[Barnacle Bill]

MOO was basically a computer Version of "Stellar Conquest" with tactical combat & ship design thrown in. The 8-bit members of the "Reach For The Stars" series were also essentially computer Versions of "Stellar Conquest", as were a few other games. MOO II replaced most of the "Stellar Conquest" game mechanics with ones that looked more like Civ, except for how you moved fleets around.

That being said, there were a number of things about MOO that bugged me, and I thought MOO II improved:

1) In MOO it was a viable strategy to build nothing but huge stacks of tiny ships. My preference generically is for a system in which different sizes of ships have separate tactical roles and a balanced "combined arms" approach is superior to a "pure" approach based on any size. If I can't have that, I'll take "bigger is better". I hate the swarm thing, though.

2) In MOO, population and troops were interchangable. Simtex was neither the first or Last 4X game to do that, but it is another one of my "hates". My preference is for troops to be something you build & move in transports, like in SE4. If I can't have that, I'll take how it worked in MOO2: defensive troops come from a structure you build on a planert, offensive troops come with troop transports that turn into troops when you invade. If I can't have that, rather than the MOO method I'd prefer what Stellar Conquest did: no troops, the planet surrenders as soon as you eliminate the defenses due to the threat of bombardment from orbit, you have to keep a ship there to to keep control over the conquered planet via that same threat.

As to Civ/CivII/Call to Power, I can't think of anything about CivII vs Civ that I thought was a change they should not have made. Call to Power was not by the same people, though, but somehow a different company got the rights to the game name "Civilization" and did a "look alike" intended to make the buyer THINK it was CivIII. The Call to Power folks entirely missed WHY CivII was so popular for so long, which is the ability of the players to create their own scenarios & mods. Having played with that, I can say that CivII was one of the best but could have been even better. Firaxis is doing the REAL CivIII, and hopefully they will make those improvements (from their web site, it appears they at least understand the importance and are taking steps to insure no customization ability is lost). Call to Power sacrificed customizing ability on the alter of glitz. Frankly, I never even bought it after reading enough about the game to see that. This, of course, is one of the great strengths of SE4.

On 4x games in general, I think eliminating detail in the name of reducing micromanagement is a mistake. The right approach is the one SE4 uses, of letting the player choose to micromanage or delegate. You just have to get the delegation AI good enough to be "competent". SE4 still needs some work there, but I believe that MM will eventually come through.

On the RTS thing, frankly I think RTS is totally inappropriate at any scale above the tactical. R&D and Production decisions don't get made like that in real life. The only way it becomes acceptable is if (a) it moves at a fairly leasurely pace and (b) you can pause it and while paused view reports and change orders. I consider any RTS game in which R&D or production decisions have to be made while frantically clicking to control what is essentially a tactictal battle to be just a new form of arcade game, not a strategy game. An RTS tactical module in a turn-based 4X game is OK, as long as the player does not have to excercise the level of control over units that you do, for example, in SE4. In other words, you would give the sort of orders an admiral would give, not the sort of orders a captain would give but you are acting as captain simultaneously for every ship in the fleet.

[This message has been edited by Barnacle Bill (edited 02 February 2001).]