21 ms·

Master of Orion

250 points by doppp 7y ago

mundo 7y ago
Playable free at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Master_of_Orion_1993 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Master_of_Orion_1993 if, like me, you got halfway through the article before the urge presented itself.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  you can also get all of them through Steam if you need an easy means to deal with this, they are around two dollars each. Sadly 1 & 2 are not listed compatible with Catalina (Mac OS)
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    GOG has them, too -- with Linux packaging for us Linux people.
    - DerekL 7y ago
      I bought MoO Classic and MoO 2 on GOG.com a while ago. I just tried installing and playing them on macOS Catalina, and I can verify that they work. But the stand-alone installers aren't notarized, so you'll have to approve them manually, or use the GOG Galaxy app.
  - reiichiroh 7y ago
    No 64-bit OS X DOSbox?
  - xycodex 7y ago
    Bought the 1+2 package on gog, works on catalina
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- smhenderson 7y ago
  I just bought both MOO I and II as a bundle on GOG for $2.09. Well worth it! (it's on sale from $5.99 at the moment) https://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion_1_2 https://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion_1_2
- Diederich 7y ago
  Wow, thanks I think? You probably cost me quite a few hours of time.
compiler-guy 7y ago
This is just an amazing game. I still play it quite regularly. I have an old Mac mini in a back room that I keep explicitly for that purpose. When the original machine gave up the ghost, I shelled out a couple of hundred bucks for a "new" obsolete mac mini just to be able to keep playing. And I will do it again when this one dies. Such a great game. I also play Civ II on this machine occasionally. Part of the magic is how simple the game play is relative to more modern games.
- cik 7y ago
  Don't know if it helps - but it's on Steam, and even behaves on Linux. Hell the emulation is painful enough that even the real waits are part of the game.
- cabalamat 7y ago
  If you have the original DOS .EXE, it runs without problems in DOSBox on Linux.
- darkmighty 7y ago
  I've played it recently and the waiting times between actions made it put it down. It's incredibly slow to do anything substantial. It could probably be fixed through a speed up button in an emulator, but I didn't go the trouble. As much as it seems like a solid strategy game, there are better modern alternatives. It was nice for the historical perspective though.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I used to love Masters of Orion II; I would play as the Psilons, get a ridiculous technological advantage, and produce massive death-star like Dreadnought ships that could vaporize any target or planet in one mega-beam. The game had a flaw, though. The AI opponents would mass up hundreds of zergling-like very weak ships, and they would EACH get a turn in combat. So my 4 dreadnoughts would wipe 4 of their ships, then 296 enemies would fire individually and miss onto my mega-shields...then they'd be down to 292 after my turn...then 292 misses...and I'd leave the game for 3 hours until the battle finished.
- chuckwnelson 7y ago
  100% agree. Always loved playing the Darlok and stealing everything (especially you tech researching races). I always dreamed of recreating this in the browser with an online multiplayer component, but the battle system was always flawed in my opinion.
  - hyperpl 7y ago
    Agreed re: Darlok. I have the most fun playing with them.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > The game had a flaw, though. Yeah, the game (and the original) has a number of flaws that can make winning pretty easy. I've adjusted my play to intentionally avoid them. You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly. But when I want an easy win in MOO2, what I tend to do is to amass a large enough force that I can start just destroying planets. Because the number of ships you can have depends on the number of planets you have, and the AI is stupid, you can bring even the most overpowered enemy to its knees by avoiding direct fights with their forces and destroying their planets. Each planet that gets destroyed results in multiple enemy ships that go away because they can no longer be supported. The best way to play either of the MOOs, though, is against real life human players. They aren't stupid.
  - 7y ago
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I love this blog, even if it is a little weird at times. Some of the best and most well documented history of video games I've come across.
- doersino 7y ago
  Define "a little weird" – I've been following Jimmy's other blog, The Analog Antiquarian [1] (and also read a few of the non-gaming focused posts on this blog), and so far nothing "a little weird" has stood out to me. Not refuting you – just curious to know what you mean. [1]: https://analog-antiquarian.net https://analog-antiquarian.net
  - danko 7y ago
    Not to put words in OP's mouth, but I'd guess the weirdness is in a couple of things: 1) Jimmy can go deep on some extremely obscure corners of the industry (e.g. interactive fiction movements that maybe only a few dozen academic acolytes are even aware of). 2) The occasional deep tangent. For example, I don't think a month-long mini-biography of Edward Mannock was really necessary to appreciate the Amiga game _Wings_. But then again, I loved that tangent, so it's the kind of weirdness that I can personally embrace. I'm guessing the Analog Antiquarian is going to end up ultimately absorbing that energy anyway.
    - AcerbicZero 7y ago
      You've explained it better than I could, although in retrospect I should have included an explanation originally. Esoteric would have been a better word than weird, but I guess my coffee hadn't kicked in yet.
pvg 7y ago
One thing I find odd about the Space 4x genre is that it remains popular and new games or expansions for existing ones come out fairly regularly but there hasn't been a genuine hit in it, seemingly since MOO II or so.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Stellaris? Endless Space? Galactic Civilizations? It's a bit niche next to Civilization, or Battle-Royale-FPS-of-the-week, but it's not quite at the level of flight simulators.
  - pvg 7y ago
    None of these have been genuine hits, really. They are not terrible (well, maybe some of the GalCivs have been near-terrible). I don't see anybody ever writing the sort of retrospective on any of them as the one on MOO in this article.
    - TillE 7y ago
      Stellaris is truly excellent, I think. It's not turn-based, but otherwise it's the closest thing to a MOO2 successor I've ever played. It does a lot to capture the magic of exploring space as a growing empire, especially through the special encounters and branching scenarios which go to some pretty wild places. I also love the huge variety of gameplay experiences offered depending on the attributes of the species you choose to play as.
      - pvg 7y ago
        Stellaris is a decent enough game but I don't think the comparison to MOO2 is particularly apt. Right in this thread you can read people talking about MOO2's quirks and deficiencies or the fact that they still play it - this, to me, says something about the strength of its design. Stellaris, conversely, doesn't even have a static core design - the game changes drastically with every expansion. It's more of a sequence of related games, some better than others, using the same engine.
JohnFen 7y ago
Master of Orion and Master of Orion II (they are very, very different games) are two of my all-time favorites to this day. I started playing them when they were first released, and they've never left my game rotation. As it happens, I've been playing the original MOO again for the last couple of weeks!
- foobarian 7y ago
  It was difficult to play MOO for a while due to driver/emulation shenanigans but it got easier again thanks to the emulation community's improvements. Now you can play it in the browser or get it on Steam. Such an amazing game. For the past 20 years I have been using this endgame quote [1] as a quip in casual conversation. My favorite way to play is to build a nuke fleet and wipe out enemy colonies that cross me. [1] https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/orion_019.png https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/orion_019....
