End this MOO3 support

[Vince278]

All are valid points. I'm still playing the game right now (heavy modded).

[bakalov]

The main problems of the MOO3 game, imo, are:
- unfriendly user interface
- no tools for macromanagement besides the development plans, ant these are not real tools, just an unclear way to tweak the AI.
For the tactical combat what I miss is an overview of the whole battle. What kind of general or admiral you can be when you cannot see the whole battleground?

And here are some concrete issues:
- Much of the items do not have context help.
- There are items that are not longer used but still can be seen in the user interface (like these concerning robotic FLUs).
- There is no good enough tool to keep the planets with a single type of pop. Sometimes I want to eliminate or send elsewhere a certain part/type of the population. When setting migration I'd want to be able to tell what kind of population I want there. I want to forbid migration of certain races to certain planets.
The need of doing this is not my freak, it is "natural" or "logical".

-For the lack of tools for macromanagement I mean some simple things that can allow easy and efficient handling of the planetary production like global settings (for the entire empire) and local settings (for each planet), and a checkbox on each planet wheather to use the global settings or not.
These settings could be something like:
- Min and Max AU spent per industry point - or - minimum efficiency allowed (1:2 for example) - I do want to limit the AI from "wasting" the 1M AU bank I have collected with great effort only in a few turns by setting the production at 20% and causing a terrible inefficiency this way (this is an example for one very STUPID thing that the AI does). The efficiency exists as a term and there MUST be a way for it to be managed. I do not say "remove the AI", just give it some limits.
-The same applies for science.
-I want that I can globally or locally lock the ratio between the AUs spent for production and science.
-The queues should be longer and there should be adjustable predefined queues so the player can switch them.
-I liked the feature in galciv that allowed global changes of production: "All planets building S1 should now change to S2" - very useful when introducing new ship designs. Even an option to cancel current unfinished production of S1-s can be added. S2 even can be "nothing" and this can be used to stop a kind of production.
-Allow bombardment/attack on outposts.
-The detection and cloaking are a vital part of the battle, and there is no good enough explaination how do they work. I can never know how much ECM and ECCM is enough and on which ships they should be, and how this wil affect the detection of the whole task force.
-Make a minimap and/or allow zoom change for the tactical combat.

These are a few very simple things (or at least the greater part of them) that could have made the game much more playable and enjoyable. Most of them require very little effort to be implemented. I wonder how the designers did not guess about them themselves :PP

[Stormhound]

The designers did guess about some of them. One or two of them are even in the game...but I leave it to you to figure out which, after that last comment.

[ChristopherC]

It is for me disappointing and puzzling about a computer game when some one such as me, admittedly with no programming knowledge, but a deep love of strategic computer games and, I feel, an intuitive feel for what constitutes a good one, can see in a game such as MOO3 bugs and deficiencies which are so glaringly obvious that the programmers and developers should have noticed them even if they had been wearing sunglasses in front of their computer screens!

However, improve the fonts, add a powerful scenario editor and, if possible, soup-up the combat engine and this could be a classic game, which is why I have stuck with it for so far. But the urge to try out Haegemonia: Legions of Iron or Frontier Wars, now gathering dust on my shelves, is growing ever stronger. And while I am not won over to Galactic Civilisations yet, maybe the scenario editor in the offing may seduce me.

I just dont understand why these games shouldnt be getting better and better. Every year there is more powerful software, let alone computery, so developers and programmers shouldnt have to re-invent the wheel or fail to make sure the wheel they do invent is perfectly round! It seems to me that now one ought to be able to write increasingly sophisticated strategic games almost to order and with a minimum of costs and time. They seem to be able to do it with shoot-em 'up games! Incidentally, I imagine that fifty years from now our home computers will be so sophisticated that we will just able to say to them that we feel like a new strategy game or shoot-em up game, name a few preferences and ideas for it and they will cook them as quickly as the microwave cooks up a meal. But admittedly I may be getting into Matrix territory here.

The absolute industry standard for space games is Alpha Centauri. The graphics may not have been very pretty but when it had added a few mods, with its logical and involving gameplay and a powerful scenario editor it seems to me to be a lone eminence in space strategy. Maybe one day, they will make a 3D version of it - which, if they did, might finally put paid to any social life I ever thought of having but that is opportunity cost for you!

Live long and prosper.

[ChristopherC]

PS. I just thought to add.

There is absolutely no point in investing in a game where the publishers wont stick with MODs, new scenarios and Add-ons for a year or two, at least. It isnt as if there isnt a commercial logic in that. I just dont see why INFOGRAMES couldnt have made such a commitment. They could make more money out of an add-on, couldnt they? More power to Stardock for making that commitment with 'Galactic Civilisations'. That is the way forward and I do hope they reap the profit from it as we reap the benefit! (No, I dont work for Stardock, even though I praise them. I am just a disappointed MOO3 fan but one still playing the game!)

