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I can still read ancient Greek and Arabic poetry but I can't play Master's of Orion

(Emphasis mine.) You can read ancient Greek and Arabic, but you misuse possessive form in English? I don't know, that seems counter-intuitive to me. (By the way, isn't it Master of Orion anyway?)

I guess when the lexer sees an apostrophe, it must mean: here comes an “s”!

Oh god yerh,
I meen who the hell wouldn't want to bring out a bug filled inferor game sequal screwing fans out of as much cash as posible then laughing as the price of the game falls to below wholesale in the first two months.

thank goodness some game companys still are willing to put in the hard yards and work out problems with games before announing relase dates to sucker punch fans out of money.

a company called SnoCap from San Franciso, sounds like a snowboarding company

Not everything is what its name sounds like.

The solution? Discussion with gamers is going to be at its most helpful for the company during the early parts of game development, when ideas and features can be requested and demand can be built up in advance of a marketing campaign. As the project approaches beta testing, employees should cease discussion with the outside world and instead talk only with the beta testers, and interaction with gamers should be done with fancy advertisements in magazines and giveaways until the product hits the shelves.

For what it's worth, Quicksilver, developer of Master of Orion III, ended up following that same pattern, with various staff members contributing (often cryptic) information about "The Elephant"--the design document for MOO3. The initial transparency and calls for fan participation drew many people (myself included) to their official message board. This formed the foundation for a community that was sometimes compared to that enjoyed by Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. Yet as development wore on, the flow of information dried up. Rumors started flying about cuts that might be happening in the feature list. Taken in conjunction with the removal of several highly visible staff members, what happened next was no surprise.

Deprived of the information flow that kept everyone on the same page, the community fragmented. "Fanboys" versus "trolls". "N00bs" versus veteran forum members. Certainly, this is par for the course in many forums; however, the sudden loss of a certain camaraderie struck me as significant. The problem was compounded as people turned back to past posts by various staff members, trying to divine the current condition of the project by piecing these posts together into a coherent account.

The end result was a lot of bad feelings all around. Although discussion was quite civilized when there was plenty of information to worwith, a paucity of information led to abandonment issues.

In a post-mortem interview with GameSpy, Rantz Hosely--art director for MOO3 and frequent presence on the boards--acknowledged that the information flow could have been better managed, specifically in terms of making sure that fans knew they weren't simply being ignored.

Personally, I doubt anyone will be (intentionally) trying the MOO3 experiment again any time soon. Why have the actual developer manage the information flow when you can have a marketer spit out full-color glossies on demand?

Master of Orion 3 is available for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP PCs.

And that Amazon UK does not stock.. sigh :( Funny, Amazon US would happily ship me Region 1 DVDs (watch out for MPAA!) but would not send me a video game. C'est la vie...

Does anyone else who can barely get to MOO's Page after a good slashdotting, think its ... a joke? ...

I really hope you're joking, but if you're not, Master of Orion is a space strategy computer game series. Clicky

How about Master of Orion 3?

Master of Orion 3, since 2001... no, Nov 2002, December 4th... Maybe January?

Shadowbane, a MMORPG without all that pesky RPG stuff

SimCity 4, delayed 'till January. "It's in 3D, trust us", except you can't swivel the camera

I'd like to point out that the space battles in the upcoming strategy game Master of Orion 3 will be rendered using voxels, according to posts made by the programmers in the discussion boards (which are too poorly organized to search through quickly, but the posts ARE there.) Hopefully, this will not cripple the game.

I have easily spent several hundred hours playing MOO and MOO2, and I absolutely can't wait for MOO3 to come out. If they do manage to pull off what they've said that they are going to do, by god it is going to easily cream every other strategy game out there.

For those who don't know, check it out!!!

Strategy is hard to implement.

1) You have to tune the ruleset to achieve a balanced gameplay. The more complex, the more you have to test.

2) You have to develop an "AI" that has to cope with your ruleset.

Both reasons urges you keep the ruleset simple, which is (at least for me) contraproductive for interesting games. Online-gaming seems to get rid of reason 2.

Strategy doesn't sell and game companies have become very conservative. (Name a current game that isn't a sequel)

1) Having limited manpower, you have to choose between GFX and game complexity. Now try to sell a non 3D game.

2) Complexity scare most customer. (I don't have the time to read a complete handbook, just to play a game)

>In fact, you'd be very hardpressed to find someone who uses actualy tactics in a strategy game

You seem to have a different understanding of the words tactis and strategy than me.
For me strategy is much more long-term orientated whereas tactics is only "a method of employing forces in combat".

Following this understanding, most RTS aren't strategy games to my eyes. They are tactical games.
They have to cope with too many different things in short time so that game-logic is reduced to build and crush.
One word says it all, pathfinding (Where is my harvester?)
GFX have to rendered quickly every frame.

>If you were to create a strategy game with real strategy, what would you implement?

I'm more a fan of build and expand, than intercept and crush, but considering war-faring, I think there are some books I'd try to reflect in the rule-set: Sun Tzu's Art of War and Miyamoto Musashi's Ni Ten Ichi Ryu
That means several things beside manpower have to be considered, troop moral, moral of the supporting nation(s), supply, training, terrain.

Currently, I'm waiting for Master of Orion III to crush my hopes :).
At least from their statements they are reflecting some of my (reduced) expectations from a good (space) strategy game.

is that they become predictable. Once you learn the exploits and how they work, the game is no longer fun. Take Alpha Centauri or Master of Orion 2, easily 2 of the best, if not the best, strategy games around (IMHO of course). However I can play both of them on impossible levels and win almost every time.

And what really bugs me is that to make up for deficiencies in their AI, as the levels increase in difficulty, the computer just cheats more. I was abhorred when I found out first hand how badly the AIs cheated at the higher levels in the 2 aforementioned games.

So what my question is, is this: How can this be fixed?

I have a few ideas. One is that you need one that learns. Before you flame me about this, let's think about this for a second. We're not talking about an AI here that can learn how to write a novel, we're talking about relatively straightforward strategies and mechanical play in these games. I know that 95% of of my strategy for these games is down to an art, it's just an automated system until I get to the few points at which I need to make a new decision, or something new crops up. So if I can do this by a predefined strategy, then why can't the computer do that? Keep in mind too that the computer can simply try variations on it's current strategies, and see what happens. If I beat the computer 9 out of 10 times, and one time with some wierd method the computer CLOBBERS me, then hey, maybe it should keep that method around. Also the computer can play against itself, with many different strategies, seeing how each one works. Keep in mind here folks that the strategies that I'm talking about have a few variables: how fast do I expand? at what point to I build an army? how big do I build my army? When do I stop expanding? When to I attack, and who? These can be values that can be changed and experimented with, and hence the computer could learn.

Secondly, one of the things I loved about Alpha Centauri is that just-about all settings were configurable through text files. This was amazing. You could make things easier or harder, change global settings, pollution rates, everything. You could even make new factions and trade them with your friends. If somehow settings for the AI were configurable this way, then people could learn how to tweak the AI to make it a more formidable opponent, and then share this information with others.

Combining those two ideas, throw it on the internet. If you have 5,000 people that are connected (not necessarily at the same time), you can try out hundreds of thousands of strategies for the AI to see what works well, and then upgrade the AI. Actually I think that is a necessity. The AI needs to be easily upgradable, otherwise it'll just get boring as you learn how it works and you can cream the game.

I'd love to hear some (constructive only please) comments about this, as it's been something I've been thinking about for a while.

Want to check out about the new Master of Orion 3? Awesome stuff happening there. -- Telek