June 13, 2010
Haven't you guys got anything better to do?
So there we Psilons were, minding our own business creating a tiny stellar empire on one side of a huge game map, and we get a big advance in ship range and discover all three of our opponents:
This is random? Actually it is; it's just tremendously bad luck. Ordinarily I'd bag a game like this and start over, but this time I really couldn't do it. Here's why:
Four of my first five colonies turned out to have artifacts. And I found an inferno ultra-rich which I really wanted to colonize later. Here's how the game ended up developing, up until a few minutes ago:
The humans (to my south) turned out to be very easy to get along with. We've had a non-aggression pact and a trade relationship since the early part of the game.
The Meklars and Klackons have had an alliance since the beginning. I took out the Meklars first, and then the Klackons. Both of them are down to a handful of new, small, isolated, colonies. I used my standard early-phase ship (medium, heavy blast cannon) for the Meklars, and my standard mid-phase ship (large, autocannon, fusion bomb) against the Klackons. Meanwhile, the humans have been doing a lot of research. They've got class X planetary shields and some decent weapons. When the time comes, they're going to be interesting to fight against. I'm researching pulse phasors right now and I already have neutronium bombs, so it shouldn't be too tough. But it's going to take a while to build a fleet capable of handling them. None of my existing ships are up to the job.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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Rotten luck with the home star distribution. Only three opponents for a huge map certainly leaves a LOT of space to expand. I hope you have the range to leapfrog the humans and grab some of that open south and west
But that start! Four artifacts worlds, for the Psilons. Wow.
Posted by: haphazard1 at June 13, 2010 05:44 PM (xF0tu)
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That's one of my pet peeves about many turn-based exploration-strategy games. The game designers sometimes seem to think that a game is boring if you have much time to explore and expand your empire before running into your opponents, so they cluster them together, even on "huge" maps.
Posted by: Siergen at June 13, 2010 05:53 PM (jMQcx)
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I'll take that flaw over "the AIs team up to gank the human player first" any day, though.
Posted by: metaphysician at June 13, 2010 06:14 PM (OLeXB)
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It does seem to be random chance. I've had games where I colonized 20 planets before I even saw an alien ship, let alone made contact with them.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 13, 2010 06:28 PM (+rSRq)
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(Also, I confess that I'm playing at "easy" level, because I'm a wimp.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 13, 2010 06:28 PM (+rSRq)
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Well, so am I, but I haven't played it in, what, 15 years? Gimmie some time to get back in the saddle, already....
Posted by: ubu at June 14, 2010 11:09 AM (i7ZAU)
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How many strategy games actually make the AI smarter at higher difficulty, though? As opposed to simply weighting the dice, giving the AIs cheat moves behind the scenes, or otherwise simply adjusting variables?
Posted by: metaphysician at June 14, 2010 04:37 PM (OLeXB)
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Usually the difficulty setting on computer chess games affects how deep the program looks ahead.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 14, 2010 04:47 PM (+rSRq)
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Many modern strategy games use AI that is actually "smarter" on higher difficulty settings. The point is that the AI needs to be told to make a bad move once in a while on low difficulties, the frequency of which can simply be reduced for higher difficulties. You can also have harder AI employ strategies that easier AI doesn't have, or let it take the player's weaknesses into account more.
I think what you say happens more in, for example, shooters, where the player will simply have less health, whereas his opponents get more.
Posted by: Jordi Vermeulen at June 15, 2010 07:42 AM (5EMw1)
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I'm curious how MOO adjusts for difficulty. I think it allows the computer to cheat outrageously on "Impossible": I had a nearby planet colonized one turn before I could get there, and when my colony ship arrived there were already 20 bases. They'll generally have many fleets and planets while I've barely colonized my 4th, with no spare resources for ships or bases.
I win maybe one out of four games on impossible, and only after many hours of playing factions off each other so they ignore me until I can build Fleets-o-Doom.
Also, is the 32k stack of enemy fleets the result of a software bug, or do some races just do that intentionally? The suspiciously round number makes me think it's a bug of some kind. Whenever I come across these I have to either employ multiple ships with Teleporters and Black Hole Generators, or destroy their economic base from under them.
Posted by: bkw at June 15, 2010 08:19 AM (34O+x)
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I think I saw something in the manual which explicitly said what the difficulty settings do. I did find this: "The difficulty setting affects several components of the game, including your opponents’ production rates, expansion rate, technology development, and willingness to ally with you. It also determines the size of your initial fleet."
Except that it doesn't affect your initial fleet; it's always two scouts and one colony.
