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It has to be Silicoids versus Ithkul.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:53
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Everybody wants to have a Rock to tie a string around. And we should crush the robots.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:57
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Bloodly posted:Game playing itself? Sounds like the game tried to be Distant Worlds way too early. Waaaaaaaaaay to early. Also only the planets can play themselves, fleet and troop movement depend 100% on the player. There are some automatic fleet functions, but they're, well, we'll get to that. sheep-dodger posted:I'd say let's go with the Silicoids and have the Ithkul as a guaranteed enemy. (Btw: How does it work if two or more Ithkul empires border one another) Perry Rhodan is it, exactly. Many of the German translations are blatant references to PR and I let some of them intact when I did my own "adjustments". In fact, some of my changes (meant to dial it down a bit, the original German translation let me sometimes think Perry Rhodan himself could turn up as a hero) are inspired by ideas I got by reading PR. So you're in for a ride here. On two Ithkul-empries bordering each other: The short answer is, nothing. Ithkul don't each other. The long answer is, welp. There are some strange edgecases where an Ithkul-empire could theoretically damage its Ithkul-neighbour by just being there. Case 1: One or both empires use Non-Ithkul to deal with some weakness they introduced in race customization. Migrating Ithkul will eat and replace them, with predictable results. Case 1 is a non-issue for the AI, since the AI was hardcoded by people who thought the Ithkul are awesome. They don't come with weaknesses and don't need Non-Ithkul. Except as food. Case 2: Bot Ithkul-empires are far away from other sources of Non-Ithkul. The migration will speed up the rate of Ithkul eating people and if not enough edible aliens are left, the Ithkul will start generating unrest. Fun fact: There are some Ithkul-heroes you can get when playing a Non-Ithkul race who come with some extra lore for them. The Ithkul actually developed clone-bodies to supply themselves with victims without slowly destroying alien races. Most Ithkul absolutely hate this. The Ithkul prefer killing people, even though they don't actually need to. I think they consider telepathically mind-controlling mindless clone-bodies to be boring Gridlocked posted:
Hey, that's cute! I'm putting this into the OP (if you're OK with it)
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Apr 12, 2016 18:08
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The planets playing themselves is mostly what i mean; it was by far the most tedious part of the game and with that out of focus it made it very easy to handle fleet/troops. I usually played the Trilarians in my games, don't quite know why. You can murder AI pretty good with any of them so it was really not terribly important.
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Apr 12, 2016 18:40
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Let's play as the silicoid, and for our first prey, let's pick those scummy, space Hitler humans.
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Apr 12, 2016 18:49
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Can you link the mods you're using? I might fire back up MOO3 (came with the MOO reboot, I think), but I don't want to do it vanilla.
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Apr 12, 2016 19:02
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE While we wait for the voting to end, I wrote up this short demonstration of how MO3 is played. (At the end there’s also a short guide to get the patches needed to “repair” your own version of MO3 if you want to try out a less bad version of the game.)  After choosing your race, this will be the first screen you see: Game Set Up. By the way, the race customization process is exhausting enough I want to go through it only once, so I spare you that process until we actually need it after voting is over. Starting from left to right and from up to down: Random Events (“Zufallsereignisse”): This influences how often random events show up. Random events in Ultima Orion also includes events to create new star lanes to make MO3s movement system feel less oppressive. Now, I did change the chance for star lane creation multiple times to find a good balance between a screen-flooding clusterfuck and too low to be noticeable, but those events will still show up fairly often. For this LP, the setting will stay on “low”. With this, new star lanes will occasionally show up, but without turning the map into a mess after the first 100 turns. Difficulty (“Schwierigkeitsgrad”): Exactly what it says. Due to the many changes in the mod, Ultima Orion is more difficult than vanilla MO3 already, but still not that hard. If I’m getting Meklar as our player-race, the setting will be difficult to offset all the strengths our robots come with. Silicoids will mean a LP on normal difficulty, since those guys have a lot of drawbacks, especially since I’m prone to confuse min-maxing and gimmick building. Number of AI Enemies: (“Anzahl Computergegner”) The number of AI-empires we can have in the game. Maximum is 16. Since I know how weird the game can be, we’ll be playing with 15 enemies, since we + 15 enemies means we’ll see all of them (hopefully) without getting a race copied. Galaxy type (“Galaxietyp”): Determines form and size of the map. The vanilla-maps are all serviable, bland and rather flat. The in-game map can display stars in a 3D-plane, but most maps don’t really do anything interesting with it. Since we’ll be cramming 16 races into our map, I’m taking my favourite: The huge Seyfert-galaxy map. A Seyfert-galaxy is a special kind of galaxy with a highly active core. Huge means enough space for all of us and this map is one of the special Ultima Orion-additions. It will use all three dimensions for a nice, actually like a galaxy looking map.  This will be our map. Most of the stars are still in the disc, but there are also a lot above and below the galactic plane, creating a nice bubbly center in the middle. Time Options (“Timeroptionen”): Here a player can change turn and battle-durations. Since this is an LP and not a multiplayer game, the turn duration option is switched off. The duration of a real-time combat can be set between 1 and 10 minutes. If a battle isn’t decided after the timer is up, the battle will continue next turn. 10 minutes sounds like a lot and I’m willing to go a couple minutes lower, but probably not below 8. Late game combats can be incredible clusterfucks with dozens of fleets taking multiple turns to resolve and if this timer is set too low, we’ll be just hurting ourselves. Star Lanes (“Sternenstraßen”): This option asks the player to understand simple logic. You can either turn your game really tedious by creating only a few, very long star lanes your ships will need ages to travel through, or take short star lanes to keep travel times sane. Also since this is not vanilla, we can take as few star lanes as possible, since the game will give us new ones later anyway. Planetary Anomalies (“Planetare Besonderheiten”): There are a lot of weird things to discover on planets and this option is basically just a way to keep things fresh, but not too fresh. Low is a good setting to make them rare even on larger maps, normal is good if you want to see them a lot without getting flooded with them and high is for really small maps. Because since planetary anomalies are thrown randomly into the map, lower settings tend to create unfair advantages in smaller maps, where one race could theoretically end up with most of them. Or most of the bad ones. For the LP, the setting will stay on normal. With our giant map that’s still enough to see a lot of them without letting the galaxy look like interdimensional rifts have opened to spew horror and nonsense all over the place. Battles Per Turn (“Kämpfe pro Spielzug”): This option was meant for old computers. Old as in, old for a time 10+ years in the past. I think my PC can deal with a lot more than 5 battles per turn, so we’ll just risk going with infinite battles. If you want to try this setting out, just take a number of battles you feel comfortable with and the game will never show you more than those per turn. I suggest taking a very small map and not many enemies if you do that, though. Victory Conditions (“Siegbedingungen”): You can win MO3 by conquering all enemy empires (tedious, but possible), letting your empire be elected leader of the New Orion Senate (let’s just say not doable with our race choices, some of our enemies are far better at this) and finding all five of the secret Antarian super-techs. I’m thinking conquering 15 other empires may take more time we all would be comfortable with and since diplomatic victories won’t be our forte, I’m playing with the idea to add the tech-victory as another option. The risk is of course: With 15 enemies, the chances are high others will be faster than us. The thing is, the five secret hidden super-techs can not only be found with galactic expeditions and exploration, you can also steal them with spies. Not a problem for Meklar, but a serious danger if we play Silicoids: Not only won’t we be getting any super-techs through espionage, everything we find will probably be stolen in short order. Since we still can get a lot of unfair advantages just by getting the techs, regardless of the used victory conditions, I’ll probably make a compromise: Tech-victory allowed if we play Meklar, disallowed if we play Silicoids. Start in Turn X (“Start in Runde X”): If for some reason you think empire building in an empire-building game is boring, you can advance the time here and let the AI determine behind the curtains how large your empire at game start should be. Risky and fairly pointless for a LP-game, so this setting stay at zero. But hell, the option is there if you want to create large empires and jump into total war right ahead. At the end, you can also change your race if you suddenly aren’t satisfied with your choice anymore.  