ThePhysicist 7y ago
I always loved Ascendancy (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendancy https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendancy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeXKf6e46I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeXKf6e46I), which I still play sometimes and still find interesting. It gets a bit boring towards the middle / end of the game though as the AI is not very advanced and easy to beat. Still I found it to be more polished than "Master of Orion".
- conanbatt 7y ago
  I loved ascendancy but that game is unfinished. Combat made no sense, the AI was super dumb. But it had potential!
  - ThePhysicist 7y ago
    There's an AI patch that makes it somewhat better though. For me most of the joy of the games was in building up a galactic network, so I still enjoyed it very much even with the "dumb" AI.
kensai 7y ago
Does everyone agree with me here that the modern remake missed the mark? http://masteroforion.com/news/legend-reborn http://masteroforion.com/news/legend-reborn
- santoriv 7y ago
  It was a remake of MOO2, not MOO 1. And yes it was terrible. Remakes (or games very similar to MOO 1) are Dominus Galaxia and Remnants of the Precursors.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    > It was a remake of MOO2, not MOO 1. And yes it was terrible. Have you played it recently, or just at launch? At some point, they did a pretty big overhaul and made a lot of improvements. I still prefer Stellaris because it has more depth, but MOO is certainly playable.
- skrowl 7y ago
  I remember being SO excited for MOO reboot, then it ended up being terribly disappointing. I went back to Stellaris after about 2 hours with new MOO.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    I don't get Stellaris. I played it 10 hours waiting for the game to start.
- ordinaryradical 7y ago
  You should take a look at Dominus Galaxia—it hews much closer to the original Master of Orion philosophy while having some nice bits of modernization. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173590/Dominus_Galaxia_KS_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173590/Dominus_Galaxia_K...
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
This game is extremely great, still influencing game design and space strategy games. Strangely, despite so many years and advances in technology, no other game could quite capture the charm of the great original Master of the Orion. Ironically, the closest was Master of the Orion 2, which had nice features - I most liked that I could capture enemy population instead of extermination, converting them to be my citizens and creating a diverse empire (long before it was cool!!) - but it kinda lacked the sense of surrounding mystery, great black dread, where the snarks lurk to prey on my tiny empire of three sols....
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  I totally forgot you'd have the conquered people as citizens...you could also replace your people with robots. I don't think it made sense with every playable race, but certain races that were bad on food or the planet had bad food, you could use robots to improve your bottom line. Eerily familiar...
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    We once had a three-player hotseat game. I made an industrial-focused race based on humans, second player made a psylon-based race of super scientists... And the third player wiped the floor with us on first contact. He made a race of silicoids who could eat rocks and breeded like crazy. He took all the maluses for strength gravity etc and easily destroyed us through sheer numbers. So I guess rocks as food and breeding is THE strategy in moo2
gavanwoolery 7y ago
Master of Orion was notable in that it was the first game I remember with "meaningful" NPC interactions. Even though interactions were quite limited (make/break alliances, espionage, trade, etc), early alliances could determine the final outcome of the game. But more importantly, it felt emotionally compelling. I found myself getting angry at certain factions when they spied/voted/etc against me. They also took the time to illustrate dispositions IIRC, so you could see when a race was happy or angry with you.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  A neat little experiment in meaningful NPC interactions was Siboot[1]. The DOS version is probably available somewhere. It's rock-paper-scissors with a social element. Well worth at least an evening's play. The author has released the mac source-code, but good luck building it. The DOS version is available at various abandonware sites and that's probably the easiest way to play it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy...
- hikarudo 7y ago
  Some twenty years ago, while playing Master of Orion, I asked the Humans to ally with me and go to war against the most powerful race. They replied something like: "Yes, we will be your allies. We fondly remember when you gave us +10 Terraforming."... which had happened scores of turns earlier, when in desperation I bribed them with tech so they wouldn't attack me!
ppeetteerr 7y ago
This game, along with Master of Magic, Civ 1, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dune 2, were the beginnings of strategy gaming for me. It's amazing to see that most of these games have been remade or copied (Stellaris, Age of Wonder, Civ 6, XCOM 2, Star Craft, respectively), and that the genre lives on.
- meesles 7y ago
  I love it. To me, the biggest limitation of physical games is that at a certain point (much like real state/warcraft), it becomes impossible to manage the sheer volume of properties and game pieces. Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors. I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. But... imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming. It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out. When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff!
- yyyk 7y ago
  Despite the similar setting, Stellaris is a very very different game, almost a different genre. MOO focuses on almost Risk-style gameplay and combat and does an excellent job at it. Stellaris focuses on roleplay and economy management (and some mid-late game issues prevent it from being great IMHO). It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions.
  - the_af 7y ago
    See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate! These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on. That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course! Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement. R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering -- my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time :)
hyperpl 7y ago
I've been playing this since 1993 and can't think of any 4X game that is as tight as this in terms of structure and playability. For those that don't know, there is an SDL re-creation that reimplements the underlying engine (you still need the original assets to play of course). https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom I've beaten it on impossible with nearly all races although I generally prefer to play with 4 races, medium galaxy on the hard setting.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  This is the more active fork of Kilgore's work: https://gitlab.com/Tapani_/1oom https://gitlab.com/Tapani_/1oom
  - hyperpl 7y ago
    Ha, beat me to it!
  - Brave-Steak 7y ago
    Hmmm, maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see any exe to run and there are no instructions for compiling it. Am I missing something? edit: Okay, it's in https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/blob/master/INSTALL https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/blob/maste... Don't know why that'd be in a separate file, but okay. And they're Linux-only. At least it seems that the original Kilgore version provides Windows binaries. https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/-/releases https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/-/releases
