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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

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.
    - closetohome 7y ago
      You can argue specific strengths and weaknesses, but Stellaris is, by any financial or sales metric, an A-list hit.
      - pvg 7y ago
        I'm not really seeing it, by the metric of sales. From its wikipedia page: "Less than 24 hours after release [...] Stellaris had sold over 200,000 units On 21 June 2016, it was announced that the game had sold over 500,000 units" Compare this to, say, Divinity 2, a popular-but-not-A-list-hit game which sold a million copies in a similar time period. XCOM-2 sold half a million copies on Steam alone in its first week.
        username90 7y ago
        Stellaris is a game with long term appeal, its sales didn't drop off that quick. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/stellaris-celebrates-over-1-5-million-copies-sold-apocalypse-dlc-available-today/ https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/stellaris-celebrates-o...
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- thrower123 7y ago
  Master of Orion is also nearly 30 years old. Stellaris, at least, I expect will be a going concern for another ten years, just because that is how Paradox does things, and they have their die-hard fans. Master of Orion, if I am being honest, feels like it has had much greater legs as a piece of abandonware and through re-release than it ever did in the initial run. I never even heard of it until many years later, when I found homeoftheunderdogs and abandonia because my computer was too old for what was then available in the bargain bin at Walmart.
  - pvg 7y ago
    I don't think that's really true for MOO, the article mentions how it was responsible for popularizing the term '4x' itself. Either way, I think the question remains as to why this seemingly still-popular genre hasn't really had a big hit. XCOM has had a fairly recent revival, Civ games are still a big deal, etc. 4x in space, though, somehow defies the rule that adding 'in space' to anything makes it better.
    - Majromax 7y ago
      > 4x in space, though, somehow defies the rule that adding 'in space' to anything makes it better. A 4x game on land automatically has to represent terrain. That immediately brings our intuitive associations to the fore: mountains are impassable, hills are good for mining and defense, and you need ships to cross water. A 4x game "in space" has to do without native terrain, and certainly without terrain that is automatically intuitive. The Plasma Storm Nebula is a creation (or not) out of whole cloth, with no natural rules beyond what the game designers impart. That's a more complicated design space, and at the same time it's not immediately, emotionally engaging for the player in the same way that playing on Earth is.
- usrusr 7y ago
  The space opera setting hit a sweet spot in terms of complexity/depth at that time: strategy game world models had to be quite simple back then and space aliens were an ideal setting for allowing the player to fill the gaps with imagination. While historical setting always have a sore spot were the necessary simplifications cause a mismatch with reality, in a sci fi setting whatever the game rules are saying is canonical world building. If a garrisoned spaceship equivalent of a phalanx unit can occasionally kill the spaceship equivalent of a bombarding stealth bomber, then that's the unquestioned reality of that world. But today we can have much deeper, more detailed world models. CK2 is awesome because it populates a simple civ-world of obtainable and upgradeable cities with thousands of simulated courtiers to meaningfully interact with, EU4 because it so carefully maps out all the socioeconomic forces that shaped the world when political interactions first started to become truly global. If you add similar details to a sci-fi setting it just feels arbitrarily burdensome. There's no way you could connect with, say of a dozen of fungoid admirals in the way you connect with a Hanoverian Capet general who learned to respect eastern religions on an aborted crusade and is now wed to a close relative of a recently ousted Czar. A similar amount of details added to a generic space alien would have zero upside, you could just as well name the stats A through Z. The rare exception was Alpha Centauri whose designer apparently understood that problem and focused on world building content instead of trying to out-4X all earlier 4Xs. What I could imagine to also work in a generic 4X space setting is a game that makes ship designs the main characters in the spotlight: don't just have that customary complex ship editor, give the individual designs an identity by accumulating RPG-like bonuses over time so that an outdated but properly "leveled-up" design can remain a viable option over more modern contenders. You might want to keep those space-B52s flying when generations of experience make the damage control teams so much more effective, production lines run at 10x efficiency and all your modern gun batteries have been tailored to the confines of its surprisingly versatile weapons bay anyways. SMAC already had prototype cost, but that was seriously lacking flavor. Stellaris has the occasional event driven per ship bonus (iirc?) but that's too micro to be engaging. Blueprints for a series of ships could be just the right level of granularity.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    > There's no way you could connect with, say of a dozen of fungoid admirals in the way you connect with a Hanoverian Capet general who learned to respect eastern religions on an aborted crusade and is now wed to a close relative of a recently ousted Czar. Which is where the licenses tie-in, less as officially sanctioned and more as popular user mods! Set your 4X in the world of Dune! Or of Warhammer 40,000! Star Wars, Trek, Battlestar Galactica! Babylon Five! And so forth. > give the individual designs an identity by accumulating RPG-like bonuses over time so that an outdated but properly "leveled-up" design can remain a viable option over more modern contenders I'm pretty sure everything from the recent Civs back to the original Starcraft tracked unit advancement. But usually it doesn't translate to RPG levels of immersion. I think Starships Unlimited, an early 2000s indie space 4X, did this fairly well.