Anyway, at higher settings the AI's produce more, expand faster, and are less likely to be friendly towards you.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 15, 2010 08:35 AM (+rSRq)
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Ah, that pretty much accounts for all the behaviour I've seen. That is, no real changes in AI, only it's doing the same things with more stuff, for cheaper, and it's harder to influence them. I haven't deduced enough about the MOO AI to guess whether it "thinks deeper" at higher difficulty levels, or even if "X-moves-ahead" is a relevant model at all.
It's a shame they didn't implement scaling fleet sizes: having more/fewer ships to start out with would have drastically changed the feel of the game. As is, the first several dozen turns are pretty identical no matter the size of the galaxy or difficulty of the game.
Posted by: bkw at June 15, 2010 09:48 AM (34O+x)
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June 09, 2010
MOO -- Ship design preferences
My favorite MOO weapon in the early going is the heavy blast cannon. It's the double-sized version of the neutron blaster. It's weapon tech level 15, so it doesn't take all that long to reach it, especially if you put half your research into weapons. It does 3-24 damage and has a range of 2.
In the early going it's a very potent weapon. When I get it, I build medium ships. They get one heavy blast cannon, plus the best targeting computer I have, plus the fastest star drive. If there's any space left, I fill it with armor. (Sometimes I include a nuclear bomb instead, or a speed-2 system drive.) The resulting ship usually costs between 80 and 90 BC, and a reasonably well built out planet can produce several per turn.
I tend to use swarms of them, which isn't hard considering how cheap they are. And of course eventually an opponent can gain something that makes their lives miserable -- say, scatterpack VII fired from a large number of missile bases. But most enemy planets aren't defended like that, and 40-100 of these ships can take out defending fleets (if they don't run like rabbits) without too much difficulty.
10 or so makes a good guard fleet on annihilated planets to prevent them from being recolonized. 20 can do a good job of protecting one of my planets that isn't yet capable of defending itself.
Naturally, this design doesn't play all the way through to the end of the game. But it's usually the first warship I build, and it can go a long way towards stabilizing a strategic situation after I meet an aggressive AI. It's also capable of completely wiping out the first opponent I run into, and that's usually how I use it.
My favorite weapon in the mid-game is the Auto Blaster, tech level 28. It fires 3 times and does 4-16 damage on each shot. Which is pretty damned good for a weapon that takes half as much space as the heavy blast cannon. By this point in the game I'm building large ships instead, and you can easily pack 6-10 of these into a single hull without skimping on shields or other useful stuff (e.g. the battle scanner). 20 such ships is a formidable force, and 100 is unstoppable. 4 make a decent guard squadron for annihilated planets.
My favorite weapon in the end-game is the Mauler Device. They're entirely too much fun. The Death Ray (the weapon you get from Orion after you beat the Guardian) does a lot more damage but it's not really very good; it takes too much room, for one thing.
But the single coolest beam weapon in the game is the Crystal Ray. You can't get it legally, but it's possible to hack the save file to get it. (I used to know how to do that, but I don't remember any more.)
I don't tend to use missiles mainly because I don't like weapons that run out. And I don't use torpedoes because I don't like weapons that can't be fired every turn. (And whose damage decays with range.)
Also, missiles are too damned big. Neutron Blaster is weapon tech 15; Merculite missiles are tech 14. The Heavy Blast Cannon is size 60; a 2-missile Merculite launcher is 105. The 5-missile launcher is about 160. (The actual size in the ship is a function of your tech level, but the relative size always remains the same.)
It's true that the missiles have longer range, but they're only doing 10 points of damage if they hit.
So I research good missiles gladly when I can, but only because I need them for missile bases. By the time you get class-V planetary shields and Stinger missiles (or something better), a reasonable planet becomes very difficult and very expensive to crack. I had the Amoeba attack one of my planets and my missile bases destroyed it before it got close enough to the planet to fire back. (I think that was Pulson missiles.)
Missiles are superb for defense, but I don't put them into my ships. It's all beams and bombs for me.
UPDATE: Research strategies figure into this. Early in the game I put everything into propulsion until I get at least range 5 and at least warp 3. Ultimately there just isn't any substitute for fast, long-legged ships, for colonization or for war.
My usual steady-state research is:
computers 20% (i.e. 10 clicks)
construction 20%
force fields 10% (i.e. 5 clicks)
planetology 20%
propulsion 10%
weapons 20%
...but of course by that point I'm usually at propulsion level 10 or more and everything else is at 1. But I've been known to run 50% weapons and 10% for each of the others, when I get hints that an enemy is coming and I haven't gotten the Neutron Blaster yet.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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I love reading other people's strategies and approaches to this game. There are so many weapons I doubt I've used a fifth of them, ever. I also tend to not build any ships until quite late in the game. I'll have to try this approach.