    - intrepidhero 7y ago
      Section 3 of your linked file has instructions for Windows.
      - Brave-Steak 7y ago
        Which is cross-compiling from Linux.
jtolmar 7y ago
I played MOO1 for the first time a few years ago, and it's by far my favorite 4x game. The sliders cut down on a lot of busywork present in MOO2 and Civ, the random tech tree is spicy, and the AI is much more interesting than the usual friend-foe modifiers system (major differences are ignoring friend-foe if someone is an easy target, dogpiling the leader, and undeclared early game border disputes). Highly recommend if you like strategy games and haven't played it. I like it so much that I've tried writing a clone a few times (but the latest attempt got sidetracked and turned into a game about interplanetary rail networks.)
- labster 7y ago
  I also like MOO the best because of the lack of busywork. In a way, it feels a lot like a Euro board game, with sliders instead of meeples working the planets. Well, like a Euro except for the glassing your opponents' planets part; genocide is kind of rare in cardboard. But it is possible to play and win without doing that, in most games anyway. And then you're playing a game where if you collect enough "points" from your economic engine -- population from terraforming -- you win the game. Now can you offer further explanation of this "interplanetary rail" thing? Is it Galaxy Express 999 style?
  - jtolmar 7y ago
    You decide what resource a planet produces, then hook it up to nearby planets that provide the resources it wants, which expands how far it can send its resource along the network. The network itself is composed of rail lines directly between planets. Screenshots on my twitter: https://twitter.com/LiterallyOwls/status/1218418806520979456 https://twitter.com/LiterallyOwls/status/1218418806520979456
Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
MoO was a masterpiece. MoO II was even better, IMO, with more depth. The ability to create your own race alone is huge. We don't talk about MoO III. Then the MoO reboot happened...terrible at release, but it got overhauled at some point and it actually made the game enjoyable.
- hyperpl 7y ago
  I appreciate that you acknowledge both as being masterpieces. I've found that the community is bifurcated w.r.t MOO1 vs MOO2 and it's great to see more people that appreciate both. I haven't managed to get into MOO2 yet but it's on my bucket list for 202x. If it can yield any semblance of the awe I've had for MOO1 then I'm in for a real treat!
  - binarycrusader 7y ago
    I think the best thing about MOO2 by far was the rather memorable audio/music. Especially the unique music they had each time you interacted with another race.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I seriously love them both, but for very different reasons. They're very different games and each requires a totally different approach.
- yyyk 7y ago
  MoO2 has some dramatic improvements (races, leaders, better AI) but also some dramatic drawbacks (planet micromanagement). An MoO1.5 - with the MoO2 improvements but more MoO-style gameplay would have been awesome.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    I always found that the planet micromanagement is fun in the early game, but tedious late game when you control 20+ planets and are expanding quickly as you take over enemy planets.
lacker 7y ago
I loved playing Civ 1. I hear a lot of times people say, oh kids should be taught money management in school. To me, playing a strategy game where you have to manage your own money supply was the best education in this sort of concept. If you save up your resources, you'll be able to do more powerful things in the future, which requires the tough emotional work of foregoing something you want now. But, sometimes that thing you want right now really is important, and you need to think hard about the difference.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  But... money doesn't mean much in Civ 1. The first thing you do is cut the tax rate to the bare minimum, often zero, so that you can route all your trade into science instead. You need to cover the maintenance costs of your buildings, but any surplus that goes into your treasury becomes nearly worthless -- the things you can spend gold on are garbage compared to science / happiness.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Btw, in the late 1990s, Russian sci-fi writer Sergey Lukianenko had written two novels ("Line of dreams", "Emperors of illusions" [1]) set in MOO universe, which are quite entertaining. Too bad he had turned a fascist and Putin's fanboy who viciously supports Crimea annexation and war with the Ukraine... [1]: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%91%D0%B7 https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%...
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
Glad the blog goes into the board game antecedents. Having played a lot of board and computer games, what I'm hoping for these days might be called "Dynamicland, but for games." At present we have to choose between real-world sociality and the power of computing for simulation; why not both? If I can play multiplayer MOO with my grandkids while looking at each other, rather than screens, I'll be happy.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  I have seen tabletop gamers do various things with projectors and/or tokens with QR codes to keep track of things on a computer while interacting with things physically. I haven't seen anything that wasn't a one-off to scratch a single-person's itch though.
Waterluvian 7y ago
Some UIs from back in that era hold up really well, in my opinion. From the article, check out this UI: https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/orion_013/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/orion_013/ It also reminds me of the original X-COM UFO Defense UI, which I think also holds up incredibly well decades later.
pridkett 7y ago
It took me forever to read this article. Because I got distracted when the article mentioned VGA Planets still existed and was actively maintained. That game was incredible back in the BBS days. Delightful to find a memory like that lives on.
entangledqubit 7y ago
Anyone else later transition to the heavily moddable 4X Space Empire IV?
- SomeHacker44 7y ago
  I played SEIV for years, and it was a wonderful game. I even built a "Play by Web" system that allowed remote turn based multiplayer for it via e-mail and web that lived for years, even after I handed it off to others to continue. What a great game.
zaroth 7y ago
Maybe someone here can help with this. Back in the late 80s in the days of BBSing games of Trade Wars and Tele-Arena... I have a faint recollection of playing an entirely text-based space adventure game with my brother. The first computer my brother and I ever had access to was a Wang, I have no idea what operating system it ran. I was 6 or 7 at the time. I'm pretty sure that's the machine we used to play this game, as well as our own instance of Trade Wars, when we weren't logged into Argus BBS over the 1200 baud. OK, so this game we played. It was like a explore and conquer game, there was a list of worlds I think they were named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. You could choose to send different types of ships to try to capture and control the various worlds, in which case it would contribute to your overall production. I recall there was a way to send spies as well, that would relay information about what kind of units were present on an enemy territory. I recall it being similar in some ways to Galactic Empire, except it was purely turn based, there was no real time component. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the game. I'm half convinced I dreamed the whole thing up. Any chance this rings a bell for anyone?
- redm 7y ago
  It doesn't ring a bell, but when I hear about TW2002 I can't help but think back to SRE/BRE, what fun.
- yyyk 7y ago
  Hmm. Maybe VGA Planets? But that game was created only in the early 90s...
- Erwin 7y ago