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.
  - closetohome 7y ago
    You can argue specific strengths and weaknesses, but Stellaris is, by any financial or sales metric, an A-list hit.
    - pvg 7y ago
      I'm not really seeing it, by the metric of sales. From its wikipedia page: "Less than 24 hours after release [...] Stellaris had sold over 200,000 units On 21 June 2016, it was announced that the game had sold over 500,000 units" Compare this to, say, Divinity 2, a popular-but-not-A-list-hit game which sold a million copies in a similar time period. XCOM-2 sold half a million copies on Steam alone in its first week.
      - username90 7y ago
        Stellaris is a game with long term appeal, its sales didn't drop off that quick. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/stellaris-celebrates-over-1-5-million-copies-sold-apocalypse-dlc-available-today/ https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/stellaris-celebrates-o...
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
thrower123 7y ago
Master of Orion is also nearly 30 years old. Stellaris, at least, I expect will be a going concern for another ten years, just because that is how Paradox does things, and they have their die-hard fans. Master of Orion, if I am being honest, feels like it has had much greater legs as a piece of abandonware and through re-release than it ever did in the initial run. I never even heard of it until many years later, when I found homeoftheunderdogs and abandonia because my computer was too old for what was then available in the bargain bin at Walmart.
- pvg 7y ago
  I don't think that's really true for MOO, the article mentions how it was responsible for popularizing the term '4x' itself. Either way, I think the question remains as to why this seemingly still-popular genre hasn't really had a big hit. XCOM has had a fairly recent revival, Civ games are still a big deal, etc. 4x in space, though, somehow defies the rule that adding 'in space' to anything makes it better.
  - Majromax 7y ago
    > 4x in space, though, somehow defies the rule that adding 'in space' to anything makes it better. A 4x game on land automatically has to represent terrain. That immediately brings our intuitive associations to the fore: mountains are impassable, hills are good for mining and defense, and you need ships to cross water. A 4x game "in space" has to do without native terrain, and certainly without terrain that is automatically intuitive. The Plasma Storm Nebula is a creation (or not) out of whole cloth, with no natural rules beyond what the game designers impart. That's a more complicated design space, and at the same time it's not immediately, emotionally engaging for the player in the same way that playing on Earth is.
usrusr 7y ago
The space opera setting hit a sweet spot in terms of complexity/depth at that time: strategy game world models had to be quite simple back then and space aliens were an ideal setting for allowing the player to fill the gaps with imagination. While historical setting always have a sore spot were the necessary simplifications cause a mismatch with reality, in a sci fi setting whatever the game rules are saying is canonical world building. If a garrisoned spaceship equivalent of a phalanx unit can occasionally kill the spaceship equivalent of a bombarding stealth bomber, then that's the unquestioned reality of that world. But today we can have much deeper, more detailed world models. CK2 is awesome because it populates a simple civ-world of obtainable and upgradeable cities with thousands of simulated courtiers to meaningfully interact with, EU4 because it so carefully maps out all the socioeconomic forces that shaped the world when political interactions first started to become truly global. If you add similar details to a sci-fi setting it just feels arbitrarily burdensome. There's no way you could connect with, say of a dozen of fungoid admirals in the way you connect with a Hanoverian Capet general who learned to respect eastern religions on an aborted crusade and is now wed to a close relative of a recently ousted Czar. A similar amount of details added to a generic space alien would have zero upside, you could just as well name the stats A through Z. The rare exception was Alpha Centauri whose designer apparently understood that problem and focused on world building content instead of trying to out-4X all earlier 4Xs. What I could imagine to also work in a generic 4X space setting is a game that makes ship designs the main characters in the spotlight: don't just have that customary complex ship editor, give the individual designs an identity by accumulating RPG-like bonuses over time so that an outdated but properly "leveled-up" design can remain a viable option over more modern contenders. You might want to keep those space-B52s flying when generations of experience make the damage control teams so much more effective, production lines run at 10x efficiency and all your modern gun batteries have been tailored to the confines of its surprisingly versatile weapons bay anyways. SMAC already had prototype cost, but that was seriously lacking flavor. Stellaris has the occasional event driven per ship bonus (iirc?) but that's too micro to be engaging. Blueprints for a series of ships could be just the right level of granularity.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  > There's no way you could connect with, say of a dozen of fungoid admirals in the way you connect with a Hanoverian Capet general who learned to respect eastern religions on an aborted crusade and is now wed to a close relative of a recently ousted Czar. Which is where the licenses tie-in, less as officially sanctioned and more as popular user mods! Set your 4X in the world of Dune! Or of Warhammer 40,000! Star Wars, Trek, Battlestar Galactica! Babylon Five! And so forth. > give the individual designs an identity by accumulating RPG-like bonuses over time so that an outdated but properly "leveled-up" design can remain a viable option over more modern contenders I'm pretty sure everything from the recent Civs back to the original Starcraft tracked unit advancement. But usually it doesn't translate to RPG levels of immersion. I think Starships Unlimited, an early 2000s indie space 4X, did this fairly well.