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Detailed Preview of Masters of Orion 3
garibald writes "Constantine, the head developer, promised that there would be a detailed preview of the game this week, and here it is at Apolyton. Constantine also said the game was in it's final regression testing. Here's hoping that the game will be out by the end of this month." Oh, Lordie, if I counted the hours I spent playing MOO and MOO2 - I'm really looking forward to this one.
I enjoyed both MOO1 and MOO2, but was a bit disappointed with the fact that the skills in MOO2 were basically a carbon copy of those in M001. I liked the improved graphics and interface of M002, but would have appreciated more expansion of content.
It gets kinda dull when you reach the end of the game and start exhausting what you can research. Researching Planetary Future Tech 24 , or Weapons Tech 33 may improve my score...but I'd rather have better guns/ships.
Does anyone know if the skills have been expanded for M003?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I've had my preorder at EB since October. I really hope they get it out soon, it looks like it's going to be great. Maybe they'll actually make a Master of Magic 2 as well...oooh...*drool.* For those of you who haven't played the old Simtex games, see if you can find them, they're worth playing even now.
A friend of mine gave me access to his copy of the game when I was attending school. I ended up choosing a Lithovore race (can live in toxic environments by eating rocks). I was doing ok, but an aggressor species kept attacking me and demanding tribute. I had a few plantets, but had lost most of them quite quickly.
But lucky for me, I had some excellent research abilities. I managed to discover Planetary Converter lasers (one shot kills a planet) and Doom Stars. But I was so heavily out numbered, that I kept losing most direct confrontations. But I had enough to hold back the attackers from wiping me out.
At this point in the game, I had maybe 5 planets, and my opponent had everything else (about 100 planets). I was despearate, so I started sending my ships to planet colonies of the attacking race, and vaporising every planet in the system, and moving on.
Initially, he continued to demand my surrender and 75% tribute. After toasting about 20 systems, He demanded 50%. Another 20 systems turned to asteroid fields, and he was willing to settle for 25%. A few systems later, he was saying that I was no longer worth his time to squash, so lets call the whole war off. After destroying his home system, he began offering me tribute.
I ended up destorying every star system in the entire galaxy and all life (except my own). It was the only time I can recall winning a game by committing wholesale galactic genocide.
I look forward to buying MOO3.
END COMMUNICATION
That usually looks better than being fired.
:p
EverQuest has nothing on the Master of Orion series for addictiveness. I ruined the cumulative GPA of an entire dorm floor in college with it.
MOO2 was a great game. It had impressive graphics and a stunning musical score that stood toe to toe with games released years later. Not to mention it was one of the few strategy games that involved strategy back then. To this day, I know of one person who can beat MOO2 on 'impossible'. And not even directly.
Aliens of every variety, hot chicks (mmm, Elerian scientist chick), sci-fi weapons out the arse..
Damn, now I have to dig out my MOO2 disc.
Oh, what to do, mod parrent as troll or reply....
Ok, I guess I reply instead. Turn based combat worked just fine in MOO and MOO 2!
Why does everything have to be real time today, where the AI is so "advanced" that the advanced part is that it attacks you on 3 fronts at once, oh gee what exitement!
I hope they make it a bit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights so you can pause and stack your commands on all ships, now that would be cool.
-H
No, it didn't. Two fleets of identical ships face off, and they are built so that it takes a full volley of fire from two ships to destroy one. Suppose there are 100 ships in each fleet. What is the deciding factor in the outcome of the battle?
Answer: who shoots first, wins.
Fleet 1 fires, destroying as many ships as possible and leaving the others undamaged. Fifty of Fleet 2's ships go down in flames. Now it's Fleet 2's turn - but because half of them are dead, they only take down 25 of Fleet 1. Fleet 1 returns fire again and demolishes 37 of Fleet 2's ships, seriously damaging one other. The thirteen remaining ships (if they are at all sensible) turn and run.
