What Moo3 looks like from a SMACer's perspective..

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by Grumbold
I will also never forgive it for automatically upgrading all your ground batteries and space stations to the weapons which have no effect against space monsters and Antarrans just because they are higher in the tech tree than the other weapons you've researched. Duh!!

That always annoyed the hell out of me as well...

the worst weapon upgrade of ALL TIME is to get the Ion Pulse Cannon from a random event or artifacts world Then you're STUCK with beam weapons that do nothing to monsters (and do next to nothing to shielded or properly armored ships)

[viciouscycle]

MOO was a great game... MOO2 was pretty good too though it was far different from the original. Same goes for the Civ series. Out of all the recent games, I like SMAC the best.

Still I remember the good ol' days of Empire. That was a great freakin' game! And I remember too the days of playing Civilization when it was a board game. I must be getting old.

Going back even further, I recall playing Imperium Galactum on the Commodore. And all those great old wargames like Eastern Front, Clash of Steel, Carrier Strike. Ah... the memories.

Pacific War by Gary Grigsby... now there was a loooong game for ya. And if people think the MOO3 development is a tough process, does anyone remember waiting for the computer game version of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to come out? What a deal!

Sorry... what were we talking about?

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by viciouscycle
Still I remember the good ol' days of Empire. That was a great freakin' game! And I remember too the days of playing Civilization when it was a board game. I must be getting old.

EMPIRE! I LOVED THAT GAME! I had a copy on my old Atari ST, which we bought back in 1986! I remember playing the oldschool Empire in 4-color graphics on my Atari ST... that machine had 1 whole megabite of RAM!

Civilization the Boardgame... I STILL play that with friends when I have people over It's still a great game, even now. If you have a bunch of people over and about 4-5 hours to burn, it's a good thing to do. We eventually bought Advanced Civilization and the Western Expansion, both of which I like using better than the original game.

I'm glad others enjoy it as well. You aren't THAT old

Going back even further, I recall playing Imperium Galactum on the Commodore. And all those great old wargames like Eastern Front, Clash of Steel, Carrier Strike. Ah... the memories.

Imperium Galactum was a decent game. The others I never played, but a friend of mine owned them.

I still own our old Atari 800, bought in 1981

Pacific War by Gary Grigsby... now there was a loooong game for ya. And if people think the MOO3 development is a tough process, does anyone remember waiting for the computer game version of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to come out? What a deal!

Sorry... what were we talking about?

I never really got into the Gary Grisby games... too d--- complicated for my tastes. That said, I did buy Gary Grisby's Pacific War for my friend because he wanted it... then he never played it... go figure

[Sirian]

I would add that I never felt that a single ship strategy was all-powerful. Go for a big ship strategy and you could be defeated by the 2,000 strong scout force armed with bioweapons because you couldn't shoot them all before they reached your planet.

Repulsor Beams, baby, yeah!

Big ships WERE Uber, if you knew what you were doing. Or at least, if not uber, certainly the strongest overall option. And as for BHG's... 95% of my games didn't last that long in the tech tree. Just win before they get to those, that ends that problem.

Sometimes it was fun to play a small ship strategy for the extra challenge, though. Smaller ships were still quite viable, just suffered more attrition and carried less effective specials.


There were two things about MOO1 not mentioned yet:

* NO SCORING! This was the best. No points, no hall of fame, no records. Just play for the sheer thrill of it. Last race standing wins, or... if you weren't in the mood for playing it all the way out to the last shred of completion, take your victory by domination from the vote. Of course, you could also win a true diplomatic victory from a less than commanding position. A win was a win, and you knew when you had won, and SO DID THE GAME. That, I loved. MOO1 was fun in large part because there were no Civ3-style "sluggish late game" aspects you had to slog through to get the game to notice that you had kicked its ass two ages back. The game could end (or not) when you had a winning position. It was brilliant. They were smart enough to say "no scoring system can measure the results of this game, so we're not going to score you, just play and love it." And we did.

* DEFENSE RULED! That's right. Even massing your whole fleet into one big Stack of Doom could not overcome enemy planetary defenses and fleets if they were far enough ahead in tech. Your weapons inadequate to penetrate their shields, your bombs bouncing harmlessly off their planetary atmospheres. Their repulsor beams keeping your bombers away if you were geared to kill planets but not ships. Their engine jammers clogging your slow-@$$ fleets leaving them dead in space and easy pickings if you didn't have the engine power to close quickly. By favoring defense, it rendered the kind of thing human players do to disintegrate the poor Civ3 AI an impossible task. You couldn't paper cut the AI to death, nor lure them in with a trap, with them foolishing attacking you in direct zombie mode, blindly sending all their forces at the nearest targets regardless of their odds. Sometime even one missile base was enough defense to hold off entire early AI fleets in MOO, buying you some time. But... not if they were much farther ahead of you, then they could overwhelm your defensive advantage. Bottom line, a significant and truly well balanced advantage to defense in the game lifted this game to the heights. MOO1 was the best macro-strategy game of all time for this reason alone. The game would go on with BALANCED empires, none able to nibble away at or swallow others unless and until they managed to gain some kind of significant strategic advantage. This could be a specific weapon, a set of planets that boosted resources high enough, or what have you. The danger was always in pursuing such an edge TOO HARD, leaving yourself too far behind in other areas and allowing an opponent thereby to gain such an edge over you just because you failed to keep up with the Joneses.

