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4X Interstellar Space: Genesis - MoO2 inspired space 4x

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,882
It seems crazy nobody on 'Dex mentioned this game here considering how much people love MoO2.

This just released today on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/984680/Interstellar_Space_Genesis/

Seems very interesting.

ABOUT THIS GAME
You are among the latest, and perhaps the last, of the challengers to undertake this great journey into the stars. While the universe may be ancient, you and your rivals are still young. As you compete with one another for control of this galaxy, there are others, far older and more powerful than you, who watch from a distance with unknown intentions. It is time for you to prove your empire deserves to rule this galaxy, once and for all. You may prove worthy after all, but worthy of what? It is up to you to Discover the Unknown...

Interstellar Space: Genesis takes classic turn-based space 4X strategy mechanics, adds in a few twists of its own, and tosses them in with several brand new mechanics to create a truly unique entry into the genre. It also aims to provide a lack of burdensome micromanagement and an emphasis on the best aspects of classic 4X space strategy games.



I have not played it as it is a bit expensive for me but maybe some of you with deeper pockets can tell us if it is worth its cost.
 

ArchAngel

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This review says it is good: https://explorminate.net/2019/07/25/interstellar-space-genesis-review/

THE VERDICT
Interstellar Space: Genesis is a tough game to pin down.

On one hand, as mentioned in our preview article, ISG feels like a game where the developers have done their homework. They’ve implemented exploration, research, combat, and planetary management systems (aka the core building blocks of a 4X game) in ways that usher in a variety of exciting innovations. Few games have launched with so many of the core systems feeling like they are designed as artfully as in ISG. Add to this a robust leader system, a solid warmongering AI, and a highly functional UI, and we’ve got a definite winner.

From a gameplay perspective, the pacing of 4X games is enormously important for achieving that “one more turn” feeling. In general, ISG does well, although I should note that the early game can feel slow with frequent “dead turns” while waiting for a key research or ship to finish. But as I’ve become more experienced with the game, I’ve found subtle ways to accelerate my early progress – whether this is a sign of greater depth or just “more things to learn” I’m not sure. By the mid-game, there is plenty of fast-paced galactic activity to keep you hooked.

Occasionally, I’ve felt like some of mechanics is at odds with itself, and that maybe things could’ve been simplified a bit more. Did we really need a separate planet infrastructure andbuilding queue system? Is the system really providing a deeper experience, or just a more complex one? I think it’s a bit of both. I also think there are some missed opportunities for greater narrative depth, play style variety (faction specific space culture?), and non-military means of empire interaction (markets? Galactic quests?). Hopefully these are avenues of consideration for future updates.

O2h3iqBjkXEpgF2TbnUJ_ye34NN-yM7f449bkwEfXWUCL-AC-ecLJtot6t00Zbfkl2mASsYHll--gUcx2XDG8I7e-Ycshk8CUYskJcrxIDOroPEcCETS9ku0jyB1pI6Wa_RmMz1L

Empire information screen with a surprising dose of detail

ISG
, as a traditional 4X game, runs afoul of the classic “problem” that plagues much of the genre, the dreaded mid-game to end-game slog. However, ISG tempers the situation by the relatively small and focused scale of the game and the inclusion of things like the galactic council that can help bring the game swiftly to a close. It’s certainly not an egregious offender, but I hope the developers can revisit this aspect of the design (and it’s association with victory conditions) in the future. More broadly, I think it is unfair on my part to expect ISG to rectify the classic “problem” at a fundamental level, since by intent the game set out to modernize the traditional MoO2 experience, warts and all. Praxis Studios never intended to reinvent the wheel, so it’s unreasonable to hold them to that standard.

So I’ll leave it with this: ISG shows tremendous sophistication and design aptitude, and we ended up with a solid, traditional 4X game that brings along a host of subtle, but impactful design innovations. While ISG is not a game that will take the 4X genre in a bold new direction, it is a highwater mark for the design and execution of traditional 4X gameplay. On that basis alone, it’s worth a serious look

recommended.png

Caveats to the Rating:

  • If you’re looking for a full-featured, traditional style space 4X, this is one to try
  • The graphics are a strange and eclectic mix, which could turn off some people (the UI is functionally solid however!)
  • Demonstrates lots of subtle innovations and best practices in 4X system design
  • Turn-based combat done well
 

Jeff Graw

StarChart Interactive
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It's pretty great. Presentation could be better/more consistent, but mechanically IS:G improves on MoO 2 in a number of ways. Full disclosure: I'm rather chummy with the devs, but I'll try not to hold back on criticism where it's due.


