Newest Steam review:
Will pick sniper
455 products in account
1 review
Not Recommended
277.8 hrs on record
This review may not accurately reflect the state of the released version.">Pre-Release Review
Posted: 25 August
One can fix the bugs, glitches and even contents with enough patches. However, one cannot fix bad gameplay design decisions no matter how much one can pour its money and time. The new Moo is the prime example of the latter.
I had been maintaining weapon mod list thread in the official Moo forum until I gave up on the game.
This game massively suffers in three areas: combat, content, and game design which is terrible.
I am not even going to talk about the tactical battle being real-time instead of turn-based, or staranes instead of free movements, because those issues are actually trivial issues compared to what I am going to discuss here.
No, there is no tl:dr version. You can always choose to not read this.
1) Combat :
The fact is that you will probably feel have even less control of the units in the battle than the games like Stellaris and Endless Space. Only game that provides even less interesting and uncontrollable battle is Gal Civ 3, and Gal Civ series was already infamous for such lackluster battle.
You will notice that you really do not have much control on the ship movements in "AI assisted" mode. You could try second option which gives you "total control" of the ships, which is nothing more than making ships basically immobile shooting turrets unless you order it to move. It's really badly implemented.
A good ship movements example would be games like Homeworld, where the capital ships properly make formations (this game's formations are hardly formations except 'bonus' stuffs) while smaller fighters/bombers and smaller ships move around to flank the enemy in fluent way. Despite 2016 game, New Master of Orion provides worse battle than a game that came out in 1999.
Also you will realize that you have no clue just how effective weapons or have no indication whether the weapons mods or special modules are actually working due to lack of the information. Even Stellaris provides a nice during-battle statistics such as damage, accuracy, and other useful stuffs. For Moo, this is very hard to tell due to fast nature of the tactical combat. One of the reasons why my thread was popular was that people have no clue whether the mod is working or not, and had to be manually tested each in optimal conditions.
This is already a fatal flaw, since the Moo is not really famous for 4X elements, but rather robust tactical battles. By throwing away having good tactical battles, the game is already in mediocre category.
Unfortunately, the combat is the least problematic of the three I mentioned.
2) Contents :
The game basically lacks contents. Even if NGO and Wargaming implement minor civs back in a good manner, the game still lacks a lot of stuffs missing. There is no governors, no interesting random events, pirates are half-baked, and the research tree feels shorts even if one can consider they have changed it to Civ style from binary choice method.
The main cause of the problem is... well, starlanes. So what happened? Since NGO has chosen to go from free movement to starlane movement, suddenly there was no need for implementing techs like fuel and reactors. The problem is that those fuel and reactors took a large portion of Moo techs. Because NGO has not sufficiently added additional content to fill this void, the overall tech tree feels short and feel something is missing.
Lack of governors and/or general are really missed features and most likely won't be ever implemented since it was NGO's decision to not implement in the first place.
However, even this content issue is not the most damaging issue for this game. Again, people can change their minds and spend money/time to implement said features, or you can just suck it up since the game is a bit cheap, however....
3) Game design :
....One just cannot fix design issues. You cannot fix it with time and money when you have a wrong idea. Try make gold from dirt, no matter how hard you try for next thirty years, you cannot transform dirt to gold.
This issue also unfortunately includes UI issues too. Here is copy-paste from my "My verdict on new Moo." thread regarding UI and micro-management issues caused by bad game design.
There are so many unnecessary, tiresome micro in this game. I think the developers believe making the game micro-intensive would make the game more 'complex' or something. No, it doesn't. It just makes the game chore. Here are the examples of this super duper terrible amount of unnecessary micro.
1) Pollution mechanic : The most insidious mechanics I've ever seen in any 4X games, literally. It is as insidious as Emperor Palpatine with his master's name "Sidious" implies. Basically, it works like this.
"You MUST babysit ALL non-barren, non-volcano planets with sharp eyes or they will degrade, forcing you to terraform the planet again!"
Seriously, when the number of the planets goes up 20+, this just makes me crazy all the time. You know, original Moo and other Moo clones have chosen much sane way (by just reducing total production output) to cut off this unnecessary micro-management, for a good reason.
