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only a german could lp this impenetrable game
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Apr 18, 2016 21:39
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There were some pretty from AARs on the old Atari forum, I think my favorite one had Psilons as Mafia overlords as a theme. "Is that a Grendarl in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" Bit of a shame that that forum is no more. From what I remember of the game, my game plan consisted of trying to collect as many minor races as possible, overexpanding all over the place and having the minor races colonize gas giants and stuff for me. You could generally rival AI Gasbags, provided you find your own gasbags (I may remember that the incorperal minors could also kind of settle gasgiants, but not very well) quickly enough and then use your own gasbags minors to colonize your gas giants. Since the AI gasbags dont colonize normal planets, while you effectively colonize gas giants and normal planets, this gives you quite a leg up.
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Apr 18, 2016 22:28
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Mad Wack posted:only a german could lp this impenetrable game
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Apr 18, 2016 23:28
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Mad Wack posted:only a german could lp this impenetrable game During one of my test-games I noticed you could actually automate most of that stuff and then ignore it. The game can "mostly" play itself, after all! Sure, your empire will be badly mis-managed, but as a player you probably only notice something wrong after a couple hundred turns.  If the AI weren't so terribly retarded, this would make MO3 one of the most easily playable 4x-games. As it stands though, welp.
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Apr 19, 2016 14:35
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MO3 has some nice ideas with pretty crappy implementation. Imperium didn't even have nice ideas.
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Apr 19, 2016 15:48
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 06: End of Peace  30 cycles of peaceful exploration come to an abrupt end when some alien assholes bombard Seginus II. The Dila Empire has a weird way of saying “Hello!”. They definitely don’t come in peace. We’re lucky this is still the early game and early game ships have some real trouble doing damage to planets.  The Dila are Saurians. They have some sort of Federation and are rather cautious right now. We also have 1 ship more than them, which considering our low production rate doesn’t bode well for the Dilarians. Those guys must be in trouble.  They control only one planet out of 7 inside their borders. These guys had a rough start, it seems. They’re on position 14 out of 16. The third worst place. Man, really rough. This game’s RNG really hated them.  Interesting fact: Like with the victory-menus knowing all kinds of poo poo we can’t possible know, we can switch our tech matrix view to whatever empire we’re in contact with. Also the ship bombarding us was a single shortrange-combat ship. (The Task Force shown is a division. A ship division can only have 1-2 ships, in this case just one.) The AI sometimes sends out really small combat fleets as explorers. It's kind of odd, but  And presto, space magic allows us to view the AI research in real time. The Dila aren’t doing badly, considering they only have one planet: They’re only 1-2 levels behind in everything. They don’t seem to have any tech we want and are missing some of ours. They probably won’t survive long enough to get any we can’t get, either. Yes, the RNG really wanted those guys dead.  One thing annoys me though: We still barely have any upgrades to make a real combat fleet. Next turn we get a little bit more free space for weapons and that’s it. Afterwards it’s back to waiting time.  Next turn our scientists suddenly realize how to project a massive EM-field around a ship without loving everything up. The way to our first shields are paved! This is of course only the theoretical research, we still need two levels more for our engineers to understand how to actually build a shield generator implementing this knowledge.  Another more practical research coming up soon will allow us to build smaller sensors, but with the same range and output. (It's the green ball looking thing, the "Miniaturized Sensor Matrix")  And you all have been waiting for it: Our new neighbors, the Raas! I don’t want to immediately attack them, so the Kingdom of Almandin graciously overlooks the unprovoked attack and asks in the most neutral way possibly for a trade treaty.  Most of the time, diplomatic exchanges take a while. The target empire gets your message the turn after you send it out and then it takes another turn for the answer to come back. If they answer, both you and the AI can be assholes and just ignore messages. Generally the AI prefers insults and threats to just ignoring, though. Oh, and both miniaturized normal drives and light armor are finished. Ships with light armor are now actually armored, instead of just having “Armor” painted on the hulls. In other news, Almandin VI joins our growing list of colonies.  As I like to do, I fill out DEAs for Almandin VI to future-proof our empire. The planet gets some industry, government and recreation, followed by some research because this planet will get a lot of population far later in the game and every little bit counts. Most of the planet will be filled with mining DEAs, of course. That’s why I colonized the planet in the first place, after all.  EM-shield research has started. Picture lots of weird looking shiny rocks experimenting with smaller shiny rocks to resonate electromagnetic fields and poo poo.  Diplomacy! The initial reaction to meeting us was -40 for the Raas. Ouch. Hate at first sight. Under “Casus Belli” you can see numbers, in this case -10, -13. Those numbers will tell you how far your relations have to drop before the AI will start declaring war on you. The Raas seem horrified at the very existence of crystalline life and will probably throw their little empire directly into our maw. Welp, I wanted to get some more research done first, but the game really wants me to showcase our lovely starting techs, it seems.   