The two big ones are colony management and leaders:

(My own perspective is that colony management is theoretically the hardest thing in a 4X, and if it doesn't seem hard that's only because developers have universally failed to come up with any good implementations. Ideally, you want to be deep and streamlined. Depth is nowhere to be found -- these are all largely internally facing optimisation problems at heart. The two big buckets are shallow, streamlined, not interesting (where MoO 1 falls) and shallow, micromanagement-hell, interesting (where MoO 2 falls))

-IS:G's colony management is very good (at least relative to the genre -- there's still a long way to go in absolute terms). Perhaps on the surface it looks like a bit of a MoO 1-MoO 2 hybrid but that's not really fair, it's definitely it's own thing. Micro-management falls squarely between MoO 1 and 2. Colony management in IS:G is a bit more fun to interact with than MoO 2 (even though the presentation detracts a bit, the colony screen being one of the uglier ones) by virtue of being less rote -- you are limited along several dimensions regarding the number of improvements you can make to each colony. It's still mostly an optimisation puzzle, albeit a relatively (versus the genre) interesting one. Despite that, there's more strategic depth here than in either MoO 1 or 2, or any other 4X that comes to mind (I certainly haven't played all of them). So, for example, your choices have real consequences, and it's difficult to backtrack those choices, and there's a stronger than average temporal component (e.g. sacrifice the present for the future) as well. Would I like to see a higher strategic signal-to-nonstrategic-noise ratio? Sure. But at least, unlike the genre as a whole, there's a palpable strategic signal to be had. The only criticism I can level is that IS:G's colony management screen looks rather daunting, and certainly isn't the most intuitive.

-Leaders have become first class citizens. You can increase their usefulness by meeting goals and demands, and conversely failing to meet these objectives will reduce their usefulness. Leaders can also have negative traits. And they double as spies, where sending a leader on a mission means you lose their bonuses while they're away. Leaders feel much more significant now than an item you equip to a ship or a colony. It's not just the trade-offs and choices, but how well everything is implemented and balanced on top of that. IS:G hit this one out of the park, and I hope that their take becomes the prototype for future genre entries. If you have an interest in 4X game design, the leader implementation alone is worth the cost of entry -- it's that good.


Besides those:

-Remote exploration is interesting. Not super significant, but it adds.

-Star systems feel more concrete and unique than in MoO 2, or most other space 4Xes for that matter.

-Combat is merely serviceable -- mechanically similar to MoO 2 (probably with a few improvements but this isn't an area I delved too deeply into) but largely lacking the feel that made MoO 2 combat so endearing thanks again to
presentation.

-The research system is only a small improvement over MoO 2 -- increasing costs based on the order of acquisition is a bit more interesting than MoO 2's approach. This is again tempered by the fact that MoO 2's presentation of research is awesome, and ISG's is bare bones. We're still far away from research system exemplars like SoTS 1 and MoO 1, and chances are no static tree will ever compare favourably against well done pseudo-random implementations.
IS:G does have an option to randomise the tree, but the implementation here is poor*, merely rearranging the order (and associated cost) of certain technologies. Unlike MoO 1 or SoTS the entire tree is still visible, so it's still possible to plot a course from turn 0. If anything, because you can now randomly get more useful techs sooner and cheaper, this option is even more abuse-able than the default. The point of a randomised tree is to prevent flow-chart gameplay and also to present players with unique situations and challenges, neither of which the random option in IS:G accomplishes. It's more random balance change than random tech tree.

*EDIT: I guess a tech can only shift up or down one rung, so this option probably doesn't hurt balance too significantly. Having the option doesn't hurt anything at least.


This certainly isn't an exhaustive accounting of the differences. IS:G makes many, many small additions and improvements to the MoO 2 formula. Overall, I like IS:G quite a lot and I'd play it over MoO 2 any day of the week. Specifically, outside the beginning turns which are too slow, the pacing is fantastic considering the amount of complexity. The game doesn't collapse in on itself as it scales out like MoO 2 does. I suspect that how well it compares with MoO 2 for any specific individual will largely come down to the extent that they prefer tight mechanics over immersion -- I fit squarely in the first bucket. That said, IS:G's presentation isn't terrible (although it is disjointed), and it's not an ugly game. It's more that MoO 2's presentation is stratospherically good. If the developers can improve the presentation moving forward, then IS:G will become an even easier recommendation.
 