This pollution mechanic is perhaps one of the most discussed subjects regarding micro-management problem this game has, and yet no adjustment is being made.
2) Population : Yet another micro-intensive element that does not have to.
Even moving people around is challenging.
Why we have to individually move them around to properly balance planet output?
Why we have to make individual civil transport and disembark population individually in such tiresome manner? I mean for god's sake original Moo and countless of Moo clones got this one right a long time ago. There are just tons of unneeded and unjustified micro-management in population alone.
3) Colony improvement/management : another crucial element that riddled with terrible micro-intensive-ridden stuffs.
From EA1, we have been voicing about the fact that there are only 5 (what? why only 5? Just... why???!?) order slots available for planetary improvement building order, and the fact that we cannot make our own building order to save time in the late game.
After 3 months this issue, like other micro-management issues, is rarely (more likely never) recognized despite the fact that this is the most crucial reason why people easily get 'tired' after several hours of the play. Watching a person playing this game in twitch is insanely boring and exercise in futility that forced me to turn off the channel, because of these insane, endless micro-management feast.
After how espionage has been implemented, I have no faith that the micro-management issues will be ever fixed.(Reminder: this article was written in May. For more than 3 months these issues were never addressed.)
Sadly, it turned out that most of these issues were actually intentional(!!) When someone actually asked why there are only 9 ship design slots available, the dev said it's intentional. Just like terrible pollution mechanics, such arbitary restrictions that cause massive increase of micro-management are all intentional (a.k.a "features".)
This is actually a huge step back from the original Moo and Moo2. Even Moo2 had MORE building queue slots than this modern Moo. Yes, Moo2 had 7 queue slots instead of 5. Sad but true.
So, are there any positives? Sure yes, the game itself is very polished (tho Endless Space is about as polished as this game), and super expensive AAA voice acting, and surprisngly competent AI (then again, the game itself is not that complex to begin with) but none of these can overcome such fatal flaws this game has, particually game design issues.
Only saving grace is cheap price. At least Wargaming did not have balls to charge people AAA price for this game. It's only 30 bucks. If you can tolerate it, all power to you. But I'd recommend to spend money elsewhere.
Will pick sniper
455 products in account
1 review
Not Recommended
277.8 hrs on record
This review may not accurately reflect the state of the released version.">Pre-Release Review
Posted: 25 August
One can fix the bugs, glitches and even contents with enough patches. However, one cannot fix bad gameplay design decisions no matter how much one can pour its money and time. The new Moo is the prime example of the latter.
I had been maintaining weapon mod list thread in the official Moo forum until I gave up on the game.
This game massively suffers in three areas: combat, content, and game design which is terrible.
I am not even going to talk about the tactical battle being real-time instead of turn-based, or staranes instead of free movements, because those issues are actually trivial issues compared to what I am going to discuss here.
No, there is no tl:dr version. You can always choose to not read this.
1) Combat :
The fact is that you will probably feel have even less control of the units in the battle than the games like Stellaris and Endless Space. Only game that provides even less interesting and uncontrollable battle is Gal Civ 3, and Gal Civ series was already infamous for such lackluster battle.
You will notice that you really do not have much control on the ship movements in "AI assisted" mode. You could try second option which gives you "total control" of the ships, which is nothing more than making ships basically immobile shooting turrets unless you order it to move. It's really badly implemented.
A good ship movements example would be games like Homeworld, where the capital ships properly make formations (this game's formations are hardly formations except 'bonus' stuffs) while smaller fighters/bombers and smaller ships move around to flank the enemy in fluent way. Despite 2016 game, New Master of Orion provides worse battle than a game that came out in 1999.
Also you will realize that you have no clue just how effective weapons or have no indication whether the weapons mods or special modules are actually working due to lack of the information. Even Stellaris provides a nice during-battle statistics such as damage, accuracy, and other useful stuffs. For Moo, this is very hard to tell due to fast nature of the tactical combat. One of the reasons why my thread was popular was that people have no clue whether the mod is working or not, and had to be manually tested each in optimal conditions.
This is already a fatal flaw, since the Moo is not really famous for 4X elements, but rather robust tactical battles. By throwing away having good tactical battles, the game is already in mediocre category.
Unfortunately, the combat is the least problematic of the three I mentioned.
