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The Digital Antiquarian on Master of Orion

Boleskine

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

Master of Orion
24 Jan




Given the shadow which the original Master of Orion still casts over the gaming landscape of today, one might be forgiven for assuming, as many younger gamers doubtless do, that it was the very first conquer-the-galaxy grand-strategy game ever made. The reality, however, is quite different. For all that its position of influence is hardly misbegotten for other very good reasons, it was already the heir to a long tradition of such games at the time of its release in 1993. In fact, the tradition dates back to well before computer games as we know them today even existed.

The roots of the strategic space opera can be traced back to the tabletop game known as Diplomacy, designed by Allan B. Calhamer and first published in 1959 by Avalon Hill. Taking place in the years just prior to World War I, it put seven players in the roles of leaders of the various “great powers” of Europe. Although it included a playing board, tokens, and most of the other accoutrements of a typical board game, the real action, at least if you were playing it properly, was entirely social, in the alliances that were forged and broken and the shady deals that were struck. In this respect, it presaged many of the ideas that would later go into Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. It thus represents an instant in gaming history as seminal in its own way as the 1954 publication of Avalon Hill’s Tactics, the canonical first tabletop wargame and the one which touched off the hobby of experiential gaming in general. But just as importantly for our purposes, Diplomacy‘s shifting alliances and the back-stabbings they led to would become an essential part of countless strategic space operas, including Master of Orion 34 years later.

Had things gone just a little bit differently, Master of Orion too might have been a shareware release. It was designed in the spare time of Steve Barcia, an electrical engineer living in Austin, Texas, and programmed by Steve himself, his wife Marcia Barcia, and their friend Ken Burd. Steve claims not ever to have played any of the computer games I’ve just mentioned, but, as an avid and longtime tabletop gamer, he was very familiar with Stellar Conquest and a number of its successors. (No surprise there: Howard Thompson and his game were in fact also products of Austin’s vibrant board-gaming scene.)

After working on their computer game, which they called Star Lords, on and off for years, the little band of hobbyist programmers submitted it to MicroProse, whose grand-strategy game of Civilization, a creation of their leading in-house designer Sid Meier, had just taken the world by storm. A MicroProse producer named Jeff Johannigman — himself another member of the Austin gaming fraternity, as it happened, one who had just left Origin Systems in Austin to join MicroProse up in Baltimore — took a shine to the unpolished gem and signed its creators to develop it further. Seeing their hobby about to become a real business, the trio quit their jobs, took the name of SimTex, and leased a cramped office above a gyro joint to finish their game under Johannigman’s remote supervision, with a little additional help from MicroProse’s art department.

However that may be, though, the lion’s share of the credit for Master of Orion‘s enduring influence must surely be ascribed to what a superb game it is in its own right. If it didn’t invent the 4X space opera, it did in some sense perfect it, at least in its digital form. It doesn’t do anything conceptually new on the face of it — you’re still leading an alien race as it expands through a randomly created galaxy, competing with other races in the fields of economics, technology, diplomacy, and warfare to become the dominant civilization — but it just does it all so well.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
Glad he dove deep into the randomization of the tech tree. That is the most intelligent thing Master of Orion does. It may actually be the single most elegant idea I've ever seen in a game.
 

Infinitron

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I was hard on Emrich in earlier articles for his silly assertion that Civilization‘s inclusion of global warming as a threat to progress and women’s suffrage as a Wonder of the World contituted some form of surrender to left-wing political correctness, as I was for his even sillier assertion that the game’s simplistic and highly artificial economic model could somehow be held up as proof for the pseudo-scientific theory of trickle-down economics. Therefore let me be very clear in praising him here: Emrich and Hughes played an absolutely massive role in making Master of Orion one of the greatest strategy games of all time. Their contribution was such that SimTex took the unusual step of adding to the credits listing a “Special Thanks to Alan Emrich and Tom Hughes for their invaluable design critiquing and suggestions.” If anything, that credit would seem to be more ungenerous than the opposite. By all indications, a pair of full-fledged co-designer credits wouldn’t have been out of proportion to the reality of their contribution. The two would go on to write the exhaustive official strategy guide for the game, a tome numbering more than 400 pages. No one could have been more qualified to tackle that project.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Emrich did one more great service for Master of Orion and, one might even say, for gaming in general. In a “revealing sneak preview” of the game, published in the September 1993 issue of Computer Gaming World, he pronounced it to be “rated XXXX.” After the requisite measure of back-patting for such edgy turns of phrase as these, Emrich settled down to explain what he really meant by the label: “XXXX” in this context stood for “EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate.” And thus was a new sub-genre label born. The formulation from the article was quickly shortened to “4X” by enterprising gamers uninterested in making strained allusions to pornographic films. In that form, it would be applied to countless titles going forward, right up to the present day, and retroactively applied to countless titles of the past, including all of the earlier space operas I’ve just described as well as the original Civilization — a game to which the “EXterminate” part of the label fits perhaps less well, but such is life.

