[FarAway Pretender]

For myself, I found Galactic Civilization extraordinary. Had a lot of the same replayability as Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri--various different ways to play and win the game which make it a lot more fun. Every bit as enjoyable for me as Master of Orion.

I'm not the crusader on machine privacy/control that a lot of you guys are, but we each choose areas of our lives to understand in more detail or less because they might or might not impact us unfairly (e.g., tax codes, local business ordinances, software copyright protection, PC system security).

As for the StarDock App, if you're fundamentally opposed to installing apps on your system, I can see that being a limitation. I myself have found the App to be perfectly reliable and nonobtrusive--the fact that StarDock doesn't make most of their money publishing games (they mostly develop GUI utilities and such, I gather) means there's less potential for commercial conflict of interest...

I think the MoM sequel would be a very cool thing. Dom2 is the best game in the genre since MoM (with Heroes 2 coming in a close second place), and is perhaps better in its own right. Sort of like comaring girlfriends from when I was 17 and when I was 32? The things that I loved most about MoM:

1) Random sites populated with varying levels of evil nasties that would occasionally go rampaging out in my kingdom.

2) Developing those Heroes to "Legendary status". You can do it in Dom, but it relies more on a lucky break for your Heroic bonus and loading him up with the right magic items, as opposed to growing and nurturing a Hero's skills. Maybe I'm just too slow, but I regret building a Dom Hero up over 20 turns and then having him die in one silly battle because I forgot to change his orders.

3) Finding those distant, mouth-watering city spots early in the game, and spending 20 turns extending my "sphere of control/stability" so I could colonize it and bring the resources Online.

4) Having different cities produce different types of value. Some city sites were great research centers, others were awesome troop factories (yeah, Adamantium!), others were all about income, and many were just thriving metropolis sites. Valuing different city sites differently for different sides was also fun (e.g., Dwarves love gold-rich cities and don't care so much about cities with huge hind-end population limits because they grow slowly).

[ July 17, 2004, 17:44: Message edited by: FarAway Pretender ]