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Naraya

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Oct 19, 2014
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Tuono-Tabr
I'm so glad I've found this thread and learnt about this game. Got it today and so far I like what I see a lot. I don't really understand why people say the presentation isn't very good (I've seen such complaints on Steam as well) - to me it's perfectly fine graphic/sound-wise. The most important thing - coherency - is there and that's what matters.

I've only played several hours but I haven't figured out if it's possible to transfer pop from one planet to another, like it was done in MoO using transports? It'd really help with starting the colony development after it's founded. I thought freighter fleets will do the trick, but after building one I don't see the option anywhere. Is waiting 20+ turns for pop to increase by one a normal thing?

Good luck with further development of IS:G!
 
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tindrli

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Dragodol
does it have mines, boarding ship options? drones? combat satelites? ground combat?
 
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rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
I think the game is solid, but kinda underwhelming.

In large parts it's a competent MOO2 clone and you basically get what you'd expect hearing that.
As is par for the course for these clones, you get a short list of things that this game clearly does better and a longer list of things it does worse than the original.

My main gripe is the pacing, which I feel is pretty horrible - in pretty much all areas. But I have other gripes as well.
For example, you can research pretty far down the tree before you'll ever design and build your own frigate, let alone cruiser or even bigger, i.e. balancing of research vs. building capabilities is almost non-existant.
I researched Titan construction before ever having built a frigate.
And, in case you're wondering, it's Frigate->Destroyer->Cruiser->Battleship->Titan.
Research is a tiny bit like MOO1, where you have some techs per tech level and get to pick ONE of them. Only, here the other choices do not get locked, they only increase in price. And this increase still makes them cheaper than a higher tech level and you are clearly expected to research all or many of them in many cases. Worst of both worlds, imo.
The different colonization techs (for different planet types) are mostly very early down the techtree, so everyone is quickly colonizing everything. Which the AI makes agressive use of. Which makes the galaxy feel like a tiny place.
It also leads to runaway success stories / snowballing if a player gets lucky with his first systems - the game has basically no systems to combat such issues.

On a normal sized map, ship ranges pretty quickly allow everyone to get everywhere as long as an outpost is established SOMEWHERE, which the AI makes agressive use of - this also makes the galaxy feel like a tiny place.
As the galaxy fills with colored blobs representing the borders of the empires, it often happens that a "culture war" like in Civ4 develops ... but it's feedback mechanisms are VERY poor, imo.
Also, WHEN the border shifts to, say, envelop a system containing alien mining outposts ... there is a diplomatic treaty allowing for those, but even if you have not signed this treaty, they get to keep their mining outposts, they don't flip ownership, there's no way to tell the AI player to remove them or to demand they transfer ownership.
If you make the unfortunate decistion to ally yourself with another empire, it will even happily colonize planets in your systems without asking. Thanks bro, I guess.

There's multiple "leveling" systems, you have an empire level which unlocks some stuff, you have colony levels ... all of these systems feel pretty unbalanced/poorly thought out to me.

The UI isn't bad overall, but has a long series of mostly small quirks. For example, you get a notification about population increase when the turn starts. But it does not tell you the current population, or the old one, or anything like that. You have to remember which planet that was and it's relative size or check by clicking on it. There's many such notifications which COULD tell you all you need to know but in reality prompt you to spend a couple of clicks looking for the meat of the info elsewhere or tell you nothing, really.

Finally, the performance is pretty sad. There's hardly anything going on, it's a TBS ffs, and not a fantastically looking one at that, yet turn slowdowns become an issue even on a normal sized map with only 4 players by mid-game.
At the start of each turn, you get a delay that can take from 5 all the way up to 20 seconds, if you click your mouse during that time you get the windows dialog "the application has stopped responding". Always a telltale sign.

TLDR: A well executed MOO2 clone, but for every new thing or improvement there's a good chance you'll find two things to nag about.
 