The Dila lost some ship somewhere. I’m guessing a colony ship landing, since with just one planet I’d see their enemies too if there were any fighting. After the Dila-scout reported back, the horrified Federation changed their internal focus to Limited Warfare and their border politics to Total War. They really fear Silicoid agents impersonating Raas and slipping across the border, it seems.  There’s no way we could misinterpret what is coming, so I’m recruiting some more infantry. Soon we will have to build warships and there won’t be any free space in the assembly line for ground troops anymore. (Until our inevitable victory, of course.)  Seginus II survived the bombardment with minimal damage, but I forgot to tell the AI what to build last turn and now I’m regretting it. The AI started building a system colonizer, but the other world is a useless drain on our resources right now, so I have to manually correct this error. Here you guys learn what happens if one of your assembly lines has already invested some production into a planned construction: The construction has to be scrapped first to make the slot free. The used production is lost and a large red “X” will block that slot for the rest of the turn. (It’s also the place where I learn the regional anti-space batteries aren’t actually an auto-building and have to be built in your assembly line for buildings. You still need a military DEA for them, though.)  The next turn demands a battle before it will start. Time for a video: Encounter at Deanton Don’t worry about the UI-details for now, there’ll be lots of battles in the future and lots of chances to explain everything. This one is just a short demonstrations to show you how the real-time battles look. For those who can't view YouTube-videos for some reason: We see the alien fleet at Deanton and retreat.  Galactic cycle 33 starts with some mixed news. A new leader shows up, the Dila Empire agrees to a trade treaty, but on the other hand our scout got driven out of Deanton and the Dila Empire declared war. Wait what? I hate it when the AI does this.  Tane Buneki is a Human. He is a master of trade and our space ports will generate 15% more money. His drawbacks are 5% less industry and 2% imperial taxes, both kind of nasty. But as the game has just demonstrated, trade is kind of iffy when playing Silicoids. When we eventually develop space ports and build them in our DEAs, we can at least generate more income from intra-imperial trade. There won’t be much external trade, though. Even then. Also ha ha, we don’t have any space ports right now, so we only feel the drawbacks. I clicked so hard on sack, my mouse nearly broke. Next turn this dud will be gone. This guy and his uselessness was a bad first contact with Mankind.  Since aliens have appeared, it’s time for our first secret agent. I’m taking a saboteur, who can take out military assembly-lines if we’re lucky. We won’t use him offensively, just to protect ourselves from whatever the Raas might try when they notice fighting someone five times your size isn’t a winning move. (Their probably vastly better spies can do this and other nasty poo poo to us, too.)  The Raas accepted our treaty, but apparently they looked up videos of Silicoids eating money on YouTube and got weirded out, because right after they declared war. Raas diplomat: "Your offer is interesting. We came to an agreement and accept your offer. Anything else?"  WAR! The Raas got spunk, you have to give it to them. They see creepy crystalline weirdos from outer space with more ships, better tech and five times as many planets and go: “Yeah, we can take them.” Raas diplomat: "We respect all life. We promise to keep a few specimen of your kind alive for further experiments. Our civilizations are now at war." Raas Diplomacy in Action  A war declaration punts your diplomatic relations down into hades. We’re down from -40 to -170!  If you’re looking closely, you’ll see the other side has two bars to our one. This is because in this window you can also see what the other population thinks about us, not only the government. Generally speaking, if you declare war to a species your own people love, they’ll generate more unrest. In practical terms this almost never happens. The difference between -40 and -170 may seem huge, but as long as it’s negative, the Raas civilians don’t actually care about their political leader committing genocide on their own people like this. They’ll happily follow them to their doom.  A fleet after retreat is forced to flee back through the star lane they came from until they reach the next system. Until then, you have no control over them. Also poo poo, Deanton is close enough to Innar to trouble our expansion-plans. We’ll need to deal with this now, because every ship we send will take half an eternity before it reaches Innar.  Since I have nothing else, I take a brand-new Discoverer and send the frigate to Innar. In 5 turns our fleeing old Discoverer will arrive and then just have to survive 8 more turns for reinforcements. Too bad our colony ship will arrive somewhere in-between and either be forced to flee back to Seginus, or be caught and destroyed. Let’s hope we can stop Raas-ships from breaking through long enough to secure the system.  I really don’t want to do this, but one unknown force of ships (well, one ship actually) from the Dila Empire is already beyond Seginus and will reach us a lot faster then our shield-research can finish. First priority is some protection for the Almandin-System. This Light Cruiser has better armor than our old system defense ships and is a carrier. Since the Raas have some oddly slow designs, I’m hoping this maximum speed carrier can just stay away and not get hit. Without shields and still objectively bad armor, this ship can’t take many of those.  The secondary weapon of the Shieldwall-class light cruise is six standard laser-batteries. It’s always good to have back-up, after all.  Seconds later, the game reminds me to take out the FTL-drive. That doesn’t belong on a SDS-ship. The free space I gain with this gets filled with more fighter bays and laser-batteries. Now the Shieldwall-class has the firepower of three of our Discoverer-frigates with lasers alone. With 28 Interceptors, the ship has enough alpha-strike power to kill 6-8 of the starting design explorers at once. (But to be fair, if we ever get into range to that many ships, they’ll be able to take this cruiser out, too. No shields, remember?)  