Released in 1996 by Microprose, Master of Orion 2 Battle at Antares is undoubtably considered the reference for 4x space strategy games. But what made this game so popular that after 13 years of game design innovation, better computer resources and way better available graphics no space strategy game seems to be able to surpass MOO2 success? I invite you to read my post about MOO2 success at SpaceSector.com Post your comments here or in the blog itself if you prefer. Cheers Adam Solo

Enjoyed reading your article, thank you for presenting it.

Quote:The level of micromanagement provided by MOO2 is pointed as being at the same time the best and worst of its features. The player can have full control of its colonies however due to the lack of effective governors that could automate the more tedius tasks the player spends most of its time, during late games, assigning buildings for construction in all its planets one by one turning the gameplay experience in a complete nightmare.

They tried to automate the governors in MOO3, and it didn't work out so well. The governors took over the player's job, so what is a player to do, if the game does the playing? I got jealous when the governors started elbowing in on my plans.

In the beginning of these games, I enjoyed them. When I could comprehend and move the pieces. But later on, it was too much -- beyond comprehension and into tedium. So is there a way to make the game still not too much, even as the scale goes up?

One solution is to offload the duties with governors. Another might be to scale up the size of a unit with fleet movements, regions of space, and other chunking. And this could be fun for the player, deciding what to group together and why. And yet another possibility is the fire and forget method, where orders can be given just once to a ship, fleet, factory or dukedom. Supreme Commander did this well with their advanced waypoint system.

The board game Go has an interesting interplay between controlling the whole map vs getting heavily invested in local events.

Quote:Original post by smitty1276

Quote:Original post by Fingers_
It's a nice and thorough writeup, but you should consider at least using a spell checker ... constant misspellings are very distracting ... Then there's all the its/it's, principle/principal, to/for stuff but there you can just blame lack of education)

I'm sure your Portuguese is flawless. Spellcheck can't hurt though.

You're right, I was sloppy about that. Thanks for raising that to my attention. I'll start using the wordpress spellchecker from this point forward.
Glad you enjoyed the post though :)