would keep an eye on M.O.R.E., It seems to have a better chance at recreating that experience. Been following their progress over the last year and they already made the bold statement they wanna match or do better than moo2. It is their inspiration for the game itself.
As a backer I will be shocked if M.O.R.E. ever makes it out the gate.
I hear ya on that, with all the effort they have put in though its a bit to late to turn around now. I Backed em as well and am just being patient by remembering back when you would read about a sequel coming out and waiting years later to buy it off the self. MOO3 really burned me after all those sleepless nights waiting to get my copy in the mail only to find out they should have stuck with what worked in the 2nd place. There is allot of ruff out there but few diamonds.
Saying anything outdoes MOO2 on a 4X forum is quite likely to get you assassinated, you know.
And quit hating on MOO3. Buried underneath the horrible interface and game-breaking bugs there was actually a top-drawer strategy game. With all the necessary balance-and-fix mods and 12 months of intensive training on how everything works, it's really rather good; I still have it installed and play it from time to time. Frankly, the fact it made it out the gate at all given the insane convulsions the production team went through is pretty impressive. There was apparently an alpha build from ~6 months before release which was far closer to the original vision of the game and actually rather better built than the final release was.
Personally, I don't even compare Galciv with Moo because they are different games to me.
Master of Orion was civilization in space. The timing of them and the relative ground breaking strength of both places them in lofty positions. Moo was always about how to guide your race through this journey to dominance. But the journey was focused with a specific rule and option set. It was a game for optimizers and min/maxers, it was a game that you kept going back to refining and tweaking. It was also a game that (largely due to the time period) was never meant to be DLCed or modded. The ruleset was pretty well balanced and dominating that ruleset was the name of the game.
Galciv is a space sandbox. The whole feel and approach is different. I care about lore, I explore different race tech trees. I try ridiculous endgame ship designs and I look forward to that DLC with new everything to play with. You can definitely min/max galciv and play cut-throat. Galciv got MP much more right than Moo did (granted thats because MOO3 was the MP version and it failed on several fronts) but the fact is still there. So that aspect definitely exists in Galciv but it also has a more casual enjoyment factor that Moo didnt really have. I never really roleplayed Moo...I played it to knife my enemies before they even saw me coming...
I love them both and the more of both franchises that comes out the better.
I do agree that resurrecting MOO will be particularly difficult though. The guys who did MOO3 weren't idiots. They just failed at a rather ambitious attempt to make MOO mp. They tried to do what Sins would later succeed at. Except Sins also modified the scope way down whereas MOO tried to automate large portions of it. Personally, they need to take some lessons from Galciv3 on MP because turn based can definitely work just fine. The devs for Galciv3 need significant credit for simple QoL features like free order and turn planning while waiting etc.
This announcement has me somewhere between "yay", "ugh", and "meh".
Memories of MOO1 bring back visions of late nights and red eyes in the morning. MOO2 did much of the same, just with better graphics. MOO3 hit the trash can pretty much within a few weeks of purchase. To see my beloved MOO resurrected will be a blast from the past. I know that it will be a daunting task, but I won't underestimate the devs as my hope and faith in their goals and ideals will not waiver.
I find it odd because Star Drive 2 was recently released -- http://stardrivegame.com/ -- and it is unabashed admission that it is modeled to be almost precisely as a remake of MoO 2. (Star Drive 1 was a remake of MoO 3 and the publishers got tired of hearing that it was a BIG mistake to redo 3 instead of 2.)
And it had tactical combat which I really wish GalCiv 3 would of had.
If it is as good as MOO2 but updated to modern graphics and such and had tactical combat as well as a Ship Designer (ala. Galciv 2 and 3) and if it were easy to customize races and such then it would by pass Gal3 as best Space 4x TBS game in my book. Oh almost forgot, and be MP which is a must for me anyway:)
And it had tactical combat which I really wish GalCiv 3 would of had.If it is as good as MOO2 but updated to modern graphics and such and had tactical combat as well as a Ship Designer (ala. Galciv 2 and 3) and if it were easy to customize races and such then it would by pass Gal3 as best Space 4x TBS game in my book. Oh almost forgot, and be MP which is a must for me anyway:)
That was part of the balance, you spend that time in the ship editor customizing so that you could actually play it out in the game. The enemy AI was actually not terrible at combat either, early on they could be brutal with their competitive advantages giving them the one up on resources, and better tech. I wish they'd implemented tactical combat at least at a basic level in Gal Civ instead of espionage but that is too small for the scope of the game. Even if you could only really control one battle it just isn't about that in the space opera that is Gal Civ. I do think making it even a tiny bit more interactive though would benefit the engagements immensely, even if you could only pick targets for certain groups.
