Now that I've gotten back into this forum (and the Space Sector project), I've started thinking more about the other MOO2 clones that are already out there... and what they did right and wrong. The most obvious one is StarDrive 2, which practically IS MOO2 with certain "enhancements" (quests, real-time space battles, more planet specials, random hostiles in the galaxy, more techs, and the ability to do stuff in empty sectors)... but the Space Sector crew has already extensively reviewed StarDrive 2, and I doubt I could say anything about it that they haven't already contemplated deeply. Then there's Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars, the official MOO2 remake... which had starlanes, no turn-based combat, no leaders, and not even any race customization. I actually didn't think it was THAT bad (and its minor civs and biome pollution degredation were good ideas), but I can't think of it as a proper MOO2 remake. (EDIT: Leaders were added to the new MOO in a later patch or DLC. But still.) But there's also Stars In Shadow, which is now out of Early Access and is yet another small-team project that was heavily inspired by MOO2. And I ended up enjoying it a lot. Bad Things First, though, let's get the game's flaws out of the way. At least on the normal difficulty, it was way too easy to make alliances. If you have enough influence points and have already done the target race a favor or two, they'll sign up with no hesitation, and they don't even seem to get mad if you refuse to join their wars later (or even if you're already allied to another empire they're at war with!). I was playing the Yoral that time, who had quotes like "With so many alien whelps around, it's hard to decide who to conquer first!"... but it was SO much easier to just get everyone on my side and be voted master of the galaxy than go through the hassle of conquering anyone. Speaking of victory, that was another letdown. There's only conquest and alliance/election victories, which I felt was really inadequate (this issue was even the thing that most dampened my enthusiasm for Stellaris). Worse yet, your reward for an election win is practically "A winner is you!". You don't get a victory movie or even a final score... the game doesn't even end. You just start getting a popup every turn that says something like "No resistance remains; the galaxy is ours." Meh. The tech tree is something of a hassle to navigate. It only shows you what you can research NOW. If you want to know how to reach a tech farther up the tree, you have to dig through the category links for it, then work backwards through the links until you've reached the step you can do NEXT. Moreover, researching techs didn't involve the agonizing choices that a proper MOO2 remake should inflict upon you. There are also no leaders or spies or ancient super-menaces to stand in for the Antareans. Good Things The above issues aside, Stars In Shadow did a lot of things right. I really liked the game's handling of planets. Each planet has only a few slots for infrastructure (mines, factories, farms, etc). While that may sound limiting, I liked how easy it was to specialize planets for certain functions, and how mining was separated from production. And unlike MOO2, you don't end up with a lot of late game micromanagement where you're building everything on every planet. You actually have to think about what each planet is good for, versus what your empire needs and what the planet's max population will ultimately support. Planets still have one biome, but most of them have different climate zones (Ocean, Forest, Arid, Ice, Airless, etc), and each race prefers certain zones over others. Again, this is an improvement over MOO2, as once your empire starts absorbing other races, it pays to think about what kinds of planets you should have them living on, especially since population contributes to the votes you need for a victory. (Yes, MOO3 also did the "planets have different subregions" thing... but that wasn't one of its failings. The dumb AI was the real problem, as it rarely paid any attention to what regions it was building on.) Speaking of the races, that was largely another good point. There are only a half dozen main races you can play, but they all play at least a little differently from each other... the Yoral can thrive in almost any climate, while the Gremak can enslave others, and the Humans start with no colonies and one refugee fleet. There are also at least a dozen minor races (which ranged from useful to very annoying). That number is paltry compared to Stellaris, I know, but these minor races had the feeling of being handcrafted, rather than random assemblages of portraits and stats. The game also had pirate factions that seemed possibly inspired by Distant Worlds. Some of the pirates would harass or enslave your colonies, but others are more willing to trade or coexist with you. Sadly, there seemed to be no way to bribe them to harass other empires, but still, they weren't the completely mindless barbarians they usually are in 4X games. Finally, the game has robust ship design and (holy shit) TURN-BASED SPACE COMBAT. I don't know if I can overstate how much these two things alone made it feel like I was finally playing a classic old school space 4X game again. Hell, I can't even think of a space 4X game from the last several years that even had turn-based combat. Final Thoughts I enjoyed Stars In Shadow overall, and think all MOO2 fans should give it a try. However, I still look forward to the Space Sector project and hope it will produce the best spiritual successor to MOO2. After considering Stars In Shadow's example, I find myself asking questions that I have not yet seen answers for in the Community Feedback List or the dev diaries. What is a good way to reduce late-game micromanagement when you have so many things to build on a planet? Are different climate zones / subregions for planets a worthwhile way to add complexity and make planets unique from each other? Are sophisticated minor races and/or pirate factions something Space Sector can (or should) do?
