Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

I feel like spewing, so without further ado...Has 'ado' ever been used in another context? Is this further ado? And why is ado always further? What about the initial ado? Anyway...

Things That Suck About
MOO3:
1. It takes way too long to realize a player's move (reward frequency)
2. Player decisions are counter-manded by the player's own peices (detachement)
4. Moves planned out for players (Programmers playing instead of players); simulation rather than game.

Galactic Civilizations:
1. Graphics are lame.
2. Scenario-based, no strategic game.

GC2:
1. Turning up difficulty becomes a SuperCheeze competition.

SEV:
1. Lousy GUI

StarCraft:
1. Linear plot
2. In-between-mission missions added for filler.

Massive Assault:
1. Scenario-level only

UFO:Aftermath:
1. Boringly repetetive scenarios. (scenario design requires too much labor)
2. Lame strategic play (waste of time)

Starfleet Command III:
1. Removed tactical controls and player feedback.
2. Demoted strategy game to shooter.

SpellForce 2
1. Lack of monster differentiation (model shortage = level 12 mosquitos)

4x Economics
 

One of the main probs with 4x is their economic explosion. There's some initial struggle to survive, a critical mass, and then an exponential growth that trivializes all money.

I think it is mostly because the currency is magically centralized.

If all resources were restricted to their locale, the game wouldn't explode. Freighters would have to be used to ship minerals to a factory. Shipyards could only produce with what's on hand. And the result would be a lot less explosion.

Re: 4x Economics
 

Here's a thought: Why not reduce the number of ships as technology develops? Now, unless I'm miss-remembering, ship battles in the mediteranian in the greek and roman eras often involved up to three hundred ships. Now, the entire US navy, the most powerfull nation in the world, significantly larger than the roman empire, has 280 ships total.

So, my suggestion for tech levels is, less numbers. Less ships, less units, but significantly more powerfull ships and units. First firepower goes up, then speed, then area control.

Re: 4x Economics
 

AngleWyrm said:
...If all resources were restricted to their locale...

Stars! did that, and it wasn't much fun at all.

Re: 4x Economics
 

Well then this would mean that the more powerful ships will cost more to build, and therfore cost more to maintain as well...

Re: 4x Economics
 

Just tried looking for a demo for Stars!, but no luck. Google seems to ignore the exclamation point, and moves on to thousands of irrelevant pages.

Many cheap units vs a few expensive ones. Quantity vs Quality. Production vs Research. Some core philosophies there.

In MOO3, the research tree was priced to match typical research point income during the course of an empire's growth. So it had an exponential cost to closely mimic the player's development.

That was the plan, anyway. But just sleight variance in starting conditions effected the exponential trajectory in a major way. The butterfly effect made starting conditions almost a deciding factor.

Re: 4x Economics
 

Tribes Vengenance
1. Unreal with spinfuser
2. Rampant on line MP cheating
3. Developers didn't listen to the fans - took a great game franchise and turned it into FUBAR.

MOO3
1. Bad horrible UI
2. Fuzzy Fonts
3. Released an early alpha as the full game.

Dominions II
1. Small tiny graphics
2. Lack of intuative player controls for economic, unit, and expansion control
3. Needed TANKS!

Sim City 4 - pre rush hour
1. Half a game
2. Horribly executed game
3. Just out right nasty game

Civ 3
1. It gave me nightmares
2. Still get sick to my stomic when thinking of it.
3. Caused absolute dispair and generated feelings of depression

Space Empires V
1. NDA - Cannot talk about the one or two little things that upset until NDA lifted.

Re: 4x Economics
 

AngleWyrm:
GGmod promises some nice horde vs hero options...

Ship construction costs are roughly proportional to the hull size squared. Maintenance cost grows slower than size.

Thus, you can quickly have a horde of small ships (which are somewhat high maintenance, so throw them at the enemy quick), or you can take your time to build big, beautiful Dreadnoughts http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

Moo3:

1. Many features were cut from the game late in development, but the design was never revamped to account for the cuts, leaving a gaping void in the gameplay where those features used to be.
2. The game is fundementally broken. For example, ECM/ECCM has no effect whatsoever on combat. Many of these problems are due to sheer laziness on the part of the developers. For example, the famously broken diplomay was in fact down a to a misnamed text file.
3. The AIs obsession with troop transports and point defence frigates.
4. That the game had so much potentual, so many good ideas, a few parts that worked well (see: the economic model) and yet is such a shuddering, wretched abortion of a game.

GalCiv & GalCiv 2:

1. The strategic map is one of the worst ever conceived.

Space Empires V:

1. AI based on the martians from Stranger In a Strange Land.
2. Why is the system view isometric 3D, again? Put the full 3D in tactical combat where it'll be appreciated.

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

Have you tried the moo3 patcher? At the risk of being flamed, I'll just mention that after I applied the moo3 patcher and a few mods moo3 was insanely fun... http://bhruic.dyndns.org/patcher/

One might argue, "why should I need mods to fix the game?"

To which I'd counter, "why the hell are you playing se5? get off the forums you troll."

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

I don’t see how this comment was called for.

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

With some data patches and mods MoO3 is easily a classic and on my 'best games' list. I wouldn't really compare it to Space Empires or even MoO2 though, it's an entirely different game.

