Hot posts in thread: Master of Orion 2 pet peeves and annoyances in general

I have mentioned this, I think, spying extra late game. It is not uncommon in a game that I want to take out all planets that have been colonized,that at the point where a race is down to one planet and maybe size 1 or 2. They are able to steal a tech, while I have 64 spies on defense.

They did not manage to steal the whole game, now they do. It has no impact, but it does annoy me.

 

Don't worry about your English Maximiliano, You went to the trouble of learning a second language and I respect that.
From what I sense the Devs have shown about a third of their vision so far and they are flexible ways to accomplish the rest. There is already an element of what you propose with the leaders who level up in a way to give an RPG factor to PSS in just the right amount. Doing something similar with the ships may be something to consider as PSS evolves.

 

Thanks you very much for the welcome Chris!, i was a very active member in the "freeorion project", that was years ago.. damn i´m getting old...
I think too that this will be "the one", it will have all the plus from MoO2 and improve where it need to. About the colonies micromanagement i am complete confident in the approach that you describe taken by Adam & Co.
Going a bit more deep in the concept of fewer ships but more important one, i think that one technology to research can be "adaptative AI combat/quantum computer". With this technology the vessel that has it can adapt, through successive battles, to the styles of combat of the different races (if survives, of course). That would translate into improvement of aim, evasion, enemy ship weak points or things like that when you fight that race again with that ship. Only one of my many ideas. (sorry for my english) Thanks again for the kind welcome!

 

Welcome aboard Maximiliano, excellent post and I agree with you across the board with one qualification.
PSS will not need anything like the sector mechanic in Stellaris to contain micromanagement. That particular mechanic is useful but also disliked by some players so it is not entirely a positive asset. PSS has found an approach that allows a player to both diversify and specialise colonies without incurring micromanagement or being arbitrary, when I first examined it I was quite taken aback by how effective and well thought out it is. I too am a huge MoO2 fan and PSS has managed to rectify quite a lot areas that were somewhat lacking there. I have to tell you, I really feel like this is "the one"... and I'm a bit picky so consider that for what it is worth.
Once again, welcome aboard.

 

MoO2 fan here and i have to disagree with you in several points.
Stacking of ships was horrid, i don't want to have that again, with that the combat lost so much immersion and was so childish.. This is a Spiritual MoO2 game, not a MoO1 one.
i love the "more than 10 ships tactical battles". In MoO2 there was very few really big and long tactical battles, because you and your enemies only have one or two "major fleets", and that battles were decisive, so i am not against long battles. And i reaaaally like the idea of "fewer ships, but more important"
i Agree with the planet micromanagement, that was unnecessary, but you can make something like stellaris making sectors, and focus one sector in research, other in industry, others in building ships, food, etc.
Ships/Planets leaders was a CORE part of MoO2. If you say the opposite, then this will not be the game for you.
I like the spies as was implemented in MoO2, i like that. but can be improved.
retrofit ships is another key part of MoO2. You have a glorious ship with a very experienced crew, and you can update all the weapons and systems, shields, hulls, etc, and that things add so much immersion and "love factor". This is a MUST in a MoO2 spiritual successor.

 

Not stressful for me but very annoying: each young colony nags you about building queue every seven or so turns. Especially when you have high income and can buy everything. Getting new building type during late game is ultra annoying, you have to visit each colony, remove trade goods, enqueue new building, distribute labor and later put workers back to research.

 

Exactly which points of microing in the late game have been so stressful for many people? (not for me, I like micro but I admit that others may think different)

Maybe it just depends on the way the building system works. For example Stars in Shadow has only a few building slots (3 to 8 or so) per planet (not an infinite amount like MOO2) and a few building types (half a dozen and not dozens like MOO2), so the system naturally is almost no micromanagement even when you have dozens of planets because the slots of the older ones are filled up very soon. One of the interesting side-effects of this SiS system is that you can specialize your planets in a nice fashion and it constantly also forces the player to make decisions which building he should put on which planet.

