Master of Orion

https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/

by doppp • 6 years ago

250 155 6 years ago

mundo• 6 years ago

Playable free at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Master_of_Orion_1993 if, like me, you got halfway through the article before the urge presented itself.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

you can also get all of them through Steam if you need an easy means to deal with this, they are around two dollars each. Sadly 1 & 2 are not listed compatible with Catalina (Mac OS)

JohnFen5• 6 years ago

GOG has them, too -- with Linux packaging for us Linux people.

reiichiroh• 6 years ago

No 64-bit OS X DOSbox?

xycodex2• 6 years ago

Bought the 1+2 package on gog, works on catalina

smhenderson• 6 years ago

I just bought both MOO I and II as a bundle on GOG for $2.09. Well worth it! (it's on sale from $5.99 at the moment)

https://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion_1_2

Diederich• 6 years ago

Wow, thanks I think? You probably cost me quite a few hours of time.

compiler-guy• 6 years ago

This is just an amazing game.

I still play it quite regularly. I have an old Mac mini in a back room that I keep explicitly for that purpose. When the original machine gave up the ghost, I shelled out a couple of hundred bucks for a "new" obsolete mac mini just to be able to keep playing.

And I will do it again when this one dies. Such a great game. I also play Civ II on this machine occasionally.

Part of the magic is how simple the game play is relative to more modern games.

cik• 6 years ago

Don't know if it helps - but it's on Steam, and even behaves on Linux. Hell the emulation is painful enough that even the real waits are part of the game.

cabalamat• 6 years ago

If you have the original DOS .EXE, it runs without problems in DOSBox on Linux.

darkmighty• 6 years ago

I've played it recently and the waiting times between actions made it put it down. It's incredibly slow to do anything substantial. It could probably be fixed through a speed up button in an emulator, but I didn't go the trouble. As much as it seems like a solid strategy game, there are better modern alternatives. It was nice for the historical perspective though.

WhompingWindows2• 6 years ago

I used to love Masters of Orion II; I would play as the Psilons, get a ridiculous technological advantage, and produce massive death-star like Dreadnought ships that could vaporize any target or planet in one mega-beam.

The game had a flaw, though. The AI opponents would mass up hundreds of zergling-like very weak ships, and they would EACH get a turn in combat. So my 4 dreadnoughts would wipe 4 of their ships, then 296 enemies would fire individually and miss onto my mega-shields...then they'd be down to 292 after my turn...then 292 misses...and I'd leave the game for 3 hours until the battle finished.

chuckwnelson• 6 years ago

100% agree. Always loved playing the Darlok and stealing everything (especially you tech researching races).

I always dreamed of recreating this in the browser with an online multiplayer component, but the battle system was always flawed in my opinion.

hyperpl5• 6 years ago

Agreed re: Darlok. I have the most fun playing with them.

JohnFen5• 6 years ago

The game had a flaw, though.

Yeah, the game (and the original) has a number of flaws that can make winning pretty easy. I've adjusted my play to intentionally avoid them. You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly.

But when I want an easy win in MOO2, what I tend to do is to amass a large enough force that I can start just destroying planets. Because the number of ships you can have depends on the number of planets you have, and the AI is stupid, you can bring even the most overpowered enemy to its knees by avoiding direct fights with their forces and destroying their planets. Each planet that gets destroyed results in multiple enemy ships that go away because they can no longer be supported.

The best way to play either of the MOOs, though, is against real life human players. They aren't stupid.

inetknght• 6 years ago

You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly.

I honestly despise games that do this. I understand why they do though: writing a difficult AI can be quite hard to do.

Sohcahtoa825• 6 years ago

That's why you equip your ships with large numbers of missile batteries with the Dauntless Guidance System. Makes it so if 20 missiles fire, but it only 1 is necessary to blow up a ship, the other 19 will find new targets.

jkoudys2• 6 years ago

I enjoy taking the opposite approach. Advanced start, impossible, Elerians, or any race with full negative picks plus telepathy. Rush out some cheap ships with no shields and piles of MIRVing nukes. Straight to the silicoid or sakkra (anyone with a good species and weak government), blast their starbase and mind control the colony. Immediately start shipping the population around using freighters, and the impossible difficulty works in your advantage, since you know have a super-species under your control. Properly managed you can outgrow anyone now. Keep the momentum up and steamroll anyone else who you can't be friends with and keep harmless.

SkyMarshal• 6 years ago

That's a great hack of impossible difficulty, love it.

conanbatt4• 6 years ago

Telepathy is such a broken trait. Mind control is way too powerful, and assimilation way too difficult to have it any other way.

conanbatt4• 6 years ago

I think I have more than 10,000 hours on MOII. It took me literally years to understand the spy system (without googling it out).

I've won in every possible combination: fully industrial feudals military, super rich charismatic weakling diplo win, techno-antares, custom ship building.

The game has an amazing amount of design flaws for today's standard, but what a game. I think the only rival in complexity and replayability is Heroes of Might & Magic 3, one where I've put in 3x the time and each time I play it I discover something new.

to11mtm• 6 years ago

HOMM3 is still a game I'll play from time to time, it's half the reason I made a GOG account (Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games being the second).

I was actually thinking of HOMM as I was reading this thread, although I was thinking about it because of the subthread on AI. The AI in HOMM3 was surprisingly good for it's time, with very few times where I would ever see it 'stuck' or otherwise play in a way that was unfair or overly 'brain dead'.

aidenn07• 6 years ago

FWIW the point-cost of the "Creative" ability was bumped at least once (maybe twice?) over the course of the patches for MOO 2, so any race with creative is overpowered in the original release (which is what most people played because who downloaded patches in the 90s?)

ianbicking• 6 years ago

If you pressed "Z" it would autoplay extra fast, making those battles progress at a reasonable speed.

uep• 6 years ago

I also enjoyed playing as the Psilons. It's probably nostalgia, but there is still stuff I miss from more modern games like Stellaris, that I think MOO2 did right. It was really only the late game that became tedious.

There were tons of way to get cheap wins in the game. I vaguely recall there being tech (possibly from the Orions), that allowed you to cloak your ship. Enemies could not even target you while cloaked. There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had). With a single ship, you could attack, then cloak, and avoid all damage.

max_effort• 6 years ago

There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had).

Time Warp Facilitator. I installed it on each of my Doom Stars, along with a Stellar Converter that could vaporize pretty much any ship with one shot.

One of my favorite games of all time.

shoo• 6 years ago

another cheap trick: in late game after unlocking terraforming & Gaia transformation tech, you could turn any colony into a Gaia world apart from a colony on a toxic planet. But if you had a second colony in the system, you could gift your toxic colony to an opponent, then attack it with a stellar converter equipped fleet, fire the stellar converter to destroy the planet and convert it into an asteroid belt, then get your second colony in the system to start an artificial planet construction project to turn the fresh belt into a terraformable barren world.

It's a bit more Douglas Adams than George Lucas: apologies former citizens, you and your corrosive world needs to be vaporised to work around zoning regulations as part of the empire's galactic terraforming project.

Another fun way to play the early/mid game was to try to advance up the tech tree by scrapping captured higher tech ships. You needed large fleets of disposable ships with lots of room for boarding parties, tractor beams to pin enemies, and if possible weapons with radiation damage to kill the enemy crew before boarding. It was particularly fun and frustrating trying to capture ancient-tech antaran ships in the early/mid game (the game designers were wise enough to equip antaran ships with the quantum detonator tech giving them a very high chance to self destruct nuke their ship's drive when you tried to board them)

usrusr4• 6 years ago

I blame multiplayer: now even games that don't have it are expected to be "balanced". Nothing you can do in a modern game is allowed to be really clever, or else it will be utterly trashed by opinion leaders.

LorenPechtel5• 6 years ago

Yeah, the zerglings were a problem. However (hopefully I'm getting it right, it's been a long time), at max tech with the psilons: Stellar converter x8. Top computer (you need initiative), the tech to increase damage once you burned through their shields, increased hull space, the double shot tech. Note that to fit all this in you have to weaken the defenses, but it doesn't matter. This ship gets 16 shots that hit with full power all the way across the battle map--the zerglings almost never can do meaningful damage from their starting position. If they don't have Antares tech dreadnaughts die with two shots, anything else dies with one. A full Antares-tech design can take 5 hits before dying--but note that you have 16.

In practice a fleet of 8 of these can take on anything the AI will ever field, losses will be extremely rare. Be careful with planets if you want to capture them, it's very easy to kill them by accident.

Once I can build those I didn't even worry about the council.

AcerbicZero2• 6 years ago

I love this blog, even if it is a little weird at times. Some of the best and most well documented history of video games I've come across.

doersino• 6 years ago

Define "a little weird" – I've been following Jimmy's other blog, The Analog Antiquarian [1] (and also read a few of the non-gaming focused posts on this blog), and so far nothing "a little weird" has stood out to me. Not refuting you – just curious to know what you mean.

[1] https://analog-antiquarian.net

danko• 6 years ago

Not to put words in OP's mouth, but I'd guess the weirdness is in a couple of things:

1) Jimmy can go deep on some extremely obscure corners of the industry (e.g. interactive fiction movements that maybe only a few dozen academic acolytes are even aware of).

2) The occasional deep tangent. For example, I don't think a month-long mini-biography of Edward Mannock was really necessary to appreciate the Amiga game _Wings_. But then again, I loved that tangent, so it's the kind of weirdness that I can personally embrace. I'm guessing the Analog Antiquarian is going to end up ultimately absorbing that energy anyway.

pvg6• 6 years ago

One thing I find odd about the Space 4x genre is that it remains popular and new games or expansions for existing ones come out fairly regularly but there hasn't been a genuine hit in it, seemingly since MOO II or so.

thrower1232• 6 years ago

Stellaris? Endless Space? Galactic Civilizations?

It's a bit niche next to Civilization, or Battle-Royale-FPS-of-the-week, but it's not quite at the level of flight simulators.

pvg6• 6 years ago

None of these have been genuine hits, really. They are not terrible (well, maybe some of the GalCivs have been near-terrible). I don't see anybody ever writing the sort of retrospective on any of them as the one on MOO in this article.

santoriv2• 6 years ago

I would agree with you that there hasn't been a genuine hit since MOO 2. I would say, however, that one game, Distant Worlds: Universe, was a huge leap forward in redefining what's possible in the 4x genre (i.e. deep and immersive gameplay in a real-time context). Most of the other 4x games since 1996 have been a variation on the gameplay mechanics of MOO 2.

DW:U is the only 4x game that I would unequivocally say is as good as the original MOO2.

pvg6• 6 years ago

Oh that's one I haven't tried, which I should, if for no other reason than to improve my 'complaining about space 4x games' meta-game.

RockIslandLine• 6 years ago

Real time sucks, but I'll have to at least check it out.

JohnFen5• 6 years ago

Master of Orion and Master of Orion II (they are very, very different games) are two of my all-time favorites to this day. I started playing them when they were first released, and they've never left my game rotation.

As it happens, I've been playing the original MOO again for the last couple of weeks!

foobarian2• 6 years ago

It was difficult to play MOO for a while due to driver/emulation shenanigans but it got easier again thanks to the emulation community's improvements. Now you can play it in the browser or get it on Steam. Such an amazing game. For the past 20 years I have been using this endgame quote [1] as a quip in casual conversation. My favorite way to play is to build a nuke fleet and wipe out enemy colonies that cross me.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/orion_019....

ThePhysicist2• 6 years ago

I always loved Ascendancy (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendancy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeXKf6e46I), which I still play sometimes and still find interesting. It gets a bit boring towards the middle / end of the game though as the AI is not very advanced and easy to beat. Still I found it to be more polished than "Master of Orion".

conanbatt4• 6 years ago

I loved ascendancy but that game is unfinished. Combat made no sense, the AI was super dumb. But it had potential!

ThePhysicist2• 6 years ago

There's an AI patch that makes it somewhat better though. For me most of the joy of the games was in building up a galactic network, so I still enjoyed it very much even with the "dumb" AI.

kensai• 6 years ago

Does everyone agree with me here that the modern remake missed the mark?

http://masteroforion.com/news/legend-reborn

santoriv2• 6 years ago

It was a remake of MOO2, not MOO 1. And yes it was terrible.

Remakes (or games very similar to MOO 1) are Dominus Galaxia and Remnants of the Precursors.

Sohcahtoa825• 6 years ago

It was a remake of MOO2, not MOO 1. And yes it was terrible.

Have you played it recently, or just at launch? At some point, they did a pretty big overhaul and made a lot of improvements.

I still prefer Stellaris because it has more depth, but MOO is certainly playable.

skrowl• 6 years ago

I remember being SO excited for MOO reboot, then it ended up being terribly disappointing.

I went back to Stellaris after about 2 hours with new MOO.

conanbatt4• 6 years ago

I don't get Stellaris. I played it 10 hours waiting for the game to start.

ordinaryradical• 6 years ago

You should take a look at Dominus Galaxia—it hews much closer to the original Master of Orion philosophy while having some nice bits of modernization.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173590/Dominus_Galaxia_K...

Andrew_nenakhov3• 6 years ago

This game is extremely great, still influencing game design and space strategy games. Strangely, despite so many years and advances in technology, no other game could quite capture the charm of the great original Master of the Orion.

Ironically, the closest was Master of the Orion 2, which had nice features - I most liked that I could capture enemy population instead of extermination, converting them to be my citizens and creating a diverse empire (long before it was cool!!) - but it kinda lacked the sense of surrounding mystery, great black dread, where the snarks lurk to prey on my tiny empire of three sols....

WhompingWindows2• 6 years ago

I totally forgot you'd have the conquered people as citizens...you could also replace your people with robots. I don't think it made sense with every playable race, but certain races that were bad on food or the planet had bad food, you could use robots to improve your bottom line. Eerily familiar...

Andrew_nenakhov3• 6 years ago

We once had a three-player hotseat game. I made an industrial-focused race based on humans, second player made a psylon-based race of super scientists... And the third player wiped the floor with us on first contact. He made a race of silicoids who could eat rocks and breeded like crazy. He took all the maluses for strength gravity etc and easily destroyed us through sheer numbers.

So I guess rocks as food and breeding is THE strategy in moo2

gavanwoolery• 6 years ago

Master of Orion was notable in that it was the first game I remember with "meaningful" NPC interactions. Even though interactions were quite limited (make/break alliances, espionage, trade, etc), early alliances could determine the final outcome of the game. But more importantly, it felt emotionally compelling. I found myself getting angry at certain factions when they spied/voted/etc against me. They also took the time to illustrate dispositions IIRC, so you could see when a race was happy or angry with you.

aidenn07• 6 years ago

A neat little experiment in meaningful NPC interactions was Siboot[1]. The DOS version is probably available somewhere. It's rock-paper-scissors with a social element. Well worth at least an evening's play. The author has released the mac source-code, but good luck building it. The DOS version is available at various abandonware sites and that's probably the easiest way to play it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy...

hikarudo2• 6 years ago

Some twenty years ago, while playing Master of Orion, I asked the Humans to ally with me and go to war against the most powerful race. They replied something like: "Yes, we will be your allies. We fondly remember when you gave us +10 Terraforming."... which had happened scores of turns earlier, when in desperation I bribed them with tech so they wouldn't attack me!

ppeetteerr3• 6 years ago

This game, along with Master of Magic, Civ 1, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dune 2, were the beginnings of strategy gaming for me. It's amazing to see that most of these games have been remade or copied (Stellaris, Age of Wonder, Civ 6, XCOM 2, Star Craft, respectively), and that the genre lives on.

meesles• 6 years ago

I love it. To me, the biggest limitation of physical games is that at a certain point (much like real state/warcraft), it becomes impossible to manage the sheer volume of properties and game pieces.

Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors. I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. But... imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming.

It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out. When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff!

yyyk5• 6 years ago

Despite the similar setting, Stellaris is a very very different game, almost a different genre. MOO focuses on almost Risk-style gameplay and combat and does an excellent job at it. Stellaris focuses on roleplay and economy management (and some mid-late game issues prevent it from being great IMHO).

It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions.

the_af4• 6 years ago

See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate!

These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on. That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course!

Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement. R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering -- my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time :)

the_af4• 6 years ago

Agreed.

XCOM (the original) to this day remains one of my favorite turn-based games. How you grew attached to your troopers! The remake is pretty good, too.

How do you find Stellaris, by the way? I'm tempted by it but at the same time these days I simply don't have time for time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun.

bllguo• 6 years ago

time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun

pretty much covers Stellaris. It might have been salvageable if the world were interesting, but despite all the ways they let you customize your faction I never feel any attachment to them, to say nothing about the AI-controlled factions. Other games may have only a few factions but they all feel genuinely unique and different.

ppeetteerr3• 6 years ago

I didn't enjoy Stellaris as much as I remember enjoying MOO. However, the latest version of MOO is just okay. MOO 2 and Ascendancy were by far my favorite. I say this, but that was decades ago. How about yourself?

cabaalis• 6 years ago

Aside from some simple BASIC, I can attribute the beginning of my development career to being a kid playing with the text-based config files of Civ 1.

ppeetteerr3• 6 years ago

I used to use a hex editor to modify my XCom save files to max the stats of my soldiers and my money :)

hyperpl5• 6 years ago

I've been playing this since 1993 and can't think of any 4X game that is as tight as this in terms of structure and playability. For those that don't know, there is an SDL re-creation that reimplements the underlying engine (you still need the original assets to play of course). https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom

I've beaten it on impossible with nearly all races although I generally prefer to play with 4 races, medium galaxy on the hard setting.

antisthenes• 6 years ago

This is the more active fork of Kilgore's work:

https://gitlab.com/Tapani_/1oom

hyperpl5• 6 years ago

Ha, beat me to it!

Brave-Steak2• 6 years ago

Hmmm, maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see any exe to run and there are no instructions for compiling it. Am I missing something?

edit: Okay, it's in https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/blob/maste... Don't know why that'd be in a separate file, but okay. And they're Linux-only.

At least it seems that the original Kilgore version provides Windows binaries.

https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/-/releases

hyperpl5• 6 years ago

I should also mention that the developer stopped developing as s/he felt it was feature complete but there is at least one other fork that is still actively being developed (don't have the link handy as I'm traveling).

paulmd3• 6 years ago

Space Empires IV is fantastic, easily worth the 10 bucks on GOG or whatever

edit: $2 right now

jtolmar2• 6 years ago

I played MOO1 for the first time a few years ago, and it's by far my favorite 4x game. The sliders cut down on a lot of busywork present in MOO2 and Civ, the random tech tree is spicy, and the AI is much more interesting than the usual friend-foe modifiers system (major differences are ignoring friend-foe if someone is an easy target, dogpiling the leader, and undeclared early game border disputes).

Highly recommend if you like strategy games and haven't played it. I like it so much that I've tried writing a clone a few times (but the latest attempt got sidetracked and turned into a game about interplanetary rail networks.)

labster• 6 years ago

I also like MOO the best because of the lack of busywork. In a way, it feels a lot like a Euro board game, with sliders instead of meeples working the planets. Well, like a Euro except for the glassing your opponents' planets part; genocide is kind of rare in cardboard. But it is possible to play and win without doing that, in most games anyway. And then you're playing a game where if you collect enough "points" from your economic engine -- population from terraforming -- you win the game.

Now can you offer further explanation of this "interplanetary rail" thing? Is it Galaxy Express 999 style?

jtolmar2• 6 years ago

You decide what resource a planet produces, then hook it up to nearby planets that provide the resources it wants, which expands how far it can send its resource along the network. The network itself is composed of rail lines directly between planets.

Screenshots on my twitter: https://twitter.com/LiterallyOwls/status/1218418806520979456

Sohcahtoa825• 6 years ago

MoO was a masterpiece.

MoO II was even better, IMO, with more depth. The ability to create your own race alone is huge.

We don't talk about MoO III.

Then the MoO reboot happened...terrible at release, but it got overhauled at some point and it actually made the game enjoyable.

hyperpl5• 6 years ago

I appreciate that you acknowledge both as being masterpieces. I've found that the community is bifurcated w.r.t MOO1 vs MOO2 and it's great to see more people that appreciate both.

I haven't managed to get into MOO2 yet but it's on my bucket list for 202x. If it can yield any semblance of the awe I've had for MOO1 then I'm in for a real treat!

binarycrusader• 6 years ago

I think the best thing about MOO2 by far was the rather memorable audio/music. Especially the unique music they had each time you interacted with another race.

JohnFen5• 6 years ago

I seriously love them both, but for very different reasons. They're very different games and each requires a totally different approach.

yyyk5• 6 years ago

MoO2 has some dramatic improvements (races, leaders, better AI) but also some dramatic drawbacks (planet micromanagement). An MoO1.5 - with the MoO2 improvements but more MoO-style gameplay would have been awesome.

Sohcahtoa825• 6 years ago

I always found that the planet micromanagement is fun in the early game, but tedious late game when you control 20+ planets and are expanding quickly as you take over enemy planets.

aidenn07• 6 years ago

I agree with you on MoO II, but was wondering what your thoughts on MoM were?

I actually liked MoM better than MoO II except for the interface, which was intermediate betwen MoO and MoO II. It's also unfortunate it had so many bugs at release, though MoO II has gone through many patches, so it's not immune from that either.

Sohcahtoa825• 6 years ago

MoM

I'm assuming this is Master of Magic? Never played it.

chongli2• 6 years ago

I love Master of Magic. One of my favourite games by far. I loved taking 11 death books and starting with wraiths! Damn, once you summon your first unit of wraiths you could nearly conquer an entire plane! The free undead garrisons they left behind were just the cherry on top!

Then later on you get death knights and it’s all over. They are ridiculously powerful!

Another one I love is to pick Myrran and fill the rest with death books. Start with trolls and work your way up to war trolls. Cast death channel on elite war trolls and you have some truly formidable units!

Or go with halflings and life magic. Cast heroism on slingers and just laugh at the enemy as you pelt the heck out of them!

MoM has millions of different strategies to try and they’re all very interesting!

lacker• 6 years ago

I loved playing Civ 1. I hear a lot of times people say, oh kids should be taught money management in school. To me, playing a strategy game where you have to manage your own money supply was the best education in this sort of concept. If you save up your resources, you'll be able to do more powerful things in the future, which requires the tough emotional work of foregoing something you want now. But, sometimes that thing you want right now really is important, and you need to think hard about the difference.

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

But... money doesn't mean much in Civ 1. The first thing you do is cut the tax rate to the bare minimum, often zero, so that you can route all your trade into science instead.

You need to cover the maintenance costs of your buildings, but any surplus that goes into your treasury becomes nearly worthless -- the things you can spend gold on are garbage compared to science / happiness.

Andrew_nenakhov3• 6 years ago

Btw, in the late 1990s, Russian sci-fi writer Sergey Lukianenko had written two novels ("Line of dreams", "Emperors of illusions" [1]) set in MOO universe, which are quite entertaining.

Too bad he had turned a fascist and Putin's fanboy who viciously supports Crimea annexation and war with the Ukraine...

[1] https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%...

invalidOrTaken• 6 years ago

Glad the blog goes into the board game antecedents.

Having played a lot of board and computer games, what I'm hoping for these days might be called "Dynamicland, but for games." At present we have to choose between real-world sociality and the power of computing for simulation; why not both? If I can play multiplayer MOO with my grandkids while looking at each other, rather than screens, I'll be happy.

aidenn07• 6 years ago

I have seen tabletop gamers do various things with projectors and/or tokens with QR codes to keep track of things on a computer while interacting with things physically. I haven't seen anything that wasn't a one-off to scratch a single-person's itch though.

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

Some UIs from back in that era hold up really well, in my opinion. From the article, check out this UI: https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/orion_013/

It also reminds me of the original X-COM UFO Defense UI, which I think also holds up incredibly well decades later.

pridkett• 6 years ago

It took me forever to read this article. Because I got distracted when the article mentioned VGA Planets still existed and was actively maintained. That game was incredible back in the BBS days. Delightful to find a memory like that lives on.

entangledqubit• 6 years ago

Anyone else later transition to the heavily moddable 4X Space Empire IV?

SomeHacker44• 6 years ago

I played SEIV for years, and it was a wonderful game. I even built a "Play by Web" system that allowed remote turn based multiplayer for it via e-mail and web that lived for years, even after I handed it off to others to continue. What a great game.

zaroth2• 6 years ago

Maybe someone here can help with this. Back in the late 80s in the days of BBSing games of Trade Wars and Tele-Arena... I have a faint recollection of playing an entirely text-based space adventure game with my brother.

The first computer my brother and I ever had access to was a Wang, I have no idea what operating system it ran. I was 6 or 7 at the time. I'm pretty sure that's the machine we used to play this game, as well as our own instance of Trade Wars, when we weren't logged into Argus BBS over the 1200 baud.

OK, so this game we played. It was like a explore and conquer game, there was a list of worlds I think they were named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. You could choose to send different types of ships to try to capture and control the various worlds, in which case it would contribute to your overall production. I recall there was a way to send spies as well, that would relay information about what kind of units were present on an enemy territory. I recall it being similar in some ways to Galactic Empire, except it was purely turn based, there was no real time component.

I can't for the life of me remember the name of the game. I'm half convinced I dreamed the whole thing up. Any chance this rings a bell for anyone?

redm• 6 years ago

It doesn't ring a bell, but when I hear about TW2002 I can't help but think back to SRE/BRE, what fun.

yyyk5• 6 years ago

Hmm. Maybe VGA Planets? But that game was created only in the early 90s...

Erwin• 6 years ago

Solar Realms Elite sounds similar, but Amit Patel wrote it in 1990. It was inspired by Space Empire Elite in 1987 (the programmer was 13 years old at the time).

This article has some screenshots: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2016/02/02/jon-radoff-creator...

zaroth2• 6 years ago

Thank you! I think it was Space Empire Elite! Or possibly one of the later derivatives.

Man.... now I just have to track down a binary!

jwkane• 6 years ago

https://utopia-game.com/ is in some sense the great great grandchild of SRE. Mehul Patel created it a few years after the BBS scene died.

I'm not exactly advocating it as a game, I played the first six or seven "ages" and was shocked to see that the game still exists, 84 ages and 20 years later.

SubiculumCode2• 6 years ago

Space Empires I. II and III should be mentioned, IMO. Great games. Edit: and especially Space Empires IV

paulmd3• 6 years ago

III was the first 4X that I got way way too into. Really great "arcadey" experience that lets you focus on blowing shit up and not resource management as much.

IV is probably the apex of the series, much deeper and more complex. That's when you shift from 1 resource to 3. Ship combat has more depth as well.

I think V got a little too into the graphics and missed the mark on the mechanics, although the weapon mount system is pretty interesting.

edit: SE4 is currently $2 on GOG

SubiculumCode2• 6 years ago

oops got my numbers wrong. Like you, I actually started on III, but played IV extensively, for maybe hundreds of hours...and loved all the modding, AI improvements, etc. I still play it on occasion. I couldn't get into V though.

int_19h• 6 years ago

It's too bad that SE3 isn't sold anywhere. It still works fine on Win10, provided that you can get past installing it (which can be tricky, because the installer is a 16-bit Windows app!).

hikarudo2• 6 years ago

Ah, Master of Orion!

I had a ritual when I was 13 or so: when I got home on the last day of school before vacation, I would play Master of Orion nonstop until 3 or 4 am.

I still enjoy this game and play it a few times every couple of years.

duncancarroll• 6 years ago

There is a really well-done, faithful-to-the-original but still slightly expanded-upon open source Java clone of MOO1 called Remnants of the Precursors: https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/eew3hs/guide_to_the_r...

It compiles in IntelliJ and is very fun to play and mod.

homarp• 6 years ago

https://kilgoretroutmaskreplicant.gitlab.io/plain-html/ is an exact replica of the original Master of Orion engine, and requires original game data to be played.

littlecranky67• 6 years ago

I loved Moo2 as a child and I played a lot of hours with a friend of mine back in the DOS days - was one of the only hotseat playable games back in the day (and Worms of course).

Later when I became a programmer I was also fascinated by the fact that there were several "community patches" - patches that enhanced gameplay (larger galaxy sizes etc.), added new artwork and such without the availability of the source code - people reverse engineered the game and wrote binary patches that would contribute a lot to overall gameplay. To this day I can't fully understand how they did it - i get the theory, but not what tools they used, and how they got the motivation to do machine level changes to the game. Overall, good memories.

xycodex2• 6 years ago

+1, played when I was a kid, picked it up again a few months ago for nostalgia, I must say it holds up really well. It’s feels well-constructed, put together from simple concepts/components, in a way that makes it quite replayable. Many decisions have big-ish consequences, and there is not too much micro managing, unless you play really big galaxy and want to exterminate everyone. Very tight UI as well for the era. I like it much better than Moo2. I only wonder what would have to be different if there was multiplayer.

wolco• 6 years ago

What is the best semi-modern moo type game for someone who hasn't played the orginal but would probably enjoy it.

imtringued2• 6 years ago

The first MoO is superior compared to the second. You can terraform your planets from useless 25M population to 200M gaia planets. The fleet limit in MoO II was so annoying.

Master of Orion

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