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I took the freedom of translating the whole preview (which came today) into English , and it sure has some interesting points about the game.
(begin preview)
Few games have been so expected this year as the third part of the Master of Orion series. Instead of warming up old ideas, the whole game system has been renewed. Both in good and bad.
Master of Orion III's idea of how being a galatic ruler is is beautiful. The player is not a jack-of-all-trades handling every possible action is his galactic empire, but a visionary handling the Big Lines, whose goals the local governments try to make true.
When an exploration report from a new star system arrives at the Great Leader's desk, he proclaims "These planets are colonized, an outpost is placed here, ignore the others." The wheels of the machinery rotate and a planet housing space docks place a new colony ship under production. When the ship's finally ready, it is automatically set to fulfill whatever orders the Great Leader ordered - doing so no longer required his attention.
Using the sliders in the budjet screen the Great Leader is able to decide how much resources are actually placed into colonizing those planets. In addition to ship construction money goes to science, infrastructure and Keeping The People Happy. The budjet screen is really handy, but the game could tell a bit more about the actual effects of the player's choices - currently, you'll have to adjust the sliders mostly by intuition.
In addition to adjusting the budjet the Great Leader can decide about his people's freedom using the Oppressometer - keeping it high makes life difficult for both your own people and foreign agents and vice versa.
Perhaps the most important tool in leading your space empire is the Grand Plan, a straightforward table which allows you to decide primary, secondary and tertiary goals for planets of a specific type.
In the Plan you can for example say that the primary goal for high-mineral planets is to build mines, the secondary to build factories and the tertiary to build ships. The goals can also cross each other and you can leave for example the primary goal completely out, making a statement like "do whatever you want otherwise, but your secondary goal is research".
With the Plan you can efficiently avoid micro-managing single planets, but you can also take that approach if you wish so. The usefulness of the Plan is also increased by the fact that you can change the types of single planets, causing it to consider that ultra-rich world a research one.
The bad side of it all is that it is far too easy to just assume to role of a watcher and leave everything under the AI's control. Even if taking obsessive micromanaging out of the game is a noble goal, too much automatization in the basic things takes some feel of being there out of the game. However you'll have to admit that when your empire spans hundreds of worlds controlling every little thing would be too much for even the hardcore strategist.
Warfare is perhaps the only thing in MOO3 where the player can't use the AI to do things for him. Because of the increased scale of the game, you don't control single ships but fleet divisions which consist of up to 64 ships. You'll have to create your divisions with care, because their efficiency in battle is determined greatly by the types of ships they include.
The core of a division are its "mission ships" which decide the division's type. The "mission ships" can be for example missile ships or planet-killers, but also completely "normal" battleships. In battle, the mission ships are covered by escort ships, which try to take shots aimed at the mission ships and defend them in other manners. The third ring of ships are the guard ships, which are used to direct fire and probing the enemy.
When the battles consist of even ten divisions per side, it's quite clear that the stats of a single ship don't matter so much in the end. Therefor, designing your ships doesn't feel so interesting like in the earlier MOOs.
After playing the game for some days, you really can't say anything about the battles being real-time and everything. They may look like a simple click-fest, but using your divisions efficiently is hardly that.
The same feeling of can't-really-say-a-thing-about-it-yet is caused by the whole game. It's absurdly deep and hard to understand, and after the first tries you really can't say if the game is the sovereign masterpiece of turn-based space strategy or an exploded mess impossible to understand by a human being.
(end preview)
(begin preview)
Few games have been so expected this year as the third part of the Master of Orion series. Instead of warming up old ideas, the whole game system has been renewed. Both in good and bad.
Master of Orion III's idea of how being a galatic ruler is is beautiful. The player is not a jack-of-all-trades handling every possible action is his galactic empire, but a visionary handling the Big Lines, whose goals the local governments try to make true.
When an exploration report from a new star system arrives at the Great Leader's desk, he proclaims "These planets are colonized, an outpost is placed here, ignore the others." The wheels of the machinery rotate and a planet housing space docks place a new colony ship under production. When the ship's finally ready, it is automatically set to fulfill whatever orders the Great Leader ordered - doing so no longer required his attention.
Using the sliders in the budjet screen the Great Leader is able to decide how much resources are actually placed into colonizing those planets. In addition to ship construction money goes to science, infrastructure and Keeping The People Happy. The budjet screen is really handy, but the game could tell a bit more about the actual effects of the player's choices - currently, you'll have to adjust the sliders mostly by intuition.
In addition to adjusting the budjet the Great Leader can decide about his people's freedom using the Oppressometer - keeping it high makes life difficult for both your own people and foreign agents and vice versa.
Perhaps the most important tool in leading your space empire is the Grand Plan, a straightforward table which allows you to decide primary, secondary and tertiary goals for planets of a specific type.
In the Plan you can for example say that the primary goal for high-mineral planets is to build mines, the secondary to build factories and the tertiary to build ships. The goals can also cross each other and you can leave for example the primary goal completely out, making a statement like "do whatever you want otherwise, but your secondary goal is research".
With the Plan you can efficiently avoid micro-managing single planets, but you can also take that approach if you wish so. The usefulness of the Plan is also increased by the fact that you can change the types of single planets, causing it to consider that ultra-rich world a research one.
The bad side of it all is that it is far too easy to just assume to role of a watcher and leave everything under the AI's control. Even if taking obsessive micromanaging out of the game is a noble goal, too much automatization in the basic things takes some feel of being there out of the game. However you'll have to admit that when your empire spans hundreds of worlds controlling every little thing would be too much for even the hardcore strategist.
Warfare is perhaps the only thing in MOO3 where the player can't use the AI to do things for him. Because of the increased scale of the game, you don't control single ships but fleet divisions which consist of up to 64 ships. You'll have to create your divisions with care, because their efficiency in battle is determined greatly by the types of ships they include.
The core of a division are its "mission ships" which decide the division's type. The "mission ships" can be for example missile ships or planet-killers, but also completely "normal" battleships. In battle, the mission ships are covered by escort ships, which try to take shots aimed at the mission ships and defend them in other manners. The third ring of ships are the guard ships, which are used to direct fire and probing the enemy.
When the battles consist of even ten divisions per side, it's quite clear that the stats of a single ship don't matter so much in the end. Therefor, designing your ships doesn't feel so interesting like in the earlier MOOs.
After playing the game for some days, you really can't say anything about the battles being real-time and everything. They may look like a simple click-fest, but using your divisions efficiently is hardly that.
The same feeling of can't-really-say-a-thing-about-it-yet is caused by the whole game. It's absurdly deep and hard to understand, and after the first tries you really can't say if the game is the sovereign masterpiece of turn-based space strategy or an exploded mess impossible to understand by a human being.
(end preview)
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