Dirk the Average posted:

Master of Orion. I've always found it to be better than MoO2 for the simple reason that when you unlock new industry tech, you don't have to gently caress around with a buildings screen - you just up industrial spending and your governors build the industry. The UI in MoO is ancient, and honestly a modern take on MoO where the economy was dead simple would be fantastic.

Ragnar34 posted:

Hot take? Jesus, is that a minority opinion? I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they wanted to design units. I assume there are some grognards out there who are excited to manually retrofit all their units from bronze to iron on turn 40 of every game, but surely they're a negligible portion of the target audience.

Relax Or DIE posted:

possibly unpopular opinion: 4X in general should have the 'board' be more of a player and/or should be more willing to jostle the player's house of cards with events outside of their control. it's likely a tough balance to strike, you don't want a player chugging along just fine to have their empire drop into a hole suddenly, but at least in my experience games are a bit too afraid to have the player(s) forced to react to something that isn't a war declaration. a good example of this might be the grand menances from Sword of the Stars.

Relax Or DIE posted:

on of the greatest secrets to enjoying 4x is knowing when to quit, yeah. Which 4xes remain engaging all the way to the end? I can't think of any outside of stuff where you can mess around being totally busted for fun, like MoO2 or MoM or something.

Mayveena posted:

Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/

I'm phone posting, otherwise I'd list them as well.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

They keep loving up moo2 remakes by putting crap like starlanes in the game, or making colony management too finicky.

Clarste posted:

I will say that MOO2 was the only game in history where I had fun with the ship designer.

Meme Poker Party posted:

I am reporting you for space racism against lizards.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

They also added star-lanes, which suck and their implementation of them in that game is especially bad since the way the ships move, you are always a minimum of 3 turns away from a planet regardless of your engine tech. One turn to leave the system and go into hyperspace, one turn to leave hyperspace and get to a planet. What a mess.

habituallyred posted:

MOO2 had the perfect LAN multiplayer setup. Everybody inputs their non combat stuff at the same time. Then the game processes everything once all the turns are in. The only thing you can race to do is conduct diplomacy with other species. Dominions has this going for it too, but there is way more stuff to fiddle with there.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

Are you saying there is updated Master of Orion 2? I only see the old Master of Orion remake which is a pretty bad game since it decided to use star-lanes for the galaxy topology which makes the end-game a huge slog. Literally a minimum of 6 turns to traverse between two systems.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

MoO has always had multiple win conditions The Galactic Senate, Conquering all or killing the Antarans in MoO2. But It's also always had late game techs that make the conquest victory lap easier and fun. The new MoO doesn't have the ability to make the end game a fun victory lap instead of a slog. Also the planet management mechanics are very uninspired and the race customization sucks. MoO2 has much better custom race options.

chaosapiant posted:

Is there a packaged version somewhere of Civilization 2 that runs natively on Windows 10 and isn't bugged? I have the "Civilization Collection" box set which has Civ 2, but I don't have a disc drive any more and my understanding is that the "working/current" version of the game has some kind of bugged AI?

Edit: While I'm here, i've decided to play some of the older 4Xs I never played when I was younger: Master of Magic, Master of Orion, and MoO 2. Are there any good let's plays of the original flavor Master of Orion that goons would recommend? Either video or SSLPs are fine with me. I've found some good stuff for MoM and MoO2 already.

chaosapiant posted:

After years of playing 4Xs, but never playing either MoO Classic or MoO 2, i'm falling in love with both of these games. I think I do prefer MoO 2 for the better presentation and atmosphere and I like loving with pops. But both games are just so drat elegant in their design it makes me wonder why other 4Xs keep having to get just more and more complicated.

Ironically, it's Distant Worlds Universe that reminds me the most of the original MoOs. It's got that right mix of mystery and atmosphere the original games have.

More Master of Orion questions:

1. How was the remake of MoO? Is it as good as the originals? Or is it just a soul-less knock off type thing?

2. Master of Orion 3: is that any good these days? I know there's been fan-patches to fix tons of issues, but is it actually a good game these days with those patches? I've been reading Libliuni's awesome MoO3 Let's Play, but it's hard to get an idea of how the game plays today, fully patched and what not?

RandomBlue posted:

1. Not good. Extremely bland and forgettable IMO.

2. I've tried it a few times but even all patched to hell it wasn't enjoyable for me.

chaosapiant posted:

Is there any reason at all to play it over MoO 2? I mean, when it comes to more modern 4Xs, I've got Endless Space 2, Distant Worlds Universe and its sequel, and of course Stellaris.