Civilization explicitly bills itself as a grand journey through human history, from the time in our distant past when the first hunter-gatherers settled down in villages to an optimistic near-future in space. The rules underpinning the journey are loose-goosey, full of potential exploits. The most infamous of these is undoubtedly the barbarian-horde strategy, in which you research only a few minimal technologies necessary for war-making and never attempt to evolve your society or participate in any meaningful diplomacy thereafter, but merely flood the world with miserable hardscrabble cities supporting primitive armies, attacking everything that moves until every other civilization is extinct. At the lower and moderate difficulty levels at least, this strategy works every single time, albeit whilst bypassing most of what the game was meant to be about. As put by Ralph Betza, a contributor to an early Civilization strategy guide posted to Usenet: “You can always play Despotic Conquest, regardless of the world you find yourself starting with, and you can always win without using any of the many ways to cheat. When you choose any other strategy, you are deliberately risking a loss in order to make the game more interesting.”

So very much in Civilization is of limited utility at best in purely mechanical terms. Many or most of the much-vaunted Wonders of the World, for example, really aren’t worth the cost you have to pay for them. But that’s okay; you pay for them anyway because you like the idea of having built the Pyramids of Giza or the Globe Theatre or Project Apollo, just as you choose not to go all Genghis Khan on the world because you’d rather build a civilization you can feel proud of. Perhaps the clearest statement of Civilization‘s guiding design philosophy can be found in the manual. It says that, even if you make it all the way to the end of the game only to see one of your rivals achieve the ultimate goal of mounting an expedition to Alpha Centauri before you do, “the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons.” Or, as Sid Meier himself puts it, “a game of Civilization is an epic story.”

Such sentiments are deeply foreign to Master of Orion; this is a zero-sum game if ever there was one. If you lose the final Galactic Council vote, there’s no attaboy for getting this far, much less any consolation delivered that the galaxy has entered a new era of peaceful cooperation with some other race in the leadership role. Instead the closing cinematic tells you that you’ve left the known galaxy and “set forth to conquer new worlds, vowing to return and claim the renowned title of Master of Orion.” (Better to rule in Hell, right?) There are no Wonders of the World in Master of Orion, and, while there is a tech tree to work through, you won’t find on it any of Civilization‘s more humanistic advances, such as Chivalry or Mysticism, or even Communism or The Corporation. What you get instead are technologies — it’s telling that Master of Orion talks about a “tech tree,” while Civilization prefers the word “advances” — with a direct practical application to settling worlds and making war, divided into the STEM-centric categories of Computers, Construction, Force Fields, Planetology, Propulsion, and Weapons.

So, Civilization is the more idealistic, more educational, perhaps even the nobler of the two games. And yet it often plays a little awkwardly — which awkwardness we forgive because of its aspirational qualities. Master of Orion‘s fictional context is a much thinner veneer to stretch over its mechanics, while words like “idealistic” simply don’t exist in its vocabulary. And yet, being without any high-flown themes to fall back on, it makes sure that its mechanics are absolutely tight. These dichotomies can create a dilemma for a critic like yours truly. If you asked me which game presents a better argument for gaming writ large as a potentially uplifting, ennobling pursuit, I know which of the two I’d have to point to. But then, when I’m just looking for a fun, challenging, intriguing game to play… well, let’s just say that I’ve played a lot more Master of Orion than Civilization over the last quarter-century. Indeed, Master of Orion can easily be read as the work of a designer who looked at Civilization and was unimpressed with its touchy-feely side, then set out to make a game that fixed all the other failings which that side obscured.