  Solar Realms Elite sounds similar, but Amit Patel wrote it in 1990. It was inspired by Space Empire Elite in 1987 (the programmer was 13 years old at the time). This article has some screenshots: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2016/02/02/jon-radoff-creator-of-space-empire-elite-and-final-frontier/ https://breakintochat.com/blog/2016/02/02/jon-radoff-creator...
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Thank you! I think it was Space Empire Elite! Or possibly one of the later derivatives. Man.... now I just have to track down a binary!
SubiculumCode 7y ago
Space Empires I. II and III should be mentioned, IMO. Great games. Edit: and especially Space Empires IV
- paulmd 7y ago
  III was the first 4X that I got way way too into. Really great "arcadey" experience that lets you focus on blowing shit up and not resource management as much. IV is probably the apex of the series, much deeper and more complex. That's when you shift from 1 resource to 3. Ship combat has more depth as well. I think V got a little too into the graphics and missed the mark on the mechanics, although the weapon mount system is pretty interesting. edit: SE4 is currently $2 on GOG
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    oops got my numbers wrong. Like you, I actually started on III, but played IV extensively, for maybe hundreds of hours...and loved all the modding, AI improvements, etc. I still play it on occasion. I couldn't get into V though.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    It's too bad that SE3 isn't sold anywhere. It still works fine on Win10, provided that you can get past installing it (which can be tricky, because the installer is a 16-bit Windows app!).
    - paulmd 7y ago
      Maybe it's on the Internet Archive somewhere? I'll set up an XP VM and extract it and upload it. It's shareware, so I don't see the problem with repackaging it and distributing it unaltered. I thought I might have a copy where I'd done that but I guess not. edit: from https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpire https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpire to https://www.dropbox.com/s/rac1gouedkjqxve/se3.7z?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/rac1gouedkjqxve/se3.7z?dl=0 To be honest - I think the shareware game actually has better play than the full version. Having a fairly shallow tech tree, limited to light cruiser sized ships and no super OP weapons, without any of the stellar manipulation or planetbase/battlecruiser tier endgame ships is actually a pretty fun ruleset for casual play. It's a more arcadey game than SE4 (with just one "construction point" instead of 3 materials) and cruising around with big fleets having pew pew battles of massive task groups and crushing each other's planets really suits it well. I dunno if the guy who wrote it is still attached to it at all. Apparently Strategy First bought Malfador in 2006? Erm, confession time. This was one of the first games I ever ""cracked"", in a stunning triumph of sysadminery for 8 year old me or whatever. Malfador originally used the "send me a check in the mail" business model. then it suddenly popped up on a publisher's site - called Crystal Interactive or similar. They offered a "30 day free trial" that (in hindsight, surprisingly) actually worked and installed a legit key, then presumably was going to pull it when the trial expired. I pinned down where it was writing the key with registry editor and exported the key, then just used it with the normal game. I actually found that og .reg file a few months ago, it is probably the single earliest file that I've got saved. (I also learned to use the "Executor by ARDI" macos 7 emulator so I could play escape velocity by Ambrosia Software on my windows PC. Executor had a 30 day trial... but you could delete the registry key and reinstall and use it forever. hackerman! ) (Executor is actually a very interesting "hybrid emulator" that attempted to replace the MacOS rom/mac toolkit with a windows native reimplmentation in native C and is now open source if you'd like to take a look - https://github.com/ctm/executor https://github.com/ctm/executor ) To this day I don't know if Crystal Interactive was legit or not - was that a legit indie publisher providing a framework for licensing and CC services (a not-trivial burden in the years before Steam) or did they pirate these games themselves and resell them? The registration had the legitimate username "REGISTERED USER", and they disappeared into the ether very rapidly, like within 6 months every trace of them on the internet was gone. I'd gladly buy a copy, but I don't think there's a way to get it anymore either. I thiiiink you might be able to track down a copy of the Space Empires Collection disc? That one was registered out of the box. Malfador eventually ended up with Strategy First, who was a legit indie publisher and sold their stuff for a lot of years. Again, it looks like Strategy First bought them in 2006, but he continued developing more stuff after that. Space Empires Starfury is actually an interesting Escape Velocity/Starfleet Command kind of crossover. It is the tactical mode for SE V turned into an open world game. From what I remember it plays better than the actual SE V. Again, weapon mounts are cool, the actual gameplay sucks and is way too slow. Even SE 4 really needs a "move ships faster" mode. https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpiresStarfury https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpiresStarfury FYI if anyone else ever played Warlords 3: Darklords Rising, that game is now available on GOG too. Also while I was looking on Archive I found this Turkish clone (lol) of SE3 from 2003 with an Apple II aesthetic? Crazy. https://archive.org/details/MiniSpaceEmpires https://archive.org/details/MiniSpaceEmpires
hikarudo 7y ago
Ah, Master of Orion! I had a ritual when I was 13 or so: when I got home on the last day of school before vacation, I would play Master of Orion nonstop until 3 or 4 am. I still enjoy this game and play it a few times every couple of years.
duncancarroll 7y ago
There is a really well-done, faithful-to-the-original but still slightly expanded-upon open source Java clone of MOO1 called Remnants of the Precursors: https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/eew3hs/guide_to_the_remnants_of_the_precursors_alpha_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/eew3hs/guide_to_the_r... It compiles in IntelliJ and is very fun to play and mod.
homarp 7y ago
https://kilgoretroutmaskreplicant.gitlab.io/plain-html/ https://kilgoretroutmaskreplicant.gitlab.io/plain-html/ is an exact replica of the original Master of Orion engine, and requires original game data to be played.
littlecranky67 7y ago
I loved Moo2 as a child and I played a lot of hours with a friend of mine back in the DOS days - was one of the only hotseat playable games back in the day (and Worms of course). Later when I became a programmer I was also fascinated by the fact that there were several "community patches" - patches that enhanced gameplay (larger galaxy sizes etc.), added new artwork and such without the availability of the source code - people reverse engineered the game and wrote binary patches that would contribute a lot to overall gameplay. To this day I can't fully understand how they did it - i get the theory, but not what tools they used, and how they got the motivation to do machine level changes to the game. Overall, good memories.
xycodex 7y ago
+1, played when I was a kid, picked it up again a few months ago for nostalgia, I must say it holds up really well. It’s feels well-constructed, put together from simple concepts/components, in a way that makes it quite replayable. Many decisions have big-ish consequences, and there is not too much micro managing, unless you play really big galaxy and want to exterminate everyone. Very tight UI as well for the era. I like it much better than Moo2. I only wonder what would have to be different if there was multiplayer.
wolco 7y ago
What is the best semi-modern moo type game for someone who hasn't played the orginal but would probably enjoy it.
imtringued 7y ago
The first MoO is superior compared to the second. You can terraform your planets from useless 25M population to 200M gaia planets. The fleet limit in MoO II was so annoying.