Posted by: bkw at June 09, 2010 11:52 PM (34O+x)
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I can't remember my MOO tech choices too well; I'm mostly a MOO2 guy, where Ion Pulse Cannons (with the Heavy upgrade) are my early-mid-game favorite. There's nothing like bypassing a ship's armor and detonating their engine, crippling all their surrounding ships in the process. While I like to turtle, if I have to fight something before I get those (or fight monsters to get to rich worlds), I'll use PT boats loaded with the best 2-pack of missiles that I can build. I turn and run as soon as the battle starts, launching everything as I go. As soon as the missiles hit, I retreat, and come back for another round (hopefully) before the target fully repairs.
By late game, it's usually Maulers and Stellar Converters. If the final vote goes against me and I don't think I can beat the rest of the galaxy, I just pop over to Antares and hit the I WIN button.
Posted by: Big D at June 10, 2010 08:21 AM (LjWr8)
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I may have to buy Moo/Moo2 again. I already did get Master of Magic, and have wasted a LOT of time on that one.
I do remember that in Moo2 I rarely used missiles as the game went along. Your ships could get powerful enough that you could easily pop enemy ships before equivalent missiles would even hit them. So you'd take less return fire using beams...
Posted by: DrHeinous at June 10, 2010 09:57 AM (AktpP)
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My staple was the Mass( o') Driver(s)--excellent until opponents had shields bigger than half their (individually) low damage. By which time I was usually in striking distance of their big brother, the Gauss Cannon. No range attenuation, excellent accuracy, and enough of them together (easily accomplished) would carve enemy fleets into Swiss cheese. [this may have been MOO2, not MOO1]
The one-two combo of the sandblaster weapon followed by a pulsar was the most effective way of helping the Klakons out by removing that 32767 stack of ships from their maintenance schedule in MOO1 though.
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at June 10, 2010 01:42 PM (9eDDd)
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I am curious what other weapons you choose if your favorites are not available in your tech tree for a given game. That is probably my favorite part of MOO -- having to improvise with what I happen to have access to in a particular game. I love Civ, but it does occasionally get tiresome to realize I have planned out my tech path over 150 turns in advance.
Propulsion...in too many games I have skimped on research in this field, and ended up regretting it. Having incredibly awesome but incredibly slow ships is an ugly position to be in.
Posted by: haphazard1 at June 10, 2010 05:21 PM (xF0tu)
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If I can't get the Neutron Blaster, I usually go with the heavy Ion Cannon. It's smaller, which is good, but has less punch, which means more ships are needed in a stack, and they become obsolete sooner.
The best choice substitute for the Auto Blaster is the Heavy Phasor. That takes somewhat different tactics since it has more punch but fires less often. One shot of 5-40 instead of three of 4-16.
I didn't mention it, but depending on who I am facing and the kind of ships they're building, I often include the Graviton beam or the Tachyon beam. There's nothing more frustrating than using your hugely-powerful beam weapon against an immense pile of smalls, and only killing ten or fifteen a turn. There are times when nothing will do besides a streaming weapon.
You go with what you got, and the higher level weapons are all decent when used properly. Which is not something you can say about the earliest weaons. The Gatling Laser and the Neutron Pellet Gun are jokes.
I won't build a ship with less than a heavy Ion cannon because there isn't any point. I'm better off putting that production into missile bases and researrch.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 10, 2010 07:05 PM (+rSRq)
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June 01, 2010
I love the Psilons!
They can do stuff like this:
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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The Psilons have become my race of choice in hard scenarios. The miniaturization advantages at higher tech levels is crazy, and I credit it with being able to pull off wins after losing a Galactic Council vote.
Posted by: bkw at June 02, 2010 12:28 AM (34O+x)
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Wow. That is just crazy research.
The Psilon racial bonus is one of the strongest in the game, and they get better than average ratings in almost all fields of research as well. This is great when you are the Psilons. It is absolutely terror-inducing when you are another race and meet the Psilons for the first time...and realize they already own half the galaxy.
Posted by: haphazard1 at June 02, 2010 12:15 PM (xF0tu)
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You can do something like that with the Meklar, too. The difference is that when they switch from research to ship-building, the bonus stays the same.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 02, 2010 04:27 PM (+rSRq)
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The Meklar are a lot of fun to play. But I often have trouble with them, because I get too caught up in building (and building, and building, and building) all those factories. Have to remember to occasionally do something with all that production, other than watch it all disappear into the ravenous maw of clean up spending and more factories.