Libluini posted:

MO16 has sexy cat ladies, if you're into that. Otherwise, not really. "It looks nicer to modern audiences" is the only thing it has going for it.

PerniciousKnid posted:

It was run by Alan Emrich who wrote the prior have strategy guides so I assume it was writer arrogance, like every time a movie critic makes a movie and it turns out terrible.

Kvlt! posted:

anyone have recs for "coffee break" 4X games if they exist? Don't have to be actual short spanned in game length, but just something lighter than Civ to tinker with after work when im tired and don't have a lot of brainpower to use

victrix posted:

asymmetric design answers that, by having the AI play a different game than the player - with the intent not being to play the same snowball 4x ICS as the player, but instead to present an interesting and enjoyable challenge (cf. AI War)

the baked in assumption that the CPU players must play the same game as the player without cheating (screeching from the 4x audience), hamstrings so many 4x games from the word go

StrixNebulosa posted:

I generally see it as the PVP vs PVE divide. Do you want the game more heavily tilted towards fighting mind worms / barbarians / the invader guys from MOO2, or towards fighting other players/AI? I suspect I could turn off enemy wizards in Warlock 2 entirely and still have a good time exploring and beating up monster lairs, but if I turned off the other dudes in SMAX, fighting mind worms wouldn't be enough.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

most games have lame unit design because 4X is a wasteland of the imagination where the biggest difference in unit parts most designers can conceive of is a gun that does 10% more damage with 20% less range or if you really wanna get kinky a rock-paper-scissors thing with shields and armor. This is not an issue in any other genre that has customization (RPGs, tactical combat games) because the people making them aren't stuck trying to replicate DOS-era game design and let the little modules have weird gimmicks that synergize in distinct ways, so you can build goofy stuff like aircraft carrier submarines and spaceships that only work at point-blank range but shoot grappling guns so they'll stay at point-blank range and have those be extremely contextually effective against someone who didn't plan for that, and also hilarious

Agean90 posted:

scifi 4x games are made by science fiction nerds which means they're easily distracted by dumb details that dont actually matter

I don't want to give a poo poo about the loadout of each specific ship, I want to know what they were built for and what their use for the state is. I don't want to declare that this planet will have this building and personality dictate it's construction plan for the next 10 years, I want to dictate an economic plan based on available resources and stay focused on the bigger picture

GlyphGryph posted:

I found an old copy of SMAC on my computer and copied it to my son's computer, and we've been playing a bunch of it lately, and god drat I forgot how much more fun this is than most of the 4xs I've played since.

Playing with my son has been especially fun, since he has some clear rules: Deirdre is always his friend, and if she doesn't want to be he will make her. Yang is always his enemy, no matter what. And he will absolutely stab in me in the back at every opportunity if one opens up, but he will immediately apologize and try to give me tech/money to make up for having done so after a few turns (he's keeping the cities though).

One of the best parts about playing SMAC was playing against other leaders who felt like they had personalities, at least a little bit, and my playing with my son is a lot like that, compared to the boringness of most 4x players I've played with trying to optimize everything.

my dad posted:

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

Again outside the 4X space there's games that do combat quite well in comparable circumstances, Frozen Synapse comes to mind. But that's a tactical game where the whole point is high-tension combat puzzle-solving, not noodling around the map making a little country without having to worry that if you waste some moves doing something silly the computer is going to eat you alive

Fangz posted:

EDIT: ^^^ Into the Breach "AI" is just random.

GlyphGryph posted:

Hey, something I'm actually knowledgeable about! Machine learning is very very good at the sort of complexity you're describing, and no you don't need a human opponent or an existing AI to train them. 4x games would be a remarkably easy problem for adversarial networks to solve in fairly robust ways with modern design approaches. It doesn't even matter that games are particularly long (and they wouldn't be all that long for an AI) because any decent training network isn't going to be playing full games anyway.

Absolutely no one developing 4xs right now is likely to have the skill to do any of that, nor do they have any real incentive to gain or develop or them, because that involves a lot of work and technical know-how, but it wouldn't be particularly difficult to train an AI to play a 4x game well enough to completely outshine any human player, since they are complex enough you don't need to get anywhere near "optimal" play, you just need heuristics slightly better than the ones human use.

But who actually wants that? Do players care enough to make it worth the money to hire the talent or buy the hardware needed? Hell no, and most players would complain about the AI "cheating" if you bothered. This is video game development! If you can take a shortcut to avoid doing work the player can't see, that's what you're gonna do!

Lady Radia posted:

Miriam was right tho

Lady Radia posted:

no, that is correct, given everything that transpires.