250 points by doppp 7y ago

Playable free at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Master_of_Orion_1993 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Master_of_Orion_1993 if, like me, you got halfway through the article before the urge presented itself.

Shivetya 7y ago
you can also get all of them through Steam if you need an easy means to deal with this, they are around two dollars each. Sadly 1 & 2 are not listed compatible with Catalina (Mac OS)
- JohnFen 7y ago
  GOG has them, too -- with Linux packaging for us Linux people.
  - DerekL 7y ago
    I bought MoO Classic and MoO 2 on GOG.com a while ago. I just tried installing and playing them on macOS Catalina, and I can verify that they work. But the stand-alone installers aren't notarized, so you'll have to approve them manually, or use the GOG Galaxy app.
- reiichiroh 7y ago
  No 64-bit OS X DOSbox?
- xycodex 7y ago
  Bought the 1+2 package on gog, works on catalina
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
smhenderson 7y ago
I just bought both MOO I and II as a bundle on GOG for $2.09. Well worth it! (it's on sale from $5.99 at the moment) https://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion_1_2 https://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion_1_2
Diederich 7y ago
Wow, thanks I think? You probably cost me quite a few hours of time.

compiler-guy 7y ago

This is just an amazing game. I still play it quite regularly. I have an old Mac mini in a back room that I keep explicitly for that purpose. When the original machine gave up the ghost, I shelled out a couple of hundred bucks for a "new" obsolete mac mini just to be able to keep playing. And I will do it again when this one dies. Such a great game. I also play Civ II on this machine occasionally. Part of the magic is how simple the game play is relative to more modern games.

cik 7y ago
Don't know if it helps - but it's on Steam, and even behaves on Linux. Hell the emulation is painful enough that even the real waits are part of the game.
cabalamat 7y ago
If you have the original DOS .EXE, it runs without problems in DOSBox on Linux.
darkmighty 7y ago
I've played it recently and the waiting times between actions made it put it down. It's incredibly slow to do anything substantial. It could probably be fixed through a speed up button in an emulator, but I didn't go the trouble. As much as it seems like a solid strategy game, there are better modern alternatives. It was nice for the historical perspective though.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

I used to love Masters of Orion II; I would play as the Psilons, get a ridiculous technological advantage, and produce massive death-star like Dreadnought ships that could vaporize any target or planet in one mega-beam. The game had a flaw, though. The AI opponents would mass up hundreds of zergling-like very weak ships, and they would EACH get a turn in combat. So my 4 dreadnoughts would wipe 4 of their ships, then 296 enemies would fire individually and miss onto my mega-shields...then they'd be down to 292 after my turn...then 292 misses...and I'd leave the game for 3 hours until the battle finished.

chuckwnelson 7y ago
100% agree. Always loved playing the Darlok and stealing everything (especially you tech researching races). I always dreamed of recreating this in the browser with an online multiplayer component, but the battle system was always flawed in my opinion.
- hyperpl 7y ago
  Agreed re: Darlok. I have the most fun playing with them.
JohnFen 7y ago
> The game had a flaw, though. Yeah, the game (and the original) has a number of flaws that can make winning pretty easy. I've adjusted my play to intentionally avoid them. You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly. But when I want an easy win in MOO2, what I tend to do is to amass a large enough force that I can start just destroying planets. Because the number of ships you can have depends on the number of planets you have, and the AI is stupid, you can bring even the most overpowered enemy to its knees by avoiding direct fights with their forces and destroying their planets. Each planet that gets destroyed results in multiple enemy ships that go away because they can no longer be supported. The best way to play either of the MOOs, though, is against real life human players. They aren't stupid.
- 7y ago

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I love this blog, even if it is a little weird at times. Some of the best and most well documented history of video games I've come across.

doersino 7y ago
Define "a little weird" – I've been following Jimmy's other blog, The Analog Antiquarian [1] (and also read a few of the non-gaming focused posts on this blog), and so far nothing "a little weird" has stood out to me. Not refuting you – just curious to know what you mean. [1]: https://analog-antiquarian.net https://analog-antiquarian.net
- danko 7y ago
  Not to put words in OP's mouth, but I'd guess the weirdness is in a couple of things: 1) Jimmy can go deep on some extremely obscure corners of the industry (e.g. interactive fiction movements that maybe only a few dozen academic acolytes are even aware of). 2) The occasional deep tangent. For example, I don't think a month-long mini-biography of Edward Mannock was really necessary to appreciate the Amiga game _Wings_. But then again, I loved that tangent, so it's the kind of weirdness that I can personally embrace. I'm guessing the Analog Antiquarian is going to end up ultimately absorbing that energy anyway.
  - AcerbicZero 7y ago
    You've explained it better than I could, although in retrospect I should have included an explanation originally. Esoteric would have been a better word than weird, but I guess my coffee hadn't kicked in yet.

pvg 7y ago

One thing I find odd about the Space 4x genre is that it remains popular and new games or expansions for existing ones come out fairly regularly but there hasn't been a genuine hit in it, seemingly since MOO II or so.

thrower123 7y ago
Stellaris? Endless Space? Galactic Civilizations? It's a bit niche next to Civilization, or Battle-Royale-FPS-of-the-week, but it's not quite at the level of flight simulators.
- pvg 7y ago
  None of these have been genuine hits, really. They are not terrible (well, maybe some of the GalCivs have been near-terrible). I don't see anybody ever writing the sort of retrospective on any of them as the one on MOO in this article.
  - TillE 7y ago
    Stellaris is truly excellent, I think. It's not turn-based, but otherwise it's the closest thing to a MOO2 successor I've ever played. It does a lot to capture the magic of exploring space as a growing empire, especially through the special encounters and branching scenarios which go to some pretty wild places. I also love the huge variety of gameplay experiences offered depending on the attributes of the species you choose to play as.
    - pvg 7y ago
      Stellaris is a decent enough game but I don't think the comparison to MOO2 is particularly apt. Right in this thread you can read people talking about MOO2's quirks and deficiencies or the fact that they still play it - this, to me, says something about the strength of its design. Stellaris, conversely, doesn't even have a static core design - the game changes drastically with every expansion. It's more of a sequence of related games, some better than others, using the same engine.

