Moo3's Death by a Thousand Cuts

[H Tower]

someone explain what IFP is to a Moo virgin please

[Sikander]

Imperial Focus Points, sort of a measure of your (The Emporer's) time and staff capabilities. Many actions in a turn would cost you IFP's to effect. Thus rather than visiting every colony and changing its production around to fit your taste, you can only make as many changes as your IFPs allow. Everything not decided by you is decided by the AI governors. This would have been a good brake to late game MM, and would have helped the AI immensely vs the human player. People complain that they want to MM everything, but I don't see why a mode where one received infinite IFP wouldn't have been possible .

[SnowFire]

I miss IPF's too, because they would have been an impressively gutsy risk. Still, all hope is not lost... let's not forget that replacement they made, the whole increasing inefficiency by amount of micromanagement thing. If you perform too much micro, your efficiency gets a slight decrease, and if you go clicky nuts, then it takes a major hit. That should keep some of IPF's spirit.

Then again, maybe this got cut too.

[H Tower]

if the game has ifp points, i ber we'll have a "stupid things the AI governors did to my empire" thread.

if the AI so much as moves one of my ships, i'll go ballistic

[Harry Seldon]

I hear you can remove your AI governors if you don't like the job they're doing. What would be even cooler, IMHO, would be to hold a messy public execution as a humble reminder of your wrath. I'd be on the edge of my seat just WAITING for one of my governors to step outta line...

[Ozymandous]

And then...

Sure you execute a poor governor, then the morale of your populus goes down and people start secret movements to tear down your government. If you're going to be a blood-thirsty tyrant then you should pay some sort of price as well..

[H Tower]

execution for cause though would be fun

[Kc7mxo]

Heh, I often execute unit commanders who flee in battle while I'm playing medieval. Typically I'll try them for treason, but sometimes I'll have an assasin take them out. If I'm playing catholic, i ussually have some inquisitors around, and they can typically make the coward pay.

[Comrade Tribune]

Re: Re: Moo3's Death by a Thousand Cuts

Originally posted by Xentropy
Personally, I love strategy games, but removing IFP's has officially killed the potential of MOO3 to move to the next level, since it will be burdened with the SAME problem MOO2 had: rediculous boring micromanagement after the first few turns.

Arguments that there will be AI to control parts of your empire are a moot point, because NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE AI, IT WILL NOT BE AS GOOD AT MAKING DECISIONS AS I CAN BE. Therefore, I am FORCED to micro every last spec of a colony in my empire or else my empire will NOT work up to its potential. So removing IFP's have just made this game a 4-hour-per-turn lategame, and I'm not sure that I'll be buying it because of that. I still may buy it, but do something similar to what I did in MOO2; start a new game, play about 100 turns, see that winning is inevitable but not feel like going through the days of tedium to play those turns to win and start a new game again. Lategame in MOO2 practically didn't exist, because I never got there in a situation where the endgame wasn't a foregone conclusion and wasn't boring to play due to large numbers of colonies to control.

At least with IFP's, everyone could control the same amounts of their empires, large or small, heavy micro or light micro players. It leveled the playing field. FORCED everyone to use the inferior AI to control the majority of their empire and only focus on the threat areas, like most people will do anyway. Instead, with IFP's out, I am hella glad that colonizable moons are out, because it's bad enough I'll have 900 colonies, each of which to spend 30 seconds looking over every single turn and deciding what they should be doing, (for a total of 7.5 hours per turn lategame in a huge galaxy), without also having 2700 moons around those colonies to also check up on.

Perfectly well said.

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Xentropy
With IFP's, the STRATEGIC DEPTH was there, because not only did you have to make the right decisions, you had to make the right choices as to which decisions were the most important.

Or, if you are a truely outstanding player, you could try to make questionable priority decisions work. Which might be great fun.

[Comrade Tribune]

Re: And then...

Originally posted by Ozymandous
Sure you execute a poor governor, then the morale of your populus goes down and people start secret movements to tear down your government. If you're going to be a blood-thirsty tyrant then you should pay some sort of price as well..

I think the governors got cut, too. They have already been executed by Quicksilver, so to speak...

[Kc7mxo]

[Urban Ranger]

Re: Re: Moo3's Death by a Thousand Cuts

Originally posted by Xentropy
I'll miss having the ability, but I honestly didn't use it much even in MOO2. It's not like it was very cost-effective. Spend 25% of the cost of a whole new ship just to add one extra mass driver now that you've miniaturized a bit?

That sounds like a personal problem. Why would anybody sane do that? You need to judge the cost/benefit ratio like you do everything else in the game.

Originally posted by Xentropy
This is a shame, but I didn't use this in MOO2 any more than I did refitting. It wasn't all that effective. The AI rarely had decent ship designs so all a capture would amount to is *maybe* some tech (though rarely; I tend to be a tech hound and would outtech the AI even in huge impossibles) and a few credits in scrap.

You don't have to use it. But why are you stopping others to use it?

Originally posted by Xentropy
These were too powerful anyway. Anything that makes it impossible to ever attack someone's empire, even with good tactics and intelligence like watching where their fleet is, is a bad idea. To the person who complained that a defensive strategy was completely killed by not having these, I argue that such a strategy would still work, but it wouldn't be an automatic win like it would be with interdictors.

Hm, how would a defensive strategy be an automatic win unless I also have a decent fleet and good tech? Besides, there are abilities (stealth ships, for example) and methods to counter interdictors.

Originally posted by Xentropy
I'd imagine this would be a ***** to code, except maybe like the Artemis system net, only placable in-system. Not all that much use, either. May as well build a bunch of tiny weak ships and tell them to ram as soon as battle begins hehe.

Mines? Piece of cake to code IMHO.

Originally posted by Xentropy
Now here I disagree entirely with the sentiment of most of the people here. Personally, I love strategy games, but removing IFP's has officially killed the potential of MOO3 to move to the next level, since it will be burdened with the SAME problem MOO2 had: rediculous boring micromanagement after the first few turns.

What next level?

Originally posted by Xentropy
Arguments that there will be AI to control parts of your empire are a moot point, because NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE AI, IT WILL NOT BE AS GOOD AT MAKING DECISIONS AS I CAN BE. Therefore, I am FORCED to micro every last spec of a colony in my empire or else my empire will NOT work up to its potential.

That is one of the most pathetic design decisions AFAIK. Make the game massively complicated, then tell the player he can't control half of it. Whose bright idea is it anyway? Why would somebody make a game complicated, then let loose a nitwit AI to do the stuff for a human player? Sorry, this is too retarded for words. If a designer doesn't want a player to tweak some details, hide it. For strategic games, a simpler design is usually a better design.

[Petep]

No No
I don’t believe it.
It can’t be true.
This game should not be in MOO-series.
These ‘small cuts’ are great and vital ideas to the game.
What can creators of the Moo3 propose in return which will be equally interesting?
I really don’t know why these guys are making these ‘small cuts’ if they are already programmed in the game (why not making them optional – this should be easy)
It’s the last chance (hopefully before the next patch) to alter the game.

[Ozymandous]

Re: Re: Re: Moo3's Death by a Thousand Cuts

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune


Perfectly well said.

Heh, care to explain how you want IFP's on one hand, yet say that because of the poor AI (which would be the foundation of IFP execution) you will want to micro every part of the game?

So which is it, do you want to NOT have the ability to control anything on a smaller level and constantly curse the "poor AI" for making stupid decisions, or do you want to be able to handle everything, but be potentially swamped with micro because of poor AI?

You can't have it both ways.