 

Automation would help but combined with additional methods it could work better. How the game paces and scales is important in this (and other key areas). If the situation sees the player controlling 40-50 colonies each session, then keep things simpler. If on the other hand, 12 colonies is an achievement (it can be done and the player still made to feel that they are fighting for the galaxy), then you can be more sophisticated. Automation, balance, scale, ease of use, ease of understanding, degree of sophistication... all these areas can control micromanagement and enhance the game.

 

That was actually a race-dependent. If your race was creative than you could have all three.
Getting back to topic: Micromanagement in the late game was a pain. However, we can not forget that the same miromanagement kept game interesting in early phase where there was not much to do. I think what was missing is some sorf of mechanism that would allow you to automate this at later stages. Easier said than done though.

 

JOM, I agree heavily with what you list but with one qualification, at certain times the AI did field some excellent designs that tore through my own, forcing me to come up with something different to counter. In my view, the AI wasn't bad at construction and design, just very inconsistent. Sometimes they were effective just as often they were not.

 

-technology imbalance. Many of the techs are not even remotely a good choice in comparision with others in the same cathegory/level.
-only 2x4 leaders and mostly all of them are of other races you had not even detected.
-cheesy events
-bad AI ship construction

-almost all the above issues could have been removed if the game would have been moddable but it wasnt, so this is another issue.

 

I'd say my biggest is that once you know the optimal ship builds, then the AI is basically won.

It's been a while since I've payed MOO2, but I remember some mods tended to fix some of these issues.

 

MoO1 fan here. There are very few things MoO2 did better. These include extra side 'missions' such as fighting space monsters for planets and antaran lore. Better variety among the races. Custom race option. *Maybe* Colony leaders but they need to be tweaked to no longer be stationed AT a particular planet.

Some things the 2 games were equally bad at. Namely: spying, diplomacy, lack of early ground combat options. Poor galaxy generation options.

Now on to the things MoO2 was worse at....

Micro hell.

Sliders > population assignment.

Late game combat absolutely terrible.

Freighters are just unnecessary and would be better off as costs.

"Constructing" combat troops added to micro headaches that MoO1 gracefully handled as population.

Build queues. MoO1 could be adding population, building a ship, building a missile base, and increasing production (ie building automated factories). Queues were a step BACK not forward.

Predictable (and therefore optimal) research choices compared to the far superior method of randomized ladders.

MoO1 defense through missile bases was potentially much more formidable but also easier to prepare against (because it was just missiles). This is a superior system to MoO2's "variety" of defenses that ultimately melted.

Micro managing planets.

Only 1 research topic at a time compared to MoO1's much more elegant allocation system.

Ship leaders are a joke and only emphasize how poorly MoO2 combat scaled once you were building huges.

Have I mentioned planet micro?

Building spies which added to micro headaches compared to %BC allocation of MoO1.

Multiple planets per system gets praised but they only hurt tactics/strategy and would've been much better off as separate planets to defend.

Any combat with more than ~10 ships was just painful. Please take notes from MoO1 stacks or continue to reward larger and larger ships in smaller numbers.

Refit sounds nice in theory but it wasn't worth the mouse clicks. Take notes from MoO1 scapping into BC. I would even be in favor of a separate BC account that scrapped ships feed into and new ships can be built at 2-3x the rate when using that source. If you want to build that new ship quickly? Better find some existing ones to trash.

Boarding parties are just ridiculous. Unnecessary. Maybe have a small % chance that destroyed ships are recovered.

Tedious planet micro.

Terraforming as adding +max pop is fine by me. Repeat building it multiple times? Ugh. MoO1 eco sllider ftw.

Planet micro that makes me want to uninstall the game?

 

Generally speaking I agree with you. There were times however when the trade treaties scaled better. This meant you had one with a faction that eventually grew to be quite powerful, of course that would end soon after reaching this point. If the player didn't break it, the AI would, and it was during some of those times that I truly felt the impact of a trade treaty.