JohnFen 7y ago

Master of Orion and Master of Orion II (they are very, very different games) are two of my all-time favorites to this day. I started playing them when they were first released, and they've never left my game rotation. As it happens, I've been playing the original MOO again for the last couple of weeks!

foobarian 7y ago
It was difficult to play MOO for a while due to driver/emulation shenanigans but it got easier again thanks to the emulation community's improvements. Now you can play it in the browser or get it on Steam. Such an amazing game. For the past 20 years I have been using this endgame quote [1] as a quip in casual conversation. My favorite way to play is to build a nuke fleet and wipe out enemy colonies that cross me. [1] https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/orion_019.png https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/orion_019....

ThePhysicist 7y ago

I always loved Ascendancy (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendancy https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendancy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeXKf6e46I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeXKf6e46I), which I still play sometimes and still find interesting. It gets a bit boring towards the middle / end of the game though as the AI is not very advanced and easy to beat. Still I found it to be more polished than "Master of Orion".

conanbatt 7y ago
I loved ascendancy but that game is unfinished. Combat made no sense, the AI was super dumb. But it had potential!
- ThePhysicist 7y ago
  There's an AI patch that makes it somewhat better though. For me most of the joy of the games was in building up a galactic network, so I still enjoyed it very much even with the "dumb" AI.

kensai 7y ago

Does everyone agree with me here that the modern remake missed the mark? http://masteroforion.com/news/legend-reborn http://masteroforion.com/news/legend-reborn

santoriv 7y ago
It was a remake of MOO2, not MOO 1. And yes it was terrible. Remakes (or games very similar to MOO 1) are Dominus Galaxia and Remnants of the Precursors.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  > It was a remake of MOO2, not MOO 1. And yes it was terrible. Have you played it recently, or just at launch? At some point, they did a pretty big overhaul and made a lot of improvements. I still prefer Stellaris because it has more depth, but MOO is certainly playable.
skrowl 7y ago
I remember being SO excited for MOO reboot, then it ended up being terribly disappointing. I went back to Stellaris after about 2 hours with new MOO.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  I don't get Stellaris. I played it 10 hours waiting for the game to start.
ordinaryradical 7y ago
You should take a look at Dominus Galaxia—it hews much closer to the original Master of Orion philosophy while having some nice bits of modernization. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173590/Dominus_Galaxia_KS_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173590/Dominus_Galaxia_K...

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

This game is extremely great, still influencing game design and space strategy games. Strangely, despite so many years and advances in technology, no other game could quite capture the charm of the great original Master of the Orion. Ironically, the closest was Master of the Orion 2, which had nice features - I most liked that I could capture enemy population instead of extermination, converting them to be my citizens and creating a diverse empire (long before it was cool!!) - but it kinda lacked the sense of surrounding mystery, great black dread, where the snarks lurk to prey on my tiny empire of three sols....

WhompingWindows 7y ago
I totally forgot you'd have the conquered people as citizens...you could also replace your people with robots. I don't think it made sense with every playable race, but certain races that were bad on food or the planet had bad food, you could use robots to improve your bottom line. Eerily familiar...
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  We once had a three-player hotseat game. I made an industrial-focused race based on humans, second player made a psylon-based race of super scientists... And the third player wiped the floor with us on first contact. He made a race of silicoids who could eat rocks and breeded like crazy. He took all the maluses for strength gravity etc and easily destroyed us through sheer numbers. So I guess rocks as food and breeding is THE strategy in moo2

gavanwoolery 7y ago

Master of Orion was notable in that it was the first game I remember with "meaningful" NPC interactions. Even though interactions were quite limited (make/break alliances, espionage, trade, etc), early alliances could determine the final outcome of the game. But more importantly, it felt emotionally compelling. I found myself getting angry at certain factions when they spied/voted/etc against me. They also took the time to illustrate dispositions IIRC, so you could see when a race was happy or angry with you.

aidenn0 7y ago
A neat little experiment in meaningful NPC interactions was Siboot[1]. The DOS version is probably available somewhere. It's rock-paper-scissors with a social element. Well worth at least an evening's play. The author has released the mac source-code, but good luck building it. The DOS version is available at various abandonware sites and that's probably the easiest way to play it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy...
hikarudo 7y ago
Some twenty years ago, while playing Master of Orion, I asked the Humans to ally with me and go to war against the most powerful race. They replied something like: "Yes, we will be your allies. We fondly remember when you gave us +10 Terraforming."... which had happened scores of turns earlier, when in desperation I bribed them with tech so they wouldn't attack me!

ppeetteerr 7y ago

This game, along with Master of Magic, Civ 1, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dune 2, were the beginnings of strategy gaming for me. It's amazing to see that most of these games have been remade or copied (Stellaris, Age of Wonder, Civ 6, XCOM 2, Star Craft, respectively), and that the genre lives on.

meesles 7y ago
I love it. To me, the biggest limitation of physical games is that at a certain point (much like real state/warcraft), it becomes impossible to manage the sheer volume of properties and game pieces. Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors. I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. But... imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming. It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out. When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff!
yyyk 7y ago
Despite the similar setting, Stellaris is a very very different game, almost a different genre. MOO focuses on almost Risk-style gameplay and combat and does an excellent job at it. Stellaris focuses on roleplay and economy management (and some mid-late game issues prevent it from being great IMHO). It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions.
- the_af 7y ago
  See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate! These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on. That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course! Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement. R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering -- my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time :)

hyperpl 7y ago

I've been playing this since 1993 and can't think of any 4X game that is as tight as this in terms of structure and playability. For those that don't know, there is an SDL re-creation that reimplements the underlying engine (you still need the original assets to play of course). https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom I've beaten it on impossible with nearly all races although I generally prefer to play with 4 races, medium galaxy on the hard setting.

antisthenes 7y ago
This is the more active fork of Kilgore's work: https://gitlab.com/Tapani_/1oom https://gitlab.com/Tapani_/1oom
- hyperpl 7y ago
  Ha, beat me to it!
- Brave-Steak 7y ago
  Hmmm, maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see any exe to run and there are no instructions for compiling it. Am I missing something? edit: Okay, it's in https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/blob/master/INSTALL https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/blob/maste... Don't know why that'd be in a separate file, but okay. And they're Linux-only. At least it seems that the original Kilgore version provides Windows binaries. https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/-/releases https://gitlab.com/KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant/1oom/-/releases
  - intrepidhero 7y ago
    Section 3 of your linked file has instructions for Windows.
    - Brave-Steak 7y ago
      Which is cross-compiling from Linux.

