The new version of Master of Orion was available for free from Wargaming https://wargaming.com/en/games/master-of-orion installable via their wargaming center launcher https://na.wargaming.net/en/wgc
Master of Orion
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Master of Orion
#62The sequel to MOO, and most 4X games made since then, have always felt inferior to me. MOO was like a game of chess. The rules were relatively simple, but complex enough to give you the "box of chocolates" games this article talks about. MOO2 bogged you down in micromanaging colony buildings, etc. and other 4X games made since have added far more complex systems. The results feels like chess where each piece now has…
I liked the micromanaging of buildings in MOO2 in the early game, but later game, when you're invading multiple planets, it definitely gets annoying.
> I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement?
Such a game would probably fail to achieve commercial success in today's world. It would be criticized for lack of depth.
Re: Master of Orion
#63For those interested in playing MOO or MOO2 on a Modern Mac - you can use https://boxer.thec0de.com and open the App that Steam gives you with View Package Contents and find the .boxer file and run it with the modern boxer; it'll load just fine (they're all wrapped dosbox anyway). And the strategy guide mentioned is available on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/MasterOfOrionStrategyGuide
There are also MacOS releases of DosBox-X, including one for M1 (ARM64), and MOO and MOO2 work correctly on my M1 MacBook.
Re: Master of Orion
#64There is an excellent remake (with an active modding community and real tricky AIs if you want to enable them) available; open source, no less! Remnants of the Ancients: https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
Remnants is a lot of fun.
Of course, like frogcomposband, I find it a lot more fun when I figure out how to attach a debugger and the source code and hack the underlying values...
Size 1000 homeworld that is both Ultra Rich and Artifacts?
Add 40 technologies to be discovered upon entering a system?
Set your empire reserve to 99,999,999?
Remnants is such an impressive work of love though. The artwork in ROTP alone is worth the download.
Strangely, as a java programmer I've done far more custom code modifications to the frogcomposband (C code) fork. It is a guilty pleasure with open source games hacking their code to do fun things. Also strangely, it was easier to compile frogcomposband than RotP.
Re: Master of Orion
#65Are there any noteworthy Civ1 and Civ2 remakes (other than FreeCiv)? I know about https://github.com/SWY1985/CivOne, which was supposed to recreated Civ1 in C#, but they stopped development before implementing the AI, which is always tricky to faithfully replicate without some solid/time-consuming disassembly of civ.exe.
Those are two games that AFAIK haven't been re-released through the normal Steam/GoG channels. Seems like only Civ3+ are available, not sure why.
Re: Master of Orion
#66The sequel to MOO, and most 4X games made since then, have always felt inferior to me. MOO was like a game of chess. The rules were relatively simple, but complex enough to give you the "box of chocolates" games this article talks about. MOO2 bogged you down in micromanaging colony buildings, etc. and other 4X games made since have added far more complex systems. The results feels like chess where each piece now has…
I liked the micromanaging of buildings in MOO2 in the early game, but later game, when you're invading multiple planets, it definitely gets annoying. > I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement? Such a game would probably fail to achieve commercial success in today's world. It wou…
I think there's room for commercially successful games that lack apparent depth. I think the success of match 3 mobile games is an indication that the market is out there.
But it's possible that it no longer overlaps with the market of self-selected 4X gamers.
Re: Master of Orion
#67As a kid I remember playing an old MS-DOS game that was kind of similar to MoO but may have predated it. You were in command of a new government on a resource-rich planet called Harmony and you had to steer your society through a star cluster full of intrigue and war. There was more of an over-arching narrative than something like MoO or Civilization, but much of the gameplay was similar. It had a bit of a Dune vibe.
For the life of me I can't remember what this game was actually called. Does this ring a bell for anyone else? Would love to look it up again.
Re: Master of Orion
#68TIL that the the term 4X was coined by a guy who thought > that Civilization‘s inclusion of global warming as a threat to progress and women’s suffrage as a Wonder of the World constituted some form of surrender to left-wing political correctness ... ick.
[deleted]
Re: Master of Orion
#69I was always partial to Stars![0] though I did enjoy MOO. It looked a lot like a Windows productivity app so I could play it with no one being the wiser. It wasn't as deep as MOO other some other games but I enjoyed it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars !
Stars!! Finally another living human who has heard of it. I remember finding the limited demo on one of those "101 games!" $1.99 CD-ROMs, and then tracked down a full version at some remote Circuit City. Still have the installer and the key, and occasionally load it up on a VM (plays fine, only needed like 32mb of RAM :P ) A great game, but another one which suffered from the burden of overwhelm in the late game stag…
> Stars!! Finally another living human who has heard of it.
There's dozens of us, dozens!
I had a game key for a while and then lost it. So any time I dust it off to play it's the shareware version. The shareware version has pretty high limits so you can just get to "unmanageable endgame".
One of my pet peeves, especially later in the game, is there's no way to upgrade fleets. So if you've got a long lived fleet it'll be way below your current tech level. Woe follows if you forgot it was the only defense for some far flung yet important planet.
Re: Master of Orion
#70I was always partial to Stars![0] though I did enjoy MOO. It looked a lot like a Windows productivity app so I could play it with no one being the wiser. It wasn't as deep as MOO other some other games but I enjoyed it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars !
I remember from around the same time another game in this windows "productivity" optic. Something with ships. You don't happen to know the name of that one?
The only other games in that vein I remember were Yoda Stories and I Indiana Jones Stories from LucasArts. Hopefully someone else knows the one you're thinking of.