Master of Orion as the edgy reactionary take on Civilization. And it's so good that he doesn't care.
 

octavius

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Glad he dove deep into the randomization of the tech tree. That is the most intelligent thing Master of Orion does. It may actually be the single most elegant idea I've ever seen in a game.

It's the main thing that makes it so much more unpredictable and thus more replayable than the Civ games and SMAC (the other being the assymetric races).
 

Endemic

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The Schwarzschild series is interesting in that it contains most of MOO's gameplay elements but started 5 years earlier in 1988.

It's the main thing that makes it so much more unpredictable and thus more replayable than the Civ games and SMAC (the other being the assymetric races).

SMAC has random techs though, and feels less like playing a spreadsheet overlaid on a galaxy map :P Don't get me wrong, Master of Orion is enjoyable, but hardly the only great 4X game.
 

Morblot

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Same here. Got me reading his blog again after a long pause. It's really good.
 

almondblight

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A modest trickle of other boxed computer games of a similar stripe also appeared, albeit none which did much to comprehensively improve on SSG’s effort: Imperium Galactum, Spaceward Ho!, Armada 2525, Pax Imperia.

Pax Imperia (the 1992 game, though it's 1997 sequel is more well known) always sounds interesting to me whenever I've come across it. For instance, from the link:

Noteworthy elements of gameplay aside from the usual fare for games of its ilk (i.e. starship combat and exploration, colony-building, economics, etc.) included:

  • Species customization with such features as specifiable atmosphere type (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon or hydrogen), temperature range and tolerance, and four percentile-rated attributes -- curiosity, efficiency, reproduction and aggression;
  • Detailed ship and ship systems design;
  • Detailed personnel management for your ministers/advisers (including selecting from a pool of candidates with varying attributes, attitudes and loyalty à la Koei's strategy games, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series);
  • Separate development and management of up to nine distinct regions of each planet;
  • Planetary surface operations (primarily raids, assaults and even the landing of hostile colonists into specific planetary regions of enemy-controlled planets);
  • Migration between planetary regions (even by another player's colonists, leading to 'Migration Wars'!);
  • Five different mineral resources grouped into scientifically-valid categories (Ferrites, Pyrrites, Silicates, Crystals and Radiants) to find, mine and trade with other space civilizations;
  • Starships organized into and moved as fleets, not individual ships;
  • Espionage options that include bribing or assassinating enemy ministers; and
  • Detailed, custom research ('Tech Design') in which individual attributes of developed ship systems can customized (including, for example, a dynamic range/accuracy graph for weapons).
 

fastjack

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Pax Imperia was my first 4x so I have pretty fond memories of it, but it's been so long that the bullet points above are reminding me of things I'd totally forgotten. I mostly remembering sending fleets across space that were hopelessly outdated when they arrived, and years of disappointment with wormhole based space movement in other space 4x games (space empires series for instance).
 

almondblight

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and years of disappointment with wormhole based space movement in other space 4x games (space empires series for instance).

Yeah, I've read that Pax Imperia was one of the few space 4x where you could send you're fleets anywhere in space (instead of just jumping system to system). So you could do things like load up a spaceship with sensor equipment and then park it in empty space near an enemy system to spy on them.
 

taxalot

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I had never played MOO before that article. I installed it because I had it on GoG.

It felt terrible.

I don't know, if it's the interface, the incredible clunkiness or something. Is the remake or sequel better ? I know nothing about that series.
 

Morblot

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MOO2 has a friendlier UI (right click on anything to get help), larger screen resolution and a good soundtrack. It is very much worth trying out. It's one of the first games I ever bought and also still one of my all-time favorites. Get the 1.5 patch from moo2mod.com, it fixes some bugs that still remain at least in the GOG version.

MOO3 is abhorrent, the 2016 remake I don't know or care about.
 

Nutria

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Strap Yourselves In
It never ceases to amaze me how annoying this guy is even when I agree with his main points. He thinks Civilization's mechanics are bad because he found some degenerate strategy that works on low difficulty levels. But apparently MOO is some perfect flawless gem that can't be broken just by playing it enough. Somehow he's never figured out that you just need to survive long enough to build huge ships with repulsor beams and automated repair.
 

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