MOO1 was brilliant. By comparison, MOO2 was just a pretender. It upgraded graphics, it added complexity to combat, it added complexity to planetary management, it added complexity to races and many other elements. Some of these additions were "very cool" and much better than MOO1, but the big picture was lost. The game balance was lost. Defense was too difficult. Growth became redundant and mindless, with no real choices to make, just you deciding whether or not to follow the predestined "best" set of options available to you, or not. Which race picks you selected had more to do with your chances of winning a truly challenging scenario than any other factors. That's not a test of skill, it's a jigsaw puzzle. Figure out which picks are uber and stick with them? That's not my recipe for strategy gaming. The gap between the strong races and the weak became too wide. Besides your own race picks, your opponents (and their bonus abilities on high difficulty) were the other factor. The same game on the same setting could be three or four TIMES as hard, depending on which opponents you happened to be dealt. That's nice and all if a list of "cool features" on the box impresses you, but if you want a great gaming experience, you're rolling the dice, and too often you would roll craps and just be wasting your time. MOO1 delivered every game, every time, without fail.


If MOO3 gets back to its MOO1 gameplay roots, while still including some MOO2-style "cool stuff", it will be the best game of all time. And if not... it will be one of the biggest duds ever. In just a few weeks now, we'll get to find out which.


- Sirian

[Arnelos]

Sirian, you are dead-on-target with that post

[Capt Dizle]

I probably would never had bought another computer game after Moo1 except for one fatal AI flaw. You could always win easily by splitting your forces into multiple fleets and attacking multiple targets. The AI would send one big fleet and take out one target while you would take out three or four.

[Arnelos]

jimmytrick,

Yeah, they do that. The problem often being that you were unable to STOP that one big killer fleet from leveling one of your better worlds while you were cleaning out 5-6 of their's.

It depends, though... occassionally, I have a game where the AI has at least decent defenses all around, but throws one huge stack at me which is BARELY able to defeat my defenses at any one given world, where splitting his forces would have doomed him anywhere.

But I agree, the problem is that the AI is pretty consistent on fleet concentration.

[AIL]

I thought the biggest AI flaw was that they did not defend their newly aquired worlds for at least as long until others who wanted that world were driven away. That could easily cause em to have war with anyone else + these planets were never developed. For example I had a game as Klackons with Silis and Psilons beeing the biggest Empires. Each of the had ~10 planets that keept changing their owner. The Silicoids recolinzed that hostile planets that I could not get because of a lack in tech, over and over again just to leave it undefended for my bombardement.

The inability to divide their forces properly was only of importance in late game when the ships were better than planetary defenses. But I think Moo2 had the same problem even bigger.

I can not say anything about SMAC. I never owned it. Only played it for a short while at a friends. I found the graphics just too ugly and there was too much text to read for me.

From the 4x games I own I like Moo1 and Civ3 the most. Civ3 because it cut micromanement to an amount I can live with compared to prior Civ-Games. Yes, I don't like micromanagement very much... and hope the AI-helpers in Moo3 will do fine doing that for me.

[Kc7mxo]

I can not say anything about SMAC. I never owned it. Only played it for a short while at a friends. I found the graphics just too ugly and there was too much text to read for me.

And red. It was red. Did I mention that everything was red? I don't like red. Stupid red.

[Hendrik]

Recently I have become much less skeptical of Moo3, after reading the beta tester posts. Citizen Kane especially strikes me as someone who wouldn't be afraid to criticize the game if criticism were due... I am getting fairly excited about Moo3.

[darcy]

Of course he would be afraid, he signed an NDA after all. IIRC it's currently illegal for him to criticize Moo3 publically.

[Adacore]

No - they've stated multiple times that they have no obligation to be 'nice' to QS. If the game sucked, i think they'd say so (especially CK). The NDA only covers the actual details of the game, not their opinions of it. They are completely at liberty to say 'this game stinks' if they think it does.

[jscott991]

Betatesters very rarely can criticize a game they are testing. Don't you think in a large group of people, someone would dislike it, no matter how great it is? Isn't it interesting that there hasn't been any substantive criticism of the game from the testers?

I have confidence that the game will be good overall, but there are somethings I know are going to be disappointing and I am surprised to not hear any negative feedback from the testers on these points.

[Sarxis]

If MoO3 does suck, then the beta testers will be the second people to get linched. :P

[kalbear]

Actually, it's not all that indicative one way or another about how good a game is by BT's lack of comments regarding how bad it is.

CK, however, has not been mum on it. He has been very vocal in his support on how good the game is. There's a difference, right there. And CK's said he's under no obligation to be nice to 'em.

I still love Chaos Avatar's 'AAR' of an early beta test, where his spies, instructed to go steal toproq tech, instead blew up a bunch of things. That made me laugh hard, and indicated that yes, some things were dumb and have been fixed.

The other reason that the BTs aren't likely negative is simple - every single thing they say gets scrutinized like nothing else, and blown up into epic proportions. I'd be damn careful about saying things either in that case.

Last point is this - there have been plenty of BTs I've read about that have criticized the game before and after it was released. Blizzard's famous for it, for instance. The lack of condemnation makes me shocked, because normally I hear either generic praise (This game is great! and that's it) or very specific likes/dislikes. I have heard very specific likes, and very little in the way of dislikes.