Thanks for the "review"! The negative points don't seem to be unsurmountable (e.g., in a future fix). I think I will give it a try. On your final thoughts: I think one way to limit this a bit is to require that each building has one population unit on the planet to match: after all, you need workers to run these buildings! If one wants to keep the farmer/worker/scientist scheme of MOO2, you need 1 worker to run a factory, 1 scientist to run a research lab, etc. So on planets with limited population (e.g., because its an inhospitable piece of rock), you would only get to build a few buildings. Whereas on larger, terrestrial (or terraformed) planets, you could build essentially everything you wanted. Perhaps - but perhaps that would also invite the danger of micromanagement. But if you do have some system that invites concentration to a few great core worlds with a lot of auxilliary buildings/mines/etc. distributed over some minor planets, then perhaps you could afford to micromanage the surfaces of core worlds a bit more. Minor races is one of the few things I really missed from MOO2. You had "natives", ok, and you could have "lost colonies" joining you, but real minor races (like Birth of the Federation had them at the time) would have provided an interesting addition to the game.
IG 2 took this a step further, not only did you require population for your buildings but energy as well. When there was not enough energy available you could build additional power plants but they also required population to run. Very effective in pacing growth and far more realistic as a mechanic. Edit Birth of the Federation partially applied this, some structures required energy while others did not, an interesting variation of the concept.
Thanks for the responses, guys. I like this idea, too. In fact, Stars In Shadow dipped a little into this by having minimum pop requirements for your infrastructure. If you were under the "fully staffed" level for your buildings, you wouldn't get full productivity out of them. Where it got weird, though, is that it only applied those rules to DUPLICATES of the same building. So if your planet had 2 factories (which require 4 pops each), you'll need 8 pops to avoid productivity loss. But 1 factory (4 pops to fully staff) and 1 market (4 pops)? Somehow, you only need 4 pops! Anyway, both realistically and from a gameplay perspective, you shouldn't be able to take a piddly 1 pop colony, build everything on it, and get the same benefits. Luckily, in MOO2 it isn't QUITE like that. A max-pop planet still has many more pops working in their slots, so the planet is still outproducing the 1 pop colony. I don't know, I just hope Space Sector will have something (more than maintenance costs) to make me think carefully about what I want to build on a planet. This is another place where the tech tree could give us an interesting choice - automated buildings that work well on low-pop worlds (but can't be improved much by having a high population) vs. buildings that are awesome IF you have the pops to make full use of them.
I like this, clean, effective and not difficult to integrate into the game. It also stays well within the feel of Moo2 (autolabs come to mind) A few more building types along these lines would certainly be an asset to the game in multiple ways, we would see more variety of buildings, greater differentiation between colony types and add some realism to the subject while still remaining abstract (neat trick that). If I could agree with this twice, I would.
I'll do it for you. Yes, that would indeed seem like a good approach: a few "robotic" buildings geared towards making low-pop worlds more effective in the mid-game, but they should still be nowhere near as effective as other buildings doing similar things (e.g., production) on a highly populated world.