jtolmar 7y ago

I played MOO1 for the first time a few years ago, and it's by far my favorite 4x game. The sliders cut down on a lot of busywork present in MOO2 and Civ, the random tech tree is spicy, and the AI is much more interesting than the usual friend-foe modifiers system (major differences are ignoring friend-foe if someone is an easy target, dogpiling the leader, and undeclared early game border disputes). Highly recommend if you like strategy games and haven't played it. I like it so much that I've tried writing a clone a few times (but the latest attempt got sidetracked and turned into a game about interplanetary rail networks.)

labster 7y ago
I also like MOO the best because of the lack of busywork. In a way, it feels a lot like a Euro board game, with sliders instead of meeples working the planets. Well, like a Euro except for the glassing your opponents' planets part; genocide is kind of rare in cardboard. But it is possible to play and win without doing that, in most games anyway. And then you're playing a game where if you collect enough "points" from your economic engine -- population from terraforming -- you win the game. Now can you offer further explanation of this "interplanetary rail" thing? Is it Galaxy Express 999 style?
- jtolmar 7y ago
  You decide what resource a planet produces, then hook it up to nearby planets that provide the resources it wants, which expands how far it can send its resource along the network. The network itself is composed of rail lines directly between planets. Screenshots on my twitter: https://twitter.com/LiterallyOwls/status/1218418806520979456 https://twitter.com/LiterallyOwls/status/1218418806520979456

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago

MoO was a masterpiece. MoO II was even better, IMO, with more depth. The ability to create your own race alone is huge. We don't talk about MoO III. Then the MoO reboot happened...terrible at release, but it got overhauled at some point and it actually made the game enjoyable.

hyperpl 7y ago
I appreciate that you acknowledge both as being masterpieces. I've found that the community is bifurcated w.r.t MOO1 vs MOO2 and it's great to see more people that appreciate both. I haven't managed to get into MOO2 yet but it's on my bucket list for 202x. If it can yield any semblance of the awe I've had for MOO1 then I'm in for a real treat!
- binarycrusader 7y ago
  I think the best thing about MOO2 by far was the rather memorable audio/music. Especially the unique music they had each time you interacted with another race.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I seriously love them both, but for very different reasons. They're very different games and each requires a totally different approach.
yyyk 7y ago
MoO2 has some dramatic improvements (races, leaders, better AI) but also some dramatic drawbacks (planet micromanagement). An MoO1.5 - with the MoO2 improvements but more MoO-style gameplay would have been awesome.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  I always found that the planet micromanagement is fun in the early game, but tedious late game when you control 20+ planets and are expanding quickly as you take over enemy planets.

lacker 7y ago

I loved playing Civ 1. I hear a lot of times people say, oh kids should be taught money management in school. To me, playing a strategy game where you have to manage your own money supply was the best education in this sort of concept. If you save up your resources, you'll be able to do more powerful things in the future, which requires the tough emotional work of foregoing something you want now. But, sometimes that thing you want right now really is important, and you need to think hard about the difference.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
But... money doesn't mean much in Civ 1. The first thing you do is cut the tax rate to the bare minimum, often zero, so that you can route all your trade into science instead. You need to cover the maintenance costs of your buildings, but any surplus that goes into your treasury becomes nearly worthless -- the things you can spend gold on are garbage compared to science / happiness.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

Btw, in the late 1990s, Russian sci-fi writer Sergey Lukianenko had written two novels ("Line of dreams", "Emperors of illusions" [1]) set in MOO universe, which are quite entertaining. Too bad he had turned a fascist and Putin's fanboy who viciously supports Crimea annexation and war with the Ukraine... [1]: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%91%D0%B7 https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%...

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

Glad the blog goes into the board game antecedents. Having played a lot of board and computer games, what I'm hoping for these days might be called "Dynamicland, but for games." At present we have to choose between real-world sociality and the power of computing for simulation; why not both? If I can play multiplayer MOO with my grandkids while looking at each other, rather than screens, I'll be happy.

aidenn0 7y ago
I have seen tabletop gamers do various things with projectors and/or tokens with QR codes to keep track of things on a computer while interacting with things physically. I haven't seen anything that wasn't a one-off to scratch a single-person's itch though.

Waterluvian 7y ago

Some UIs from back in that era hold up really well, in my opinion. From the article, check out this UI: https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/orion_013/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/orion_013/ It also reminds me of the original X-COM UFO Defense UI, which I think also holds up incredibly well decades later.

pridkett 7y ago

It took me forever to read this article. Because I got distracted when the article mentioned VGA Planets still existed and was actively maintained. That game was incredible back in the BBS days. Delightful to find a memory like that lives on.

entangledqubit 7y ago

Anyone else later transition to the heavily moddable 4X Space Empire IV?

SomeHacker44 7y ago
I played SEIV for years, and it was a wonderful game. I even built a "Play by Web" system that allowed remote turn based multiplayer for it via e-mail and web that lived for years, even after I handed it off to others to continue. What a great game.

zaroth 7y ago

Maybe someone here can help with this. Back in the late 80s in the days of BBSing games of Trade Wars and Tele-Arena... I have a faint recollection of playing an entirely text-based space adventure game with my brother. The first computer my brother and I ever had access to was a Wang, I have no idea what operating system it ran. I was 6 or 7 at the time. I'm pretty sure that's the machine we used to play this game, as well as our own instance of Trade Wars, when we weren't logged into Argus BBS over the 1200 baud. OK, so this game we played. It was like a explore and conquer game, there was a list of worlds I think they were named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. You could choose to send different types of ships to try to capture and control the various worlds, in which case it would contribute to your overall production. I recall there was a way to send spies as well, that would relay information about what kind of units were present on an enemy territory. I recall it being similar in some ways to Galactic Empire, except it was purely turn based, there was no real time component. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the game. I'm half convinced I dreamed the whole thing up. Any chance this rings a bell for anyone?

redm 7y ago
It doesn't ring a bell, but when I hear about TW2002 I can't help but think back to SRE/BRE, what fun.
yyyk 7y ago
Hmm. Maybe VGA Planets? But that game was created only in the early 90s...
Erwin 7y ago
Solar Realms Elite sounds similar, but Amit Patel wrote it in 1990. It was inspired by Space Empire Elite in 1987 (the programmer was 13 years old at the time). This article has some screenshots: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2016/02/02/jon-radoff-creator-of-space-empire-elite-and-final-frontier/ https://breakintochat.com/blog/2016/02/02/jon-radoff-creator...
- zaroth 7y ago
  Thank you! I think it was Space Empire Elite! Or possibly one of the later derivatives. Man.... now I just have to track down a binary!