After finishing the SDS Shieldwall design, I’m adding the Light Attack Craft Needle, another system ship. Using the second-smallest hull, this so-called Lancer is supposed to harry forces with their single medium-mass drivers and their 3 light laser-batteries. In effect, they’re scouts and will (hopefully) be added to the same system defense task force the AI will put our Shieldwalls in. The sensors were supposed to give an advantage to sight and to-hit chance in battle, but were bugged in vanilla. I vaguely remember either the patch or UO dealing with that, so if it works, it will give our carries some nice combat boost: Enemy squadrons will show up earlier in view and our weapons will hit more often. For a carrier, the first thing is immensely more important of course.  If we can get at least one of our light carriers build, we’ll be reasonably able to destroy everything the Raas could possibly send to us.  Our two oldest colonies are far enough along the line I feel save in adding a LAC each to their lines. (If you’re curious, boosting military production higher to get them build faster is not really a good idea for now: The bars are already at yellow, which means we won’t gain much beyond maybe 1-2 turns of building time, but we will waste tons of resources.)  Our fleet-overview again. The red mark reads “OUTDATED” in German. It means I made one of our SDS-designs obsolete. This will prevent the AI at Seginus and other still AI-controlled colonies wasting time and money on building them.  Turn 23 starts, but for now the war is just fizzling. Long travel in the early game sucks, there’s no sugar-coating this. Most people in the Kingdom of Almandin aren’t even taking this “war” serious and instead use those newfangled hydroponic farms to make new and exciting types of flowers. Next time we’ll see if our Silicoids start taking the alien threat seriously, or if there’s more silent amusement about the Raas’ strange antics.
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Apr 19, 2016 17:40
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Good old 4X AI. Intelligent enough to realize that the player is an ambitious, self-centered existential threat, dumb enough to launch a suicidal war against a much larger, better-developed empire.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:12
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Cythereal posted:Good old 4X AI. Intelligent enough to realize that the player is an ambitious, self-centered existential threat, dumb enough to launch a suicidal war against a much larger, better-developed empire. The sad truth it, this is an upgrade to vanilla-AI. In the original game, you could fully expect the AI to ally with threats like the Ithkul and then just meekly let them devour them from the inside. Edit: Seriously, in one vanilla game of ages past I found myself and my Meklar fighting a coalition of AI-empires lead by the Harvesters. And while I was wiping out one of their dumb monster colonies after another, their allies were angrily throwing themselves at me to defend them. "Guys, those things are loving eating you. Why are you trying to be on their side?" Then I got Ithkul in my own empire thanks to migration from infected alien worlds I had taken over. At that point I had tons of AI-controlled worlds. And some of them actually started building Ithkul-colony ships from their infested worlds, spreading the problem even farther. After 400+ turns of swatting them everywhere I just gave up. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 18:17
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What would actually happen if you got Ithkul in your empire and they ate all of your original species citizens?
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Apr 19, 2016 19:20
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PurpleXVI posted:What would actually happen if you got Ithkul in your empire and they ate all of your original species citizens? It's an ithkul bit funny, this feeling inside...
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Apr 19, 2016 19:27
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PurpleXVI posted:What would actually happen if you got Ithkul in your empire and they ate all of your original species citizens? An edible species (not us, thank god) can only be totally replaced if a player was dumb enough to take enough bad social picks to make people flee his empire. Why? Well, the devs actually thought this through and the Ithkul can't take over a region if it is filled with 100% non-Ithkul. So theoretically, your core worlds are safe while the Ithkul rampage through your less overfilled border-worlds. Now the problems start if people leave a full region and migration-mechanics shove some Ithkul in. Luckily this process is so goddamn slow and dependent on the RNG so much you'll never ever see a total takeover. But finding Ithkul everywhere like some sort of space-cockroaches is bad enough in my opinion. In case of a total takeover, we would become the Ithkul pretending to be the original species via diplomacy-hologram, of course. Our ships would still be following our original template, but all our ground troops would be Ithkul, all colony ships we can build would be filled with Ithkul and without feeding more people to the Ithkul we will suffer tremendous unrest. Mechanically, there would be no difference anymore between us and a player who started as Ithkul.
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Apr 19, 2016 19:40
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Society bonuses?
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Apr 19, 2016 19:45
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How the heck did MoO 3 get so ugly? MoO 2 still holds up today, in my opinion at least, but this looks dire.
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Apr 19, 2016 20:31
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CheeseThief posted:How the heck did MoO 3 get so ugly? MoO 2 still holds up today, in my opinion at least, but this looks dire. The modders tried to make Ultima Orion better, so arguably the base game looks even worse. It's certainly less colorful.
