[raynor]

1. MOO2 addressed the small ship problem by giving each empire a certain number of command points. Your command points were based on your number of starbases, battle stations and star fortresses combined with certain technologies. Each successively larger ship class required a greater number of command points. Once the number of command points from your fleet exceeded the number of command points from your starbases, you had to pay 10 gold per command point in maintenance--VERY EXPENSIVE after a while.

2. I think I see your point about troops/population from MOO. OTOH, troops in SEIV are a manufactured good that gets stored in the cargo bay...

I'm surprised you didn't mention Alpha Centauri as the successor to CIVII. It further expanded CIVII by allowing you to design your own units. Adding the planet itself as an additional opponent makes the game interesting as well. Plus, Alpha Centauri's build queues and ministers make the game a bit less micro-management intensive.


Civ:CTP and CivII:CTP were kinda neat in that you had points you could spend to do 'Settler' type things instead of sitting there micro-managing a couple of hundred of those guys. But CTP had many and various other problems. I think the most severe was the introduction of lots of extremely powerful specialty units such as the Slaver which steals population, Lawyers?, Bio-Terrorists, etc which really unbalanced the game.

Firaxis CivIII looks pretty interesting. It
will not be as good a game as it might have been before Brian Reynolds had a falling out with Sid Meir and left Firaxis. Still, we might get lucky. It looks like they are going to try doing 3D renderings of all the units plus animate them. Improved graphics will be neat to see but we'll have to wait and see what they do with the gameplay.

I used to really, really hate RTS strategy games after Command and Conquer came on the scene. Games like this were not about finesse. Instead, it was just a matter of constantly building tons of troops which were going to die in just a few seconds anyways.

Warcraft I changed all that by requiring supply points for all the units. Warcraft II was a little better game. Then, came StarCraft, the best game ever made. (Gee... with a callsign like Raynor, didn't you figure I probably thought the sun rose and set on StarCraft) StarCraft had three completely unique races with extremely unique and well-balanced units that make RTS a bLast to play.