The Psilon racial bonus does not help production directly, although higher tech levels reduce cost and size. But the Psilons get their research boost immediately, without having to spend on infrastructure, which can help them get off to a faster start. It takes the Meklar a while to really get the virtuous circle going.
Posted by: haphazard1 at June 02, 2010 06:23 PM (xF0tu)
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May 23, 2010
MOO -- accounting
Here's something I've always wondered about:
Why are those two colony ships different costs?
All five of the starting designs cost more than they would if you made them yourself in the Design frame.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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Obviously you are bypassing the kickbacks in the normal procurement system as well as shopping around .
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at May 23, 2010 05:49 PM (EJaOX)
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Besides which, the original one has chrome bumpers.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 23, 2010 06:10 PM (+rSRq)
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Cost overruns on the prototypes.
Scrapping the initial designs is always something to do as soon as possible. If one of those initial scouts gets eaten by the Guardian, I always try to tell myself that at least it makes it easier to get rid of the design. It helps...a little.
Posted by: haphazard1 at May 23, 2010 06:30 PM (xF0tu)
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The cost of a unit is constant, after design, but as your tech level
increases, older technology in that tree becomes cheaper. The Colony I
ship was designed after you had made some tech advances that were
relevant to the units included. Equipment also gets smaller as your tech
level goes up. I think, late in the game, that it's even possible to
put colony units on a small frame.
Posted by: TheShaper at May 24, 2010 09:30 AM (15wkT)
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TheShaper is correct that tech shrinks ship components. 2% per tech level in the relevant field, IIRC. And Construction tech level affects overall hull space as well. Usually around the point where you tech Duralloy you can fit a colony base plus extended fuel tanks on a large hull and extend your colonization range, for example. But if you try it at the beginning you are well short of having enough space.
But what I believe our host was talking about is that you can create a new colony ship design (or scout, or whatever) on the very first turn before you start any research at all. And it will be cheaper than the default designs. Default scout is 10, I think, but an identical redesign costs 8 -- big savings in the early game.
Posted by: haphazard1 at May 24, 2010 12:11 PM (xF0tu)
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Exactly so. This has nothing to do with the cost decline caused by rising technology. The image above was from before I began any research.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 24, 2010 12:14 PM (+rSRq)
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My only guess is that the initial ship designs cost as if you had level 0 in all technologies, whereas you actually have level 1 as soon as you start the game.
Posted by: Griffin at May 24, 2010 12:31 PM (uXpoK)
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You might be right about that. It does make sense.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 24, 2010 07:22 PM (+rSRq)
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May 14, 2010
My favorite spell
I don't really remember MOM very well. But I remember this spell:
Armageddon:
Chaos. Global Enchantment. Casting Cost: 1250 mana;
Upkeep: 40 mana/turn. Very Rare.
Inexorably and methodically destroys both worlds. For each volcano that rises from a map square, the casting wizard gains one magic power point per game turn.
It took a long time to get it, and a hell of a lot of power to start it and keep it going. But after a while it paid for itself, and it was amazing to see the entire world except for your own territory getting turned into volcanoes. I remember a couple of times where I let it run long enough to pretty much convert the entire world.
Of course, it makes everyone else utterly pissed off at you, but by that point I was already on everyone's shit list, so it didn't matter.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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I'm doomed!
I just bought Duke Nukem 3D and Master of Magic.
Somewhere around here I have a couple of CDs which contain a backup of the DN3D directory I used to have. Reason I'd want to find it again is that it contains about 300 good single-player levels I colllected over a couple of years. But I was looking for it earlier and couldn't find it. Moan, I hope it isn't gone forever. That would really suck.
UPDATE: But before I make any kind of attempt to play MOM, I'm gonna read the whole manual, and then the entire spell book. The biggest drawback of MOM is that it has a steep learning curve.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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I just loaded up MOO2. So much for getting anything done today...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 15, 2010 12:31 AM (PiXy!)
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Bwahaha! Take that, Antaran scum!
Whoops, it's 4AM...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 15, 2010 10:25 AM (PiXy!)
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One of the things that's nice about MOO is that I can finish a game in a couple of hours. I remember games of MOM that took me days to finish.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 15, 2010 10:48 AM (+rSRq)
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A much better Duke Nukem engine is at http://www.eduke32.com/
I've only run it under Linux, myself.
Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at May 15, 2010 11:30 AM (Lbkvv)
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Uh oh... if what you liked about MOO was its brevity, MOM is possibly the worst game ever made for that. Take the length of a game of Civ 4, multiply it by the length of a game of MOO2, and you'll have the approximate length of a game of MOM... and you're pretty much guaranteed to never see more than a tenth of the possible content in any single play through. I've played the game for decades, only to encounter (and get my killer Paladin units slaughtered by) Chaos Spawn for the first time a few months ago. They're not even the most powerful unit, just one of the more unexpectedly difficult ones... basically Beholders that can be (but most of the time never are) summoned by Red Mages.