Stars in Shadows became a little too simple, one major negative for me is that it was only war that allowed you to do anything. The empire building and doing peaceful buildup was non-existent. The entire game play boiled down too: Find an artifact planet (extra research), que up research labs and then produce research, never touch planet again. Find a mineral rich planet, que up mines and then produce minerals, never touch planet again. Find a fertile planet, que up farms and then produce food, never touch planet again. Find a mineral poor planet, que up markets and then produce money, never touch planet again. Find a ho hum general planet, que up mines or markets and then produce minerals or money, never touch planet again. Each of these planets only took a couple turns to manage, que up 5 of each of their specialty, when those were done 50 turns later, set planet to produce its specialty and done. On 2 Planets in your empire, large planets for big pops, you produce factories and then ships. You cant make anything else other than ships or the above 4 items. You will need 10 mineral production planets to feed a single factory planet as minerals are slow to produce. Take 1 factory planet and build about 3 factories and have it produce merchant transports ad infinitium for the rest of the game. Take other factory planet and produce your best ship the rest of the game (which will be a rail gun equipped ship). That's it for all planetary management. Very simple, not much to do and gets boring. The only thing you can then do is war war war, or alliances and diplomatic victory. This latter route is very boring because there is nothing to do if you are at peace. No wonders to build, no cool planetary improvements, no spying, just really nothing but make ships for war. The combat was great 20 yrs ago in Moo2, and this is a total clone of it, and the graphics arent really any better, but are slightly higher resolution. But the combat by today's standards was boring. Combat starts, all ships for each participant line up on each side like its the civil war, and 1 player goes first. Move ships fire with your long range rail guns, destroy 1/3 of enemy fleet on first turn and those ships you destroyed will never get a chance to fire. No maneuvering required. Next player (AI) goes, they fire their missiles and fighters and beam weapons. Then first player goes again and shoots down all missiles and fighters, not a single one will ever land a single hit once your are past the 35% mark in the tech tree because your point defenses are too strong, but the AI keeps building them anyways. Andy planetary defenses are like butter, as if they dont even exist. The AI builds a crap tone of tanks so doing a ground invasion is impossible. So you bombard the planet to ashes and land a colony ship and rebuild. Once you bomb a few enemy planets to smithereens, the entire enemies empire goes into revolt. This will happen to you as well if you let the enemy glass a few of your planets. Every single citizen on every one your planets, or theirs, will go into revolt shutting down the whole empire. At that point if you did the bombing, and can then take your time and go from planet to planet of theirs, bomb them to nothing and drop a colony ship and they will never be able to stop you. But don't bomb the planet until have a colony ship in orbit, otherwise another AI will be there 2 turns later with a colony ship If you fall behind in tech, go to the mercenary exchange and buy several ships, they are cheap and will have all the latest technology. You just have to wait a few turns before you get them. Go back every 10 turns and buy more ships, you will can be way behind in tech but as long as you have some money, you can fight with all the latest tech. Exploration was almost non-existent as well. No quests, and you will only find about 2 goody huts in a game. only a single scout ship is ever needed. After a couple of games, I ultimately found it rather boring. Nothing to do during peace, only thing to do during war was have a single planet or 2 planets at most build a steady stream of ships. Fight the boring civil war combat, glass a few planets and win. The combat is great the first several times, even the whole first game, but quickly gets boring as you realize there just isn't much to do. Its just an open combat, no asteroids, no nebula (no terrain), not much point in rotating ships, no tractor beams, no repulsers, missiles and fighters are completely worthless. You can do boarding raids and capture ships, but you will quickly loose interest in it, and there is only a single planet with a single missile base and a single space station present as fixed defenses. I wanted to like it, but just couldn't really get into it. It just felt too dated and too geared for war and not enough strategy involved.
Yeah, Stars in Shadow has some interesting ideas (I did like planet management, which was simplified and more to my liking). But the combat and AI and Research and exploration as you mentioned were a bummer.