Blake00

Learned
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Oct 1, 2020
Messages
271
Location
Australia
Yeah I really enjoyed playing it and it felt more like MoO2 than most other attempts. My only complaints at the time were that it needed a bit more polishing and some more content (ie more aliens) which has pretty much been sorted out over the last couple of years since I played it thanks to the constant patching and the first addon. Now with this second addon it'll get even better. The dev is really responsive too, I listed a bunch of issues in my steam review above and he went and fixed nearly all of them over the months that followed.
 
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ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,882
It is 60% off atm. I completely forgot about this game in the meantime lol.
I need to buy it and play it now :)
 

Eyestabber

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HUEland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Played this game today. It's competently made but doesn't bring anything groundbreaking to the table. It seems incredibly complex at first glance, but really isn't. Played a test match at recommended difficulty up until turn 186. Easy development -> turned efforts into ship production -> it's genocide o' clock -> I take the 2nd place's capital -> other aliens vote me class president, lel. Devs really should suggest at least normal difficulty, but whatever.

I might play another match for real. Is the AI in this game actually capable of presenting a challenge?
 

Blake00

Learned
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Oct 1, 2020
Messages
271
Location
Australia
Played this game today. It's competently made but doesn't bring anything groundbreaking to the table. It seems incredibly complex at first glance, but really isn't. Played a test match at recommended difficulty up until turn 186. Easy development -> turned efforts into ship production -> it's genocide o' clock -> I take the 2nd place's capital -> other aliens vote me class president, lel. Devs really should suggest at least normal difficulty, but whatever.

I might play another match for real. Is the AI in this game actually capable of presenting a challenge?

Yeah it's pretty much MoO2 (with a touch of 1 & 3 sprinkled on top) with 3D graphics and some additions (eg sector scanning, culture skill tree, infrastructure tree, artifact research, hero/leader development, and Civ like wonders) but that's what makes it good haha. So many other MoO2 wannabes tried to remake the wheel and paid dearly for it. These guys just went with what works and make little changes here and there to compliment it.

Urrrgh.. yes.. that.. damn.. I was hoping that they'd done more with that by now. I remember when I played it 2 years ago all the talk was that the president election victory was too easy. So when I played I turned it off, and yes I stomped the easy level AI and should have played higher.

So yeah anyone who wants to play a longer more action packed game should turn the hollow election victories off and up the AI level to higher then you think you'll need, even if you think you suck haha.

I remember the president election sequence looked nice so back in 2020 I made a suggestion to them to make it harder to win and that they expand it to be something like what MoO3 had where you'd all vote on various galactic issues, penalties and bonuses. As I suspect that most players are turning it off and never seeing it which seems like a waste of effort.

.
 

Eyestabber

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
QcpNRfE.png

The game's brilliant AI that stood as the OTHER viable candidate decides to hand me over victory on a silver platter.

Alright fellas, I think I'm done here. This game has (or had?) potential, but it falls short of being a great 4X. Increasing difficulty didn't change my perception of the ISG, I still think this game is competently made, but ultimately unimpressive. Time for my bullet point pseudo-review:

What's GOOD about this game:
  • A LOT of effort went into "doing the math" and ensuring everything is properly balanced and there isn't a glaring "play like this or gimp yourself" issue with ANY of the game's systems. Succeeding in this game inevitably comes down to experimenting and adapting, specially when it comes to figuring out the "best" way to design a ship. There are SO many factors to consider and when you add the miniaturization and the weapon mods system you end up with a ton of viable approaches, all ready to suit your min-maxing needs. Colonization and management also bring their own challenging optimization puzzles to the table.
  • Despite every system featuring fairly complex formulas, it all boils down to rather simple and intuitive gameplay. The tooltips are extremely helpful and it doesn't take long to figure out individual systems, put it all together and assemble everything into an overall strategy. The holy grail of both strategy and RPG gameplay design is to deliver depth without forcing an insurmountable learning curve upon the player. This game is a remarkable success in this regard.
  • Devs made a serious effort to reduce the typical micromanagement drudgery so common in other games of the genre. Moving workers around is a chore and this game made changing a colony's focus a simple and painless endeavor.
  • The turn based ship combat is fun and reasonably well thought out.
The CRAPPY stuff:
  • Two letters are enough to express why this game fails to live up to its predecessors: AI. Your rivals in ISG are colossally stupid in every possible way. They accept/refuse deals seemingly at random, their wars start whenever one of their ships stumble into a civilian ship (it's like the AI can't "stand down" like the player can), they pick infrastructure perks at random and worst of all: the goddamn AI can't assemble a proper fleet to save its life. Ships are built, but they're not put together, resulting in the AI losing wars to the player due to sheer stupidity. In my game I won my first war by parking 3-5 ships over some bug's capital and then shooting down all the (MANY) stragglers that were sent to lift the blockade. Due to how damage works in this game, smaller fleets do NOTHING against larger fleets. Since the AI can't into doomstacks you can beat it quite easily with a handful of high quality ships.
  • Invasions are EXCRUCIATINGLY painful. Assault ships drop like flies, despite being sent into heavily bombarded systems. You can't make more than one invasion per turn in a system and I guess the game expects you to "siege" before invading, thus wasting even more turns. And once you finally secure a shiny new planet at the cost of 4-6 AS you get...A FUCKING REBELLION THE NEXT TURN. All that effort is now GONE as the planet magically reverts to its previous owner. My patience ended midway through the second war and I just started bombing everything into rubble and then genociding the defenders. Wish i had a Death Star TBH. Oh, and there's no ground combat, it's always a bizarre autocalc.
  • Presentation is terrible, game looks ugly, sound seems to have come out of some free library and the ending would've looked bad in 2003. But the worst part is how uninspired the Wonders are. "Ho-ray I finished the gold wonder! Time to enjoy the global bonuses!!!!" -> that's the full extent of the wonder building experience in ISG. It doesn't hold a candle to this:




Granted the AI entity haunted my childhood and made me go "WHAT HAVE I DONE" immediately after building it but...yeah, wonders in ISG are super generic buildings whose sole purpose is to deliver a permanent buff to whoever built them. And the science one is beyond busted. Uninteresting and OP, go figure.
  • The world is pretty insipid as a whole. The aliens look like generic bugs, the ships look weird, animations look stiff and the overall art direction is quite uninspired. Even a modern competitor like Endless Space, DESPITE being vastly inferior in terms of gameplay mechanics ends up coming out on top. I'm not a sci-fi expert by any means, but to me even the admittedly generic GalCiv looks much better than ISG.
  • When all is said and done, a 4X is about winning and the win conditions in ISG are absolutely terrible. The only alternative to the dreaded "election" is galactic conquest. But considering how much of a pain in the ass planetary invasions were made to be, getting elected Galaxy Pres is the only real option for a sane person. It's quite telling that I finished the game twice without unlocking a single achievement. Goes to show how off the pacing truly is.
The EH...WHATEVER stuff:
  • The production triangle is functional but I think it could've been made easier to grasp. Infrastructure/Engineering/Building all sound like the same thing and it takes a while to figure out the nuances. FIDSI or worked tiles like in Civ are more intuitive, even if they end up resulting in worse micro hell. Maybe some compromise could've been made? The current system feels like too many gamey abstractions put together.
  • The AI should be taught better priorities. It tries to send single ships to annoy the player by taking asteroid fields while its own homeworld gets blockaded. AI rivals should be competitors, not mere nuisances.
  • ISG suffers incredibly hard from "only the capital actually matters" syndrome. In my game I had a planet I named "Eden". Eden had everything going for it to become Earth-but-better, but it never did, even after 180+ turns, despite having migration from 2-3 planets for over 100 turns. The only real players in my empire were Earth and the bug-capital I took first. Everyone else was just there for the extra bonuses and to churn out assault ships non-stop.

All things considered I don't regret spending time with the game and I think 4X players should give it a try and draw their own conclusions.
 

Blake00

Learned
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Oct 1, 2020
Messages
271
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Australia
Space Nazis Empire bahahaha!

Can't really argue with any of that, all very sound points! I'll only say that one's expectations should factor in that ISG is basically an indie game from a small group of fans of the genre going into business for themselves so it's never going to be able to directly compete with 4X games from bigger studios.

Those SMAC and CTP1 wonder videos came from professional game studios with publishers backing them (funnily enough SMAC nearly didn't have wonder videos due to budget concerns but Brian fought for them). GalCiv1 was pretty simple but the sequels enjoyed the benefits of Stardock becoming a larger professional studio and publisher. Pretty similar story with Endless Space as while the first was crowdfunded it's sequel enjoyed a much bigger budget and more dev staff due to Amplitudes growth. I don't think these guys can fully compete with that... However what they lack in resources they clearly make up for in dedication as the game came out years ago yet it has changed a lot since then. Plus it'll probably continue to change in the years to come as they just keep working on it and adding to it so hopefully some of those issues can be improved. Might send your review to the dev and hopefully it'll help.
 