How come you thought the UI was so terrible, Atrocities? I thought it was actually rather ingenius, considering how much information you can access in just a few clicks, and generally the way it's all set up. There's room for improvements, like with all things, but overall I thought it worked nicely.

But yeah, it was released as an Alpha/Beta version, sadly.

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

No. But the time I've heard of it, I'd pretty much lost any interest in playing Moo3. Maybe one day I'll give it a go.

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

MOO3:
3-D galactic map was a bad idea. There's a patch to flatten the galaxy so that distances seen on-screen are correlated to how far apart stars are in game.

Enforced fleet composition was a joke. Imposing rules about which kind of ships can go in what part of the fleet, and how many, turned into just design a ship that SAYS it's a picket scout.

SEV:
There's a little bit of that going on with SEV, where the programmers are doing the DesignType field for the player. Recent changes also include programmers doing the research choices for the player, and older ones as insisting on some of the ship components for the player. This is a failure to recognize--player choices should not be overtly chosen by the game designer.

A good game designer changes the outcomes. Hey, when's the last time you heard the expression "Of course, it's up to you..."? By the time you hear that, the 'correct' choice is obvious, right?

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

=(

Alas. Didn't mean to stir emotions. perhaps a smilie after that would have highlighted my jovial tone. I'm sorry if you took it harshly.

I only meant to highlight a similarity between moo3 and se5 - they're both much better after you download a couple mods.

In hindsight, that was a dumb way to do it. Too late for hindsight though! =/

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

I hate to admit but with the patches and a couple of mods (strawberry and chocolate for example) I actually thought MOO3 turned out to be alright. Admittedly it's a RADICAL departure from MOO2 and I think that was part of what killed it. My biggest complaint is it gets repetetive (sp?) late in the game but I honestly still play it.

Re: Rant: Things that sucked about...
 

No big deal. It’s hard to convey emotions across the board, which is why I tried to make my observation as neutral as I could.

Re: 4x Economics
 

I agree with you on all points, but for many players such a degree of micromanagement would be intolerable.

I myself enjoy micromanagement, but I also like to have a rudimentary AI to automate certain things if I decide to use it.

I like micromanagement, but when my SEIV empires reach a certain size I'm a crappy micromanager. I forget systems for turns and turns, I forget to add stuff to the R&D queue, etc.

So, I don't complain about the SEIV AI. My own sloppiness in the later stages of the game I call "the friction of government," and in my eyes its effects are balanced out by weaknesses in the AI.

So I always have fun. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: 4x Economics
 

These problems are due to the extremely abstract nature of the economic model. You have a general availability of minerals, radioctives, and organics, and you have a general 'mood' of the population affecting productivity. But nothing about the logistics. The relative availability of one resource does not affect any of the others, and the relative availability of labor has only the very crudest effect (things stop when the population riots).

In the very early betas MM had workforce as a factor in facility production. Each facility required a certain number of workers to operate at full efficiency and if there were less available the output/production would be reduced accordingly. Unfortunately, when some testers complained he completely removed it instead of trying to adjust it. If he had just tried some different models than 'fill from top to bottom' (meaning the facility workforces filled like a single resource tank and some would have zero work force while others were at full staff) -- proportional distribution would have been so much better -- most testers would not have been so unhappy. He could even have used my suggestion to make 'productivity' itself a seperate resource. Worker time is also a resource, after all. So count each population point as generating a certain amount of 'labor' and have technologies that multiply this just like you do for mining or farming or whatnot. You could then have very high tech products that use little resources but require lots of labor to produce. (Like modern electronics!) This would lead naturally to large population centers being large production centers -- unlike the game is now where you can put a huge shipyard complex anywhere at all.

All sorts of interesting economic wrinkles are possible with a system that takes labor supply into account. But he was afraid to experiment anymore and that was the end of that.

Re: 4x Economics
 

This is my favorite economic model, where labor is a valued asset. Farms and Mines could be considered as just advanced tools, much like a complex hammer, for increasing the rate of production.

And producing...There's an interesting word. What about converting one type of resource (minerals and organics) into another (Starships and Farms)?

Re: 4x Economics
 

I think having to move resources around in Stars! adds a nice strategic and tactical element. And it wasn't that had to make transports to move resources around - Just use the option to set a planets' minerals to something.

Re: 4x Economics
 

It adds in a true value to pirating and raiding your enemies supply network. This in turn would open the door to an entire new dimension of play. Ship capture would truly mean something along with tactics to keep your battle fleet from smashing any cargo ships. Escort ships would be needed and that one little neutral that acts as a speed bump to your empire now; would become a source of supply raiding to feed your demands in a real war!

Re: 4x Economics
 

Labor was a valued asset in moo3. So was the efficiency of productivity, expressed in a percentage, and it was possible and obviously desirable to get that efficiency above 100%.

Things take on a whole new light when you have to worry about actually having enough people for your facilities.

moo3 also included unemployment, which would be a negative unrest factor - easy to counter, but it puts a nice check/balance on my SE mentality of "pile as many people on the planet as possible to get that space yard % bonus at its max". Basically people supply becomes a second order function with an optimal point vice a first order "more is better" system.