[macraig]

Originally posted by ChristopherC The absolute industry standard for space games is Alpha Centauri. The graphics may not have been very pretty but when it had added a few mods, with its logical and involving gameplay and a powerful scenario editor it seems to me to be a lone eminence in space strategy. Maybe one day, they will make a 3D version of it - which, if they did, might finally put paid to any social life I ever thought of having but that is opportunity cost for you!

Oh, you are SO misguided in this conclusion that I don't know where to begin! Wait... yes I do: it's a knock-off, a copy-cat. News Flash: Sid Meier is not known for breaking new ground; he steals other's ideas and repackages them. Not that everyone else doesn't also do it, but they do so quietly; Meier has deliberately worked to associate his name with originality in spite of his thievery, so much so that now his name alone on a box is supposed to be a selling point. AFAIK he's never paid homage to the people whose ideas he "borrowed" and from which he's profited.

Alpha Centauri is a thinly-disguised remake of Mark Baldwin's Empire, plain and simple. So are all the Civ games, too, really; Alpha Centauri merely adds the sci-fi element in an attempt to further obfuscate the obvious. Take away the graphics of these games and they play no better - in some cases [b]worse[b] - than even Baldwin's original ASCII-text version of Empire.

Of course you might not have known that if you haven't been gaming as long as I have, so your affliction might merely be ignorance rather than stupidity. I've been around long enough to have seen these gaming progressions, though, so I can speak with some authority on the matter.

Take my word for it, trust me, honest: if you see Sid Meier's name affixed to a game, RUN, don't walk, quickly the other way. There's better out there.

AFA why games aren't "getting better and better", I think I know why, and I've been sharing the theory for the last couple years with anyone that would listen (and even a few that wouldn't). Short story: it's a matter of economics; there's no long-term profit to be had in producing the "perfect" 4X game. There are altruistic designers and programmers that would do it (I think Emrich is one such), but the people holding the purse strings aren't gamers and aren't in it for the altruism, I'll tell you what.

[Destroyer]

I dont see what point you are making.

Civ drew lots of ideas from many different places. I thought it was a board game first????

Anyway, unorigionality does not make it crap. SMAC was everything that civ3 should have been.

And I am afraid that SMAC is probably the best space 4x game. Its ai and diplomacy are the best I have seen.

You critisise, but you didnt say what you thought was the best.

Moo3 is a different type of 4x game. If it had the kind of development and polish, plus support that smac had, we would all probably be in gaming heaven right about now

[ChristopherC]

Well, Macraig I defer to your experience. But I have tried out quite a few games in this genre over the years and IMHO none has quite the playability SMAC has. It is one of the few games to which I could consider going back to play, if I got so disillusioned with what is out there at the moment. SMAC had a scenario bug at the outset which needed fixing but thereafter it was remarkably bug-free. The scenario editor was relatively simple to use and a joy to set up, covering the widest range of options for how difficult or how weird you wanted the gameplay. I was particularly impressed with that, in contrast, say, to 'Reach for the Stars' which, particularly with the lack of documentation, seemed to require a degree in astronautics!

What I am really hoping is that Stardock do well in their commitment to enhancing Galactic Civilisations over a given period so that they continue to turn a profit and we punters find our pleasure in the game enhanced. (I must admit I find that the budget rules are diabolical!) That could prove a pathfinder for other publishing companies.

There are also lone programmers who have programmed and managed to get published the likes of 'Starships Unlimited', 'Space Empires' and there are some still trying to get 'Stars! Supernova' off the ground. Maybe that is another way forward?

As for Destroyer's remark, 'Moo3 is a different type of 4x game. If it had the kind of development and polish, plus support that smac had, we would all probably be in gaming heaven right about now.' Right on, Destroyer! My sentiments exactly!

Live long and prosper.

[Alex]

Originally posted by ChristopherC
SMAC had a scenario bug at the outset which needed fixing but thereafter it was remarkably bug-free.

I agree with you about SMAC being a wonderfully playable strat game, but it has lots of bugs that were never fixed... these bugs may not be game-breakers in the end, but they're annoying nonetheless.

[Vince278]

Empire may have been the great grand daddy of all games of the type but that doesn't mean its spiritual descendants are copies. I also may be alone in saying that I was not impressed with SMAC but I cannot elaborate because its been so long since I've played it. I can agree with the perception that Sid just seems to slap his name on someone else's efforts to sell it but I'm sure he has done alot to get to where he is in the first place. I'm also a fan of Space Empires. I'm still playing MOO3 but I believe SE IV to be a far superior game.

[macraig]

Originally posted by Vince278
I'm also a fan of Space Empires. I'm still playing MOO3 but I believe SE IV to be a far superior game.