Alpharius

Scholar
Joined
Mar 1, 2018
Messages
585
Also played it recently since i saw a fellow codexer shilling for the game.

Compared to MoO2 i didn't like:
A ton of stacking bonuses from technology, perks, leaders etc to everything, to the point where it doesn't even matter that much wether the planet is ultra rich or ultra poor and which race inhabits it. Only the quantity of the population matters.
No food resource (why?).
The second space culture "tech tree", copied from civilization games i guess, doesn't add anything to the game except for more bonuses.
The division into planetary engineering, infrastructure and production seems redundant as well. Planetary egineering is like "terraform if you can do it in reasonable time frame, set to 0 otherwise". Infrastructure is just more bonuses, seems like there is no reason not to pick the +3 building slots and increased ship production 99% of the time.
AI seems even dumber tham MoO2 one.
No antaran attacks. :(
An option of researching technologies in the same branch with already researched one for increased cost (so you can get all the most OP techs each time even without spying or trading).
No techs from scrapping captured ships, instead they sometimes are dropped from destroyed ships and have to be "picked-up" by friendly ships. :lol: So not much reason to try and board them since AI ship designs suck ass anyway.
Colony space defences seemed kinda weak, no separate missle, cannon and fighter buildings, only strabase-battlestation-starfortress.

Things i liked:
Scanning, outposts (that actually produce something) and strategic resources seemed like a decent addition to MoO2 formula.
Bomb racks are a special system instead of a weapon, so AI can't make designs that have most of the space dedicated to bombs anymore.

Most other thing are pretty much the same as in MoO2. Picked t2 kinetic weapon and never had to switch it since it has shield piercing after reseraching t3 weapons, and AI didn't use hard shields (not sure such thing exists in this game).

So perhaps its not the worst MoO2-like game but not that good either, possbily worth a few playthroughs.
 
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Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Colony space defences seemed kinda weak, no separate missle, cannon and fighter buildings, only strabase-battlestation-starfortress.
To be fair, in MOO2, the only benefit to putting missile/cannon/fighter buildings on your planet was not even implemented in the game anyway. You don't get to score propaganda points for putting defenses next to civilian buildings and then blaming the resulting civilian casualties on the enemy to score propaganda points. The only thing doing this accomplishes is getting your people killed, with no way to cry crocodile tears and accuse your enemies of committing atrocities. So the fact that they're not in this game at all isn't really a huge loss.

Don't use planetary defenses in MOO2: If you put no planetary defenses, the enemy will just destroy the starbase and not fire on the planet at all because it isn't a military target, so your planet will be left unmolested as long as you ultimately win the battle....and the starbase is doomed, because the starbase is autodesigned and therefore utterly dogshit, compared to one of your own ships that can obliterate hundreds of enemies without a scratch. And facetank a dozen stellar converter shots a turn.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,882
I finally started playing it (few hours yesterday). I played MoO2 ages ago and I don't remember much except I played some brain faction that let me research all tech instead of just one from the group and overwhelming AI with better tech (also that I was always first and I would kill more than half of enemy army before they got to act) so I cannot really compare it well with that.
Space 4x that I spent more time with was Birth of the Federation, Endless Space and Sword of the Stars. Compared to those there is much more fiddling with your colonies here and I like it. Also everything takes "forever" to build but I might have fucked up things since this was my first game (on Average difficulty). For ship building and combat I mostly left it on auto as I don't have a clue what I am doing atm (I tried to do some battles manually at first but for some reason their ships moved more and have more range with weapons and would just destroy me).
It has all the things one expects from a modern 4x, 4x+spying and culture stuff.
 
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Blake00

Learned
Joined
Oct 1, 2020
Messages
271
Location
Australia
Yeah I remember the start is very slow and while you can get a 2nd colony ship pretty quick through culture perks its a real long time before you can start pumping out colony ships to get more colonies. I remember that using the first outpost ship you get to mine an asteroid belt and setting it to send production to your capital was critical for getting to more colony ships quicker. Otherwise you just fall behind...
 

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