Honestly, I've never played a Civ-type game that has consistently been able to surprise me, even years after it was first created, as MOM. But yeah, when the (now long out-of-print) strategy guide has over a thousand pages, and not even a single one of those pages is dedicated to showcasing some in-game (or even fan-made) artwork, you can tell it's not an easy or simple game.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at May 15, 2010 12:55 PM (4njWT)
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Hmmm, sounds like another excellent older game to try.
But first I need to finish my current run through X-COM. Mid-May, India just went over to the aliens, alien base popped up just as I finished off a battleship assault. Elerium, yummy. I have plans for that base, just as soon as I finish researching the stun bomb launcher and ammo. Yes, plans....
And another game of MOO sounds tempting, all this discussion has me thinking about playing the Meklar again....
Who needs free time, anyway?
Posted by: haphazard1 at May 15, 2010 01:29 PM (xF0tu)
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May 13, 2010
OHNOES! ITSA TRAP!
We're well into the game here. My Klackons currently own 32 planets (in a "huge" playing field) and my average tech is about 25. I was deeply worried about the Psilons, since I didn't encounter them for a long time. When I finally found them, they only had a single planet. They hadn't done any colonies.
Guess why? That green star, which is the only one within 3 parsecs of Mentar, turns out to be Orion. Everything they've sent in has gotten destroyed by the Guardian -- and because of that, the star remains unscouted, and it's the obvious choice for their next attempt to create a colony since it's so close.
A couple of days ago I wrote about how most of the races were no fun to play. Just for the hell of it I tried playing the Bulrathi, and in fact they were a lot of fun. I had a big tech advantage over the stinking Humans, and one time I invaded a planet of theirs with a population of 80, using only 40 attackers. And I won without any losses. It was hilarious.
I don't completely understand the Klackon racial advantage. The Meklars can operate two more factories per colonist than anyone else, so when they're nominally at "Robotic Controls IV" then they're really at "Robotic Controls VI".
But if I read the description properly, the Klackons produce twice as much for a given planet than anyone else would with the same planet and the same number of factories. Is that really how it works? Because than means that "Robotic Controls IV" effectively is "Robotic Controls IX" -- and that's scary.
UPDATE: The computer I used to play this on had a SoundBlaster AWE32 in it, which for the time was a pretty good MIDI synth. It was certainly a whole hell of a lot better than the SB-16.
DosBox emulates an SB-16, and it really sounds cheesy. Looking through the documentation, it seems as if it also emulates a Gravis UltraSound, which was another half-way decent MIDI synth. Does anyone know if that really does work, and if MOO will work with it? I know that my sound module (USB2, but very sophisticated) will have no trouble doing decent MIDI. But will DosBox use it? And what do I have to do to DosBox and to MOO itself to make it all work?
I'm a bit afraid to try it on my own, for fear of not being able to find my way back if I louse up. But it sure would be neat if the music sounded better.
UPDATE: Another thing I want to know is if it's possible to make DosBox scale the window up 2:1. Right now it's the size you see above, which is only 640*480 plus the bezel. If it was twice that size it still wouldn't fill my display, but it would be a lot more comfortable to look at.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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Can't help you on the sound, but you can scale up. In your .conf file for MOO, in the [render] section you need a line like scaler=normal3x (I have been using normal3x with MoM for some time). Sounds like you want the normal2x scaler.
A full list of scalers is here
Posted by: Intrope at May 14, 2010 08:35 AM (ilrUS)
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Perfect! It was set to "hq2x" and I changed it to "hq3x" and it's gorgeous! Thanks!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2010 08:44 AM (+rSRq)
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The Klackon racial bonus applies only to the production from population, not production from factories. But it is still a very nice edge, since your new planets start out with population but no factories. Klackons can really get a new world going fast.
Posted by: haphazard1 at May 14, 2010 04:58 PM (xF0tu)
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So it's effectively a free level of "Robotic Controls", that you start with. That makes sense. I can believe it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2010 07:40 PM (+rSRq)
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In terms of trying to get better music, I did some messing around and nothing I tried made any difference at all. I may be wrong about the midi abilities of my current sound module.
... no, I just tried playing some .mid files. They don't sound as good as the AWE64 did, but they sound a lot better than the SB-16 synth that MOO sounds like it's using. There's probably some way to make this work, but I don't know what it is.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2010 08:02 PM (+rSRq)
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May 11, 2010
MOO -- Silicoids
In Master of Orion for me, at least, the only two races worth playing are the Psilons and the Meklar. The others make interesting opponents, often very challenging opponents, but their racial advantages don't really work as well for me as a player.