You know, I'd rather forgotten about SE IV, in all my obsession with GalCiv and MOO III and how to "fix" them. I'd played the demo several times and was getting pretty attached to it, but then I got distracted before I actually bought the game. I need to go back and try that demo again with MOO III and GalCiv fresh in my mind. Maybe Starships Unlimited, too. Maybe that will cure me of this growing urge to start modding MOO III in earnest.

[bakalov]

Stormhound, no matter what did you say, the interface is unfriendly and inconvenient.
I know that you can delete the production of a design, but you CANNOT change it to another design, and if you want to do so you have to click on HUNDREDS planets and queues. Deletion only is not enough.

Such things ruin the whole game imo. I like the game but the user interface and the game control are awful. I am frustrated when it takes me half an hour just to start building new type of a ship. Of course having an AI to do the most of the things is good, but this should be OPTIONAL. And there should be tools for manual MACROMANAGEMENT and the AI should be as much tweakable as it can be. I can give another example for a good macromanagement tool that was not mentioned in my previous post:
A simple table with the current ship designs (or may be ship types according to their roles - beam, missile, carrier, recon, colony, outpost, ground forces - battle, and ground forces - support, with sliders or percentages to the right, so the player can select how much of each type should be built. There can be comboboxes for the preference of the race for colony ships, and the desired native gravity of the ground forces. The AI can set military queues quite well according to such simple information, and I am sure that I would like the result. The planets may have a checkbox that would enable the system ship building and still use the same ratios.

I know that there were lots of problems during the project, major changes in the design team but this is not an excuse. I do not want to be so offensive, but I am angry (and sorry at the same time) that one of my favourite series finished in such way.

[ChristopherC]

I would have loved to have played Space Empires but, being in the UK, I learnt that the only way it would have been available was on the Net. Now, gentlemen, you can pull out my fingernails or rack me but I will never, ever diverge credit details on the Net even if the secure site is Fort Knox! It seems to me there are just too many evil wizards with baddd programs out there which can hoover such details no matter how protected you think you are.

The saddest but most instructive example for our discussion, I think, is a game called Stars! Supernova. This has been developed by a bunch of guys who really care about space strategy who had originally published Stars!, a great concept, though with shareware graphics, and who sought to upgrade it. They have apparently been struggling for several years now to publish without success! I hope their fairy godmother turns up for them soon!

I still maintain that a publishing company can make money out of remaining committed to a game by publishing add-ons etc., for which if we loved the game we would be happy to fork out, which it is why it is soooo important that it works out for Stardock!

Live and prosper.

[macraig]

Originally posted by ChristopherC
Now, gentlemen, you can pull out my fingernails or rack me but I will never, ever diverge credit details on the Net even if the secure site is Fort Knox!

Oh, stop! The 'Net is no less (or more) secure than tangible equivalents in the real world, and there's no excuse to use that as a reason to avoid it as a transaction medium. You're demonstrating how superstition arises from fear and lack of specific knowledge.

I know about the Stars! Supernova struggle, and it's not entirely unique. In spite of that, self-publishing, open source, and donation-ware are the only way that designers and developers are going to recapture the integrity of the process. No good can come from a process where the decision-makers have a completely different agenda than the "implementers", and it's time the implementers rebelled en masse. I don't much like GalCiv myself because of the basic design approach, but I do appreciate their relative success at avoiding selling the soul of their project to venture capitalists (publishers) who care nothing for the integrity of the project beyond their "dividends".

"We wantsss our cut, we wantsss it to be big, yes Preciousss, and we doesn't care what has to be done to get it!"

[macraig]

Originally posted by bakalov
Such things ruin the whole game imo. I like the game but the user interface and the game control are awful.

bakalov:

While I agree with your complaint (I've echoed it previously), it's also true that MOO III is just one recipient of that complaint: there are many others. In fact it's rare to find a 4X game that really does find the right balance between micro- and macro-management, and provides a useful interface to accomplish both as needed. As for me, I'm still looking; even MOO II wasn't the bee's knees, though I played it for seven years for wont of anything better.

I also recognize (when I'm not busy whining) that designers have their own private Hell in which they live: if they design a game to suit my tastes, they'll anger someone else whose tastes differ from mine. Designers are challenged with trying to be all things to all gamers in a genre, and AFAIK no one has yet succeeded; if they do, it will be a big expensive project, but I can be patient....

A simple table with the current ship designs (or may be ship types according to their roles - beam, missile, carrier, recon, colony, outpost, ground forces - battle, and ground forces - support, with sliders or percentages to the right, so the player can select how much of each type should be built.

Ironically, there IS such a table already, in TaskForceRules.txt, and it's purpose is exactly what you describe. Unfortunately, the details of that table were not exposed through the UI (user interface), so the balances are fixed unless you're willing and able to modify the table beforehand (and which of course doesn't help if you want to change the proportions mid-game).