I believe I tried this a year or 2 ago but I've always favored https://gitlab.com/Tapani_/1oom as I feel it delivers the closest experience to the original - also I prefer the old pixel graphics.
Of course, like frogcomposband, I find it a lot more fun when I figure out how to attach a debugger and the source code and hack the underlying values...
Size 1000 homeworld that is both Ultra Rich and Artifacts?
Add 40 technologies to be discovered upon entering a system?
Set your empire reserve to 99,999,999?
Remnants is such an impressive work of love though. The artwork in ROTP alone is worth the download.
Strangely, as a java programmer I've done far more custom code modifications to the frogcomposband (C code) fork. It is a guilty pleasure with open source games hacking their code to do fun things. Also strangely, it was easier to compile frogcomposband than RotP.
My favorite win: ally with the Darlok, the reprehensible race. Share all technology with them profligately. They grow with you to be the top 2 races in the galaxy. Upon the first election nobody will vote for the Darlok (a racial characteristic - everybody hates them) so they all vote for you. Win!
The sequel to MOO, and most 4X games made since then, have always felt inferior to me. MOO was like a game of chess. The rules were relatively simple, but complex enough to give you the "box of chocolates" games this article talks about.
MOO2 bogged you down in micromanaging colony buildings, etc. and other 4X games made since have added far more complex systems. The results feels like chess where each piece now has bolted-on RPG stats that have to be individually micromanaged. The game becomes more complex, but not in an elegant way. I don't want to manage maces and chain-mail and morale. I just want to play chess!
I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement?
I liked the micromanaging of buildings in MOO2 in the early game, but later game, when you're invading multiple planets, it definitely gets annoying.
> I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement?
Such a game would probably fail to achieve commercial success in today's world. It would be criticized for lack of depth.
I think there's room for commercially successful games that lack apparent depth. I think the success of match 3 mobile games is an indication that the market is out there.
But it's possible that it no longer overlaps with the market of self-selected 4X gamers.
Yeah, it's a certain type of trap. At first it is something to do and some near term goal that exist there. Later when you complete everything in a turn it just becomes exercise of going through a list of actions repeated over half-a-dozen to dozens systems. Maybe games should offer some tools for this, like templates what to build and what ratios and so on. You could automatically set one of these or have custom one made for those needing more special actions.
A simple "inherit from parent" checkbox for each settings dialog?
So you adjust all the settings for each, say, city in the first few rounds; then, when you have several countries, you click that box in each of the cities and from then on set it just for each country; later, click it in each country and just set for whole planets. If later you want to micromanage some specific city or country, just uncheck the box only for that one, and let all the other cities in the country / countries on the planet keep following the settings of their parent level.
That's for geographical entities. But perhaps something similar could be set by inventing hierarchical levels for more abstract concepts like technological / economic / military / research strategies. Or maybe it doesn't even need to be invented; maybe they are already bundled together in sub- and sub-sub-concepts in some games?
I don't know, I haven't played any games of this kind for... Since Civ 1 or 2, maybe mid-nineties. This came to mind because I've been thinking about doing something like this in a (totally unrelated) piece of software I'm designing in my head.
Agree, no 4X game I've seen does a kind of 'scale with scope' gameplay. Ideally the number of decisions and considerations would stay roughly the same for each turn throughout the game, regardless of how big the empire gets. The decisions would simply get larger in scope, and it'd optionally let you dig in and make tweaks to certain parts if you wanted.
I understand why nobody's done this (it's hard to do & requires having AI for each subsystem as well as the whole) but it'd make the whole genre much more fun. Right now almost all 4X games just stop being fun mid-game when their mechanics and flow just bog down in endless notifications.
I have once played a hot seat game of Moo2 with two friends. I had an increased production race, one friend had an improved science race, and second one had silicoids on steroids - he picked all kinds of maluses to get eating rocks and surplus birth rate.
... and he wiped the floor with both of us, silicoids are OP, please, nerf.
Great games and happy memories from childhood. Moo1 was better in feel, but moo2 was better at actual gameplay.
I always found population trumps all else. So if you have modifiers like subterranean (higher max pop per planet) plus maybe a pop growth increase, you’re likely to win.
