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.

Comments

Favorite MOO2 Memory

[LordZardoz]

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.

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Re:Favorite MOO2 Memory

[DarklordJonnyDigital]

My favourite tactic in MOO2 was not to destroy anything, but to ally with everyone and become their best friends. Seems kinda pathetic, I know, but read on.

Eventually, my people would be in perfect harmony with the Psilons - the most technologically advanced race in the game who not only get more technologies than anyone else in every field of research, they also gain them all faster. In MOO2, technology is a huge power, one that can make or break the game, and if all goes well I'm perfectly allied with these guys. What few enemies I have won't stand a chance.

Now, here's a the excellent part. When you're in perfect friendship with the Psilons and 'demand' one of their technologies, they'll give it. No questions asked - you're their ally, and they really do love you that much. "Hey blueface, how about some of those planet destroying beams of yours?" "No problem, human ally!"

And it's not just technologies. They'll give you entire star systems as well. ENTIRE STAR SYSTEMS. Systems with Gaia planets, systems with Ultra-Rich planets, systems of strategic importance, systems they just spent their hard-earned cash colonising - systems with expensive superpowerful ships at them. Systems choc-full of superbrainy Psilon scientists.

Of course, there's one thing they won't give you, and that's their homeworld. Of course, by the time you demand their homeworld, you've got every other star system of theirs, ninety percent of their fleet and all of their technology.

Luckily, my pacifist race (the Web Designers) is Telepathic, so I once I use ninety percent of their own fleet against the remaining ten percent, I simply Mind Control their home planet into loving my race and serving my faithfully..

Assuming it supports LAN play, I look forward to buying MOO3 for my brother's birthday.

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Re:favorite part

[meringuoid]

Ok, I guess I reply instead. Turn based combat worked just fine in MOO and MOO 2!

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...

Re:Will the AI cheat?

[meringuoid]

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 the AI will cheat - they always do. If an AI doesn't cheat it hasn't a hope against a competent human. It took decades of programming work to develop chess programs that could take on good human players on even term; Civs and Moos are far more complex games than chess, and their developers haven't had anything like as long to develop the AI. As long as the AI doesn't cheat and get caught, then we're OK. It should really be spelled out in the manual: 'Easy: The AI pays extra for all its ships, its population grows more slowly, and it has trouble keeping its people happy. Normal: The AI plays on even terms. Hard: The AI gets discount ships, faster population growth, and less unrest. Impossible: As Hard, but more so. Also, AIs will be naturally more friendly with each other than with you.'

I think MOO2's AI cheated in the opening game, then stopped. AIs always used to build their first few colony ships and cruisers more quickly than I could. Later on, they came out with some very large fleets, but this seemed to be a policy of going for quantity over quality, and I didn't catch them cheating in their production.

As a matter of fact, I _liked_ seeing someone cruising about with a fleet of 120 obsolete battleships. Cheap to build, sure, but the upkeep on those things must be crippling. Here comes my small but perfectly formed Psilon cruiser to help cut their government spending... *gloat* They definitely have to pay upkeep on their fleets - I tested this once. I had an enemy on his knees, in the last free star system in the galaxy. I ordered the fleet to guard the neighbouring systems, and gave the enemy 10% tribute. This is an enormous sum - most of my great war factories are idle, churning out Trade Goods. AI promptly invests this money in producing all the ships it can, and once it considers its bases adequately defended it starts sending out fleets to attack me. I then cancel the 10% tribute, and watch the economic crisis begin ;-)

I'm pretty sure the AIs don't cheat when against the wall; usually when they're in that state you have full sensor coverage of their territory, and are watching everything that happens. If a dozen warships appear out of thin air the player will notice something awry.

There is one thing the MOO2 AIs do that _really_ annoyed me, but it isn't cheating. The Galaxy's split between me, another superpower that I'm reluctant to fight, and several small empires. I'm storming into one of the little guys in a blatant landgrab, and they realise they're doomed. They immediately surrender - to the other superpower. Aargh!

Re:Er..what kind of game is it?

[Alsee]

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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