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Apr 19, 2016 20:41
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CheeseThief posted:How the heck did MoO 3 get so ugly? MoO 2 still holds up today, in my opinion at least, but this looks dire. 3D graphics age much worse than 2D graphics, in general. Libluini posted:An edible species (not us, thank god) can only be totally replaced if a player was dumb enough to take enough bad social picks to make people flee his empire. Why? It's kind of disappointing that the consequences wouldn't be worse than that.
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Apr 19, 2016 21:14
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PurpleXVI posted:3D graphics age much worse than 2D graphics, in general. Not every game can be Imperium
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Apr 19, 2016 21:15
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Libluini posted:Not every game can be Imperium Well, in Imperium the consequences of most actions are beneficial, because they make you lose the game or crash the game. The worst consequence is having to keep playing Imperium.
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Apr 19, 2016 21:19
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So was that all your terrible first impression, or are the lizards just quick to war?
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Apr 20, 2016 05:03
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Motion to find and bomb the poo poo out of those lizard fucks before we deal with our nominal enemy the Brain Slugs.
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Apr 20, 2016 06:29
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Oh god. I too was one of the whippersnappers whose first experience of developer interaction was the MOO3 forums. I remember playing the game when it finally arrived with a certain amount of desperation in an effort to wring any possible fun I could out of it. It took me ages to accept that the game was actually just a buggy mess and there was no rescuing it. One thing I remember in particular is that the combat sensor model was hopelessly bugged to the point of rendering sensors irrelevant - if you stacked insufficient sensors you wouldn't see the enemy until they were right on top of you, and if you stacked too many they would overflow and enemy ships would disappear when they got close. The game was insanely ambitious for its time, and the UI was already uglier than MOO2's when it came out. I never played the player-made patches because I didn't see any way it could be rescued. I will follow this LP relatively obsessively to see if I was wrong.
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Apr 20, 2016 07:28
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quote:and if you stacked too many they would overflow and enemy ships would disappear when they got close. Masters of Orion -1: A treatise on Stack Overflows
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Apr 20, 2016 09:22
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Aethernet posted:Oh god. I too was one of the whippersnappers whose first experience of developer interaction was the MOO3 forums. I remember playing the game when it finally arrived with a certain amount of desperation in an effort to wring any possible fun I could out of it. It took me ages to accept that the game was actually just a buggy mess and there was no rescuing it. One thing I remember in particular is that the combat sensor model was hopelessly bugged to the point of rendering sensors irrelevant - if you stacked insufficient sensors you wouldn't see the enemy until they were right on top of you, and if you stacked too many they would overflow and enemy ships would disappear when they got close. This is interesting. The modders discussing the sensor bug made it seem like they never worked at all in the vanilla game. For me, the existence of the overflow-error in finances causing instant game over through bankruptcy was a lot more annoying since I never noticed anything wrong with the sensors, but was the victim of my bank account overflowing into the largest possible negative number at least once. Glazius posted:So was that all your terrible first impression, or are the lizards just quick to war? The Raas are the most peaceful of the three Saurian races, but they're still quick to anger. And boy, did our bad first impression anger them quick. The AI has its presets to determine when a declaration of war would be appropriate and our own first impression is bad enough we will trigger a war declaration almost every time. When we want peace with someone, we just have to suck it down and take a defensive stance, hoping we can avoid tanking our relations even further until the enemy population becomes at least indifferent. At which point the AI will be forced to end the war, or at least let the war run out on its own.
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Apr 20, 2016 09:52
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This game is painful to watch someone else play. I can't imagine actually playing it myself. Intellectually I know I own it and have tried it, but I seem to have blocked those memories.
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Apr 20, 2016 14:43
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Morrow posted:This game is painful to watch someone else play. I can't imagine actually playing it myself. The last stage of grief is clicking "uninstall."
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Apr 20, 2016 14:58
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Oh, wow, this is a thread I never expected to see. MOO3 was the first game I ever got on the hype train for and, yeah, god it was a disappointment but I STILL prefer the modded MOO3 to basically any 4X made since besides Distant Worlds (including, ironically, the early-access MOO reboot, having tried both last night) because I hated MOO2-style micromanagement THAT MUCH. I'm actually picking it back up again to kill time before Stellaris releases, and I blame you (and myself, because I am clearly a broken soul).Nick Esasky posted:sooo, is the Ultima Orion mod without a English version or something? Are there even any recommended English mods for MOO3 these days? A lot of the changes in Ultima Orion are actually from the "Tropical" version of the main recommended MOO3 mod, the Unofficial Patch which is somehow STILL available here, so if your German ist nicht so gut you can still play a tolerable version of the game. (note: if you bought the GOG version rather than being one of the poor saps like me who literally bought this game on launch day thirteen years ago, you'll have to EXE-patch the game manually (there's a good set of instructions here rather than using the MOO3.exe that's included with the mod, because that will overwrite GOG's executable and start asking you for a CD again.) Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 15:56
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Gridlocked posted:Motion to find and bomb the poo poo out of those lizard fucks before we deal with our nominal enemy the Brain Slugs. second. and I'm running a Moo1 game in sympathy.
