Rant: Things that sucked about...

[President_Elect_Shang]

Yimboli said:To which I'd counter, "why the hell are you playing se5? get off the forums you troll."

I don�t see how this comment was called for.

[Raapys]

With some data patches and mods MoO3 is easily a classic and on my 'best games' list. I wouldn't really compare it to Space Empires or even MoO2 though, it's an entirely different game.

How come you thought the UI was so terrible, Atrocities? I thought it was actually rather ingenius, considering how much information you can access in just a few clicks, and generally the way it's all set up. There's room for improvements, like with all things, but overall I thought it worked nicely.

But yeah, it was released as an Alpha/Beta version, sadly.

[Tim_Ward]

Have you tried the moo3 patcher? At the risk of being flamed, I'll just mention that after I applied the moo3 patcher and a few mods moo3 was insanely fun... http://bhruic.dyndns.org/patcher/

No. But the time I've heard of it, I'd pretty much lost any interest in playing Moo3. Maybe one day I'll give it a go.

[AngleWyrm]

MOO3:
3-D galactic map was a bad idea. There's a patch to flatten the galaxy so that distances seen on-screen are correlated to how far apart stars are in game.

Enforced fleet composition was a joke. Imposing rules about which kind of ships can go in what part of the fleet, and how many, turned into just design a ship that SAYS it's a picket scout.

SEV:
There's a little bit of that going on with SEV, where the programmers are doing the DesignType field for the player. Recent changes also include programmers doing the research choices for the player, and older ones as insisting on some of the ship components for the player. This is a failure to recognize--player choices should not be overtly chosen by the game designer.

A good game designer changes the outcomes. Hey, when's the last time you heard the expression "Of course, it's up to you..."? By the time you hear that, the 'correct' choice is obvious, right?

[Yimboli]

President_Elect_Shang said:

I don�t see how this comment was called for.

=(

Alas. Didn't mean to stir emotions. perhaps a smilie after that would have highlighted my jovial tone. I'm sorry if you took it harshly.

I only meant to highlight a similarity between moo3 and se5 - they're both much better after you download a couple mods.

In hindsight, that was a dumb way to do it. Too late for hindsight though! =/

[Sabrax]

I hate to admit but with the patches and a couple of mods (strawberry and chocolate for example) I actually thought MOO3 turned out to be alright. Admittedly it's a RADICAL departure from MOO2 and I think that was part of what killed it. My biggest complaint is it gets repetetive (sp?) late in the game but I honestly still play it.

[President_Elect_Shang]

No big deal. It�s hard to convey emotions across the board, which is why I tried to make my observation as neutral as I could.

[Artaud]

AngleWyrm said:
One of the main probs with 4x is their economic explosion. There's some initial struggle to survive, a critical mass, and then an exponential growth that trivializes all money.

I think it is mostly because the currency is magically centralized.

If all resources were restricted to their locale, the game wouldn't explode. Freighters would have to be used to ship minerals to a factory. Shipyards could only produce with what's on hand. And the result would be a lot less explosion.

I agree with you on all points, but for many players such a degree of micromanagement would be intolerable.

I myself enjoy micromanagement, but I also like to have a rudimentary AI to automate certain things if I decide to use it.

I like micromanagement, but when my SEIV empires reach a certain size I'm a crappy micromanager. I forget systems for turns and turns, I forget to add stuff to the R&D queue, etc.

So, I don't complain about the SEIV AI. My own sloppiness in the later stages of the game I call "the friction of government," and in my eyes its effects are balanced out by weaknesses in the AI.

So I always have fun.

[Baron Munchausen]

AngleWyrm said:
One of the main probs with 4x is their economic explosion. There's some initial struggle to survive, a critical mass, and then an exponential growth that trivializes all money.

I think it is mostly because the currency is magically centralized.

If all resources were restricted to their locale, the game wouldn't explode. Freighters would have to be used to ship minerals to a factory. Shipyards could only produce with what's on hand. And the result would be a lot less explosion.

These problems are due to the extremely abstract nature of the economic model. You have a general availability of minerals, radioctives, and organics, and you have a general 'mood' of the population affecting productivity. But nothing about the logistics. The relative availability of one resource does not affect any of the others, and the relative availability of labor has only the very crudest effect (things stop when the population riots).

In the very early betas MM had workforce as a factor in facility production. Each facility required a certain number of workers to operate at full efficiency and if there were less available the output/production would be reduced accordingly. Unfortunately, when some testers complained he completely removed it instead of trying to adjust it. If he had just tried some different models than 'fill from top to bottom' (meaning the facility workforces filled like a single resource tank and some would have zero work force while others were at full staff) -- proportional distribution would have been so much better -- most testers would not have been so unhappy. He could even have used my suggestion to make 'productivity' itself a seperate resource. Worker time is also a resource, after all. So count each population point as generating a certain amount of 'labor' and have technologies that multiply this just like you do for mining or farming or whatnot. You could then have very high tech products that use little resources but require lots of labor to produce. (Like modern electronics!) This would lead naturally to large population centers being large production centers -- unlike the game is now where you can put a huge shipyard complex anywhere at all.

All sorts of interesting economic wrinkles are possible with a system that takes labor supply into account. But he was afraid to experiment anymore and that was the end of that.

[AngleWyrm]

He could even have used my suggestion to make 'productivity' itself a seperate resource. Worker time is also a resource, after all. So count each population point as generating a certain amount of 'labor' and have technologies that multiply this just like you do for mining or farming or whatnot.

This is my favorite economic model, where labor is a valued asset. Farms and Mines could be considered as just advanced tools, much like a complex hammer, for increasing the rate of production.

And producing...There's an interesting word. What about converting one type of resource (minerals and organics) into another (Starships and Farms)?