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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

by 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 :)
- CDSlice 7y ago
  Stellaris doesn't have much tech or fleet micro. However, there is a _massive_ amount of planet (or more specifically, population) micro. You have to manually build up each planet and move the extra pops that grow to wherever they are most needed. Once you get to the late game and you have 20-30+ planets the game really becomes a slog to micro and game performance drops a ton. I still love Stellaris despite these flaws, but they are pretty big flaws.
  - the_af 7y ago
    Thanks! Pretty big flaws indeed. Not the game for me then.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give "general directions" for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers were also automatable in this way. It works pretty well for casual play, but playing higher difficulties still requires micromanagement. Since you can micromanage, you can zoom in on the nitty gritty as desired. For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.
  - mntmoss 7y ago
    The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances". The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.
    - IggleSniggle 7y ago
      You summed up more perfectly than I could why the AI governors are really only suitable for a certain kind of casual (relaxed) style of play.
- yyyk 7y ago
  >See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate! Basically, it's a game emphasizing and focusing on roleplay. The early game is absolutely brilliant. But it has way too strict rules and there aren't many meaningful (combat or diplomatic) interactions with the AI past mid-game once you've exhausted most events * . The war AI is a joke once you've grown enough, and diplomacy offers very few options - maybe the latest DLC will help with that. So you are left with either slowly conquering the galaxy (because the wargoal system is stupid, I'll get to that), or basically doing very little - diplo is only slightly more fleshed out than MoO, Federations only make sense for some Empires and don't do much yet - and waiting until the Crisis, which is bugged enough that it's no longer that much of a threat. There are also the drastic performance issues some players have mid-late game, or how the economy revamp (a good idea in theory, tiles needed to go) didn't reduce micromanagement, but arguably increased it. Again, early game Stellaris is awesome, but later... not so much. --- As for the wargoal system, unless you're playing a genocidal (FP/DE) race which almost removes diplomacy, you're limited to wars with very limited goals with 10-year ceasefires * . There's no way to break those ceasefires, despite it not making any roleplay sense. By comparison, in MoO sometimes an AI race will attack one of your planets without declaring war, and sometimes I just have to take in the chin, because I'm nowhere near strong enough to fight. At which point I might begin methodically planning revenge while being nice-nice diplomatically. This is actually something that can also happen the other way around, with the player being the aggressor. AFAIK, there are no fixed rules in the MoO code for that - this is just an emergent property. Stellaris, despite the large number of fixed events and mechanics can't support that kind of interaction, because the mechanics are implemented way too strictly, and you can't just send out ships without formally declaring war with fixed pre-set goals limited by Influence and if you did have a war, you'd always have the large diplomatic malus with the faction and no good way to try to appease the AI. * Events are basically fixed storylines choices written by Paradox, where every choice makes a small difference. Compare GalCiv which also had that mechanic, but GalCiv's choices are far less detailed and GalCiv had a moral scale mechanic which wouldn't have been a good fit for Stellaris * Well, there's the Vasselize-Annex method, which is almost as slow because it costs a lot of Influence.
  - CDSlice 7y ago
    This is a great summary of Stellaris, but I have one tiny nit. If you get the Apocalypse DLC you can build a Colossus which gives you a total war war goal that lets you immediately annex conquered systems without spending influence or having to wait for the war to end to gain control of the systems.

by yyyk 7y ago

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 :)

CDSlice 7y ago
Stellaris doesn't have much tech or fleet micro. However, there is a _massive_ amount of planet (or more specifically, population) micro. You have to manually build up each planet and move the extra pops that grow to wherever they are most needed. Once you get to the late game and you have 20-30+ planets the game really becomes a slog to micro and game performance drops a ton. I still love Stellaris despite these flaws, but they are pretty big flaws.
- the_af 7y ago
  Thanks! Pretty big flaws indeed. Not the game for me then.
IggleSniggle 7y ago
Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give "general directions" for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers were also automatable in this way. It works pretty well for casual play, but playing higher difficulties still requires micromanagement. Since you can micromanage, you can zoom in on the nitty gritty as desired. For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances". The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    You summed up more perfectly than I could why the AI governors are really only suitable for a certain kind of casual (relaxed) style of play.
yyyk 7y ago
>See my sibling comment about Stellaris. Please elaborate! Basically, it's a game emphasizing and focusing on roleplay. The early game is absolutely brilliant. But it has way too strict rules and there aren't many meaningful (combat or diplomatic) interactions with the AI past mid-game once you've exhausted most events * . The war AI is a joke once you've grown enough, and diplomacy offers very few options - maybe the latest DLC will help with that. So you are left with either slowly conquering the galaxy (because the wargoal system is stupid, I'll get to that), or basically doing very little - diplo is only slightly more fleshed out than MoO, Federations only make sense for some Empires and don't do much yet - and waiting until the Crisis, which is bugged enough that it's no longer that much of a threat. There are also the drastic performance issues some players have mid-late game, or how the economy revamp (a good idea in theory, tiles needed to go) didn't reduce micromanagement, but arguably increased it. Again, early game Stellaris is awesome, but later... not so much. --- As for the wargoal system, unless you're playing a genocidal (FP/DE) race which almost removes diplomacy, you're limited to wars with very limited goals with 10-year ceasefires * . There's no way to break those ceasefires, despite it not making any roleplay sense. By comparison, in MoO sometimes an AI race will attack one of your planets without declaring war, and sometimes I just have to take in the chin, because I'm nowhere near strong enough to fight. At which point I might begin methodically planning revenge while being nice-nice diplomatically. This is actually something that can also happen the other way around, with the player being the aggressor. AFAIK, there are no fixed rules in the MoO code for that - this is just an emergent property. Stellaris, despite the large number of fixed events and mechanics can't support that kind of interaction, because the mechanics are implemented way too strictly, and you can't just send out ships without formally declaring war with fixed pre-set goals limited by Influence and if you did have a war, you'd always have the large diplomatic malus with the faction and no good way to try to appease the AI. * Events are basically fixed storylines choices written by Paradox, where every choice makes a small difference. Compare GalCiv which also had that mechanic, but GalCiv's choices are far less detailed and GalCiv had a moral scale mechanic which wouldn't have been a good fit for Stellaris * Well, there's the Vasselize-Annex method, which is almost as slow because it costs a lot of Influence.
- CDSlice 7y ago
  This is a great summary of Stellaris, but I have one tiny nit. If you get the Apocalypse DLC you can build a Colossus which gives you a total war war goal that lets you immediately annex conquered systems without spending influence or having to wait for the war to end to gain control of the systems.