After you clicked start, MO3 will generate the map, place the empires and finally show you this screen. The Emperor’s Glossary will be immediately switched off by everyone familiar with the game (including me) and then the game will start properly. If you want to, you can uncheck that box and let the Glossary bore you to death at almost every click. It’s not even needed, since you get little help-boxes on most options anyway and if you’re truly lost, there’s an entire encyclopedia worth of info to read through. But still, in theory it was a neat idea.  OK, after you discarded your useless AI-Advisor, you’ll finally be able to see this. The map, zoomed in on your home system. For flavor, I’m planning on renaming our home system to whatever name our Star Kingdom will end up getting. (I’m open to suggestions!) This screen already gives you a lot of information: The yellow thing in the top left is food production, that violet crystal-thingy is mineral production, the weird cog-wheels are our industrial capacity. Light blue for used capacity, dark blue for unused/max capacity. And as you can see out test empire has a lot of unused capacity, thanks to our starting world not producing enough minerals. The light bulb is our research and the hand on the upper right gives an immediate, if terrible inaccurate overview of empire-wide morale. Above this short line of info, there are, from left to right, the following buttons to click on: Game Menu (“Spielmenü”): Allows saving, loading, giving up and doing something worthwhile with your life. You know the drill. Sitrep (“Situation Report”): This allows you to jump to the situation report you’re given at turn start. Quite handy since every important message you’ll be dealing with from the sitrep forces you to follow a link out of it. If there are a lot of messages to deal with, you’ll be clicking on this a lot. Turn X (“Runde X”): Simply the number of game turns. If you click on it, it instead switches to what galactic cycle it is right now. (Think Space Year) I’ll be going with space years for the LP, to make it fluffier. Weird Yellow “AV”: The money symbol. In vanilla MO3, this was basically just gibberish with almost no connection to how your empire actually did financially. In Ultima Orion, enough dumb poo poo has been fixed we actually have to look at this sometimes. Encyclopedia (“Enzyklopädie”): The Galactopedia I’ve mentioned a couple times. A font of knowledge for the space interested. I’ll be posting some bits when appropriate. Ultima Orion adds a ton of guides to help out newbies. Those guides are fan-made and sadly, all in German. And not really relevant, since I’ve been noticing over the ages that my playstyle often clashes violently with the suggestions from the guides.  Turn (“Runde”): This button advances the game to the next turn. And uh that’s it.  Just for completion’s sake, the game option menu reachable from the Game Menu button. There are the obligatory settings for graphics and sound, not really relevant anymore on a modern computer, you can switch off the Emperor’s Glossary (something I always forget to do) and there are options to influence how much info a real-time space battle will show the player. Another rather exotic but neat option is the possibility of setting yourself an alert to remind yourself it’s after midnight and you should really stop playing now. I wish better games than MO3 would integrate something like this, it would really help sometimes.  That’s the Galactopedia, by the way.  OK, that’s enough about this, I have to go through the entire lower half of options later anyway, no reason to talk about this twice. Let’s continue with the more basic stuff. Clicking on a star selects it, a double click opens up the system view, like here. Flag and color show you which empire holds a planet. Neat little detail: If the name of a planet is written in lower-case, it means it isn’t a full colony yet but just an outpost. Outposts are useful for claiming planets with fast, small ships in case you don’t think you can colonize them before someone else does. Other empires of course can deal with this by bombing your people to space dust or just dropping enough colony ships on your outpost to take over. If you do the same, you’ll make the victim empire really angry. So I suggest to not overdo it if you aren’t looking for war. The little balls next to the planets are moons. Moons can’t be colonized, but they count as bonus development areas (more space) on the planets they’re attached to. The system overview has two different riders: Overview (“Überblick”) and Units (“Einheiten”). Overview shows your planets and opens the info view you can see in the screenshot for every planet you select with a click, Units shows your military strength in the system, including colony ships and transports. Annoyingly, only the Unit-window allows you to mark planets as future colonies (shown by that white symbol looking like stones haphazardly thrown together), future outposts or to open up an underdeveloped world to immigration. The Unit-window transforms the info-panel for planets into a military-only view, though. The info about which planet is a good colony can only be viewed with the Overview-rider. In praxis, this means a lot of switching back and forth, or I guess having a good memory. I’m talk some more about what all those things on the info-panel mean when we start for real.  Another basic game play element: Movement. After trying MO1, I noticed this is working more or less similar: Your squadrons are shown left of the star if they have some target and are preparing to jump out and shown on the right if they’re just waiting around for your orders. You first click on the little ship icon to get the available squadrons at that star, then you click on a target star, the squadron moves to the left and will jump out next turn. Before you click, the UI shows you how long the journey will take. In this case, 3 turns. Then you have a button to dissolve the selected squadron and send the ships in it back into our reserves. Don’t do this too often, MO3 simulates the ships slowly travelling back to whoever those reserves are held, so you can’t immediately reform them! This is again a point where I could spend pages on explaining everything, but since this is just a demonstration, you’re spared. For now. The End So, my original plans assumed less votes and me having to wait a lot longer. But it seems we already have a clear winner and I’m edging to start this. Because of this, I cut most of what I wanted to write this update (which was only meant to give you something while waiting for the vote to end) and stop the vote tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll make a post with the final numbers and then I’m pulling this lever next to me to start our wild ride into MO3 ULTIMATE How to get Ultima Orion In case you want to try this mod, here’s how it works: 1. Download the mod from here. 2. Make sure to make a fresh install of Master of Orion 3. 3. Install the official patch 1.25, you can find it here. 4. (If you can read German) Download and install the German fan translation. Edit: 5. Copy your “GameDataSets”-folder to some safe place as a failsafe. 6. Use the Ultima-Orion installer to install the Ultima Orion files. 7. Go to the folder “Patcher” in your “Master of Orion 3“-index and use the patcher program. 8. Now you have to click on “install” in the patcher-window to actually install the drat thing. 9. Now go through every single patch in your patcher-window, select one and click on “patch”. Do this for every patch. Very important: The speed numbers for missiles and fighters are hosed. The UO-website suggests replacing the numbers you see in the relevant patches with 13,000 for missiles and 10,000 for fighters. Lower numbers can end up making your missiles and fighters slower than your ships, which will create weird and unwanted behavior. 10. Launch the game over the new red MO3-starter.exe. There are some other things you need to know: Since the game isn’t hardcoded for German, you can use this list for special characters you’ll need when trying to name shipclasses and other stuff: @ for ü { for Ü ~ for ä * for Ä ` for ö } for Ö ^ for ß The Taskforce-rules are still in English, since they’re hardcoded. If loading the game music from CD irritates you, copy the folder „music“ to \GameDatasets\classic_01\gameassets\common\. The game will now load the music from your HDD. The mod uses auto-colonization, a function I could get never working in vanilla MO3. In Ultima Orion, it works too well, since I never successfully could get it switched off. It’s not a big deal however, since you can just use some foresight to prevent your colony ships from running off to bad planets. On occasion you’ll have to give your colony squadrons new orders, though. I can’t give a guarantee for the mod working, since it was meant to work together with the German fan translation, which was a mammoth-project with over 300 people working on it. If you’re lucky, you can still find it somewhere. Bad News If you can’t read English or if the mod doesn’t work without the fan translation, you’ll have to go to This guy’s website and download his patcher and every relevant patch and mod (which is all of them) and install them all by hand. This will give you some kind of barebones-working version of Ultima Orion and will be in English. OK this should cover everything. Next time, I'll officially announce the end of the vote (you can still vote now) and then we'll get this show on the road! ulmont posted:Can you link the mods you're using? I might fire back up MOO3 (came with the MOO reboot, I think), but I don't want to do it vanilla. Wish fulfilled! Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 19:24
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I'll admit when I first saw this was being LP'ed I rolled my eyes at the amount of bashing I thought this game would get by the OP. MOO and MOO2 were some of my favorite games to play growing up, so I was a little more jaded at the changes and cuts made in this game. However, since it is being run by someone who has played the first two, it is going to be interesting to see a different take on this... mess of a game. That being said, Robots vs the former Jellyfish Trilarians please.
