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Master of Magic another cult 4X game is also getting a remake soon https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623070/Master_of_Magic/
Shadow Magic in particular is probably the best game in the series and also a cult classic.
Civilization, Master of Orion, Master of Magic and Alpha Centauri are the four 4X gems. Unfortunately they don't seem to make those anymore.
Yes they do. The Civ series is still ongoing, Galciv and Stellaris have taken over for MOO, Distant Worlds came out this year. Only Master of Magic doesn't get the same kind of love as Civ and MOO. There's even a darned good FOSS implementation of Civ5 called "Unciv" that I got extremely addicted to.
Age of Wonders. All excellent games, but AoW 2: Shadow Magic is the most excellent one, with incredible depth of gameplay. Right up there with those classics.
I 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 !
Interesting. Never heard of that game. Looks interesting, but moreover it reminds me of another game I haven't thought about in years that hasn't come up in discussion yet: Spaceward Ho! Anyone remember that one?
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Stellaris does a fantastic job at this. Stays relevant until the very end.
The late game crisis is such a good idea to solve this problem. At that point you're strong enough that you can beat all the other empires but then an extra-dimensional invasion happens that's just so much stronger than anything else you've encountered and it works really well to spice up the late game and make everything relevant again.
It always fascinates me how Steve Barcia managed to balance so many different game mechanics, traits and science paths into a single game.
Master of Magic another cult 4X game is also getting a remake soon https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623070/Master_of_Magic/
I am not too excited about the remake. It will be more polished, but the AI will be terrible and the game will be less fun than the original.
It's a pity that with a large budget and 20+ years of tech evolution, game studios still have a hard time matching the fun of the original game.
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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…
Yeah, it's a certain type of trap. At first it is something to do and some near term goal that exist there. Later when you complete everything in a turn it just becomes exercise of going through a list of actions repeated over half-a-dozen to dozens systems. Maybe games should offer some tools for this, like templates what to build and what ratios and so on. You could automatically set one of these or have custom one…
So you adjust all the settings for each, say, city in the first few rounds; then, when you have several countries, you click that box in each of the cities and from then on set it just for each country; later, click it in each country and just set for whole planets. If later you want to micromanage some specific city or country, just uncheck the box only for that one, and let all the other cities in the country / countries on the planet keep following the settings of their parent level.
That's for geographical entities. But perhaps something similar could be set by inventing hierarchical levels for more abstract concepts like technological / economic / military / research strategies. Or maybe it doesn't even need to be invented; maybe they are already bundled together in sub- and sub-sub-concepts in some games?
I don't know, I haven't played any games of this kind for... Since Civ 1 or 2, maybe mid-nineties. This came to mind because I've been thinking about doing something like this in a (totally unrelated) piece of software I'm designing in my head.
[Edit: Tpyo]
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I never played it, but Google turns up a game called Maelstrom that seems to fit the bill.
Thank you! This is it. There isn't a lot of information online about this game (not even a Wikipedia article – though there is one for another 1992 game called "Maelstrom" that is unrelated). However, someone created an old-school fan website as a labor of love: http://www.overlordofharmony.com I wonder how feasible it is to play an old DOS game like this on a modern Mac...
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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.
There 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
How true to the original is it?