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Apr 20, 2016 18:07
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 07: The Peace Strikes Back  Turn 24 is somewhat mild. We can now use ECM to make our ships harder to hit and we get a small and totally useless upgrade to fighters: If we equip them with lasers, they can fire faster. Since lasers are a starting tech, this unadvisable for obvious reasons. Our planets continue to build upgrades like hydroponic farms and DEAs all over the place. The only relevant info is: One of our system defense carriers (with their already outdated laser-interceptors ) is completed. We can now sit back and be a bit more relaxed, surprise attacks on our capital system are now nearly impossible for a long, long time. Well, successful ones, anyway. Our ships are all steadily crawling along the star lines.  I’m trying to anticipate our explorers finding some good potential colonies in a couple turns, so I’m wedging another colony ship into my war plans.  This light cruiser here, even though it’s still basically only a re-arrangement of starting techs, is strong enough to wipe out all other system ships in this window combined. Fighters are nasty.  On the other side of our shortcut, my lonely scout is still trying to find out more about our elusive, strangely non-hostile other neighbors.  The next turn sees the obligatory list of upgrades and finished constructions and a novelty: Our first reported delay! It turns out protests against the running ECCM-project have forced the government to increase security measures. Now the research project will take 4 turns longer. Every turn the game rolls the dice to see if a project runs into a delay, if the delay is positive (the project can end earlier and research in the project’s main category continues before the project is even over) or negative (it takes longer and research can stall) and then it tests if the delay gets reported. If it gets reported, you get a message like the red one above. All those related picks from race customization come into play here.  Every ten or so research levels, we enter a deluge of research projects showing up, becoming available and getting completed. In vanilla the torrent never really stopped and every ship you build was already obsolete before it left the assembly line. Here at least we can relax sometimes. The reason we’re still sometimes flooded with techs is for balance-reasons: Related techs of similar strength are all positioned near each other on the tech tree, so players don’t get hosed over because they got a strong weapon early but stronger shields only show up after all their planets are smoking ruins. (Shields are important, by the way.)  Apart from the barrage of research and construction messages, nothing important happened last turn so I jump immediately to turn 26 for you. In this turn I can show how positive delays look: Both EM-shield technology and mass driver miniaturizing I got finished, but since the projects weren’t very long in time, it still took the expected number of turns. It’s something that always confuses me, even today. I’m guessing here the length of delays also depends on the RNG, because I sometimes had research projects jump from 8 turns to finished and from 5 to 13 turns. In the case of EM-shields, the positive delay was apparently less then one turn, so it still took the normal 5 turns to complete it.  Anyway, hidden under the growing mountain of messages (I keep putting off switching off the unimportant ones, since I live in constant deep fear of missing something) there was the message of the Cokanuk-system being explored.  Cokanuk III turns out to be near paradise-levels. So obviously I mark it for future colonization. Just too bad it’s quite far away for early game ships. This one will take a while.  Cokanuk is connected to three more star lanes, so exploring this edge of the Orion Sector will also take a while. At this point Master of Orion III reveals its secret subtitle: Waiting: The Game.  Our Energy-research is steadily creeping closer to the small shield generator, which we need to use our fancy new shield technology. Our first weapon that isn’t just a militarized tool will follow shortly after that. The lore-text for our starter weapons describes the lasers as repurposed mining lasers and the mass driver as repurposed industrial transport method.  One of the other technologies we’re researching right now: Automatic Ecological Fostering. It makes agricultural DEAs produce more by computerizing everything involving caring for plants/animals.  We also get some weapon upgrades. As always in the early game, they’re completely useless since we get better weapons just after. Also, our design auto-builder will always use the latest technology, so sometimes it uses upgraded old weapons just because the upgrades finished 1 turn after the modern weapons you want to use. Anyway, the Automatic Mass Driver seen here makes the standard mass driver fire 3x times as often, while taking 2x as much space. Another upgrade just below that makes mass drivers even better against armor by making them armor-piercing (armor absorption is reduced). The laser also gets an automated version soon to fire more often, but overall it’s also a waste of space. Not because it’s bad, just not good enough to compete with the coming new weapons.  Our Home Fleet now has two carriers, which is almost overkill to starting ships, but eh. The carriers will be completely outclassed in some more turns. And our colony ship en route to Innar is still 4 turns away. Our explorer-fleet is doing fine, though.  Our two oldest colonies are now busy building the two Privateer-ships I wanted, to claim some of our shittier planets as outposts for later. Every claimed planet, even just a small outpost, has to be reduced to zero population before another empire can claim it. This means peaceful neighbors will just ignore the outposted planet, while early game enemies will waste countless turns using their puny weapons on an unimportant outpost instead of your real colonies. It can get kind of wonky with this, though. I think you can take over other outposts by just dropping colony ships on them, which forces the outpost-population into your empire. The other empire won't like that at all however, so it's a situational thing. The AI doesn't do this, since they prefer to just shoot enemy populations.  