FreeOrion

[Berekän]

FreeOrion is a free, open source, turn-based space empire and galactic conquest (4X) computer game being designed and built by the FreeOrion project. FreeOrion is inspired by the tradition of the Master of Orion games, but is not a clone or remake of that series or any other game.

http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Main_Page



Anyone here tried it? Is it worth playing right now or should I wait/abandon all hope?

 

[Cassidy]

It is free, give it a try.



OSS games are like a lottery unless they are not too obscure to have earned reviews from fans of the genre that aren't participating from their development and thus naturally biased.

Expect balance problems and bugs.

 

[Malakal]

Read their forums a bit after the last MoO thread and... it seems to suck.

First of all this game looks more like MoO3 than MoO2 and while I personally liked MoO3 its nowhere near as good as 2. Then they added tons of stuff, most of features being complete shit. Urgh not what I wanted when I asked for MoO2 remake.

 

[Berekän]

Well, I wanted to wait for opinions since I have some sort of diogenes syndrome for software and didn't want to download it to never touch it again, but anyway, since it seems it's too underground for anybody to know of it and SuicideBunny asked me to play it, I will make a LP of my 5 first minutes with it. Observe:

Here's the menu screen. It's just a menu.

Here I am choosing the options for a new game. I didn't want to mess with the options too much to not break anything so I just changed the names and added 6 AI players. Chose humans but there were quite a few races, multiheaded dicks amongst them.

Main screen of the game. For some reason our home planet is called "Grotto III" wtf is this?

Oh, you can rename planets

Much better.

Here we have the fleets orbiting the system. Instead of having a display with ALL the ships in the system à la MoO2, we have our different ships assigned to the fleet we deem necessary (or in this case, that are set as default)

In this picture we can see that our "Invasion Fleet" has 1 Mark I and 2 Troop Ships.

Issuing orders to our scouts. Nice and simple right click, also Situation report which I guess will be more useful later.

AND TO THE RESEARCH

I must say I got confused by the UI here. Whenever the button is in black, it hides the researches with the filter we've selected, in this case marking (or unmarking, who the fuck knows) the completed tab we hid all our completed researches (this has to be the most pointless explanation ever)

Here I hide all the Defense technologies (awesome)

We can queue technologies, which is always a good option to have.

ALSO, THE RESEARCH TREE IS HUGE

And to the planet screen! We don't have a pretty planet view like in MoO2 but it should be functional enough. It works as in the technology screen, you can show/hide what kind of things you want to build, and in the right we have the numbers of our planet, population, health, production, the buildings built... etc

We can expand that, to show us some nice graphs and bigger building icons.

And of course hovering over anything shows us what we're looking at. Useful for all the buildings since most of they share the same icon for anything.

And the building queue! Looks like we can build more than one type of building per planet, is this useful at all? I don't know, I just played until this point at which my computer decided it was time to shut itself down.

 

[Berekän]

Also, from what I've read in the Bay12 forums seems like the AI sucks but there's potential there, who knows, will keep trying it.

 

[DakaSha]

Doe sit even have ai? it didnt last time i checked
edit: oh ok

 

[Berekän]

Should've mentioned earlier that you can change the UI colors for pretty much anything, that's nice and could solve my confussion with some of the UI buttons, although I would probably make it worse, making it look like some glowing neon turd so I'll leave it the way it is.

Here we see many things, the system Puppis, right next to my home system, has a nice small terran planet to colonize. Also, one of our scouts found a space monster in one of the systems, it's a Dyson Forest, and what the fuck is that? Nobody knows. But I can't let the xeno scum live so I'll send my invasion fleet there to annihilate the enemy.

Well, fuck, that was anticlimatic, there's no tactical combat (which I don't mind) but there isn't a briefing screen neither! Apparently you have to check EVERY FUCKING SHIP to see what the results of the battle are. In this case if we look at the number next to the silver hearth, we can see that it's now 4.7 when it was 10 before, therefore we made that stupid forest 5.3 points of damage.

Meanwhile we're about to face one of the first enemy fleets. One foreign scout fleet is aproaching one of the systems we have a scout on, THIS SHALL BE A GLORIOUS BATTLE.

And of course we're going to colonize the Puppis planet.

We destroy that heretic forest and set on our new planet, it's a glorious day turn for the Imperium.

Of fucking course, the scouts don't have weapons, so we can't do shit about the enemy scout He just stays there, laughing at our face. Also we can see that monsters can roam between systems. Could be dangerous if they had actual combat stats but so far we haven't found anything dangerous.

Setting the production for Puppis. The production system shares the same queue for every planet you have, terrible idea IMO, once you're crowded with planets it's going to be a pain looking at what's being built at every planet, what's actually waiting for another construction to finish...

Should've had individual queues for every planet and another production screen like the one in MoO2 for quick browsing your planets production.

The two technologies we had on queue have been developed at the same time... wierd, I thought it just researched one at a time but I was wrong. I should take a closer look at it later.

And now some ship design!

Pretty simple, we have different hulls, each of them has a different number of sockets with a different shape. You can put the different components in each of the sockets they fit in, you could, for example, put a component with a X shape in a square socket, but you can't put a square shaped component in a X socket. Usually the most "restrictive" shapes like the square have main components, like the one required to have a Colony ship, while the X shaped components have weapons and such. And yeah, the only thing required to have a colony ship is putting that special component in a hull, it's not a specialist ship, you could have a Colony ship with weapons or anything to make it self defensible.

