I am very excited about the reboot of original MOO. Its my favorite game of all time by far.


I hated Lord of Rigel. Its just like MOO2 which totally wasnt my taste.The video here

I am yet to see MORE.

So, Gog has already a store page up with some info and screenshots: http://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion

Going by the colony screen, planetary management is basically like in MoO2 with some extra stats (morale and defense, not sure what the latter is all about). Would have preferred something closer to MoO1 but I suppose it was to be expected.

Oh, and there are pirate fleets apparently. Hopefully that'll spice things up in early game and times of peace with the other races.

One question is: I own all MoO games on GoG already, so do I get a discount on the collectors edition then?
Because the first 3 games are part of the collectors edition, so it should be discounted for people who already own the first 3 games.

The reason I still play moo2 because it is the only game I know with decent ship design.

(Stardrive is kinda... meh)

Later games sucked at implementing it, not focussing on it. So I am pretty sure they've not got this.

I do remember reading about when Wargaming.net got the IP to MoO two years ago... At first I was worried, and then possibly relieved, thinking of them largely as a one-trick pony who would've just used it for a harmless spinoff. Now I'm kinda worried again.

Partly, it's when they step out to already begin marginalizing and downplaying a COMMUNITY in the name of what they're pushing. "It's about 10% of the players", really? We're talking about a game where it's a well-known joke that if you forgot to enable "tactical combat" for the game... You immediately trash it and restart it over. And Wargaming has absolutely zero backing to suggest that this "10%" was anything other than "100%"; they basically pulled the number out of their rear end.

I'm less worried about their current suggestion of focus (which can and does change) rather than the more-telling approach where they tried downplaying part of their own player base: that's the real sign of when a studio has already irreversibly made up their mind, and has just started preemptively getting defensive. That statement alone, unless unequivocally retracted, basically means that even if the game isn't outright bad, it won't be a decent MoO game. (possibly read: MoO 1/2)

To be a good MoO game (rather than just a generic space game with the name/trademarked races slapped on) it'd have to recognize what the "core game" of MoO is... Which includes several key things:

- Ship designing. Sure, other games may not "succeed well" with it, but that's a mix of their design not being a critical strategic consideration, nor them doing it particularly well... And it's an incorrect blanket statement to think that no other games succeeded with a high reliance on ship design. (Stars! is one where it arguably mattered even more)

- A free-form, decoupled research line. No "tech trees," and certainly nothing like Civilizations "tech ladder." A major tennant of what set MoO 1/2 apart was not just your CHOICE to invest in research, but WHAT you researched: it was a strategic choice there as well. Contrast with say, Civ, where the choice isn't WHAT you research, but merely WHEN... You have potentially very challenging choices to make in MoO 2, such as picking between the cloning center or soil enrichment, or bigger yet, the ENTIRE chemistry ladder was full of nothing but hard choices that could make or break your game.

- An open galaxy map. The pictures I see already suggest some more of the "direct lines between worlds" rubbish which basically makes it a land-based 4X with space-based visuals. Both MoO 1 and MoO 2 made for some very important strategic choices through ALL four "X"es based upon your reach and ability to defend areas, and being able to travel directly between any two stars was key to how its power game played out.

Other factors, which Wargaming might call "Core," are not really as important in MoO as they are in all the other 4X games: colony development was actually a relatively background task, as there rarely were that many choices to make; in MoO 1 you just built factories, terraformed, and built missile bases to the best of your ability. MoO 2 let you diversity between picking your housing, production, and research colonies, and in all fairness, it's focus on a LOT of gameplay on individual colonies was one of its (few) weaknesses.

I agree with a lot of your points, but I hate trashing a game before it is even developed. The artwork posted here on GoG looks like they might be going for a hybrid between MoO1 and MoO2. I guess we will just have to wait and see what Wargaming.net does with it. In any case, Lords of Rigel is looking like a very accurate MoO2 clone, so sometime next year there will be a nice choice of some new 4x space games to play.

Maybe they're trying to make the game more manageable for the AI opponents, with the direct lines between star systems, and the lack of ship design and tactical combat. Still, I'm going to miss the ship design. On the bright side, there seems to be a "Custom Race" button on the race selection screen, which is one of my favourite things in MoO2. I just hope that button won't let me down as much as it did in Star Ruler 2. But why did they make the Bulrathi look like grumpy Ewoks with shaved faces, instead of bears?

Still, overall I'm looking forward to this.

https://www.facebook.com/MasterofOrion.Official/videos/985270568195319/

The Collectors Edition with Early Access is going to appear here and on steam on February 26h, and is going to cost $49.99.

EA will have tactical combat and six of the ten races (not counting the 11th extra human race) but won't have ability to create your own race until later. Combat is hybrid RTS, with a pause feature (you can see a pic of an older build of the combat UI on the official forums). A ship design video is due out on Weds.

Hybrid means RTS with pausable combat and when you select a ship you can give it ship specific orders. There is an example of what it looks like in the new early access video 0:26-0:27

I'm a bit concerned about that hybrid-RTS-approach as well. Pausing is good and well, but in a battle with many ships involved this could boil down to being forced to pause/unpause constantly. I can be easily wrong with that, of course, but it requires intelligent automatic behaviour for the human-controlled ships then (e.g. What target does one of your ships pick when the initial one has been destroyed) Otherwise the CPU is at advanatge just because it can easily manage an endless amount of ships individually at the same time.

I know what it is ;) , some RPGs have this, too. Still it is not turnbased and you could oversee something, still better for me one by one and auto when important things are done.

AI doesn't get an endless amount of ships given the command point mechanic, plus how is the unpause, pause mechanic different from TBS? I don't understand the objection here (and for the record you're not the first to make the same objection).

I imagine Sakkraner's concern pertains to complex tactical situations in MoO2 where the targeting order/priority is important and there are different things that need to be done using specific weapons systems in a specific order: example - take down enemy shields using Hvy Mass Drivers, then kill enemy crew using Neutron Rays, then send boarding party using teleporters. It would be very tough to micromanage that for multiple friendly ships fighting multiple enemies in an rts format.

Of course, if the game doesn't do tactical combat, then maybe those types of chained actions/commands never come into play to begin with.

That said, I have played plenty of good rts games that allow lots of cool tactical decision-making with a pause option: Baldur's Gate series, Total War series, Sword of the Stars series are all good games with rts combat that uses a pause feature to give orders, each one in their own unique way. Interestingly, Star Wars Old Republic series kind of did the reverse: turn-based combat default that tries to look like an rts when hitting the "de-pause" button. That works too.

I think both rts/tbs work if they are done right. The question is how it gets implemented.