When this scenario occurred, I believe both the scaling of treaties and their in game impact were executed well, unfortunately this was not always the case.

 

A quote from another thread which reminded me of how poorly trade treaties scaled in MoO 2. Or rather didn't scale at all, you'd be limited to 0.5 BC per pop of smaller empire for the whole game. It was a lot in early game but as you get more buildings it starts to matter less and less until it becomes less then 10% of your empire net profit.

 

Agreed, nobody did the whole "living galaxy" thing better than Distant Worlds. I think it had a lot to do with the brilliantly implemented private sector and how well it worked in giving the player something for their navy to protect.

 

To be honest existing events were not that exciting. Getting time anomaly early on at system which constitutes 50% of you GDP is a hard kick in the sensitive area. Hyperspace flux was fun killer too. Both events would maybe be OK if their duration was short, say no longer then 5 turns. Losing ultra rich classification was outright bad design, from the start there are few rich and even fewer ultra rich planets in the galaxy, some of them hopelessly useless (toxic climate or small planet size) and then the game removes a good one because somebody dared to colonize it.

Scarcity of planet specials was really a missed opportunity. In most games I'd see no more then 1 gold or gem planet before drawing definitive borders with my neighbors. Natives and artifacts are decently uncommon but many times it feels they like those are only specials a planet can have. Like AI, map generator was not properly fleshed out.

Yeah but anybody get fooled, it was still a great game 10/10.

 

Ugh, that was such a massively depressing thread, by far the largest and most passionately debated topic on the entire forum and not a single dev or mod ever said a word except to finally lock it. It really highlighted WG's total total lack of concern for anything except churning out a dumbed-down, casual money spinner with the MOO label slapped on to milk some extra nostalgia sales. Very sad.

You're not wrong, while nowhere near as bad as the trainwreck that was MOO 3, MOO-Cts was basically a very casual, simplistic version of MOO, "MOO for dummies" is how many have accurately described to it. A really soul-crushing disappointment for such a long awaited sequel, if only Firaxis had successfully bid for the IP rather than Wargaming.........

But back on topic, my most notable annoyances with MOO 2 would be....
- Limited ship design slots, made no sense and the "game choice" added is very artificial, irritating and metagamey.
- Galaxy too small: Too big is definitely bad for gameplay but a little bigger would have been nice.
- Combat initiative: MOO2's implementation failed to stop one side from always shooting first. A bit of tweaking could have fixed it so that even small ships with much lower tech still moved and fired first. Combat initiative could work, but in MOO 2 it was not implemented well at all.
- No deep space intercepts: Impossible in MOO 2, but very possible (and useful) in other free-movement games like SOTS2 and Distant Worlds.
- No Minor races: I dont think they should be "make or break" like in BOTF but having them supply a modest boost or be a modest threat would be nice.
- No pre-FTL races: I love this concept in Stellaris. Having these guys to help or bully - as you see fit - would have been a great addition.
- No Fallen empires: Another great concept from Stellaris. Can really help spice up the end game which in MOO2 was quite lacking.
- Ultra simplistic ground combat: Nobody wants this too complex, but being able to do at least something strategic to affect the outcome would be nice.
- Design: Ship design was great in MOO 2 but it would have been nice to be able to design Stations, Fighters, Ground emplacements, even Ground forces. Look to the Space Empires series (4 and 5) for how awesome freedom of design for almost everything can be.
- Diplomacy: Actually not too bad in MOO 2 but having it even more detailed, nuanced and powerful would be great. It should be possible to be a diplomatic power in the galaxy, NOT just a military one.
- MODABILITY: Cant stress this one enough, MOO 2 simply wasn't moddable enough, the more easily moddable the better. As a game designer you cant possibly please all of the people all of the time but modding goes a long way towards fixing that, which translates directly into sales.