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Apr 12, 2016 19:43
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Krumbsthumbs posted:I'll admit when I first saw this was being LP'ed I rolled my eyes at the amount of bashing I thought this game would get by the OP. MOO and MOO2 were some of my favorite games to play growing up, so I was a little more jaded at the changes and cuts made in this game. However, since it is being run by someone who has played the first two, it is going to be interesting to see a different take on this... mess of a game. You mean not played the first two.  (Yes, I'm a weirdo who loves the third game despite all its flaws, but couldn't really get into the earlier games since they weren't, well, MO3.)
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Apr 12, 2016 19:47
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I for one look forward to you dominating the galaxy with a robotic fist! On a sidenote, I was always kinda sad to see the change from micro-management to macro-management go so horrendously. Despite having bought the game at launch and trying for months religiously to like it, it made it so goddarn hard.... And making the game as thrilling as an MS-Excel-sheet didn´t help.
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Apr 12, 2016 21:24
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Libluini posted:You mean not played the first two. Crap, I meant to put not in there. But you got the point. This goes to my point though, I couldn't get into MOO3 because it wasn't the first two. Really looking forward to a different approach.
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Apr 12, 2016 21:38
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this looks like the German fan-translation: http://www.patches-scrolls.com/dl.php?file=moo3_deu_v21a.zip unchecked, since I'm insufficiently masochistic to pay for this trainwreck, install it, patch it and then start it up.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:39
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I had a lot of fun with moo3 with the 'Tropical' unofficial mod. You ever use that and can you give me a comparison?
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Apr 12, 2016 22:54
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Kodos666 posted:this looks like the German fan-translation: I cross-checked this with the Ultima Orion-site. It's the right one. I'm updating the link! Everyone who wants to try this mod, please thank Kodos666 for his effort! dtkozl posted:I had a lot of fun with moo3 with the 'Tropical' unofficial mod. You ever use that and can you give me a comparison? Never heard of it, sorry.
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Apr 12, 2016 22:56
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Libluini posted:Perry Rhodan is it, exactly. Many of the German translations are blatant references to PR and I let some of them intact when I did my own "adjustments". In fact, some of my changes (meant to dial it down a bit, the original German translation let me sometimes think Perry Rhodan himself could turn up as a hero) are inspired by ideas I got by reading PR. So you're in for a ride here. 
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Apr 13, 2016 00:00
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dtkozl posted:I had a lot of fun with moo3 with the 'Tropical' unofficial mod. You ever use that and can you give me a comparison? I remember that, there were 3-4 versions made by some dude on the official forums with a Calvin & Hobbes avatar and it fixed a lot of the things this ultima version seems to and really improved the game. One thing not really mentioned is that a lot of races start with hard coded attitudes to others. E.g humanoids and mechs hate each other, lizards and fish really super hate each other. You could also build literal genocide factories to exterminate alien races on your planets which was about the only way to deal with the Ithkul I quite liked playing against the Ithkul, they are so drat bullshit you have to basically declare holy war and fight along the starlanes burning planets from orbit homeworld style as even if you bring the comical amount of troops necessary to retake a planet you suddenly have people eating parasites loose within your empire. How do I remember this after all these years. Ah looks like the mods are here, no idea how they compare to this ultima version if it even works in English. http://www.moo3.at/mods/ Saros fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 02:03
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Meklar V Ithkul. Crush the bug menace with a robotic fist.
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Apr 13, 2016 03:03
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Libluini posted:Hey, that's cute! I'm putting this into the OP (if you're OK with it) Go nuts Edit: Also I am really stoked that you are posting everything in German. I am currently using Duolingo to learn it and having some german text around is great! I only get maybe 1 in 4 words but I can read some of it  Edit 2: Also you need to fix the link to update 2 in the OP. Gridlocked fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 03:36
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No opinion on votes, but I'm super interested to see how this game is supposed to play. Probably? I played the hell out of it back in the day until that computer died and I never finished the game. Maybe it wouldn't have taken so long if I realized it was leaking memory.
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Apr 13, 2016 08:40
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Meklar vs the Ithkul. I played a lot of MoO1 and bounced off of MoO2 for some reason, and I never dared look at MoO3 because I had been warned—and then I was told that the reality was even worse than the warnings. I'm really looking forward to seeing the game dissected by someone who actually loves the poo poo out of the game while also being fully aware of its flaws. Gridlocked posted:Edit: Also I am really stoked that you are posting everything in German. I am currently using Duolingo to learn it and having some german text around is great! I only get maybe 1 in 4 words but I can read some of it Every part of this quote is also true of or for me. 
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Apr 13, 2016 09:11
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I am still tempted to attempt a game with maybe only the official patch once the LP really gets rolling. Because I do love me some bad bad 4X games and hell, I finished SOTS2 - how much worse can this be. (These are what we refer to as famous last words). though, in my defense I don't think I actually own a copy, so there's that.
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Apr 13, 2016 09:18
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Gridlocked posted:Go nuts Thanks! (Also the link is fixed now)  Vote is closed! Welp, that was a lot more voting then I thought. Thanks for all your votes! Now let's look at the result: The Silicoids collected 22 shiny rocks and win the protagonist-vote. (This also means I don't have to go back and change all the title-pictures. )The Meklar sadly couldn't end their civil war fast enough to join us as protagonists, but they got 13 votes of confidence and 2 people really hated their guts. That's enough interest to move them up a bit on our enemy-list. Speaking of which... 14 hateful stares selected the Ithkul to the number one spot on our list of enemy empires. The Meklar, thanks to getting at least some votes, are on second place right behind them. The rest just sort of falls into line and I'll starting the game with the enemy-order looking like this: Enemy Race Order posted:Ithkul 14 Expect the next update soon (tm)
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Apr 13, 2016 12:40
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Alright, everyone knows the only thing more dangerous than a rock is a rock... with a gun!
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Apr 13, 2016 13:01
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I'm fine with this, because now we can do orbital invasion drops in style: Rocks fall, everyone dies.
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Apr 13, 2016 13:58
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Veloxyll posted:I am still tempted to attempt a game with maybe only the official patch once the LP really gets rolling. While this is much worse than previous MOO games, I'd say it is actually quite a bit better than SotS2. I played this game having never played the original MOO or MOO2 and I thought it was alright. I knew that the AI was pretty terrible but the 3D Galaxy map was a nice touch even if the default maps never did anything super interesting with it. If you had never played its predecessors MOO3 just came across as a really average 4x game. I have since played Starbase Orion, which is basically MOO for iOS, and it is pretty good. Much better than this.
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Apr 13, 2016 14:07
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Cathode Raymond posted:While this is much worse than previous MOO games, I'd say it is actually quite a bit better than SotS2. Braining yourself with a cinderblock is better than SotS2
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Apr 13, 2016 21:10
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 Yaaaaay, pretty purple crystals are going to conquer the galaxy! Awesome. Can our empire be called Rammstein?
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Apr 13, 2016 21:44
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PoptartsNinja posted:Braining yourself with a cinderblock is better than SotS2 I didn't pick up SotS2 on the story basis alone, even before the game released and it became apparent how big a mess it was. The Liir already felt like overpowered creator's pets in SotS1, and 2 seemed to ram even more magic space dolphin down your throat.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:49
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Our spies should be called Silicoid Implants.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:54
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Rappaport posted:
I wish we could, but I just spend multiple hours typing down 5k words based around a really silly double-reference. Going back and restarting is something I physically can't do, that much wasted effort would burn myself out immediately. On the other hand, I put Rammstein down as a potential name for a ship-class. Disco Infiva posted:Our spies should be called Silicoid Implants. They will have Silly Names alright, but renaming spies is something we can't do.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:02
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Libluini posted:I wish we could, but I just spend multiple hours typing down 5k words based around a really silly double-reference. Going back and restarting is something I physically can't do, that much wasted effort would burn myself out immediately. That is better than fine, I was joking anyhows 
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Apr 13, 2016 22:19
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PurpleXVI posted:Yes, because replacing BLUE SPACE BABES with BLACK SPACE WEIRDOS is such a grand and amazing step forwards. Alan Emrich had some really interesting design ideas for MoO3, but I'm not sure he knew precisely what was possible technically as he's a game designer more than a programmer. From what I recall from my time lingering around the boards before Emrich was let go and the game came out as a buggy mess, he was really pushing the coherent universe angle and wanted a really ambitious race/species designer in place of the generic (and unbalanced, but FUN) custom race designer in MoO 2. Thinking seriously about evolutionary forks and branches isn't necessarily at odds with the pulp sci-fi angle of the older games, but it probably ends up being so. My impression is that there were three major problems with MoO 3: the AI simply wasn't capable of doing what Emrich wanted, which led them to remove some of the central game concepts of his initial design (like having limited control over your empire to simulate the limitations of your time in-game); the game got rushed out before it was finished and then the company went under fast enough that a robust series of patches depended entirely on fans; somewhere along the way somebody started focusing on making the game functional instead of fun.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:14
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Narsham posted:Alan Emrich had some really interesting design ideas for MoO3, but I'm not sure he knew precisely what was possible technically as he's a game designer more than a programmer. From what I recall from my time lingering around the boards before Emrich was let go and the game came out as a buggy mess, he was really pushing the coherent universe angle and wanted a really ambitious race/species designer in place of the generic (and unbalanced, but FUN) custom race designer in MoO 2. Thinking seriously about evolutionary forks and branches isn't necessarily at odds with the pulp sci-fi angle of the older games, but it probably ends up being so. It sounds a bit like the game he wanted to make, by this description, is what Stellaris may end up being. Potentially.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:29
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Chapter 01: Setting Up So you wanted to play as Silicoids? Can do! Now we just have to set the game up and that’s not gonna take much time, right?   But first, please watch this video. It’s about Antaran Problemsolving! (Edit: TIMG with integrated link didn't work for some people and was annoying as gently caress even if it worked sometimes, so I removed the "T". The link should now work like normal. Edit2: Fuuuuck I forgot how large that picture was, I had to separate the video from the screenshot.) This is the starter, this time with our updated order of enemy races.  We are the Kingdom of Almandin, a long lost colony of the Silicoids. Founded during the Dark Ages, this colony just quietly puttered along completely cut off from the rest of the Orion Sector. The founders where a strange sect of exilants, thrown from the Silicoid-Homeworld because of their obnoxiously strong individualism and their view that the universe is poo poo and in dire need of remodeling. Those so-called “Reformers of the Stone” settled on what would later become Almandin and started their grand social experiment while the rest of the Orion Sector forgot about them. There were more pressing matters. During the many years cut off from the rest of the universe, the eager cultists experimented with dangerous ideas like democracy and being nice, which resulted in a series of bloody civil wars. The wars only stopped when the three largest factions, the Non-Conformists, the Learners and the Orthodox Reformists, settled their matters in glorious Democratic Combat in the Hall of Eternal Outcry. The winner of the Great Debate was the Non-Conformist Almandin. He famously declared after his victory: “This Day Proves That A Government Has To Be For The People By The People. Now I Will Make Sure That All Of Us Will Continue To Understand This Simple Fact Forever!” Almandin declared himself king and with the three largest factions unified behind him, conquered the rest of the planet in less than a galactic cycle. A great parliament was set up for the Democratic Future of the Silicoids and Almandin became the first king of the Kingdom of Almandin. Centuries later, when the peace looked everlasting and science made great strides in recovering the lost knowledge of ages past, the entire planet was named in honor of this great rock, the founder of Silicoid Democracy.  A portrait of late King Almandin.  Now that we have selected our race and made-up a backstory, it’s time for customization. The first step is agriculture. As rocks who only can eat rocks, we’re really bad at this. We can’t even take “Superior”, the best option! It’s greyed out and unusable. Good and average are equally pointless for us, so I’m putting this setting on “Weak”. Weak hurts pretty bad, it makes our DEAs (Development Areas, more later) worse and we get 20% less money from excess production. But eh, our Silicoids need agriculture only for stuff like decorative flowers and pets until we actually have to integrate some organics into our empire, so this is kind of irrelevant. Easiest 20 points freed up ever.  The cultivable area relevant for our species. Every race prefers a certain kind, water species like the Nommo prefer doing agriculture in water (Maritim), Humans plant crops on the surface like weirdos (Oberfläche) and some, like the Silicoids, prefer caves. Races who need lots of food, like the Etherians, can give themselves a boost by adding one or more types. Depending on race, this can cost a lot. Silicoids who want to grow food on water have to pay a hefty 50 points, for example. Not really efficient use of your customization but, eh at least the choice is there. Since we give no flying gently caress about agriculture, I’m leaving the setting as it is. Our agriculture is hidden in caves deep underground, so no icky flowers will disturb the common Silicoid.  Mining is the polar opposite: Extremely important for us. And the devs knew this, so the standard setting is “Superior”, which comes with large boosts to both mining and money from excess surplus. Theoretically you can get a lot of free points to spend elsewhere if you go down to “Good” or “Average”, but you’re in for a world of hurt if you do this.  And again we can choose what kind of resource our race is talking about when mining. The Ethereans “mine” biomass for their biological ships, Humans mine ores to get metals and poo poo and we directly use stone and minerals. Which I guess you could argue is more a semantic difference, but the games doesn’t care and still demands 40 points if you want to add ores to the mix. As with agriculture, you can boost your capacity by adding more than your own species’ preference, but it tends to cost even more points for not that much gain.  Silicoid standard production capability is just “Average”, but that’s not good enough. Especially since the boosts to production (and money from industry) are even stronger than those you can get for good picks in mining and agriculture. Since I know the main weakness of the Silicoids is research, I opt to only spend 20 of my points and upgrade industry to “Good”. The efficiency of every industrial zone gets +3 and we get additional production for every single point of population.  “Produktionsschwerpunkte” are Production Focal Points, specializations which give minor bonuses for points. Generally you will always have better options to spend points on, but I guess if you ever end up with some free points and don’t know what else to take, go into this category and give yourself a small bonus. We take zero specializations. Our points are needed elsewhere. In fact, this option is so unimportant to us, I even forgot to make a screenshot. The next option is equally unimportant for us: Pollution. Production creates pollution and this setting determines how much. You can choose here to either give you another boost to industry, or you can make your industry slightly weaker, but much cleaner. Your colonies will slowly build up pollution over the course of the game. Pollution affects everything negatively: Population growth will slow down, people will generate unrest faster and the planet will slowly be less and less desirable for your population. Depending on choices made here and technologies developed later, a certain amount of pollution is cleaned up every turn. The worst you could theoretically do is take some dainty little flowers like the Psilons and give them horrible dirty industry. Then 50 turns later you start to wonder why your population starts dropping throughout your empire. Oh, also the highest pollution makes terraforming bad planets 10% more expensive in addition to 30% more pollution. I hope you brought your hazmat suits. Different races have different preferences here, like you probably already guessed. The Silicoids are surprisingly unwilling to live in smog, so you have to pay points to make your industry dirtier. Their love for nature goes only so far though and we’d have to pay for cleaner industry, too. I’m leaving this on normal, by the way.  Now that we have dealt with how our race sees industry, we’re on to the settings dealing with research. Research/Forschung is simply about how much research points our empire can generate. The normal setting for Silicoids is Weak/Schwach which we don’t want. Since bad research can hurt you badly, I personally hesitate to go below Superior/Überlegen. It costs me full 60 points to do this for the Silicoids   Creativity/Kreativität is a mechanic dealing with technological delays. Because surprise, every time a research project starts, it can collect delays like dogs collect fleas. Original/Originell means your race is creative enough to mellow this annoying mechanic out with a lot of bonuses: 10% less chance for a delay, 10% more chance for some good effect (like a research project actually finishing early) instead, 10% more chance the game will actually tell you when a project runs into a delay and finally, 24% more chance a specific technology will be available to your race. The options below that get progressively worse until you hit “Imitative”, where you get no bonuses at all anymore and you only have a 66% chance of getting a certain technology. So when the game at game start rolls to see which techs you can get, there’s a good chance you’ll be missing about a third of the game’s technologies. It’s the “I hope you took good spies”-option. The Silicoids may be bad researchers, but I underestimated their creativity. Getting “Adaptive”, the second-best setting, for free is quite frankly impressive. Paying 30 points for the best option isn’t as bad as I feared it would be. Also I have a shitload to say about how research works. But this update is like 90% race customization already, so I’m forced to table the matter for another update.  Trade/Handel is another setting where you can gently caress yourself over if you don’t know any better. Luckily the Silicoids are inflexible enough there’s not much chance of taking a bad option. Higher options give you more money from trade and trade treaties with other empires are easier to get. Weak/Schwach is the opposite and makes everything harder. As you can see, Silicoids are inflexible we would have to pay a silly amount of points to get better in trading. Which is a losing proposition, since we’d also need good diplomacy and another race who isn’t hated at first sight by many other races to leverage good use from this. A newbie would probably look at the high cost and the low number of free points you get from the weak option and just shrug and let the setting be. We are as smart as said hypothetical newbie and don’t touch this. The Kingdom of Almandin is completely average at trading. Considering Silicoids can be stubborn assholes like no others, being average at trading is actually kind of good for them.  Another option dealing with our money: Economy/Ökonomie. Good options here give us higher interest for our money and less interest for our debts. Additionally, our bureaucratic costs are lowered. The boost you can get from taking Kapitalisten/Capitalists is insane but we can only leverage those boost fairly late in the game, when we start suffering under bureaucracy. Since I don’t have any free points for this anymore, Monetary Politicy/Geldpolitik is good enough. Also please only ever take Barter Trade/Tauschhandel, if you want to play a gimmick race without currency. Or if you want to see a game over from bankrupting your empire real fast. Bureaucracy is, like pollution, a hidden stat kind of rolling around in the background while you’re doing your thing. Basically, the larger your empire grows, the more this hidden stat grows, too. Sooner or later this hidden stat will make everything more expensive to simulate bureaucrats wasting money with red tape. There are technologies who deal with this and ease the pain, but the faster you expand, the worse it gets. Bad research and Barter Trading together is another combination of traits with negative synergy because of this.  Ecology/Ökologie deals with pollution and terraforming. Better settings reduce the amount of toxins your industry vomits out and make terraforming planets cheaper, the bad setting does the opposite. The only reason this setting exists is to tempt you into taking points for pain. Silicoids start with the Superior-setting and I needed 20 points fast, so I moved it down to just good. Not every race starts from high here, obviously. If you’re unlucky enough you end with a race who reacts badly to industrial poison in their morning cereals, but is too dumb to think about consequences. Then you’ll either have to deal with a population slowly killing itself or spend a lot of points in this and other similar categories to ease the pain. Luckily the Silicoids like their planets clean and our offshoot is just less fanatical about clean planets.  Accuracy/Treffsicherheit: The first combat setting. Aside from hidden stats and special abilities, every races has a normal combat rating between 0 and 10. Accuracy doesn’t actually makes a race better at shooting, the setting adds or subtracts a number from the natural combat rating. It’s just that the combat rating is also used in determining stuff like number of hits per turn, so a unit fights better with a higher rating. So in a roundabout way, adding a point to combat rating raises accuracy, so this setting is called accuracy. Got it? Very slowly walking crystals are obviously not the ideal space marines, so the normal setting for Silicoids is Weak/Schwach. Weak makes our combat rating even lower then it would normally be, which I couldn’t tolerate so I spend the last ten points I had left over to move this setting back to average. “Good” and “Superior” would add +1 or +2 to the combat rating. Some races, like the Meklar, do not only have a good (as in, higher then 1) natural combat rating, they can get good or higher pretty drat easily, making them murder machines in the early game. For us, well we either need other races to fight for us, lots of technological upgrades, or WWI-tactics. Gott hilf.  Fitness to Fight/Kampffähigkeit: This determines how fast ground units collect experience and how fast they lose experience during peace time. Good and superior troops will get more experience than usual, while at the same time not losing their edge from too much sitting around. This sounds painful, but it isn’t too bad actually: Freshly raised troops start at the rank “Recruit” and they’re pretty much useless. But just by waiting around, those troops collect enough experience to gain several ranks until the loss from not fighting gets higher than the gain from peace time training. Meklar could actually reach the third rank “Veteran” just by sitting back at home and training. (They’re robots, so they probably made extensive use of simulated battlefields and VR.) There are several more ranks like “Elite” which need so much experience you can’t really get to them by waiting, your units have to fight and survive. Luckily most really great wars are fought by trained troops and a core of veterans. Higher ranks are just an unexpected bonus after a particularly gruesome battle and recruits die so fast you really shouldn’t use them in battle. That’s only for the truly desperate. This means a bad setting here, while it hurts, is not really a game breaking deal. As long as we have a large pool of trained troops, of course. If we ever end up in a crisis situation with only fresh green troops left, we’re probably hosed.  The Diplomacy-setting is the dumbest trap ever. All it does is modifying the initial reaction of other races. If you play a diplomatic race, sure spend some points. The thing is, for them this setting wouldn’t even cost much to raise. Or they don’t even need to raise it because they start at the top, like the Imsaies do. Theoretically, if you start with a race beloved by all, you could make this your dump stat and use the points you get in other places. Then just be careful when meeting new races until the initial revulsion has abated a bit and you won’t feel any difference. (Disclaimer: If the first race you meet are the Ithkul and they start face-loving you thanks to the initial bad first impression, don’t look at me. I said theoretically.) For us there is no other option: We have so many strikes against us in the diplomacy-department, trying to unfuck our bad PR here is futile. Every point spend here is effectively wasted. So I decide to not do that. Everyone we meet will recoil in horror at first sight. Yes, even the Ithkul.  Concept of Government/Regierunskonzept: The governing principal behind our government. The Meklar, Silicoids and the Klichéons are all races who like being collectivists. The insects because hivemind, the robots because internet and the rocks because uh… Rocks are all the same? Sometimes I don’t really understand what the devs were smoking. For some strange reason, Constitutional Monarchies are only available under “Absolutistic”. Was one of the programmers French? Only true republics can be representative! Welp, Silicoids aren’t Humans, so for the Kingdom of Almandin “Democracy” means having a parliament of the people under kingly oversight. So I guess I have to take the absolutistic setting and collect my bonus points!   Time for government-lobbies! In true fashion, you pay points to get a small bonus, but because the lobbies will vomit their bribe-money everywhere, the resulting corruption also has some negative effects. As an example, having a faction of generals haunt your government all the time results in efficient Military DEAs, 20% more militia units in case of planetary invasion and the civilians are cowering because of all those crazy guys with guns in the streets. The drawbacks for all of this are a 10% more expensive fleet (corruption) and higher costs for oppression (your personal Schutzstaffel needs money and equipment, after all.) All these options are hilarious if you need some additional flavor, but in game mechanic terms they’re kind of useless. At least with the industrial specializations you only pay for a boost, not a boost and a nasty drawback. I mean seriously, 10% more maintenance costs for your fleet? Imagine we take this and now imagine the costs of this drawback when we start building starships as large and expensive as mountains. That’s a very heavy millstone to hang around our necks.  Law Concept/Gesetzkonzept: What are laws and how do we apply them? Like the Meklar and some others, Silicoids can get the very effective Collective Consciousness option for free. That doesn’t work with our background though and I needed some points. We’re going with the next best option: Universal law for everyone! Even if we sometimes have to shoot a lot of people until they accept the law! Universal law isn’t as strong as having a mind collective forcing everyone to be nice, but it still makes our government zones a bit more effective and negates some unrest. Regional Law would be the lovely kind of law like under feudalism, where certain people like nobles get other, better laws than the common people. Anarchy is even more chaotic and everyone is armed. Only the strong survive. Silicoids can’t even imagine a society without laws, so this option is greyed out for them.  Oh boy, over 50% race building completed! This time, we take a look at Bürgerschaften/Citizenry options. Citizenry is a weirdly inverted mirror to lobbies: Most of the time, a race actually gets points from this, even though it works functionally the same. You get a bonus, but also a drawback. All options generally makes it a little bit harder to govern, with people being harder to oppress. Our earlier bonus to government DEAs is now gone and costs to suppress unrest is 10% up. On the other hand, our research is now even better. Intellectuals add a small amount of extra research per population point. This is a bonus which will get better and better over the course of the game. Since the Kingdom of Almandin has a long tradition of The other options in fast forward mode: -Ökos/Tree-huggers: Good for nature, bad for industry. -Fanatics: Makes your planets very hard to conquer. The Ithkul get this type of citizenry for free. Only the standard “annoy the government”-drawback. -Worker/Farmers/Arbeiter/Bauern: You are the Soviet Union, but bad at oppressing people. An incredible amount of chaos in your society, but both your agriculture and your industry get a bonus.  Religion! The Silicoids are kind of hampered by their mental inflexibility. You can have naturalist Silicoids believing in the power of nature and poo poo, or you can believe in nothing. I needed some more points here to round out our awesome research powers and besides, all the good things from worshipping nature are offset by an astonishingly large malus to production: Naturalism makes life better and cheaper, but it also makes production 5% slower. Not for us! Besides, the people of the Kingdom of Almandin only believe in Democracy and we all know that’s ideology, not religion.   We’re getting close to the end now. But before that, have two different flavors of weird cults! Religious cults are self-explanatory. You pay points and get a weird cult of the religious inlicination. Generally speaking, a religious cult comes with a good bonus and a smaller drawback. Still, if you don’t have many points left over, it’s kind of a raw deal. There are some good flavor-options, though: If you want to recreate the Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40K, the Divine Emperor/Gottherrscher-option is basically a must-have. Or do you want to make space knights? That’s Religios-Militärische Orden /Religious Militant Order for you. You can also get another, better organized version of fanatics. Or you get Expansion of Consciousness/Bewusstseinserweiterung. A drug cult, which gets a very slightly different version in the very next setting. With some options being useless, traps or quite plainly superfluous (like having two different things labeled exactly the same, doing roughly the same thing I’m looking at you, “Fanatics”), I get the feeling not having all of this poo poo switched on in Vanilla isn’t that critical to your gaming experience. It’s nice to have so many fluff-options to choose from, of course. Most of this poo poo isn’t relevant for us and I don’t have points to spend for this, anyway. So we’re kind of forced to take Gigantism, which the Silicoids get for free. The Kingdom of Almandin loves its giant temples to Democracy and the titanic debates between hundreds of thousands of speakers are an important tradition at this point. Also, foreigners are easily impressed by all those giant temples and statues of important kings and intellectuals we like to plant everywhere. Democratic Combat can get intense, though: We get a slight boost to our unrest-generation. All those angry rocks in the streets create a lot of loud, violent riots.  Ugh. OK, here are the other cults. The Dark Cults. Oooh, spoooky! Silicoids are too inflexible to think off complicated stuff like sacrificing people to non-existent gods or caste systems (all rocks are equal) and their ideas of espionage and other covert crap are so bad they couldn’t even have an inquisition if they tried. They can have a psychedelic cult, however. Having them in your population spreads mental illnesses. Industrial production, mining and agriculture all suffer. Oppression-costs are 5% higher to account for dealing with all those drug-crazed crazy people everywhere and recreation zones are slightly better than normal. This option is 90% drawbacks and shows you why drug abuse is a bad thing. Don’t let it destroy your star empire!  For once, the Silicoids are kind of mellow. They’re generally rather stone-faced when dealing with weird foreigners and both religious tolerance and -intolerance costs points. Religious intolerance makes it easier to discover enemy spies and people are a little bit calmer since everyone thinks the same. Other people hate you more, though. And population-growth suffers. Tolerance works the opposite way: Foreigners love you more, population growth is higher and there’s a bit more chaos in your society, allowing enemy spies an easier escape.  The preferred Philosophy in our culture. Materialists are all about money (preferred by Humans), Legalists are all about law (ironically, Silicoids hate lawyers), Naturalists are all about loving nature and Utopists love Science Fiction. While Materialists make some more money, Legalists are better at military things (“The Law demands we kill you now”) and Naturalists of course have this thing about summoning Captain Planet. Good for quality of life, but your industry suffers yet again. Utopists is our choice. Because our Silicoids are basically naïve idealists compared to other Silicoids. But also because it makes us even better at research thanks to all those people being interested in the future. We even get an additional bonus to recreation zones because people thinking about the future are generally happier. Drawback: Reading SF-novels instead of working makes all our mining and industrial zones slightly worse. But eh, Naturalists would have made our industry worse, too. We need better research more than we need rock hippies. And our mining is good enough to take this drawback like a man and continue on.  Traditions! This is just the production specializations slightly reworded. You pay points, you get a bonus. I don’t have any points left, so we skip this part. Krieger/Warrier: This tradition adds +1 to combat ability. Spiritual Tradition: Adds a small amount of research per population point. Händler/Trader: Spaceports generate some more money. Bauern/Farmers: Small bonus to agriculture. Handwerker/Artisans: Small bonus to industry.  Social Structure! This setting influences migration-mechanics and population growth, with unrest-mechanics thrown in for good measure. There is no neutral setting here, we can either eat poo poo with traditionalistic or fascistic social structures, or get a bonus with public-spirited or even cosmopolitan structures. I took Sozial/Social for an easy 5% bonus to population growth, something our rocks dearly need. The Kingdom of Almandin tends to shoot foreigners until they stop being foreigners. For some reason this works fantastic. Probably because our neighbors include nice people like the Ithkul, who get fascism for free (because of course they do, in fact Ithkul can only be fascists and nothing else  ).Fascism hurts your population growth badly and changes your migration strongly enough a lot of people will flee your borders every turn. For Ithkul, with their high population growth, this isn’t that bad of a deal. Now think about hordes of people-eating war-mongering Ithkul “fleeing” your empire to your neighbors.  