SubiculumCode 7y ago

Space Empires I. II and III should be mentioned, IMO. Great games. Edit: and especially Space Empires IV

paulmd 7y ago
III was the first 4X that I got way way too into. Really great "arcadey" experience that lets you focus on blowing shit up and not resource management as much. IV is probably the apex of the series, much deeper and more complex. That's when you shift from 1 resource to 3. Ship combat has more depth as well. I think V got a little too into the graphics and missed the mark on the mechanics, although the weapon mount system is pretty interesting. edit: SE4 is currently $2 on GOG
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  oops got my numbers wrong. Like you, I actually started on III, but played IV extensively, for maybe hundreds of hours...and loved all the modding, AI improvements, etc. I still play it on occasion. I couldn't get into V though.
- int_19h 7y ago
  It's too bad that SE3 isn't sold anywhere. It still works fine on Win10, provided that you can get past installing it (which can be tricky, because the installer is a 16-bit Windows app!).
  - paulmd 7y ago
    Maybe it's on the Internet Archive somewhere? I'll set up an XP VM and extract it and upload it. It's shareware, so I don't see the problem with repackaging it and distributing it unaltered. I thought I might have a copy where I'd done that but I guess not. edit: from https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpire https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpire to https://www.dropbox.com/s/rac1gouedkjqxve/se3.7z?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/rac1gouedkjqxve/se3.7z?dl=0 To be honest - I think the shareware game actually has better play than the full version. Having a fairly shallow tech tree, limited to light cruiser sized ships and no super OP weapons, without any of the stellar manipulation or planetbase/battlecruiser tier endgame ships is actually a pretty fun ruleset for casual play. It's a more arcadey game than SE4 (with just one "construction point" instead of 3 materials) and cruising around with big fleets having pew pew battles of massive task groups and crushing each other's planets really suits it well. I dunno if the guy who wrote it is still attached to it at all. Apparently Strategy First bought Malfador in 2006? Erm, confession time. This was one of the first games I ever ""cracked"", in a stunning triumph of sysadminery for 8 year old me or whatever. Malfador originally used the "send me a check in the mail" business model. then it suddenly popped up on a publisher's site - called Crystal Interactive or similar. They offered a "30 day free trial" that (in hindsight, surprisingly) actually worked and installed a legit key, then presumably was going to pull it when the trial expired. I pinned down where it was writing the key with registry editor and exported the key, then just used it with the normal game. I actually found that og .reg file a few months ago, it is probably the single earliest file that I've got saved. (I also learned to use the "Executor by ARDI" macos 7 emulator so I could play escape velocity by Ambrosia Software on my windows PC. Executor had a 30 day trial... but you could delete the registry key and reinstall and use it forever. hackerman! ) (Executor is actually a very interesting "hybrid emulator" that attempted to replace the MacOS rom/mac toolkit with a windows native reimplmentation in native C and is now open source if you'd like to take a look - https://github.com/ctm/executor https://github.com/ctm/executor ) To this day I don't know if Crystal Interactive was legit or not - was that a legit indie publisher providing a framework for licensing and CC services (a not-trivial burden in the years before Steam) or did they pirate these games themselves and resell them? The registration had the legitimate username "REGISTERED USER", and they disappeared into the ether very rapidly, like within 6 months every trace of them on the internet was gone. I'd gladly buy a copy, but I don't think there's a way to get it anymore either. I thiiiink you might be able to track down a copy of the Space Empires Collection disc? That one was registered out of the box. Malfador eventually ended up with Strategy First, who was a legit indie publisher and sold their stuff for a lot of years. Again, it looks like Strategy First bought them in 2006, but he continued developing more stuff after that. Space Empires Starfury is actually an interesting Escape Velocity/Starfleet Command kind of crossover. It is the tactical mode for SE V turned into an open world game. From what I remember it plays better than the actual SE V. Again, weapon mounts are cool, the actual gameplay sucks and is way too slow. Even SE 4 really needs a "move ships faster" mode. https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpiresStarfury https://archive.org/details/SpaceEmpiresStarfury FYI if anyone else ever played Warlords 3: Darklords Rising, that game is now available on GOG too. Also while I was looking on Archive I found this Turkish clone (lol) of SE3 from 2003 with an Apple II aesthetic? Crazy. https://archive.org/details/MiniSpaceEmpires https://archive.org/details/MiniSpaceEmpires

hikarudo 7y ago

Ah, Master of Orion! I had a ritual when I was 13 or so: when I got home on the last day of school before vacation, I would play Master of Orion nonstop until 3 or 4 am. I still enjoy this game and play it a few times every couple of years.

duncancarroll 7y ago

There is a really well-done, faithful-to-the-original but still slightly expanded-upon open source Java clone of MOO1 called Remnants of the Precursors: https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/eew3hs/guide_to_the_remnants_of_the_precursors_alpha_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/eew3hs/guide_to_the_r... It compiles in IntelliJ and is very fun to play and mod.

homarp 7y ago

https://kilgoretroutmaskreplicant.gitlab.io/plain-html/ https://kilgoretroutmaskreplicant.gitlab.io/plain-html/ is an exact replica of the original Master of Orion engine, and requires original game data to be played.

littlecranky67 7y ago

I loved Moo2 as a child and I played a lot of hours with a friend of mine back in the DOS days - was one of the only hotseat playable games back in the day (and Worms of course). Later when I became a programmer I was also fascinated by the fact that there were several "community patches" - patches that enhanced gameplay (larger galaxy sizes etc.), added new artwork and such without the availability of the source code - people reverse engineered the game and wrote binary patches that would contribute a lot to overall gameplay. To this day I can't fully understand how they did it - i get the theory, but not what tools they used, and how they got the motivation to do machine level changes to the game. Overall, good memories.

xycodex 7y ago

+1, played when I was a kid, picked it up again a few months ago for nostalgia, I must say it holds up really well. It’s feels well-constructed, put together from simple concepts/components, in a way that makes it quite replayable. Many decisions have big-ish consequences, and there is not too much micro managing, unless you play really big galaxy and want to exterminate everyone. Very tight UI as well for the era. I like it much better than Moo2. I only wonder what would have to be different if there was multiplayer.

wolco 7y ago

What is the best semi-modern moo type game for someone who hasn't played the orginal but would probably enjoy it.

imtringued 7y ago

The first MoO is superior compared to the second. You can terraform your planets from useless 25M population to 200M gaia planets. The fleet limit in MoO II was so annoying.