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Let’s Play Master of Orion III: Ultimate Edition (FYI, the starting screen changes depending on which race you played last.) Welp, time to get this show on the road. I had this planned for a loving long time, but I always had other stuff to do. Not anymore! This will be the LP of Master of Orion III you always wanted: With the game heavily modded and patched, because otherwise it's more like a tragedy than a game. It's also 100% translated into German and then later I changed some things I didn't like but you have me for those small, irrelevant details. Jump to Updates On Audience Participation: First off, there are a lot of races in this game, but you can only choose from two. Why? Well, from the sixteen alien species on offer, I have two favorites. And this game can drag on for far too long, so I didn’t want to risk ending up with a race I hate and then forcing myself to play with them for an eternity of suffering. I had enough of that with Imperium, thank you very much. This way, you still have the illusion of choice and I can have fun with this. Win-win! (Obligatory link to my old LP to explain why me having fun is important.) Later on, you’ll be able to rename star systems and ship classes and I’m willing to put out some strategic options to let the goon vote decide. No reason to decend into madness here! The game of mastering Orion for the third time So, what is Master of Orion III? For those of you who don’t know, in ages past there was a 4x (Exploration, Expansion, uh Extraction? And Extermination) game called Master of Orion and it was beloved by all. For a turn-based strategy game, it was very good indeed. Then Master of Orion II, the sequel, was made. And it was even better! So of course a third game had to be made. Alas, the third title was rushed out of the door because the devs apparently had run into some financial trouble of some kind and many planned features either didn’t work or were switched off in the game code because they couldn’t finish them. To the total surprise of everyone, MO3 sucked rear end and killed the series for good. Now the story doesn’t end there, at least not for me. The devs soon went under, but vomited out a last-ditch patch to correct the stupidest bugs and then some desperate fans set out to correct the rest. I didn’t know anything of this back then because I didn’t have a PC until after all this had happened. So one day, just about a year after I got a lovely second-hand PC, I stumbled upon MO3 while going through a pile of discarded video games in my local video rental store. A video rental store, for those of you too young to have experienced them, was a shop where you could rent videos and games. Anyway, my local rental store at the time was always discarding old games and videos if no-one ever rented them to make space for new stuff. The hilarity of this was, most discarded games were stuff like Baldur’s Gate, so actually good games, just not ones you would expect to be able to finish over a weekend. So when I found MO3 and saw on the description that it was something like Civilization, but In Space, I was immediately hooked! Civilization and Civilisation II were among the first game I ever played and I played them to death and back. And of course the game had to be good, since all those other good games next to it had also been discarded! The fatal flaw on that logic was of course the mountain of very bad games just next to the good games I just mentally edited out after finding my “gem”. Later I put in my first space strategy game ever and played it. Vanilla, without the patch since I didn’t know at the time you could actually “repair” games like that. I actually had a lot of fun playing MO3, even though a lot of flaws became apparent pretty drat soon. After a couple months I burned out on those flaws, but over the years I came back several times. Later I learned of magical things like “patches” and “mods” and breathed life back into this game. And here we are! The Flaws A lot of stuff will be covered over the course of this LP, but a couple things are well-known enough I think it’s worth mentioning them. Also, many of the typical flaws are fixed with the mod I’m running, so we’ll never see them otherwise. Shoddy Workmanship This category covers everything plain wrong thanks to bad programming. Did you know Master of Orion 3 has a memory leak? I didn’t know this for a long time, I just assumed when my game got slower and slower during playtime, that this had something to do with the game needing more time to calculate my turns or something. Which is true in a way, the game indeed needs more time when the computer it runs on gets less and less RAM to work with for every turn you finish! Supposedly, the patch fixed the memory leak so I should be able to finish the game with no problems. Anyway, restarting the game back then freed up the resources again so as long as you didn’t play longer then half an hour per session, this bug wasn’t that much of a problem anyway. In this category belongs the hilariously bad AI too, of course. I don’t know what the devs did wrong here, but the game’s AI has some spectacular ability to make bad choices. In contrast to other games with the same flaw, like Space Empires V, in MO3 at least the battlefield is leveled again because your own helper-AI is as retarded as the enemy’s is.  And if you play this game, you will need the AI. In this game you can end up with hundreds of planets to control and if you try to manage all of them, you go mad. Sooner or later you will have to give out a plan for the AI to use (spoilers: you can do this) and hope your AI-governors have run out of stupid juice. (spoilers: they never do) Since many things about the AI are hard-coded, the mod naturally couldn’t do anything about this, but the Ultima Orion mod I’m using has some neat work-arounds to make the AI seem smarter then it is. Another bad error the devs had to fix was the money overflow-error. Basically, if your empire became too large, you could easily make enough money to go over the limits of the game. Your empire’s accounts would overflow into negative numbers and give you an instant bankruptcy. This error was fixed by the first and only patch. Mad Balancing In this category we find ludicrously overpowered missiles and eternal fighters. In Vanilla, putting 1-2 missiles on every ship basically destroyed every enemy fleet after some point. The reason for this was two-fold: Missiles being far stronger than comparative weapons and game mechanics. See, in MO3-Vanilla, shields protecting your ships work like in Star Trek: They can take a few hits, but even the best shields go down pretty drat fast. So when you send a hard missile strike in front of you, you sometimes could overwhelm even superior forces by stripping their shields and then shooting their ships while they still had to strip your shields down. Fighters were even worse, especially against planets. A