Galactic Cycle 40 since the Kingdom reached for the stars again. It’s midsummer on Almandin V and the first new secret agent of the AIA has just finished the academy. Let’s see what Agent Petra of the Almandin Intelligence Agency has to offer.  Agent Petra was trained as a saboteur and will help us defending against foreign saboteurs causing unrest (added by UO) and blowing up military facilities. (Which will either slow down our assembly lines or harm whatever is build inside our DEAs.) Her Mantel/Cloak attribute is 1, which is literally the worst possible result you can get when rolling a new agent. Degen/Rapier is 2, which is barely better. Luck is also bad: 25 is one of the worst starting values I’ve ever seen. Loyalty is always 95 until we get techs for better indoctrination. To explain the numbers, Cloak handles the probability of getting discovered. Having a value of under 5 generally makes it nearly impossible to get into a healthy, prepared empire. A value of 1 here is the equivalent of “infiltrating” by crossing the border while broadcasting “I’m a spy” on all frequencies. Rapier (which was “Dagger” in vanilla, I think, no idea why the German translation changed it to a completely different weapon) handles the probability of an agent actually doing what he is supposed to do. The higher the value, the better the chance of wreaking havoc. If you ever want to see a spy giving you a freshly stolen new tech, you need high values here. 2 in this attribute translates to “Desk Duty Forever”. Luck is a value helping with both sides of the coin. Every new agent gets a value at the start of his/her career and the longer the agent lives, the lower it gets. 25 is again really, really bad. Generally you should only use agents above 30 luck, or even good attributes won’t help much anymore. Loyalty is the chance of the agent staying loyal. Later we can raise this to 100%, making it impossible for the agent to defect. Right now every turn there’s a 5% chance for every agent travelling around in foreign space to just stay there and join the other side. (I don’t think the spy really changes to the other side, from a game play mechanic he just vanishes, but I confess I couldn’t tell anyway until someone defects to us, which has never happened to me.)  This turn, our scientists finally start research project: Small Shield Generator. Soon we will be able to generate energy shields around our ships!  Some corrections are in order with diplomacy: I spend some time learning more about how diplomacy works, since I noticed my explanations were more confusing as I wanted them to be. (Until now, I solved every problem in MO3 with shooting, so having to explain diplomacy to others turned out to be kind of hard. The wonders of LPing.) Again, the lower bar shows our diplomatic relations with the selected empire right now. The bar at the top shows what the empire in the middle (us) thinks about the selected one. In this case, the marker is still in the yellow zone, meaning our population is most indifferent to the Raas. The bar in the middle shows what the selected empire (the Raas) think about us. Their opinion of us is even lower than our official relations. The typical Raas gets physically ill when being shown a picture of a crystal. I have no idea if the Raas just hate jewelry, or if it’s the idea of talking diamonds they take offense to. Tests and some reading revealed to me the actual meaning of the two numbers shown next to “Casus Belli”: It’s the numerical representation of the bars right below it. The AI still uses those numbers to decide when to declare war, it’s just not uh a direct static value telling them when to declare war. I was embarrassingly wrong about that.  Another thing I forgot: You can switch around the empire in the middle to look at things from their perspective. This of course switches the meaning of the higher two bars, so please don’t get confused! (I mix those two up all the time)  At Deanton/Innar, everything is calm. Still, I won’t be relaxing until our colony there is established and secure.  On the other side of our empire, a scout runs into the Imsaies-home system.  You are spared another 1 minute video of nothing happening, since the Annalona Empire is a lot more peaceful and doesn’t immediately send all their ships on intercept course. KEIN KAMPF = NO BATTLE  Another leader shows up in turn 28. I hope he is less useless as the last one.  Orakak Ardraa is an old and venerable master tactician of the Grendarl. He is a genius at planning battles and using spies to ensure his soldiers’ success. He’s also a corrupt fucker so legendary, the entire empire loses 2% taxes just so he can support his buddies and his lifestyle with bribes. Better than the last, totally useless one. But still too much trouble. A 5% bonus to winning battles when we’re still a lot of turns away from fielding a sizable force is useless and you just saw how lovely our agents are. Even if we’re lucky with rolls and get a good one, we need them for defense. Spending 2% of our income on bonuses we can’t use most of the time seems horribly inefficient, so I eject the fucker from the council.  The Dila Empire declares they want to punish us with a trade embargo. Since we’re not trading with them and at war, this does jack and poo poo. At least they’re calling us mighty. But the Almandin Parliament is still irritated by this useless waste of time.  From our main ledger: According to our ledger, we’re losing money. In fact, we have been losing money since forever, but our accounts gets larger and larger every time. My suspicion of something not being quite right in the background simulation has grown again. “AE” means “Antaranische Einheiten”. In the original version, the currency was “AU” for “Antaran Units”. And why we use the name of our worst enemy in our currency is something I will explain in a later post.  Even though the Dila Empire has been busy colonizing planets, they’re still far too behind us to be a threat. And to prevent them from catching up, I’m willing to spend some more time on colonizing myself. (Also we’re still having this annoying problem of being close to some substantial military upgrades, but not being quite there yet.)  Now we know were the other empire’s capital system is and I don’t want to provoke them, so I’m sending our scout in this sector back to Mula and beyond to the still unexplored star lane. The chances of running into anymore Imsaies-colonies should be low over there.  