But yesterday I wondered if that really was true, so I tried a game as the Silicoids. Playing them really requires a significant change in strategy.
The Silicoid advantages are that they can colonize any kind of planet without any of the advanced Planetology technologies, and they don't care about industrial wastes, so you don't have to research the technologies which reduce technological wastes, and you don't have to apply any production to Eco except when you're terraforming a planet.
The disadvantage, and it's really a big one, is that Silicoid population growth is half that of other races.
The early strategy for the Silicoids is to spread like weeds. When you get a couple of decent planets and start building up, build lots of colony ships and grab just about every planet within reach. More planets means more places to breed people, and you're gonna need them.
My opponents ended up being the Sakkra and the Psilons, just about the most dangerous possible for the Silicoids to face. The Sakkra are the opposite: they breed twice as fast as normal, four times as fast as the Silicoids. And the Psilons have the edge in tech, if they utilize it.
I was playing on a Huge playing field, and I didn't encounter the Psilons for a long time. I had nightmares of them being way ahead of me technologically and also spread like weeds, but it hadn't happened. I couldn't go looking for them, though, because I was caught in a finish fight with the Sakkra, and couldn't really stop.
As the Silicoids, once you find an opponent you've got to kill them off. If you let them alone, they'll out-breed you and then out-everything-else you. All the Silicoid advantages become less and less important as the game continues, and the opposition gain technologies giving them the same things. But your breeding disadvantage continues for the entire game.
I kind of hoped that when I got Atmospheric Terraforming (turn all planets into Gaias) that it would help, but was shocked when it turned out I couldn't use it. If you're the Silicoids, once you have it, it gets ignored. I also got cloning but never even tried it; I bet it wouldn't work either. Besides which, that one comes very late and by that point I didn't need the help.
But through most of the game, most of my planets weren't full. Between shipping colonists to newly-colonized planets, and shipping soldiers to one planet that revolted, and all the cases where I conquered enemy planets, I ended up running behind on bodies all through the game. It was kind of freaky, actually.
Actually, now that I think of it, maybe the Bulrathi would be fun to play. They get a huge advantage in ground combat, and that could be interesting.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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May 02, 2010
MOO love
I've been spending a lot of time playing Master of Orion. Yesterday I tried MOO2, and gave up after about ten minutes. I remember with MOO2 came out, and I bought it, and it never grabbed me then either.
MOO, though; it's the perfect blend of ease of play and complicated and interesting play. One of the strokes of genius Barcia included in it is the way that you don't get every research item each time you play. Sometimes you can get the ones you're missing by trading with the computer players, or better yet stealing it from them.
I ran into that today. I was playing the Meklars, against the Sakkra and the Psilons, and I got about half way through the game and hadn't gotten a single one of the "reduce pollution" technologies. Most of my planets were well developed and something like 60% of their economic output was in Eco to keep the pollution under control. I ended up restructuring my research to put most of the effort into Construction, as well as cranking up the espionage on the Psilons, and invading a couple of Psilon planets, in hopes of capturing something, anything, to try to get the pollution under control.
The Psilons had another surprise for me. They were being nasty, and also starting to spread like weeds, and I decided they needed to be "trimmed back" a bit. So I sent a group of my latest, best warships to visit one of their better planets. And to my shock, my ship was hardly able to scratch the planet. I was using a low-level beam of some kind, and they had built up some pretty incredible planetary shields. Fortunately for me their missiles were crap, so the battle was a penny-ante attrition fight. I didn't particularly care to spend fifteen minutes pecking away at him, especially since I wasn't sure I'd be the winner. So I shut down production of that ship model and designed a new one. With heavy phasors, baby, and fusion bombs. That one worked a lot better.
I think the Meklars are my favorite race to play, though the Psilons are probably a close second. Among players of the game there's no consensus as to which race is the best one -- though there's general consensus that the Mrrshan are the worst. Certainly they're the least formidable when the computer plays them.
The Bulrathi bonus in ground combat can be a bit of a shock, or at least it was for me the first time I tried invading a Bulrathi planet, even though I had a technological advantage.
The Psilon research advantage, though, is really scary. The Darlok advantage in espionage is great. But the Meklar advantage in production is IMHO the best, because high production is the virtue from which all other virtues flow. In my most recent game, it didn't take me long to surpass the Psilons technologically, even though they had a lot of planets.
Depending on the situation, the Silicoids can be a real headache as an opponent. It depends on how long it takes before you find them. If it's quite a while (and generally that's what I prefer, myself) you'll discover that they have colonized every planet within reach and probably own a couple which are "rich" and maybe one "ultra rich".
On the other hand, that can be rather nice. Once the Silicoids have colonized a planet, you can conquer and invade even if you don't have the technology to colonize planets of that type. And the Silicoid breeding disadvantage can be a real handicap.
It was hard to play-balance the races and they didn't really do a very good job of it. I gather that in MOO2 they changed that quite a lot. But in MOO the races are enough different to keep them interesting, and not so out of balance as to make the game unreasonable.
As to the Humans? Bah! Waste off time. Who wants to be a human?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
07:08 PM
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1
Stupid question: is it possible to set up a CPU vs CPU match without a human player?
Posted by: metaphysician at May 02, 2010 08:08 PM (/YIPx)
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No. There is always a human player. (Only one. The first MOO didn't have network play; that's one of the things they added in MOO2.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 02, 2010 08:15 PM (+rSRq)
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I've been up until 3am for the past two weeks playing MOO every night. I swear I must have played this back in the 90s -- so many of the dialogues ring deeply buried bells -- but I honestly can't remember. I've been playing 5 opponents on a medium map, average difficulty, which makes for pretty cut-throat sessions.
One fascinating series was when I had an accident event which turned my home planet "TOXIC." Then the planet revolted. I couldn't land troops on it to quell the revolt because I didn't have Toxic Colonization researched.
Is anything known about the programming team behind this? Did they go on to greater fame and fortune? Because this game is amazing.
Posted by: bkw at May 03, 2010 03:19 PM (34O+x)
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It's pretty much Steve Barcia, and he was responsible for several awesome games. But... as is often the case, the industry eventually crushed him. It tends to chew people up and spit them out.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 03, 2010 05:21 PM (+rSRq)
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April 22, 2010
Master of Orion -- the Guardian
I played through and won a game of MOO last night, in a large galaxy, at simple setting, with just one opponent. I played the brainy guys (man, they're fun!) and my opponent turned out to be the Alkari.
I'll move up in difficulty later, but I'm still learning the game. After all this time I hardly remember it. For instance, I got caught by surprise when I found the Orion system and fought the Guardian the first time. I honestly had completely forgotten about that!
My scout had a scanner, so I took a look at the specs, and got a bit intimidated. I put off trying to attack it until I could build a battlewagon I thought was able to compete. Ended up with 20 of those, and tried it.
And the Guardian went down in my first shot. It was 20 ships, each of which carried 11 proton torpedoes (and a 11 heavy ion cannons), and they vaporized it with their first salvo of torpedoes. I didn't lose a single ship. I really overestimated how dangerous it was. I now suspect that just one of my battlewagons could have handled it. (I think I kept a saved game just before that attack; maybe I'll try it and see.)
Maybe I was mixed up with the amoeba or the star crystal. I think those guys are a lot stronger than the Guardian.
MOO locked up on me twice. Fortunately, the game auto-saves every few turns, so I was able to restart the game and "continue" without having lost very much.
There was one advanced ship feature I remember really liking a lot which permitted a ship to teleport to any empty square on the tactical map, but I don't remember what it was called. It wasn't in my research tree this time. I did get the Mauler Device, which I vaguely remember was a lot of fun, but by that point the game was such a mismatch that it wasn't worth going on. I ended up sending just one of those battle wagons I designed for the Guardian into each of the two Alkari worlds, and they won easily.
Remember when I bought Civ 4? I installed it and played with it for an evening, and never ran it again. It's gorgeous. It's also too damned intricate. It's too complicated. If you learned the Civ series over a period of years, upgrading each time to the newer, more complicated version, maybe it wouldn't be such a challenge. But for me, coming into it cold after more than ten years, well it seemed more like work than play.
MOO hits a different point in the curve. The research tree and the kinds of things you get from research aren't so elaborate. They're easier to understand and easier to keep track of. I was hooked on this game back in the day, and I'm pretty sure I'll be hooked again.
The Good Old Games package I bought also included MOO2, but I'm not even going to look at it until I'm back up to speed on MOO, and becoming bored with it. That may take months.
It may never happen at all. Master of Orion is a masterpiece, one of the best PC games ever. It is an example of why I love 4X games.
All together now: Explore! Expand! Exploit! Exterminate!
UPDATE: I remembered wrong:
UPDATE: No, I guess I didn't underestimate the Guardian after all. One of those battlewagons got creamed. 4 of them got creamed. 11 of them won, but lost 4 in doing so.
When I originally played the game, I took 20 in, and they won without losses.
UPDATE: I have a vague memory that when you were in the main screen, there was something you could click, or some key combination you could hit, which would allow you to cycle through all your planets in order. Am I remembering wrong? What was it?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
10:10 AM
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I can't remember if it was MOO, but I remember reading somewhere that one of the early 4X games heavily favored numbers over power, such that you could break the game by defeating certain enemies way early.
Posted by: metaphysician at April 22, 2010 10:30 AM (/YIPx)
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*looks up* Yep, I think it was MOO.
I've encountered similar situations in other games ( including P&P RPGs! ), where the name of the game is "prevent any return fire." If you can throw enough weak shots at a strong enemy to kill them quick ( or at least force them to abort to dodging ), you can beat them. If you can't, they use their vastly higher firepower to one-shot your guys.
Posted by: metaphysician at April 22, 2010 10:34 AM (/YIPx)
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No, it wasn't this one. For one thing, it takes a long time before you even encounter any of your enemies, because you have to research extended range for your ships.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 10:36 AM (+rSRq)
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Congratulations on the first win. I hope you keep having fun with it.
If memory serves (it's been a couple of years since I played), the Guardian gets significantly stronger at higher difficulty settings. In particular, I'm pretty sure it gets one of the anti-missile specials. So if you were on Simple, then it probably actually
was weaker than you remembered.
I think the hotkeys you want are F2 and F3.
Yeah, I don't think MoO is imbalanced in favor of huge stacks of weak ships. It's certainly a viable option, as it should be, but there are lots of countermeasures -- good battle computers, repulsor beams, certain weapons. Most critically, the computer opponents are smart enough to deploy those countermeasures if you start using fighter swarms. And that's one of the most impressive things about MoO. Has there ever been a strategy game with a better AI?
Posted by: Griffin at April 22, 2010 12:53 PM (3WecZ)
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I've heard lots of people who say that the AI in Stardock's "Galactic Civilizations" is supposed to be extremely good.
And there was a turn-based game about railroads which got converted into a computer game (I don't recall the name, but I know that one aspect of it was that there wasn't any chance to it) and I heard that the computer players in that one were excellent.
I always thought that the MOO AI's were pretty good, but I never thought of them as being remotely as good as a human player.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 01:23 PM (+rSRq)
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Yes, F2 and F3 are exactly what I was remembering! Thanks!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 01:25 PM (+rSRq)
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Yeah, GCII has extremely good AI. It used to have an option where the AI would use all the free CPU power available. Stardock actually took that feature out in a later patch, because as computers advanced over just a few years, it became pointlessly excessive.
Posted by: metaphysician at April 22, 2010 07:32 PM (/YIPx)
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>And there was a turn-based game about railroads
Ticket to Ride?
http://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/
Posted by: cuc at April 22, 2010 09:51 PM (T3aZT)
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I'm posting this even as it violates the "unsolicited suggestion" rule, because a Civ player is morally obliged to do it...
The crowning achievements of Civ-type games are Alpha Centauri (by Brian Reynolds, the designer behind Civ2) and Master of Magic (by Steve Barcia, the designer behind MOO).
Phew, I've said it.
Posted by: cuc at April 22, 2010 09:57 PM (T3aZT)
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I figured it out: it was 1830.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 10:04 PM (+rSRq)
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cuc, MOM will be out on GOG next week.
Expect Steven to disappear entirely once that happens.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2010 12:08 AM (PiXy!)
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Personally, I am still waiting for Darklands to come out from the Microprose back catalog.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at April 23, 2010 06:13 AM (BUHwO)
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I don't think I ever played the original MOO, but I can't even begin to tally the number of hours I blew on MOO2. I suspect I'll be getting that combo and throwing any chance of sleep or productivity out the window this weekend. I never played MOM for some reason, but from what people are saying here I plan to get that one when it comes out. I've considered getting CIV4 as well, but I need to dig through my old CD binders first and see which is the last version I have, I remember I didn't like it much at all in that version, but I suspect that was one of the variants of Civ III.
The AI in 1830 probably seemed pretty impressive to a casual player, and the fact that it could be made to do well in a game with that kind of depth is an impressive, but to say 'excellent' would be quite a stretch, I was in the middle levels of the west coast tournament set back when and I could beat it in my sleep, and what some of the better players I knew could do to the poor AI was just ridiculous.
Posted by: David at April 23, 2010 07:36 AM (H5/LU)
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Actually, one title I do not imagine will come out from the Microprose back catalog (Due to copyright issues.), but would be excited if it did, is Red Storm Rising. Arguably the best blend of realism and playability in a modern submarine simulation.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at April 23, 2010 05:18 PM (BUHwO)
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