huge swarm of fighters could effortlessly walk across a star system and exterminate even vastly superior forces. Combine this “balance” with a stupid AI and you get a really easy game. Even on the hardest difficulty setting, as long as you get a good base of core systems running you simply can’t lose. This is equally important because the enemy AI is (of course) bad at designing ships, so they will never fully take advantage of fighter or missile superiority. In this mod, missiles got nerfed, but got some diversity as compensation. Point defense got a buff and also more diversity. Fighters got a lot more diversity and you can make them faster or slower if you want, but since their behavior is hard-coded there isn’t much nerfing the mod could do without breaking the game. So instead the makers compensated by giving the AI lots of simple, easy-to-use carrier designs. In Ultima Orion, you actually sometimes have to change up your fleets if you don’t want to get schooled by an enemy sending in fleets of carriers! The makers of the mod even found a way to semi-nerf missiles and fighters by changing shield mechanics. We’ll get to this later in more detail but let’s say for now this was mostly done because of a difference in SF-culture. Let’s just say Star Trek isn’t the first choice for many German SF-fans.  The Ultimate Set-Up OK, let’s cut this right here, before I spill every little detail long before the LP even starts. I’m setting up a huge, semi-3D map The map I’m taking needs more thinking when planning strategic moves, but looks far better. It also has the space we need to set up our empire properly before meeting our enemies. To experience all 16 races, we’ll play with 16 players and hope the RNG doesn’t screw this up by taking some races twice or more. Luckily Ultima Orion comes with its own starter.exe and the ability to change race priority for starting up games. I will simply put our own race at the bottom to minimize this problem.  Now the vanilla-version already has a lot of choices available when making races and the Ultima Orion mod switched on / patched in a lot of crap that was already in the game, but was never finished. The dudes and gals responsible for this mod did their best and now there is an overwhelming amount of choice. Since you probably don’t want to spend multiple updates on setting up our game, I’ve simplified everything down to two choices: Silicoids  The Silicoids are the most alien of all MO-races. I’ll get to their backstory in more detail later (the game comes with a Galactopedia containing everything you ever wanted to know) but in short, some kind of death crystal burst over their homeworld long ago and the Silicoids of today evolved out of splinters of that thing. My knowledge of the earlier games isn’t that great, but I think death crystals were some kind of galactic menace you could run into. The Silicoids were also playable in MOI (I never played MOII, so I have no idea if they were in there, too), they looked a lot less crystalline and more like walking magma-monsters, at least according to the graphic you were shown. Anyway, those guys are great, but rather inflexible. I’m trying to counter their weak points as good as possible if those guys are chosen in race creation, but they’re basically the opposite of your second choice, so we’ll enter the game with some hefty drawbacks. Pros: - Don’t need food. Every food we produce is either money in the bank or can feed the surely many, many aliens immigrating into our great empire. - They have some neat funky looking ships. (This is of course subjective. Not everyone likes pink crystals. )- They prefer large high-gravity worlds, which translates to lots of space and highly productive planets later in the game. Also we have an easier time colonizing hostile giant planets in the early game. - It’s really hard to upset your obstinate population. When other races already have to fight several splinter empires, the Silicoids are still at “slightly miffed”. Cons: - Thanks to being intelligent crystals procreating by slowly growing out of a mineral bath, their population growth is abysmal. They have the slowest population growth in the game. - Thanks to being intelligent rocks, their mental capacity is somewhat inflexible. To move points around and make alterations to their boring standard template, you’ll have to plan carefully or you end up hamstringing yourself. - As nearly immobile crystals without eyes, they also have some of the worst combat troops in the game. In vanilla you didn’t have to care since a bug made all troops the same and the only difference came from points given during set-up. The Ultima Mod brought all the differences back, including Silicoids being slow and bad at aiming. Putting points into that area during set-up only can do so much. - Silicoids are really bad at diplomacy and trying to change this costs so many points it’s pointless. - Falling behind in mining means both your population and production suffers. - The Silicoids are so incredibly bad at spying it’s kind of cute.  A Lancer. One of the smallest ship classes you can build. Basically a slightly dagger-like lump of crystal.  A Light Cruiser. Harsh angles are kind of a thing with Silicoid-ships. I don’t know why, but I just like the look of these motherfuckers. Meklar  The Meklar are your second choice! They have a long history in this series and changed a lot. In MO2 they were cyborgs, in MO3 they are split up into Cynoids (Cyborg capitalists and boring as gently caress) and purified super-robots: The Meklar. The Galactopedia has this long, sordid story about how the Meklar found some secret alien technology to finally purify the last rest of flesh without losing their soul. Some Meklar still wanted to keep their fleshy bits, though: This of course meant civil war! In the end, the cyborgs lost against the other cyborgs and left, becoming the Cynoids. The true Meklar stayed and built weird purification-chambers to pull out their brains and replace them with computers. Without losing their souls, of course. In the end this transformation-process was long, harrowing and killed many of them, so the Meklar, once one of the most powerful races in the Orion Sector, are now back to square one. Because of this they couldn’t prevent the bad guys from MO2 taking over everything, but that’s for later. Now the Meklar are robots. Incredibly flexible robots and you can play them however you want to! Some things don’t change though, here are the pros and cons: Pros: - It’s really easy to make the Meklar an industrial powerhouse churning out superdreadnoughts by the dozen without compromising anything else. - As machines with some weird fetishes they only need half the food of normal races. - As super-machines that they are, the Meklar are really good at ground combat. Even stealing more points from this category, the Meklar still get some hidden bonus at hitting things. They’re basically the opposite of the Silicoids. - As