Okda IV is filled with more gas giant dwellers then our home world has Silicoids on it. Evidence suggests this is the capital of the Annalona Empire.  The other side of the Imsaies-sector. Running into a third alien race over here would be awkward for us. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen for a while yet. (Thanks to that shortcut, it would also be awkward for the Imsaies, of course.)  Turn 29 starts with another new thing: A random pirate event happens. In this case, the pirates show up in Almandin and start harrowing shipping lanes around Almandin II. As long as this event is in effect, Almandin II will suffer more unrest. The way to limit this event’s effects is having system defense ships. Which our core system has. Crisis averted!  Another couple important research projects start or start showing up on our future research radar (that’s the upper right corner). Space Fighters are dedicated space combat fighters, larger and heavier than our interceptors. They're also supposed to be slower, but spoilers: The game has only one speed for fighters and one for missiles. So it’s probably not a surprise when I mention I have never seen different types of fighters being faster or slower than the others. In raw numbers, they can do 50% more damage than a comparable interceptor, while only taking 20% more space in their mothership. A good upgrade.  Even more important: The research project for large-scale ground batteries has started. Bodenbatterien/Anti-Space Batteries are larger versions of the regional AS-batteries we already have and they can be built on every planet, not just one with a military DEA. As soon as an empire researches more than just the basic laser- and massdriver techs, a planet transforms into a fortress with these. AS-batteries have an insane range no direct-fire ship could hope to match and the only way to siege a planet without losing all your ships is extensive use of missiles and fighters. AS-batteries always use the newest available weapon technology, which is neat in the early game but can be abused later, since not every new weapon is a straight upgrade to the last.  Jägerpanzerung/Fighter Armor is even more of a game changer: Until now, all our fighters have zero armor and every hit they take will generally destroy them. Space Fighters have some structure points more than interceptors, but most weapons will still take them out in one hit. As lovely as our basic titan steel armor is, at least now sometimes a fighter will actually survive a hit. Existing ships can't be retrofit, so with those two new technologies, our old carriers are already a huge waste of resources. Boy, that was fast.  Laser Miniaturisierung I/Laser Miniaturization I reduces the size of laser-weapons by 20%. Every weapon can get two miniaturization-techs like that. And most we will actually use. Our basic laser tech sadly is far too old to be useful, regardless of how many upgrades we pack on top.  Missile Chassis Class I/Raketenchassis Klasse I: Necessary for light missiles. Right now we can only use a point-defense version of missile launchers. It can launch missiles really fast, but the missiles are terribly small. Theoretically, you can use them to take down enemy missiles and fighters, but in practice, missiles are too impractical thanks to needing ammunition. Not that troubling when shooting point-defense missiles at other missiles, but oh boy are they useless against fighters. We will have so much fun when I can show off fighters in space battles.   This is what we have right now to launch missiles: Damage and size are all reduced by 75% compared to “standard” size. On the other hand, point-defense launchers can shoot out missiles 10x faster than standard-size launchers. Situational useful, I guess. Class I Chassis counts as standard in everything except reload-speed. Reload-speed is still 50% faster than “normal”. Whatever that is. I guess Class 2 in this case. That’s still a long way off, though.  After all that tech-talk, I have to erase some dumb AI-orders. This colony ship was supposed to go to Cokanuk, but the AI instead wants to send it to Innar. Remember, the colony with a colony ship already arriving in the next couple turns? Yeah, the amnesiac AI will be a terrible headache in the future.  Wait, strike that our colony ship en route to Innar arrives next turn already. We’re also due another system survey. On the chance of sounding greedy, I hope for some more good planets. Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Apr 22, 2016 |
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Apr 22, 2016 14:04
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"Mantel und Degen" is the equivalent German idiom for "Cloak and Dagger", so that explains why they went with that. What I absolutely don't get is the tech upgrade system, especially in light of MoO 2. There, researching new weapons also improved existing tech through miniaturization, and refits were possible. Why would you then make a sequel where weapon options are separate research projects that are effectively completely wasted when you go to the next tier and also not allow you to rejigger existing ships with new gear? I mean, I get that they overreached with the complexity and that explains many boneheaded decisions in this game, but this seems so blindingly, obviously worse to me and I just can't figure out a context in which someone thought this was a worthwhile thing to change.
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Apr 22, 2016 16:02
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Gatac posted:"Mantel und Degen" is the equivalent German idiom for "Cloak and Dagger", so that explains why they went with that. Wow, somehow I completely missed that. I got hang up on the Dolch/Dagger-question so much I never made the mental connection between the different idioms. On MO3-research: It was the first time ever for me to get the ability to design better units instead of just living with what games like Civilisation doled out, so for me this is only bad in hindsight. There were many games after Master of Orion 3 were I went like: "Wait what, I can refit my old units to use new tech? What kind of witchcraft is this??!?". In MO3, you can shrug and recycle your old units to get something back. All that time spent building obsolete units though, that's lost forever.