Positive Talents! Generally, every race gets one for free and maybe another positive talent for cheap. Sometimes a talent isn’t available. Silicoids can’t have an Antaran Heritage because they’re anorganic. There’s nothing in there Antarans could manipulate. Adaptable is a nice perk we get for free: It makes us resistant against pollution and gives us a bonus to cleaning up our planets. This perk is the reason I didn’t waste tons of points on making our rather clean industry even cleaner. I added Engineering/Technik with some left-over points because it gives us an additional +10% for rolls concerning technologies about robotics. This way we have a higher chance at getting upgrades for our industry. It also gives a 10% boost to our overall research capacity. With this we start leaving the Psilons behind us in the dust. Not bad for some dumb rocks. The Meklar obviously get Engineering for free instead. Navigation makes ship travel faster on star lanes (another option for your 40K IoM recreation) and Sixth Sense allows you to detect alien ships faster. Both are things nice to have in the early game, but later you collect tons of technologies dealing with this and then you’ll regret wasting all those points on them. Antaran Heritage is free and available for the Ithkul and that’s it. It gives a boost to finding the five hidden Antaran Technologies and thanks to you wanting to have them in the game, I was forced to uncheck tech-victory. One of the flaws of MO3 rears its ugly head here: Etherean races trivialize diplomatic victories and the Ithkul trivialize tech-victories thanks to strong spies and their stupid Heritage. This means if you want to play something exotic like diplomatic Meklar, you’re forced to conquer everyone anyway or make sure no “problematic” race is part of your game. The alternative is your game suddenly ending halfway through with some race on the other side of the galaxy winning effortlessly. Sometimes even without ever meeting you. Victory conditions are rather badly balanced.  Negative Talents! These are mostly meant to hurt yourself to generate customization points. Here are the ones we didn’t take: -Trägheit/Lazyness: Guess. -Pazifismus/Pacifism: War = More unrest -Perversions: Icky, foreign empires think you’re monsters and your population growth suffers by 5% because so many citizens are killed in nasty “experiments” You get some very slight bonus to tech delays thanks to the things you learn while jacking off to blood and gore Here are the two we did take: -Individualism: Is a curse the Kingdom has to live with, thanks to its democratic heritage. Other Silicoids would be horrified, but we will just learn to live with higher criminal rates, higher oppression costs and a slight boost to research. (Hey, freedom of thought is good for a nation! Who would’ve thought?) -Pessimism. We think the universe is poo poo and in dire need of reform. Preferable with guns and lots of explosions. In game mechanic terms, we generate more unrest and foreign empires will recoil in even more horror when we greet them with “Hi Shitheads, your God is a lie, now die!”. On the other hand, we have an easier time detecting enemy spies. All this pessimism makes even a fanatic Ithkul think about turning himself in.  Do we want to start as part of the New Orion Senate? Yes/No/Whatever. As bad diplomats we don’t want to, obviously. Starting next to multiple races, one of them extremely hostile and powerful, is like the worst choice you could possibly make. For Ethereans, Humans and other “talky” races, the situation is reversed: If you specialize in diplomacy and espionage, you want more  Nearly finished! Here you can decide if you want lots of minerals, some minerals or an early game suicide for your homeworld.  Determines how diverse life is on your homeworld. Better = better agriculture. For us this was another way to get some easy points.  The last screen: Guile. Gefährlich/Dangerous is insanely expensive for our poor, dumb rocks (while Humans get this setting for free, those fuckers) and gives you +10 luck and +2 of all abilities for your spies. In the early game this is incredibly nasty and if you get unlucky with spy techs, it’ll be impossible to catch up to those fuckers. Espionage is really not a strength for Silicoids. Since I already neutralized their other major weakness, I’m forced to just suck it up and go with the default option. Langsam/Slow: Is what is says. Instead of real spies, you get those clowns:  Yeah, no way in hell will we be using our spies effectively. I see a lot of dead dumbasses in our future.  Now we have our race, our background and the never-ending race customization is finished, too. The last part beckons: Setting up the game proper and hitting start. We take the huge, slightly more 3D Seyfert-galaxy as a map, take 15 AI-enemies (16 empires including us, every single race without duplicates). Difficulty is normal, real-time battles are 8 minutes max to preserve my sanity. Random events are rare, planetary anomalies normal. Infinite battles can be processed per turn, we start with very few and short star lanes and that’s it. Set up all done. Game Start! Chapter 02: A New Dawn Not long after we took to the stars again, we took special notice of one of our neighboring planets. It seemed that at some point during the Dark Ages, another colony of Silicoids was founded on it. We must have missed their arrival during the time of Massive Strife, when Democracy fought Democracy on our clear and polished world. Later research by historians visiting our brethren corroborated this, more or less. Those others were refugees, fleeing one of the many massacres conducted by the Antarans. Their old ships broke down shortly after making planetfall, leaving them alone and without a working tech base. In fact, it shows a remarkable show of the Silicoid Spirit for them to have made it almost back to the warp age when we encountered them again. When we showed our brethren the power of Democracy, they cheered in unison and begged to become part of our glorious Kingdom. And so it was that those wayward outcrops became a part of us. -Zzzarych, the Final Historian of Almandin at the 678th Great Speech of Democracy, Temple of Moral Fidelity.  This is Almandin, the home system of the Kingdom of Almandin.  For some reason the game gifted us a second planet. This is weird and demands some investigation. In the meantime, some data about our sun.  Almandin I is a shithole. Lots of minerals, but the planet is bad for us, so it’s far down on our priority list.  Almandin II is a nice world. Green 2 is close to ideal. On the other hand, not much minerals here. Even with our overpowered mining this is a planet where we’ll definitely won’t do much mining on. 1039 pop units is barely above the minimum to create a new colony and I can read “Pre-Warp Civilization” under the list of Planetary Anomalies. This means while stumbling back into the space age, we literally found another colony of Silicoid right next to us. Man those poor bastards must have gotten quite the shock when suddenly space ships arrived above them. Ironically, the gravity is too low for Silicoid tastes. Until we find technologies to deal with this, industry will get a small malus to production here.  Almandin III looks bad, but the gravity is just how we like it. Lots of minerals, lots of free space. This planet will be a drain on us for some turns, but it has potential.  The fourth planet is another green world, this time even with our preferred gravity. Minerals aren’t plenty here and fertility is low, but gently caress fertility we’re rocks. Lots of space for our people, though. I already marked the planet for colonization since the planet is really good. It’ll probably end up being our future main industrial center.  Almandin V is the core of our Kingdom and has over seven times the population of Almandin II. Ideal for us in everything. Thanks to the perks we took at race customization, we have lots of minerals but our fertility is low.  Almandin VI is a gas giant. It’s gravity is high enough to give even us trouble and it’s toxic and has wrong temperatures, pressure and everything. On the other hand: Lots of space (albite with low max population) and tons and tons of minerals. This planet is not good for much, but I’ll be covering this planet with mines. (Well technically mostly his moons, since it’s a gas giant, but you get what I mean.)  The outermost planet is poo poo. So poisonous it can only support half the max population Almandin II could, gravity is too low and the Planetary Anomaly is a bad one: Toxic Gases will make DEAs covered by them barely usable. And it doesn’t have the resources to offset all those drawbacks. This planet will stay uncolonized for a long time.  Interesting fact: If you wait for the AI to react to you marking planets for colonization, it takes an extra turn for the orders to take effect. If you want to have the ship landing right now, you have to give it a direct order from your system view. Now next turn we should have a third planet already. Not a bad start!  