robots, the Meklar get a higher chance to roll for technologies related to automatization, which allows for a ridiculous pile up of production bonuses if you count everything together. - Like the Silicoids, the Meklar take a lot of abuse without doing more than limply protest your shenanigans. They aren’t as unmovable as them, though. Cons: - The Meklar prefer small, low-gravity worlds and everything else means you either need technology or a lot of effort to compensate for the high malus to everything you’ll accumulate. High-gravity worlds like gas giants are extra painful for them. - Since they still need both food and minerals, you have to be extra careful to not fall behind. As with the Silicoids, not enough mining means population and industry suffers. Please remember you can have some ridiculously strong industry with Meklar and this means extra-high mineral usage. - Their ships are kind of ugly. - Diplomacy and spying are kind of a mixed bag. The Meklar are flexible enough to go either way, but for research optimization this will be our dump stats if you choose these little mechanical buggers. - There’s also a secret hidden malus to diplomacy with the Silicoids and Humanoids: The first because Silicoids are basically walking bags of tasty minerals and the latter because Humanoids tend to react badly to office supplies walking around and giving orders. In vanilla, this was irrelevant fluff, but the Ultima mod brought all those differences back as they were originally planned. So going diplomacy with Meklar is somewhat questionable if you expect Humanoids and Silicoids in your game. - A diplomatic victory is impossible with Meklar: Since most of their worlds will be rather small, they’ll lack the population mass to generate enough votes. Don’t even try it. (I’ll be extra careful and make sure the option for our game is switched off.) - Being good at both research and production while also having a strong ground army means they’re basically easy mode in an already easy game. Boring, in other words. - Hidden ground combat bonuses aren’t the only thing Ultima Orion has, there are also some obscure things like preferred battleground added in. This means for example, a Meklar-army fighting on a low-gravity world full with caves is basically unbeatable. Fighting on high-gravity worlds on the other hand cripples them badly, a weakness a player should keep in mind before assaulting Silicoid-strongholds or something.  The Meklar-Lancer  A Meklar Light Cruiser. Ugh. But they have some kind of charm to their ugliness, I guess. In general, both races will feel really differently. The Silicoids need some careful planning and we’re basically forced to take over some hapless aliens to get ground troops which don’t suck. Then we need those troops to take over even better aliens. Even with maximum points, our research will struggle and making them good at building ships and researching good tech for those ships is nearly impossible. We will either have lots of bad ships or few good ships. On the other hand, the Meklar build things so fast we don’t even need a fleet in the first turns and can concentrate on using our super-research to get some early advantages. When we finally need ships, we can generally build them fast enough to outpace most enemies. Those we can’t outpace will be far behind us in technology and die like chumps anyway. We also can just take over their planets with our superior robot armies. They also get a unique tech to purify ugly flesh into stainless steel. Let’s just say humanoids immigrating into Meklar-land won’t stay humanoid after that happens.  Before you commit to a decision, please remember two things: 1. We will stay with our chosen race a very, very long time. So better make sure you can stand to look at tons of screenshots with their ugly mugs before voting. 2. Even with everything these mad modders have done, the enemy AI is still not really that much of a threat, so if you take the Meklar, I’ll be forced to play under “difficult” instead of “normal”, or this LP would be simply unfair. Enemies Now there are 14 races besides the two open for voting, which means (together with the loser from the first vote) 15 enemy empires on our map. Thanks to the Ultima Orion mod giving at least some ability to influence enemy set-up, we’ll be able to weigh the chances to maximum plurality. Optimally, the AI will take all other races and there will be no problems whatsoever. I’m warning you though the AI can be weird sometimes and races with lower priority may not make it because the dumb AI can sometimes decide to just take a high priority race twice. This happened a looooooong time ago though and it could be I remember an unmodded game. I’m warning you just in case this happens. Anyway, here’s a short overview of all races we will hopefully shoot into their ugly faces sooner or later: (Edit: I decided to include the two races you can vote on, just for completion's sake.) Silicoids and Meklar Those I have already mentioned. Whoever loses our protagonist-vote will end up under our enemies.  Protagonist Race Choice 01: The Meklar. They’re pretty fine even in standard-mode, but the real thing is: You can customize them pretty drat hard. After playing them and Humans both, I can only say they’re probably even a little more adaptable then Humans. Which is a lot, by the way. If they win, they’ll be reworked into a Constitutional Monarchy. Because I can.   Protagonist Race Choice 02: I already said everything that needs to be said about the Silicoids, so welp. Probably the more balanced choice of the two. The Silicoids are the only race under the category “Geodes”. Imagine a world where MO3 had been a success. Maybe a MO4 would have had two different crystalline races here? Humanoids Humans and Wannabe-humans  Humans are the first and most dangerous Humanoid species. They’re evil bastards and masters at manipulation. They’re also masters at polluting the environment. Captain Planet hates these guys. On the other hand, you will always have enough money and your spies are loving monsters. According to the integrated encyclopedia, there was a time when Humans reigned over the Orion Sector with an iron fist. This Pax Humanica lasted for ten thousand years. Then hyperspace drives suddenly started working again and everyone started travelling around freely. Humans hate freedom, so they didn’t take this well. Their empire crumbled and since then they've been trying to take over the Orion Sector again.  Evon are a mystery. They just suddenly showed up one day in the Orion Sector and where like “Hey, what’s up?”. Instead of just worshipping one god (money), like the Humans, they prefer to believe in many gods. Also they’re the Captain Planet to the Human’s Looten Plunder. If the tons of options of the customization-menu are confusing you and you want to play a Humanoid race of space hippies, you can just hit “select” on these guys and you’re set to go. Their spies are as dangerous as the Human ones and they have the magical ability of constructing warships without harming nature (too badly). Major drawback: They hate Christians. (And Muslism too, I guess.  ) Psilons are psychic scientists. That’s like, their whole shtick. They looked better in the older games, but biological manipulation transformed them into freaks who need a hover-seat to move around. They’re psychic scientists who are also all cripples. Obviously, the Psilons are awesome at science. Of course, with the customization-option, there are a lot of races who can be awesome at science, so they are the most pointless race ever. They’re bad at both agriculture and mining simultaneously, so only god can help you if you choose to play as them without doing some corrections. Do you love roleplaying as the victims of mad science-experiments? Do you love starvation and economic collapse? This is the race for you. The other Cybernetic Menace  The other metal heads: The Cynoids are the losers of the last Meklar Civil War. They still have some flesh left somewhere inside their metal bodies. Those parts are grown in large batteries of artificial wombs and are small worms with 99% brain as body mass. Without the aid of machines, the Cynoids wouldn’t be able to survive. Building a new civilization from the ground up made the Cynoids masters of production: They’re building things even faster than the Meklar. They’re also even more cartoonishly capitalistic as the Humans. If it weren’t for their hostility towards all weak meat-races (and Meklar, as additional “bonus”), they’d be pretty drat set as a trader race. As it is, you’d be better served by making them into a boring Meklar-clone. It’s kind of hard to be the Robot-Gnolams if everyone hates your metallic guts. The Cynoids are the saddest thing: A good idea ruined by execution. In Vanilla MO3, you actually could play them as the trader race of MO3, greedily collecting riches. Because all that stuff about races hating/liking certain races didn’t work. As far as I can tell, the patch didn’t solve this problem. The makers of Ultima Orion however somehow made this work again. Which is fine for most of the races, but the Cynoids obviously got the shaft here. I guess even if you prefer not using customization, you could still use that extra-money from intra-imperial trade to pay for more battleships or something. Just don’t expect to do much trading with other races. Their dislike will make them break treaties constantly. Space Dinosaurs  Ever wanted to know what would have happened if the dinosaurs would have reached the space age? Here you go! The Sakkra are the first of the three (dino-)saurian species. They’re good at shooting and being fascists, because reptiloids in SF must always be evil. It’s in the contract. Anyway, they can fight well and they’re the only MO3-race I’ve played where I actually lost the game because I went bankrupt. They’re not very good with money, is what I’m getting at here. They also need constant feeding for their science sector or your ability to shoot good on planets will mean jack poo poo on account of all your ships constantly exploding in space. On the other hand, they have a tragic backstory we will get to at a later date, so they have Shakespearian tragedy going for them.  The Raas were once slaves of the Sakkra, but then fought them long and hard enough they actually won their freedom and left the Sakkra-homeworld. In gameplay terms, they’re good at trading and building poo poo. Oh come on! It’s like when the Gnolams died, capitalism sprayed from their corpses like spores from mushrooms.  Alternatively, they’re not very bright, but at least good at fighting. And when playing them, at least you won’t easily run into financially trouble. Apparently the Rass were also the Sakkra’s bankers.  The Grendarl are huge, loyal and warriors. As a surprise twist, they also like people who work hard for the greater good, even if they’re not warriors. If you want to play a proud, but not retarded warrior race of dinosaurs conquering the galaxy, the Grendarl were made for you. And you’ll better start raising troops ASAP, because the Grendarl need every planet they can get, including other people’s planets. I never played the Grendarl, but if you want to be hilarious, I guess you could take out all the points in being-good-at-punching-aliens and try to make them good in something else. Considering my “success” with the Sakkra, I wouldn’t bet on them being malleable enough for fancy stuff like Hippy-Grendarl, though. Saurians are still Saurians. Welcome to the Water  After all those dinosaurs, we’re probably relieved to see something different again: The Trilarians love water and hate Sakkras. Those fish-like weirdos are good at research, but bad at combat and understanding intrigue. They also have tons of fish gods. Trilarians are part of a really complicated net of artificially created/heavily manipulated species. We’ll be coming back to all this bullshit at a later time. For now, you only need to know that the Trilarian homeworld was kind of cramped, with at least three different sentient species duking it out. The fight led to a split. Tons of genetic modifications later, the Sakkra were born and thrown off-planet. Later there was another fight and the third species on the planet left, too. The Trilarians were left victorious, but exhausted. Trilarians are peaceful traditionalists, which makes them resistant to change. The typical MO3-bullshit twist for them is: They were originally supposed to have a special combat ability, like all races in Master of Orion III. In Vanilla, the special abilities didn’t make it, but Ultima Orion restored them again. The Trilarians have a weird evasion ability that sounds nice, but doesn’t work too well in practice. They’re rather squishy and evading a couple shots in ground combat won’t make them survive longer. You have to invest a lot of points to make their ground combat units a step up from “hopeless”. One good thing: All Ichtythosians are secretly fascists and like oppression. You can oppress them ridiculously without generating too much unrest. So if you want to roleplay as Adolph Fishtler, this is your chance. Of course, the next race is even better for that!  