Another one I always went with was to pick Repulsive (no diplomacy) since you’ll end up at war with everyone anyway.
You can wipe the floor with everyone early using a warlord + telepathic + trans-dimensional combination. Fire missles and run around. As soon as the planetary fortress falls, the planet is yours, no invasion needed. I abused it so much that friends banned the combination from multiplayer.
Interesting! Reminds me of a Civ 1 hack: build your cities one square apart, research until you can build chariots, then build a tidal wave of them. It’s against the spirit of the game but you can beat almost any other strategy this way.
I liked Telepath and silicoid - you skip all food and ground-combat skills, since you take over planets with your mind! Better than the Psilon who get all tech branches - you don't even need half of them! And can do industrial development on all planets (no wasted population making food)
Btw what I loved in Moo2 was taking planets with their population, you didn't just wipe them out, but assimilated them in your empire, and could use those colonists to settle inhospitable planets.
For those interested in playing MOO or MOO2 on a Modern Mac - you can use https://boxer.thec0de.com and open the App that Steam gives you with View Package Contents and find the .boxer file and run it with the modern boxer; it'll load just fine (they're all wrapped dosbox anyway).
Probably my favorite 4X game ever made. Been playing as the Darloks for the past 6 months on Impossible but looking to switch to another fun race to play. Any suggestions?
Meklons were fun for the added production boost. Felt like playing with the Borg. My experience is from playing more MOO2 than MOO1, though. Playing with a custom race was also fun.
Get Transports Teleporters, and your troops have a 50% change to bypass the ships in orbit. If its late game, the planet you take should have high population and production, so it can build a bunch of missile bases on the turn after you take the planet.
stellaris is a pretty good recentish one. it has the same quality that the article called out in civ, which is that you're playing a story as much as a game, and deriving enjoyment from both aspects.
Yes they do. The Civ series is still ongoing, Galciv and Stellaris have taken over for MOO, Distant Worlds came out this year. Only Master of Magic doesn't get the same kind of love as Civ and MOO.
There's even a darned good FOSS implementation of Civ5 called "Unciv" that I got extremely addicted to.
Master of magic has an entire series of games based on its concept/mechanics:
Age of Wonders. All excellent games, but AoW 2: Shadow Magic is the most excellent one, with incredible depth of gameplay. Right up there with those classics.
Nah. I tried it once and was disappointed. It was unfinished, and barely a copy. Better graphics and sound, sure, but nothing else. If I recall correctly, the tactical combat system was real-time, instead of turns, and it had flaws. There was a community patch as some point that fixed some of the issues.
Are there any games like Civilization and Master of Orion where the number of units and choices in the later game don't get so overwhelming? I usually lose interest at this point but enjoy the early game.
It's not the same kind of game or as grand in scale, but I really enjoyed Into the Breach because each turn you only have a limited number of choices and units each turn, and each choice feels important.
However, it achieves this by eliminating the combat, the opponent AI, and ways to revise your decision-making, instead making it more of an economic logistics puzzle with immense numbers of dependencies to consider on every turn, which makes some players used to having a build strategy to exploit and an enemy to beat up accuse it of being "not a game", always a good sign that you're on to something new and different.
I watched the trailer for the game, but when a selling byline is "still be done in time for lunch" I immediately go "no thanks". I want games that are engrossing and suck me in for hours at a time, not toys that can be picked up and dropped at a moments notice "on the go".
Let me put it this way: Most livestreams of this game end in several minutes of silence staring at the screen. It needs the intensity of a chess match, not Solitaire. But if you just want to veg out clicking around the map for hours, it probably won't satisfy you.
I usually lose interest at this point but enjoy the early game.
I suffer from the same problem. I love these games. I've played Civ 1-5, Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion 2, Master of Magic; all quite extensively. Every single time I get bogged down in the late game. I automate my bases/cities/planets with all of the available automation options and then try to wrap things up as quickly as I can but it always takes longer than it should.
I agree with you that the number of choices you need to make in the late game is overwhelming, and many of these choices are trivial, but there's an additional problem: you are often so far ahead of the computer AI opponents that it feels like you'd have to make some huge mistakes to give them any hope at all. It can then feel very frustrating that you're so far ahead but must still go through the whole song and dance to finish the game.