I mean right now there are 5 or 6 classes of ships. If you could only choose which type of group targets who, and get some interaction into it, it would benefit a lot. Keep it real time and on the fly so that battle still only take 2 minutes or so but still. It could be a lot more interesting than it is right now for a tiny bit of code. Right now its like watching Flo's 2 millionth Progressive auto insurance commercial. I abhor her character too btw.
Unfair for the AI? So what. The AI is going to get months or years of programming to un-suck while the player is only going to get more experienced but probably not all that much better at space battles, unless they "exploit" which seems to be plenty easy to do lots of other area.
Yes tactical combat would be a welcome addition and round out the experience incredibly. In MOO it was commonly referred to as almost its own sub-game, there were no "mini-games" back then lol. One of the reasons MOO had so much replayability and great balance.
The amount of time it takes to do a tactical battle is never a concern for me in any game I play and I'm the type that will always use it. And in a game like this to be able to command ships you designed would be beyond awesome. Now I'm not saying take out the auto combat as it is now, I just would never us it if real TC was in the game.
As a Generation X PC gamer, Master of Orion II remains probably one of my most favourites PC games of all time. So many countless hours I spent with it. I really hope to see something like MOO2, but with much better graphics, sophistication, and other enhancements. I agree that the turn based combat, while fun, would be too slow and clumsy. A real time format, much like GC III's or Gratuitous Space Battles would be better.
You don't know what you're talking about.
sounds interesting. i remember playing MoO. didn't have a PC back then, so i played it with a friend. then proceeded to bug may parents until i got a PC - just to play MoO and Civ 2 MoO2 was also pretty awesome. spent loooots of much time with those games. MoO3 was ok-ish. nothing more. unfortunately.
will be interesting to see if they can actually deliver a decent game. i doubt it will be as good as MoO or MoO2 - there's no way for a new game to live up to the nostalgia, but i wouldn't mind another decent space 4X game, even if it doesn't live up to the hype.
Partially correct. SD was based on the MoO series, but tried to take a genre that was traditionally turn-based and make it RTS: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/24/stardrive-2-flips-its-strategy-script and http://stardrivegame.com/
The need for a SD2 in just a couple years (when most 4X games seem to be on a five-year cycle) was to shift the game back to being closer to MoO 2. [I saw somewhere on the SD forum that the dev was saying that SD2 needed to be closer to MoO 2 than SD1 was.]
Partially correct. SD was based on the MoO series, but tried to take a genre that was traditionally turn-based and make it RTS: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/24/stardrive-2-flips-its-strategy-script and http://stardrivegame.com/The need for a SD2 in just a couple years (when most 4X games seem to be on a five-year cycle) was to shift the game back to being closer to MoO 2. [I saw somewhere on the SD forum that the dev was saying that SD2 needed to be closer to MoO 2 than SD1 was.]
Also, SD2 is a mixture of RTS and Turn based, where SD1 was purely RTS.
There is only 1 way for this new version of MOO to be better than SD2. They need a development staff larger than one person. I'm not sure if thats possible
Owning both SD2 and GC3 (and never owning GC2 or SD1, almost 2 decades since I played Civ or MOO), it really comes down to play style. Both games have some very unique features, which are great. Both games have some pathetic downfalls, which are sad. Replayability is quite important, and GC3 wins that by a landslide IMO.
I disagree with the GC3's devs thats combat cannot go RTS. They would just need auto-battle resolutions to be fairly close to the AI's RTS battle skill (which may be a challenge). In SD2, the auto-battle resolve is horrible, forcing you to play battle RTS. Its so bad, that in SD2, in RTS mode, you can just not move your ships at all and always do better in RTS mode than auto-resolve. But, the fights dont take that long, in both games I spend much more time planning and executing empire decisions per turn, than battles. GC3's ship designer is fantastic, but its only for asthetics, and I realized WTF am I spending so much time making ships look cool, when it doesnt matter for game play.
If GC3 added SD2's ship design ability and RTS fighting, it would be hands the best. GC3 has already overcome the SD2 downfall of ridiculously large fleets, due to its logistics system (which can itself be a flaw, due to a well designed Uber Fleet destroying dozens of fleets and taking no damage). This BEGS for RTS, as its not a lot of ships to control. Of course, both games struggle with land combat, as its a SPACE game.
Turn based is the least of my worries, as star wars empires at war was fully RTS, and you simply spent most of the game on pause turn based also lets multi-player be quite viable. As well, the hex system isnt an issue at all, in fact, much much easier to figure out range based situations. EXCEPT I AM F-ING TIRE OF COUNTING HEXES. PLEASE ADD A FUNCTION WHERE ALT+LEFTMOUSE SHOWS DISTANCE.
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