The other Ichtythosians: The Nommo were the third race in that weird chaos consuming good old Trilar. In the end, they said “gently caress it! Space Hitler Time!” and just left the ruins of their homeworld. Which was probably a good idea, the Sakkra and the amphibious Trilarians had laid waste to both water and land at that point and another civil war just after the Sakkra got exiled would have probably been a bit much. Those little squids are better at fighting than the Trilarians (which is not hard, you could give your cat a blaster rifle and it would be better at fighting than those clowns), but can’t hit for poo poo. Luckily they don’t suffer as much from hidden stats like the Trilarians and you can just boost their accuracy for a couple points. Their secret Ichtythosian combat ability works similar to the one the Trilarians have (defense/evasion), but thanks to hardcoded game mechanics, it works slightly better. I guess deep sea squids are better soldiers than fish? A bit weird for aggressive militaristic deep sea squids: The Nommo are brilliant diplomats. Better even than the peaceful, diplomatic Trilarians. Yes that’s right, the Nommo are better at being Trilarians than the Trilarians themselves. Conclusion: If you are hell-bent on playing an underwater-civilization don’t accept the amphibious knock-off brand “Trilaria”. Accept only real deep sea critters: Look out for the original “Nommo”-seal! People from Gas Giants are Weird  The Etherians are a group of gas giant dwellers with spooky organic-looking ships. And speaking of spooky, thanks to things we’re coming back to later, they both have good spies. (They even sub-contracted the shapeshifting Darloks at one point to get even better spies, but that’s another story.) Both Etherians are masters of agriculture and ecology, with weaknesses in mining, fighting and research. Both races have some minor differences in how bad their weaknesses are. The Imsaies for example are worse at research, while the Eoladi are the worst miners ever. Imsaies are famous for being diplomats and they have good spies, so they’re ideal for a diplomatic victory. With the ability to colonize gas giants, both Imsaies and Eoladi can steamroll every election they’re part of. Basically, even if you don’t play them, if they turn up in your game, just hope you remembered to switch off diplomatic victory, or the game is already over: With their titanic population, they’ll be easily able to vote themselves to the top of the Orion Senate, leaving you in the dust. Turn to the Imsaies if you want to play as peaceful as possible, but don’t neglect your defenses, not everyone likes large floating gas bags and Etherians have a hidden distrust to other races, thanks to their history.  Both Etherean races are so similar, the major differences are looks and fluff. The Eoladi have vastly variable ethics and are less total peaceniks than the Imsaies. They’re also very slightly better at fighting, so if you want a gas giant race to fight wars, better start with them. Some important points about Etherean races: They use organics to build things, including their ships. To make things easier on the player, Etherean races “mine” organic materials from their worlds, instead of minerals and metals. This means food production is still mostly for food, which you’ll need a lot of anyway, and you can play them like other races without running into trouble. Both races aren’t great at mining though, which translates to careful customization to prevent a nasty surprise, so keep that in mind. Make sure to do some small-scaled test games before going all in, the way mining works like normal, but with “mining” living organisms is confusing. I have no idea if you need planets with lots of life like for good food production, or if mineral rich planets count as “rich in life forms full of minerals” for them, I never played them that much. If I had to guess, you probably need to add the ability to exploit mineral rich planets in the customization screen, to exploit mineral rich planets. I could totally be wrong, though: Remember I didn't play them much. Anyway, when we start encountering them in the game, I’ll research them a bit more extensively to see how their game mechanics work, so don’t worry about it at this point. Bug Invasion Faction  Klackons: Space-ants, bugs from Starship Troopers, you know the drill. Good at mining, not very bright, can get a religious cult option for free (“Divine Ruler”, if I translated that correctly) The Klackons have to do everything the hard way: Research, fighting, building. They’re good at mining, which they need to be to fuel their industry, for everything else the player needs a brute force option. Like research areas on every single planet. As an AI, they tend to run into trouble fast, regardless of their vast numbers, because the player will probably always do poo poo like put research facilities on every planet, so a player with a research-oriented race will still stay far ahead of them. The AI isn’t that good at simulating this behavior, so AI Klackons suffer even more in comparison. Player-Klackons don’t have that trouble, since they know about this and can compensate by brute forcing more research. Still, I suggest putting some points in research and creativity to be less crippled in that area. If you don’t want to play the Klackons as hiveminds, you can generate a lot of free points by rejecting the relevant options, but be aware that the Klackons aren’t that tolerable of oppression. If you make them into freethinkers, you’ll risk planets rebelling all over your empire.  The Tachidi are even better at industry than the Klackons, they’re not as fiercely uncreative as them and think “Diplomacy” is some kind of witchcraft. Even though they're insectoids, they tend to rely more on quality than just numbers. In many ways they’re the polar opposite to the Klackons. Tachidi aren’t unthinking servants of an insectoid overmind. In fact, they’re rather individualistic and curious. They’re basically the players’ choice if you want to play insectoid races without suffering from the revulsion the Klichéons sometimes generate in people. What, Killing Trillions by Bombing their Worlds isn't Evil Enough for You?  Finally, the 16th and last race: Ithkul. The Ithkul were a completely new addition to MO3. Most of the other races are races you know if you played the old games, or at least weird offshoots who developed from the other well-known races. (I think the Evon are new, too. But the Evon are basically different looking Humans with a spooky lore background, so it’s hard to remember if those Blandians were in earlier games or not.) See that vaguely humanoid thing in the screenshot? That’s not the Ithkul. The Ithkul is the insect/tentacle thing hanging from it. The Ithkul are parasites, who actively need a sentient host to survive. A lot of hosts actually, since they’re slowly draining them to sustain themselves. A host doesn’t survive this for long. Playing Ithkul means playing against everyone: There will never be more than a short ceasefire. Everyone hates them and you hate them. The Ithkul come geared for war and you suffer unrest if you’re too long at peace. You also suffer unrest if your people have no other people to eat, which is a thing that happens. See, there’s a migration mechanic in the game, people tend to move freely around at the borders to other empires. Friendly empires attract a lot of aliens who want to escape their fascist hellholes and fascist hellholes suffer a constant drain of people fleeing across the border. Now here’s the thing: If other races are available, the Ithkul will consume them as food. If you conquer planets as Ithkul, the areas on the planet will slowly depopulate and fill with more Ithkul. Other races migrating to a friendly Ithkul-empire will be eaten, too. If you’re not playing the Ithkul but border them, you will slowly notice more and more of your population replaced by belligerent Ithkul. There’s no peace with Ithkul, the only way to protect yourself from this slow invasion is being something the Ithkul can’t eat, like Silicoids and Robots. From a game play perspective, the Ithkul are kind of disappointing. The Ithkul don’t really have weaknesses, so you can’t change that much. You can’t play peaceful or diplomatic Ithkul because everyone hates you. If you take them, most of the game’s options are gone and you can only do one thing: Fighting. At least you can do fighting very well, since the Ithkul are the Mary Sue race of MO3. Even their hidden bonuses are all for war –an Ithkul army landing on one of your worlds is a terrifying prospect. For the player, they’re easy mode. The Meklar at least need some tweaking before becoming unstoppable. And even then there are some weaknesses left to make things interesting. The Ithkul don’t have weaknesses. Only strengths. In Vanilla MO3, the diplomatic auto-hate didn’t work, but the hidden bonus to ground combat didn’t work either. Still, with the Ithkul auto-eating all your neighbors, this wasn’t really balanced. If you knew about this, you could make a “peaceful” Ithkul race still awesome at fighting and then just wait until your neighbors break apart because of all those new Ithkul-citizens raising up in rebellion. At least Ultima Orion gives the other races a fighting chance because the AI knows the Ithkul are the enemy. Ithkul are the edgelord-race of MO3. It’s kind of funny to roleplay the Aliens from the movies rampaging through the Orion Sector, but it gets old fast. The one good thing about them: Xenocide is not only an option, it’s something we have to do, or the survivors will just continue to eat more people. So you can bomb billions dead and don’t have to feel bad! As an AI, the Ithkul are always the most dangerous when paired with other, dumber AIs: If they survive for too long, we’ll probably end up having to destroy half the galaxy to protect non-robotic/non-crystalline life. The Vote Now the voting starts! Please bold your vote to make it easier for me to pick it up, thanks. 1. Skynet’s Brethren or Death Crystals? 2. Which enemy race do you want to see first? The first vote is straight forward, the second is a bit more complicated: Depending on how the voting goes, I’ll order the enemy-priority in our starter.exe. So first place gets placed first, second place second and so on. This way the winners of the second vote will have a guaranteed place on our map. The losers may still show up, but I’ll suggest not betting on this, see it more like an unexpected bonus if the game works like it should do. Voting will be open for a week, but don’t worry, I’m preparing a test turn to showcase the gameplay a bit. Just so you don’t have to wait over a week for the LP to really start. Expect the Pre-LP update in a couple days. And now this long, rambling OP is over! Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2016 20:39
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I believe the Trilarians, Elerians and Gnolam were new to MoO2 over MoO 1. 3 kept much of the same stuff but changed the names a bit and merged a couple of them, in addition to adding those 'sister' type races (the gas giant dwellers, the other aquatic guys). The originals from 2 & 1 that didn't make the race cut were slotted into some sort of heritage race and you can find them here or there around the galaxy. The only original races from 1 were the Sakkra, Human, Silicoid, Psilon, Meklar and Klackon, it dropped the Alkari, Ursa and darloks. I didn't play 3 much before i put it down due to the plethora of problems it had, and also that it felt like a totally unrelated game to MoO2 and it sold based off the name. In its favor you can almost setup up a few things at the start and the game will run itself. Not sure if that is really "in its favor" Sloober fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 20:53
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I'm kind of bummed that our two choices are either 'no diplomacy probably' or 'easy mode'. Even worse is that I actually love both these races when you ignore their abilities, making the choice ever harder! But I say it's time we take a stand for Mineral Rights! Silicoids please! Hopefully by glowing pretty colors we can convince other races to engage in some minor trade or something at least. e: I'd like to see the Nommo, too bad we're likely to be blowing them up Zanzibar Ham fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 20:56
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Man, I've been waiting for this. Skynet's Brethren! Also, it looks like someone's reviving the Master of Orion series, with "Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars." The race art looks equal parts bad and equal parts hilarious, with the Mrrshan being outright furry bait(not the more animal-looking guys they were in MoO2, for instance), but generally it seems to be stepping back to MoO1 or 2 in terms of fluff and art. More 1 than 2, most likely, since most of the races and options added in 2 don't seem obvious. They also changed up a good few species from 2 to 3. Trilarians are fish men now, but in MoO2 they were hyperspace-native jellyfish dudes, looked kinda Cthulhu-esque.  I'm a huge dork for MoO2, so just tell me if I'm clogging up the thread if I go on too much. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 21:02
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Sloober posted:In its favor you can almost setup up a few things at the start and the game will run itself. Not sure if that is really "in its favor" The thing is, if you let the game run itself, you've found the one secret way to give even the Vanilla AI a chance to win. (Your own AI is as bad as the AI is at running things.) I've played the game to death and even I can't play Vanilla MO3 anymore, it's that bad. Zanzibar Ham posted:I'm kind of bummed that our two choices are either 'no diplomacy probably' or 'easy mode'. Even worse is that I actually love both these races when you ignore their abilities, making the choice ever harder! The reason for my choices is, I'm incredibly bad at diplomacy, so playing a race good at diplomacy would be hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Also this LP would end in shame and dismay. PurpleXVI posted:Man, I've been waiting for this. Skynet's Brethren! Don't worry, I never played MO2 and only like five seconds of MO1, so I appreciate some context from the older games. Also seeing that picture, I finally understand what the [CENSORED] did to the Trilarians. Genetical manipulation, indeed! I think I'll put in some ancient history in my next update, so you can find out what got retconned that much faster!
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Apr 11, 2016 21:56
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I vote floaty crystals. Hopefully this is far less soul-sucking than Imperium.
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Apr 11, 2016 21:56
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Libluini posted:Don't worry, I never played MO2 and only like five seconds of MO1, so I appreciate some context from the older games. Also seeing that picture, I finally understand what the [CENSORED] did to the Trilarians. Genetical manipulation, indeed! I remember most of the MoO3 fluff myself, but I don't want to break into it, since you're obviously saving some of it for later. So I'll just toss in tidbits relevant to MoO2 when you hit a part where I think there's something to add. I figured it would be considered slightly impolite to write out a two-page essay before you've even made a single post featuring the actual game in play.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:04
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PurpleXVI posted:I remember most of the MoO3 fluff myself, but I don't want to break into it, since you're obviously saving some of it for later. So I'll just toss in tidbits relevant to MoO2 when you hit a part where I think there's something to add. Yeah, that would be the best, I think. I'm kind of excited to finally start telling you all the story of Center One and someone else posting about it before I can would be kind of awkward.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:09
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Also please don't forget to give me votes to which of those weirdos you'd prefer as enemies. Remember the farther down I put another race at set-up, the higher the chance we won't ever see them in the game. We can only play one race, but we can shoot up to 15. So which ones do you want to shoot first?
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Apr 11, 2016 22:17
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Libluini posted:We can only play one race, but we can shoot up to 15. So which ones do you want to shoot first? The Ithkul sound like a clusterfuck to deal with, we need them in the running for sure.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:51
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The Silicoids want to Nommo on some dudes. Even if they don't actually have any mouths.
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Apr 11, 2016 23:16
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Skynetniks vs the fleshy-ish skynetniks.
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Apr 11, 2016 23:23
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Silicoids for us. And lets go shoot us some menschen
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Apr 12, 2016 00:57
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Skynet's Kiddiewinks versus Traditionalist Fishmen. Also, thanks to MoO 3, the Trilarian homeworld actually had four races. It's just the fourth is, for some reason (Probably budget related) not playable in the game: The Darlok. That's right, the Darlok are a reaaaaallly old offshoot of the race, exiled simply because... Well, in a traditionalist society, who wants to trust a shapeshifter? As such, they went off and became a Master Spy Race, with the hidden goal of "gently caress up their homeworld brethren." This, and a lot more, is mentioned in MoO 3's Galactic Encyclopedia, which is... A surprisingly interesting read, considering the premises. For example, MoO 1 was, apparently, a vast social experiment by the Orions, set in motion before they nearly all died off between that game and MoO 2. Oh, and there's one other important thing in that Encyclopedia, but I think I'd have to ask permission to talk about that. Anyways, as far as Conquer the Stars go, while I dislike the Mrrshan (Design wise, yes, they're Cats With Tits), and find the Klackon redesign somewhat amusing (I know that, in order to make the game a lil' more accessible, they had to humanise my fave bug dudes a lil' bit... But they are still my fave bug dudes, and I like that NGD/Wargaming Labs are going to that effort), it's... Not bad, actually! Obviously, still not feature complete, and still in need of balancing (Most of the time, if you have a warscore advantage, you're going to win the fight by selecting all your ships, right clicking whatever poor bastards you want dead, then the cinematic camera button, and sit back and enjoy the fireworks), but I wrote some words about MoO: Conquer the Stars here (First Phase Early Access), and here (Second, and current phase: The story of how I effectively won the game with my favourite race, dem Bug Dudes  )Essentially, gameplay wise, it's definitely still in Early Access. Feels wise, apart from a few races, they've loving nailed it. (EDIT: My response to the Meklar's lines would, I suspect, be somewhat similar to this.) And spared no expense doing so... JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 01:24
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Be the crystal rockmen. put the other nonorganic races at the bottom of the enemy list. Purge organic life from the Galaxy.
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Apr 12, 2016 01:46
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Let's be the Death Crystals and purge the galaxy of the death-cult Ithkul for maximum 
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Apr 12, 2016 02:13
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Voting Robots versus Other Robots.
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Apr 12, 2016 02:20
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Silicoids want to kill all humans
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Apr 12, 2016 02:23
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sullat posted:Silicoids want to kill all humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_cfsZ9O6QA e: In case this is not clear because I am dumb this is a vote for silicoids killing humans. Bozart fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 02:45
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I know that they're not mechanically balanced but I think playing against the Ithkul is the best way to make for an interesting game. You should be the Silicoids because rocks are people too.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:21
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Remember that the Ikthul can't eat either of the races the OP picked sillycoids neighbouring Saurians
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Apr 12, 2016 05:06
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Skynet versus Ithkul. Because I want to see half the galaxy consumed by the Flood and then it's up to robots to cleanse it.
Ysengrin fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 05:47
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JamieTheD posted:Skynet's Kiddiewinks versus Traditionalist Fishmen. Once upon a time many years ago in the heady early years of the internet as a useful medium for marketing, I was an enthusiastic follower of this game during its development. They had a very active message board where the developers (led by one Alan Emerich) discussed game ideas with the fans and (over)promised all kinds of things about how the forthcoming game would work. It was actually the first time I can recall a major game design studio interfacing that heavily with its fanbase while a game was still in development, and as the game got closer to release, you could really start to see the flaws in doing so. For one thing, the forums pitched a huge poo poo fit after Emerich was quietly let go with only a few months left until release - it actually got so bad that they got him to come back onto the forum to post an open letter telling people to chill out and that the game was going to be fine without him and that his job was pretty much finished anyway! The same testing of the waters for online marketing resulted in this But I digress. To the point of the mysterious reason behind the Darlocks and several other classic MoO1/MoO2 races being unplayable, the reason was actually explicitly stated several times by the development team in developer diaries, video blogs (which was still exciting and new) and of course numerous forum posts. Emerich and the rest of the development team had decided that "Bear People" and "Cat People" and "Blue Space Babes" and "Shapeshifters" and "Psychic Wheelchair Guys" (there was enough outcry on the forums to eventually save the Psilons, but for a long time they were out) were stupid concepts for aliens, so they ended up scrapping most of the old races, re-imagining what was left, and creating a bunch of the remaining races out of whole cloth. In retrospect, this probably should have been taken as a bad sign. A few other bits of trivia:
I'll talk more later about some of the hilariously overambitious game concepts that didn't end up making it into the release version of the game.
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Apr 12, 2016 06:10
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For other similar trainwrecks during/in development, see: Sword of the Stars 2. Star Citizen. Oh, and the third X is eXploit (the resources you eXpanded into in step 2)
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Apr 12, 2016 06:36
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biosterous posted:Let's be the Death Crystals and purge the galaxy of the death-cult Ithkul for maximum You know, I like this. Sillicoids and killing the gently caress out of the parasites that's infesting the fleshies.
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Apr 12, 2016 07:45
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Skynet vs Squids What you gonna do about it, robot? Short circuit?
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Apr 12, 2016 07:52
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AJ_Impy posted:Skynet vs Squids Everybody knows underwater is just like low gravity for robots. 
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Apr 12, 2016 07:56
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Death crystals and Sakkra
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Apr 12, 2016 09:25
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Critic of the Dawn posted:Emerich and the rest of the development team had decided that "Bear People" and "Cat People" and "Blue Space Babes" and "Shapeshifters" and "Psychic Wheelchair Guys" (there was enough outcry on the forums to eventually save the Psilons, but for a long time they were out) were stupid concepts for aliens, so they ended up scrapping most of the old races, re-imagining what was left, and creating a bunch of the remaining races out of whole cloth. Yes, because replacing BLUE SPACE BABES with BLACK SPACE WEIRDOS is such a grand and amazing step forwards. Wow, though, it sounds like the people making MoO3 didn't really have any clue what they were doing. Some of the new races they added were cool, at least as concepts(I like how the Nommo look, gas giant dwellers are a cool idea and while the Ithkul are a bit edgelordy, I like, again, the IDEA, of playing a parasite race). But clearing out all those old races to make a MORE SERIOUS GAME FOR MORE SERIOUS PEOPLE, seems kind of stupid, because MoO was always at least a bit pulpy(and animal people, to me, always seems like a hallmark of older sci-fi stuff). You had space-travelling doom dragons, death crystals and amoebae as random space monster encounters. And the whole race to be the first to defeat the Guardian and claim Orion and its secrets also just reeks(in a good way) of older, pulpier sci-fi. I legitimately enjoyed a good bit of the fluff they wrote to explain the background, and some of the expanded racial backgrounds they created, it wasn't always perfect, but had some decent ideas, but the rest? Yeeaaaah, not so much of a fan.
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Apr 12, 2016 09:26
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Death Crystals vs. Ithkul Harvesters Count me in as another person in the "tried to like it," column. Heck I still have the strategy guide, which lays out what should be a pretty decent game.
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Apr 12, 2016 09:28
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Play as Silicoids and have your first neighbors be Ithkul. Also go play MOO1/MOO2 they are dirt cheap on GoG.
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Apr 12, 2016 11:34
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Silicoids versus Ithkul.
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Apr 12, 2016 12:06
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Rocks versus Humans. We'll steal the secrets of rock music from them and win a cultural victory.
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Apr 12, 2016 12:18
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The Amzing Space Adventures of Skynet! Todays tale! VERSUS THE FISHY TRILARIAN MENACE Edit: The true face of the Ithkul! 
Gridlocked fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 12:32
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Let's ROCK this bitch. Also Ithkul sound like perfect neighbours, what with the eating all those icky organic non-crystalloids.
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Apr 12, 2016 13:08
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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) Also: What German SF are you referencing? Perry Rhodan?
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Apr 12, 2016 13:11
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We are crystals right? Aren't all crystals the best friends of hippies
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Apr 12, 2016 13:28
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We should be Skynet's Bros because why not. And put all the races the AI does well in this game-you say that the Ithkul manage to snowball pretty well so throw them in.
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Apr 12, 2016 15:47
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Game playing itself? Sounds like the game tried to be Distant Worlds way too early.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:29
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