What these games really need is a diplomatic option for you to demand they surrender to you completely and become a client/puppet of your empire. Furthermore, the AI should always accept this offer if they can see they have no chance at defeating you in a war.
It might be fun if the goals of the game turned upside down when you're winning. The AI players surrender and you're the newly crowned Galactic Emperor, congratulations! Everybody works for you.
Now comes the second half of the game where you try to keep your empire together while it decays into bureaucracy. In a thousand years, a Hari Seldon appears and you have to decide whether to exile him...
> What these games really need is a diplomatic option for you to demand they surrender to you completely and become a client/puppet of your empire. Furthermore, the AI should always accept this offer if they can see they have no chance at defeating you in a war.
Try Stellaris then; vassalizing your opponents is a great strategy (even more so now that they have fixed a few things). Another strategy is to force your ideology on them, changing them into an empire with ethics more like your own who can become an ally.
> there's an additional problem: you are often so far ahead of the computer AI opponents that it feels like you'd have to make some huge mistakes to give them any hope at all. It can then feel very frustrating that you're so far ahead but must still go through the whole song and dance to finish the game.
Stellaris has an interesting innovation here too. As the end of the game approaches, there is always a Crisis which is more powerful by far than any of the AI. A good human player can beat the crisis head–on in most cases, but it is definitely a challenge. In fact, the whole game can be seen as an escalating series of boss fights built into the 4X framework, with the crisis as the final boss.
It’s fine to admit that early game is what you like - it’s true for many across many genres. Many players love Minecraft up until they get Elytra, and then really want to restart - optimizing factorio starts was always fun for me.
It’s nice when games acknowledge it as the article mentions - and some have a “victory” screen with a “keep playing” option.
The 4x games are almost between normal games and pure simulations like the city builders - where the simulation can become the fun.
I quite enjoyed The Battle of Polytopia -- it's a very cut down Civ style game.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War is enjoyable too -- it's quite simplified (the space marines can only build the one city, as appropriate for a 40k game there's zero diplomacy, etc).
Warlock - Master of the Arcane is a Master of Magic spiritual successor, and I found it a lot less taxing than Civilization in the late game.
Imho, that was the charm of Orion 1 - it was flawed about it of course, but the basic ideas that
1) You didn't have to manage individual buildings, they were just priority bars on planets...
2) Ships of the same class stacked.
meant that scaling up the empire wasn't the kind of tedious nightmare we see in more civ-style 4X games. Sadly Moo2, while a superior and more polished game than Moo1, moved away from this innovation into more conventional construciton and ship management.
This is why I couldn't get into a game like Stellaris.
Way too many mechanics that seem complex on the surface, but as far as game impact are actually irrelevant, so it feels like busywork. As opposed to MOO, where 1 slider early game can change the outcome of the entire game.
Agreed. I grew up on MOO2, played too much of it, mostly hotseat with a friend.
I tried a few other 4X space games, but none scratched the itch that Stellaris did. It's the only 4X space game I play now. And Paradox keeps adding content!
The late game crisis is such a good idea to solve this problem.
At that point you're strong enough that you can beat all the other empires but then an extra-dimensional invasion happens that's just so much stronger than anything else you've encountered and it works really well to spice up the late game and make everything relevant again.
I was always partial to Stars![0] though I did enjoy MOO. It looked a lot like a Windows productivity app so I could play it with no one being the wiser. It wasn't as deep as MOO other some other games but I enjoyed it.
Stars!! Finally another living human who has heard of it.
I remember finding the limited demo on one of those "101 games!" $1.99 CD-ROMs, and then tracked down a full version at some remote Circuit City. Still have the installer and the key, and occasionally load it up on a VM (plays fine, only needed like 32mb of RAM :P )
A great game, but another one which suffered from the burden of overwhelm in the late game stages, and was hampered by the un-expected and abrupt limitation that you could only have 255 fleets (or some such thing). I read a breakdown that the cause was due to the designers only using an 8 bit integer for the FLEET_ID, so once you had that, the game would just discard any additional fleets you made.
> Stars!! Finally another living human who has heard of it.
There's dozens of us, dozens!
I had a game key for a while and then lost it. So any time I dust it off to play it's the shareware version. The shareware version has pretty high limits so you can just get to "unmanageable endgame".