2) Contents :
The game basically lacks contents. Even if NGO and Wargaming implement minor civs back in a good manner, the game still lacks a lot of stuffs missing. There is no governors, no interesting random events, pirates are half-baked, and the research tree feels shorts even if one can consider they have changed it to Civ style from binary choice method.
The main cause of the problem is... well, starlanes. So what happened? Since NGO has chosen to go from free movement to starlane movement, suddenly there was no need for implementing techs like fuel and reactors. The problem is that those fuel and reactors took a large portion of Moo techs. Because NGO has not sufficiently added additional content to fill this void, the overall tech tree feels short and feel something is missing.
Lack of governors and/or general are really missed features and most likely won't be ever implemented since it was NGO's decision to not implement in the first place.
However, even this content issue is not the most damaging issue for this game. Again, people can change their minds and spend money/time to implement said features, or you can just suck it up since the game is a bit cheap, however....
3) Game design :
....One just cannot fix design issues. You cannot fix it with time and money when you have a wrong idea. Try make gold from dirt, no matter how hard you try for next thirty years, you cannot transform dirt to gold.
This issue also unfortunately includes UI issues too. Here is copy-paste from my "My verdict on new Moo." thread regarding UI and micro-management issues caused by bad game design.
There are so many unnecessary, tiresome micro in this game. I think the developers believe making the game micro-intensive would make the game more 'complex' or something. No, it doesn't. It just makes the game chore. Here are the examples of this super duper terrible amount of unnecessary micro.
1) Pollution mechanic : The most insidious mechanics I've ever seen in any 4X games, literally. It is as insidious as Emperor Palpatine with his master's name "Sidious" implies. Basically, it works like this.
"You MUST babysit ALL non-barren, non-volcano planets with sharp eyes or they will degrade, forcing you to terraform the planet again!"
Seriously, when the number of the planets goes up 20+, this just makes me crazy all the time. You know, original Moo and other Moo clones have chosen much sane way (by just reducing total production output) to cut off this unnecessary micro-management, for a good reason.
This pollution mechanic is perhaps one of the most discussed subjects regarding micro-management problem this game has, and yet no adjustment is being made.
2) Population : Yet another micro-intensive element that does not have to.
Even moving people around is challenging.
Why we have to individually move them around to properly balance planet output?
Why we have to make individual civil transport and disembark population individually in such tiresome manner? I mean for god's sake original Moo and countless of Moo clones got this one right a long time ago. There are just tons of unneeded and unjustified micro-management in population alone.
3) Colony improvement/management : another crucial element that riddled with terrible micro-intensive-ridden stuffs.
From EA1, we have been voicing about the fact that there are only 5 (what? why only 5? Just... why???!?) order slots available for planetary improvement building order, and the fact that we cannot make our own building order to save time in the late game.
After 3 months this issue, like other micro-management issues, is rarely (more likely never) recognized despite the fact that this is the most crucial reason why people easily get 'tired' after several hours of the play. Watching a person playing this game in twitch is insanely boring and exercise in futility that forced me to turn off the channel, because of these insane, endless micro-management feast.
After how espionage has been implemented, I have no faith that the micro-management issues will be ever fixed.(Reminder: this article was written in May. For more than 3 months these issues were never addressed.)
Sadly, it turned out that most of these issues were actually intentional(!!) When someone actually asked why there are only 9 ship design slots available, the dev said it's intentional. Just like terrible pollution mechanics, such arbitary restrictions that cause massive increase of micro-management are all intentional (a.k.a "features".)
This is actually a huge step back from the original Moo and Moo2. Even Moo2 had MORE building queue slots than this modern Moo. Yes, Moo2 had 7 queue slots instead of 5. Sad but true.
So, are there any positives? Sure yes, the game itself is very polished (tho Endless Space is about as polished as this game), and super expensive AAA voice acting, and surprisngly competent AI (then again, the game itself is not that complex to begin with) but none of these can overcome such fatal flaws this game has, particually game design issues.
Only saving grace is cheap price. At least Wargaming did not have balls to charge people AAA price for this game. It's only 30 bucks. If you can tolerate it, all power to you. But I'd recommend to spend money elsewhere.