And the player _always_ got first shot. I ended up piling on as many weapons as possible to my ships at the total expense of armour and shielding. If the enemy fired a shot at me, I was going down, but I knew full well that they weren't going to get the chance.
It got worse at the end of the game; the defence technology didn't keep pace with the weapons. Shield-piercing autofire (3 shots instead of 1 at a 20% accuracy penalty) heavy phasors coupled to a good computer (making up for that penalty) and an Achilles targeting system (which totally bypasses the target's armour and massively increases damage) were so good they were almost like cheating. Phasors miniaturised well, so you could pack a whole lot onto a ship. It got to the point where one ship could take down several enemy ships in its turn. With a kill rate of 1 a turn or greater, Fleet 2 aren't going to fire a shot; they're just going to be mown down.
One cute thing to do is to conquer all the galaxy except one enemy world - then give them 10% tribute. With such enormous cash supplies they build fleets of hundreds of ships, which you can then use as target drones. See how many you can take down with a single ship...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's not that hard as the Psilons - Creative was a major advantage, vastly underpriced IMO. Build a communications network out of Outpost Ships, making sure to plant the flag on any handy terran or Gaia planets early. This way you make contact with everyone before they meet each other, and you can set up lots of trade and research pacts. If someone starts looking nasty, you can buy 'em off with technological trinkets. You're extremely vulnerable in the early game, because someone with a big productive base (Sakkra or Bulrathi maybe) could just roll over you.
Later on, once you've converted some of those outposts to colonies and got something of a fleet and a serious technical lead, go after the monsters. A rich, huge Gaia with natives, defended only by a dragon is a good thing to have ;-) Attack the Guardian once you've got ships with graviton guns or better, and zortrium armour at least. The best combo in the mid-game is a volley of grav cannon to knock down the shields, then a volley of ion cannon to demolish internal systems. A couple of Titans with this setup can destroy the Guardian without giving it a chance to return fire.
If you're in lamer mode, you might like to refight the Avenger several times. Loknar gives you four technologies at random - most are unresearchable, but he may give you Moleculartronic Computer. The ones you want are Xentronium Armour and Damper Field. Death rays and particle beams are heavily overrated - they don't miniaturise, so late in the game you'll get more value out of maulers. The black hole generator is cool, but not that useful in practice. Make sure you have a spare slot in your ship captains list before attacking Orion, else you'll just get the ship and not Loknar.
Once you command the Avenger and start integrating Orion tech into your ships, and with microlite construction at your shipyards and Recyclotrons coming into play, and the megafluxer being invented - all at about the same time - you're suddenly the ultimate superpower. You might consider building android worlds - the manual says androids are unaffected by morale, but they are. A planet full of Android Workers with +5 morale churns out Titans every couple of turns. Now pick a fight with someone you don't like. Preferably the one you've had to buy off a few times, the one who bullied you when you were small.
At the end? HV AF SP Phasors w Achilles Targeting System. 'Nuff said. Also, it's worth investigating the potential of phasing cloaks and timewarp facilitators. Does the 'decloak - fire - recloak' tactic appeal to you? ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I never played the second one much, but I remember in the first one if you were whipping up on a race and had them down to 1 or 2 planets early in the game, they'd suddenly whip out a stack of 32,000 ships and attack you. There was no way they had the resources to legitimately build that many ships and they'd wipe out planets that you had worked diligently to build up. Very frustrating.
Of course, they would have to be really, really confident in the quality of th new version...
So. .
I maintained three types of ships in my fleets; Death Stars in the rear, billions of tiny, nothing ships to waste the enemy time/target resources on in the fore, and a heavy division of what I somewhat unimaginatively dubbed, 'Ghost Ships.'
Ghost Ships were equipped with cloaking, time-warping (for the extra moves), all the extra distance modifiers I could give them, as well as the wonderful, 'Stasis Field' generator (for freezeing enemy vessels). Ghost Ships had nothing else; no weapons or armor to speak of.
And so. . , even if the aggressor went first, they used up most of their firepower on my ranks of clay pigeons, (which I liked to imagine were remote controled). Mass destruction, etc. But when my move came along, it was game over; The Ghost Ships would immediately slip across the game board undetected and snuggle up to the target vessels. --They'd then decloak and put EVERY ship in the enemy fleet into stasis. Twenty or so Ghost Ships could usually do the job.
Then, one by one, you pull a target vessel out of stasis, and concentrate all your Death Star power on it, and efficiently win the battle.
So long as you had enough Ghost ships and at least one major weapons platform remaining by the time it was your turn, the aggressor was done for.
And if you got to go first. . . Well. Having zero casualties in massive space space combat? Not a bad system. I easily trounced races with far superior fire-power and technology.
Another tactic which I used now and again, was to equip fifty or so tiny ships with really big self destruct units. It was like entering battle with a fleet of precision controled missiles which by-passed that annoying bullshit where the computer could tell me that I 'missed'. Very simply, you'd fly them up to a target and detonate them. Fairly effective, so long as the enemy didn't really rank up in the armor. When technologies were reaching their peeks for all races, Ghost Ships were the final answer.
-Fantastic Lad --Tactics. It's what's for dinner.
does anybody have any idea how the game PLAYS?
While I haven't actually seen the game, I have been following it pretty closely. There is a lot of information available on exactly how various parts of the game work.
is it 3d?
While there are pretty 3-d graphics, the gameplay is effectively 100% 2-d. I beleive you can view and rotate the "galaxy" in 3-d but the stars effectively lie in a plane. The space combat occurs in a 2-d plane with 3-d models. The game does not require a 3-d accelerated graphics card.
what are the new weapons
You can to some extent design your fighters and missles almost like they are mini-ships. I don't know anything about new weapons. The game system for weapons seems to very similar to MOO2 for weapon mods, miniturization, and general weapon classes.
[what are] ships like?
That's a HUGE question, and a lot of it is the ENTIRELY NEW combat system. I'll just skim a few points.
There are now 14 ship sizes for each of starships, system ships, and starbases. I think they expaned the text-space because of popular demand for the name "superdreadnaught", and that one is merely size 11. The space available on system ships is effectively one size class larger and starbases are effectively 2 size classes larger. YOU GET TO DESIGN YOUR STARBASES! You can have multiple starbases over a planet and they actually orbit the planet during combat. Beta testers have described the weapon capacity of larges starbases as "staggering". Planets and starbases have enormous range on their weapons - *if* they can see you.
MOO3 you are going to making and using larger numbers of ships than MOO2 and you are handling them as task forces. Dozzens, hundreds or even thousands of ships. You are probably going to need a mix of ship sizes and weapon types. It's a lot more sophisticated than MOO2's basic plan of simply making all your ships the largest hull size and stuffing them all with the same weapon. Your task forces will be made up of a variety of ships with different roles.
The combat is real-time, BUT! Lots of MOO fans freak out when they hear "real time combat", but as I understand it is NOTHING like the typical real time combat system and that "turn-based fans" who have used it are actually happy with it. It is not a hectic click-fest. It is strategic in nature. The ship captains and task force leaders in the fleet are "smart" and you give them combat strategies.
The combat uses "fog of war" where you can only see ships within sensor range (planets are always visible). One of the roles for small ships is as perimiter scouts acting as eyes for your big ships with and ultra long range beam weapons and/or missles. You want to keep those ships out of the enemy's sight while they hammer him.
Starships can move from any star to any star just like in MOO1 and MOO2, but they're added starlanes. Starlane travel is MUCH faster than going "offroad". I think they are trying to get the "best of both worlds", starlanes help you build frontlines and choke points, but in starlane-only games things can get too restricted and the chokepoints become become stupid. From what I've read they seem to have done a good job and it works well. Hopfully the combination will give strategic richness.
There's a LOT more, but my "just skim a few points" already turned into 5 paragraphs. The starlanes and realtime combat have been very controversial, but the general consensus is that you have to actually see how it works and that it really does work out well.
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