One of my pet peeves, especially later in the game, is there's no way to upgrade fleets. So if you've got a long lived fleet it'll be way below your current tech level. Woe follows if you forgot it was the only defense for some far flung yet important planet.
Shoot me an email (in my profile) if you’d like the key. The Dev company is defunct (otherwise we’d surely all still be playing Stars! Supernova), so I don’t think they’ll mind. Fun trick I stumbled on w/ the shareware version: you can take your shareware version save files (capped at lvl 10 tech) and open them in the ‘full’ game, and go right on researching.
Interesting. Never heard of that game. Looks interesting, but moreover it reminds me of another game I haven't thought about in years that hasn't come up in discussion yet: Spaceward Ho! Anyone remember that one?
Spaceward Ho! was my Stars! refuge on the Mac. My Stars! to Spaceward Ho! ratio was easily 20:1 though. Spaceward Ho! as I recall got Carbonized so it would run natively on OSX but never got an Intel build.
I remember from around the same time another game in this windows "productivity" optic. Something with ships. You don't happen to know the name of that one?
The only other games in that vein I remember were Yoda Stories and I Indiana Jones Stories from LucasArts. Hopefully someone else knows the one you're thinking of.
Are there any noteworthy Civ1 and Civ2 remakes (other than FreeCiv)? I know about https://github.com/SWY1985/CivOne, which was supposed to recreated Civ1 in C#, but they stopped development before implementing the AI, which is always tricky to faithfully replicate without some solid/time-consuming disassembly of civ.exe.
Those are two games that AFAIK haven't been re-released through the normal Steam/GoG channels. Seems like only Civ3+ are available, not sure why.
As a kid I remember playing an old MS-DOS game that was kind of similar to MoO but may have predated it. You were in command of a new government on a resource-rich planet called Harmony and you had to steer your society through a star cluster full of intrigue and war. There was more of an over-arching narrative than something like MoO or Civilization, but much of the gameplay was similar. It had a bit of a Dune vibe.
For the life of me I can't remember what this game was actually called. Does this ring a bell for anyone else? Would love to look it up again.
Thank you! This is it. There isn't a lot of information online about this game (not even a Wikipedia article – though there is one for another 1992 game called "Maelstrom" that is unrelated). However, someone created an old-school fan website as a labor of love: http://www.overlordofharmony.com
I wonder how feasible it is to play an old DOS game like this on a modern Mac...
I was never able to understand how to "git gud" at that game :( The AI always seemed to be able to outperform me on any front, and the only solution was to use ministries for everything, which turned the game into a battle between AIs
I'd definitely recommend playing against humans if you can, I never found the computers quite as fun to play against.
Which may have helped me avoid that issue, by the time I ever played against a computer they were pretty easy just because I'd played my friends a lot.
If there's any big advice I'd give though, it's just definitely focus on expanding your production and planets as quickly as you can near the beginning.
Ascendancy is an example of how gameplay limitations ruin the game experience.
In Master of Orion I you could have huge fleets of warships roaming through the space.
In Master of Orion II (significantly less successful if you ask me) there were a mechanics of "control" or smth along these lines, which limited you from having a large number of large warships by ramping up upkeep. I guess you could live with that.
Ascendancy is nice, but: You can only have N+1 ships, where N is number of your planets. This means you need to spend 90% of time developing planets (pushing "next building") with no ways to utilize your industrial output when not building a ship replacement. Boredom of managing insignificant colonies by hand is what ruins many 4X games.
It would be an understandable limitation if Ascendancy was a board game, but in a video game it's just a sign that game designers could not balance the gameplay.
Otherwise, great game. The music and the races are awesome. Tech tree is very funny.
Hah, you can just press M (I think it was M?) to automate the management of colonies. Never managed planets by hand as it's super boring and a bit pointless as you said. In general the late game is a bit bland as the AI is not very good even with the patch they delivered, but still it's quite a fun game and the 3D view was really innovative at the time.
TIL that the the term 4X was coined by a guy who thought
> that Civilization‘s inclusion of global warming as a threat to progress and women’s suffrage as a Wonder of the World constituted some form of surrender to left-wing political correctness
Remnants of the Ancients: https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors