WG gave us a soft launch. Downloading now.

Has anyone tried it?

I loved Master of Orion 1 & 2, was really disappointed in MOO 3.

Played it for a bit last night. I'd say it's better than MoO3 for sure. Combat is a bit rough, but the giant space squid that destroyed my low tech fleet looked pretty cool.

It it turn based or real time?
I heard it was real time and sincerely i HATE when they put real time combat in 4x games.

Master of Orion's combat has always been real time, but not interactive, not at the individual unit level.

When was the combat in Marter of Orion real time? As i remember in 2 it was turn based with simultaneous movement. You set the orders and then the two fleets fights and repeat.

It's real time. Kind of like in Sword of the Stars,

Exactly, why insert RTS element in a turn based 4x I ask?
I play these games mostly because they are more about reflection than quick thinking, RTS combat, even with pause, it's one less reason to be interested in this game.

Tactical battles are terrible. In Moo / Moo2 ships could support each other with PD weapons, you could rush to fire plasma torpedos from point blank or target engines and try boarding the ship etc

In new master of orion basically you can only tell ship where to fly and that's it ! Ships will fire all available missiles at tiny fregate which is super frustrating. Why do i put missiles in 4 different slots if they all fire it on closest target.

Moo1 was all about tactical battles. Moo2 had even more tactical options in battles but they also add whole empire management stuff. New moo is all about building empire and moving people around with transporters. Tactical battles are fully automated and takes like 2% of your total play time. It's more like galactic civilizations rather than moo

It's a cute MoO 0.5.
All money went in cutiness.

It's very good for a late alpha. But needs work. AI is very weak, Tech Tree is creative-light, Etc.