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Apr 22, 2016 16:12
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You could refit your ships in MOO2. You also didn't need to research upgrades individually. There are so many aspects of MOO3 that were apparently designed to be as convoluted as possible.
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Apr 22, 2016 16:18
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Aethernet posted:You could refit your ships in MOO2. You also didn't need to research upgrades individually. There are so many aspects of MOO3 that were apparently designed to be as convoluted as possible. To be fair, you don't really research upgrades "individually". It's more like, the research categories you spend your points on automatically vomit them forth. And since three of our categories are far more important than the other three, we're not even really getting a choice on how to spend our points. Well, we have the choice to fail, I guess.
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Apr 22, 2016 16:39
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quote:Theoretically, you can use them to take down enemy missiles and fighters, but in praxis missiles are too impractical thanks to needing ammunition. I presume the word here is meant to be 'practice'. I can't come up with a funny joke for 'praxis'.
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Apr 22, 2016 20:07
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Bloodly posted:I presume the word here is meant to be 'practice'. I can't come up with a funny joke for 'praxis'. loving hell, looks like my mothertongue wedged itself inbetween wanting to type "practice" and actually typing. I'm fixing this right now. Good catch!
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Apr 22, 2016 20:14
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This game is such a seemingly perfect showcase for Extra Credits's "Complexity vs Depth" argument. I think we can all agree that it's way up there on the Complexity axis of the graph, but I think we're also seeing that it's a lot of poorly-conceived busywork - and anyone who's played it feel free to correct me, but it certainly feels like there's not a lot of meaningful choices in how you play this. What's the point in hundreds of customizations and decisions when the game is so badly put together that you straight up don't want to engage with so much of it? Completely baseless assertion: A good game needs a strong central loop asking the player to juggle no more than, say, a dozen mental items at a time. Anything more than that, you're gonna be jumping from one sub-problem to another constantly without being able to grasp the entire situation. Once you have pared down your game to this and made sure that the player understands how these (up to) twelve items function, you can start to introduce rules to modify them - not add more things to worry about, but new ways to engage with what's already there. I'm not one of those people who says that every game needs to be pure fun at every point of its gameplay. It's okay to challenge the player or require some work to unpack. But a design where every fiddly little thing has its own fiddly little system and rules to contend with is doomed to permanent residency in Grognard City. Build out from a solid core of game and add wrinkles that encourage interesting decisions and trade-offs, don't dump a heap of simulation onto the ground and then go looking for the game inside.
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Apr 22, 2016 20:42
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I loved fortifying planets in Master of Orion 2. Planetary beam batteries, planetary missile batteries and a hefty space station could murder most attacking fleets. It did a lot to make sure you didn't have to be everywhere at once with your fleets, all the static defenses meant that really only determined attacks were a danger. Also what's the difference between the regional and planet-wide beam batteries? Just a matter of scale?
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Apr 22, 2016 21:21
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PurpleXVI posted:I loved fortifying planets in Master of Orion 2. Planetary beam batteries, planetary missile batteries and a hefty space station could murder most attacking fleets. It did a lot to make sure you didn't have to be everywhere at once with your fleets, all the static defenses meant that really only determined attacks were a danger. You can do that in part 3 too, just with a giant caveat we'll be getting to in the far future of this thread. And to be honest, while the planetary batteries are a fleet-destroying horror, regional batteries were a low-scale addition by the modders I never could quite wrap my head around. I can't even remember seeing them in action, since by the time they could be relevant, you generally already have the better version. Planetary assaults in the later game tend to be orgies of destruction where whatever they do is easily overlooked. And I'm the master of overlooking. But for this LP, I'll make sure to build lots of regional batteries on our lower-tier borderworlds, so we can eventually get a battle recorded when someone attacks them.
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Apr 22, 2016 21:38
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I have to say, one of the most worthwhile changes they made in 3 was letting everybody have the opportunity to get every tech. As opposed to MoO2, where that was a racial perk. For reasons. (I always played psilons because gently caress dicking around with tech trading...)
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Apr 22, 2016 22:46
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Bloodly posted:I presume the word here is meant to be 'practice'. I can't come up with a funny joke for 'praxis'. Actually "praxis" means practical knowledge gained from experience, as opposed to theoretical knowledge gained from reading or other hands-off education. So yeah, missile praxis is they ain't worth it.
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Apr 23, 2016 02:13
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That the two primary spy attributes are "Cloak" and "Dagger" is the first point in this game where I actually laughed with the game instead of at it. re: "praxis": the best part of English is how we steal the same word like six times and then repurpose it slightly differently depending on source.
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Apr 23, 2016 03:41
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The sad thing is, I didn't know that "praxis" was also a word which exists in English, I just changed back to German mid-word in practice = in der Praxis It's kind of dumb, but I'm so bad at foreign languages I sometimes slip from English to German and back without noticing.
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Apr 23, 2016 09:28
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