But what is this?! Some fool xeno has tried to scout our home system! They shall be purged from the skies!

It is at this point that I notice I can't move my scout ships WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING BUG, BUG! Wait... what's that 0.1 number... FUEL!? Are you telling me that my scout it's just going to stand there floating in space? Well, fuck, should've know that before sending them to their doom without spare gas.

And another of our scouts has found someone's home base and has been destroyed. Well, at least they won't starve to death in space.

And we finish this chapter with someone's Mark I aproaching our home planet, looks like they're stupid enough to try and take us down with that stupid little fighter, dumb AI indeed.

 

[Cassidy]

Is it me or is there a disproportionatedly larger amount of good quality games or games with real potential to become something good among now GPL projects which consist into "Mod from a game whose original engine was GPLed by their developers now standalone under GPL license" compared to GPL projects started from scratch? Although obviously the latter will take longer to mature, among those who got far enough in development to be considered "full games" the list of those who aren't shit is much more limited than among the mods for Doom 3 and Freespace 2, for example. Truth be told I've been disillusioned with certain segments of the OSS community since Unity/Gnome3 and the now shit interfaces of many open-source softwares joined the iFag bandwagon which is the equivalent and as pointless as an OSS game being developed as a Gears of War or Modern Warfare clone.

tl;dr the fact there are more good mods at engines made GPL then turned standalone and OSS than OSS games developed from scratch is an accurate example of that old saying on reinventing the wheel.

 

[Berekän]

Well, I suppose everything's easier once you have the rules you're going to work with and can just focus on the design of the improvements you're going to make. If you're working from scratch and working actively with random contributors you're going to have a tougher time if you have to set up the engine with everyone trying to push their idea, I guess you need to have a strong grip and a good vision of the project to make everything march at a steady rate and not make everyone lose interest.

 

[SCO]

Also, artists and artistic vision (even if there are open source graphics and animations).
The dark mod for instance, has a lot of trouble for only having 3 modelers, and they are one of the most accomplished mods out there.

I can't complain about the code once a commercial game gets open sourced/reversed - arx fatalis is going very nice for instance, scummvm speaks for itself - towering accomplishment -, gemrb etc.

 

[index.php]

FreeOrion v0.5 has been released.

This is the version of FreeOrion recommended for those who just want to play and enjoy the game. So unless you want to participate in game development or play the latest development version with all the new features (but potentially more bugs), this stable release is for you.

Two years and eight months. This is the time since our last major release, 0.4.10. That is, probably by far, the longest it has ever taken us to get out a new release, but it is finally here. There is, of course, a reason for this (and no, it's not the pandemic), and the jump of the version number to 0.5 - we introduced major new mechanics: the "Influence" resource and government policies, which makes this the "Government and Policies" release. That brought some big changes to gameplay, and required a lot of balancing (and rebalancing) of a lot of things. The AI had to brought up to speed (at least to a point where it isn't broken anymore), and then there have been the usual plethora of changes: bug fixes, AI adjustments and optimizations etc., see the list of key changes below.

That, of course, means that this release is more "rough around the edges" than usual. With such major additions and many changes to the game, issues are to be expected, most of all in the balance and AI areas. A lot of polishing will be necessary in subsequent releases, and we hope to get a lot of feedback and help with that from people who play the new release.

As always, and with a release as big as this probably more than ever, a huge thank you to all our contributors - the devs, the playtesters, the content creators, and everyone else who helped making FreeOrion better. Even if maybe only by submitting a bug report. Big or small, every bit helps and is appreciated.

With that, now go, get the new release, and enjoy!

Follow FreeOrion on Twitter if you want to receive related news, especially announcements of releases.

Download:

Get FreeOrion here, for macOS and Windows.

Linux users can either get the snap package we provide on snapcraft.io (please be patient, it may take a few days until the 0.5 snap is available), or try to get the new release from the respective package repositories of their distributions (if your distro maintains FreeOrion packages). If you can't use our snap package, and your distro does not maintain FreeOrion packages, Linux users need to build FreeOrion with cmake/make per the instructions here.

Key Changes:
(since v0.4.10 July 2020)

• Added a government policies system
  - Policies have various positive or negative effects on an empire, some of which were moved from techs to policies
  - Policies represent various social, economic, and military ideas and ideals
  - Empires have limited slots in which policies can be adopted
  - Slots are unlocked by techs, buildings, other policies, ships, species or other content
• Gave species likes and dislikes
  - Buildings, policies, or specials nearby or in an empire affect their planet stability
• Made planet stability have more consequences
  - Various planet effects depend on stability levels, including resource output growth rates and stable values
  - Low planet stability causes rebel troops to appear
  - Rebel troops can cause a planet to leave an empire
• Added influence resource
  - Spent to adopt policies
  - Consumed by colonies and outposts and various content
  - Generated by various content and associated planet focus setting
  - Going into debt will reduce planet stability
• Extensive content reworking and balance adjustments for buildings, techs, policies, species, ship hulls and parts
• Combats default to 4 bouts, with ship structure and damage adjusted accordingly

The detailed changelog can be found here.