Now let’s go a step deeper, into the planet window. You’ll see this in the next update quite often. The regions of a planet work by simple symbolic logic: Mountains are better for mining, green leaves and plains are better for agriculture. Right now only the small forlorn Silicoid-colony lives on here, so only development areas in regions with Silicoids living in it will be build. The empty regions can get planned out, though. It saves some time. Some lore bits: The Silicoids we found are a bit different (translation: less weird) from our society. So we’re using military power right now to stomp out resistance and in a couple turns the colony will be fully integrated. Pre-warp colonies of your race integrate actually quite easily. They’re just colonies with some unrest on them. A couple turns inside of a healthy empire is enough to deal with that.  Right now the AI has full control about our homeworld. And it isn’t doing too badly. This will change fast, though. The civilian budgets (Zivilen Etats) control how much of a planet’s money/research/production power is pumped into either terraforming (this planet is already the best possible, so this option is blocked here), research (“Wissenschaft und Forschung”) or economic development (the other large German compound word). Those budgets are also indirectly controllable from somewhere else (we’ll see in the next update), but thankfully only the AI obeys those foreign directives. There’s no way you can overwrite your own choices without doing so manually. So if you were wondering what “research/production per population unit” actually meant, here you go. Every unit of population can either create research, production or money. People who don’t do anything create money via taxes, workers make stuff happen and researcher research. Simple, just with larger numbers than in Civilization. Your choices at race customization manipulate the output you can get. One thing though: The DEAs of a world are completely separated from this, they will do their poo poo on their own. Economic development allows your colonies to create development areas and allows those to automatically build stuff in them, but as soon as everything is build this slider turns useless. You have two more sliders for your assembly lines to create important buildings (those are different from the buildings a DEA constructs automatically) on planets and to build military stuff like ships, troops and shipyard upgrades. The same goes for them: What you allot them is obviously useless if there isn’t anything to be build. And another thing: Boosting production works on diminishing returns. The game warns you by slowly turning the bar of assigned people from green to red. As soon as it turns red, you’re just wasting money and effort to zero effect. In the screenshot, the AI has boosted our economic and our research budget both to orange already. We’ll let it do this for a couple turns to get our homeworld filled up faster with our planned areas and to get more research. In a couple turns, when our first planets are slowly building their DEAs, we won’t need to boost production that high anymore and can instead boost military production to get stuff faster. The AI tends to disagree, so I’ll be shutting it off on our capital planet soon. As you can see, we’re building some ships and some troops right now. The AI made those choices for us, but since there isn’t much to do wrong here, I can leave this alone for now. The first ship will be a system-colonizer which will automatically drop on the next uncolonized planet (if it is marked as colonizable by us, or the ship will just meekly join our defending units and wait). The troops were another automatic choice and since troops are cheap and we’ll need them sooner or later, I also left this unchanged. The last item in the list is a frigate armed with some sensors and a small laser. We can use it as a fast throw-away explorer since we can’t build anything better right now anyway. (The name translates to “Discoverer/Explorer”, by the way.) Here we get our first difference between vanilla AI and modded AI: Normally, the AI insists of building troops one by one. Which is a giant waste of effort even for small planets and just clogs the assembly line uselessly. The mod changed this by forcing the AI to always take x10 when building troops. This way at least the AI doesn’t eject tons of wasted production into space. And when some random border planet goes full retard and builds ground troops without you telling it to do so, you at least get some armies out of it. In vanilla, AI-stupidity instead irritates you by giving you some random units, but never enough for a full army. In vanilla, the way to create armies was to stop the assembly lines on many of your planets to fill them with enough 10x units until you had the force you wanted. In Ultima Orion, the AI will generally build enough ground units to keep you supplied. It’s not perfect, but it shows how a small detail corrected can ease up a lot of pain.  After that giant wall of text, it’s time to have a look around. Three star lanes connect Almandin to the rest of the Orion Sector and we have two scouts and an outpost ship to explore them. In 4-6 turns, our ships will slowly arrive. Also I’m showing you a neat detail with the help of that neutron star over there: You can actually ignore star lanes and cross interstellar space however you want, it just takes at least ten times more time! So, it’s kind of situational. But the AI will never use this, so it’s nice to remember you can outmaneuver the AI in the late game, when it gets harder to out-tech someone. In the early game it’s of course dumb because 30-40 turns are a lot of time and whoever you reach will just swat your suddenly outdated fleet aside. In Vanilla it was even more unusable for reasons I’ll be explaining next time. But… still, the option is there if you want.  Something else not immediately obvious: The game generates a situation report even in turn 1, it just doesn’t tell you about it. So if you see something weird like a second colony, you can go to the sitrep and see what’s up. In this case, the sitrep tells us about the colony we “founded” by taking over those backwoods hicks on the neighboring planet. Next: Even more game play talk, but we also do more than just one turn. gently caress, I really didn't think explaining all this would take so long. At least now that you know all about MO3 Race Customization, feel assured you will never have to deal with this poo poo again. Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:09 on May 2, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 13:12
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Libluini posted:Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE timgs and youtube links seem to not work with each other. Could you separate them, please?
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Apr 14, 2016 14:04
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drat, character creation is way complicated... I remember in MoOII I'd always make a Meklar with some Psilon added in for the technology advantages. I don't know if it was an actually good race because I'd only play on the easiest setting (I just wanted a giant space empire with my very own death stars, not a challenge). Seeing the customization here, I wish someone was crazy enough to make a joke bonus LP of the most laissez faire libertarian society possible and see how quickly they collapse. And how are those Ithkul good spies? The intro clearly shows that it's practically impossible to miss someone who's been brained by them. "Oh hey Bob, it seems you have some sort of Ithkul-shaped mass under your suit." "Thank You For The Concern, Dave, But It Is Just My Cosplay For IthkulCon. It Is Going To Be Great And It Goes On Every Day. Do You Wish To Join Me? It Will Be Fun."
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Apr 14, 2016 14:21
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Nuramor posted:timgs and youtube links seem to not work with each other. Could you separate them, please? Weird, when I tested it it worked. (Or I'm just to accustomed to using my mouse-wheel. That works too for some reason.) Right-click and selecting one of the link-options works, too. But you're right, forcing people to do work-arounds is a bit much, I'll separate the link.
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Apr 14, 2016 14:24
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Zanzibar Ham posted:And how are those Ithkul good spies? The intro clearly shows that it's practically impossible to miss someone who's been brained by them. The secret is, the Ithkul have the developers in their corner. They really have no weaknesses and in character-creation, most bad options are either greyed out or give only a few points so a player is discouraged from taking drawbacks. Also, in cases like with fascism, the Ithkul are hardcoded in a way the "drawback" actually helps them. While you can ruin basically every other race if you want a challenge, the Ithkul just can't be made into bads. They'll always be your little Mary Sues. Edit: This is even sadder because the devs were willing to be harsh when it was logical in other races. The Silicoids are hilariously bad at spying because they're huge, sentient rocks. This makes sense. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 14:35
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I don't recognize almost half of those options at race customization, I take it they were added by that mod you are using. Vanilla itself was insane with all the options and this is twice the insanity.
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Apr 14, 2016 14:51
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That is far and away the most involved and obtuse race creation/customization menu I've ever seen in a game.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:08
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