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The sequel to MOO, and most 4X games made since then, have always felt inferior to me. MOO was like a game of chess. The rules were relatively simple, but com
by beloch 4y ago
The sequel to MOO, and most 4X games made since then, have always felt inferior to me. MOO was like a game of chess. The rules were relatively simple, but complex enough to give you the "box of chocolates" games this article talks about.
MOO2 bogged you down in micromanaging colony buildings, etc. and other 4X games made since have added far more complex systems. The results feels like chess where each piece now has bolted-on RPG stats that have to be individually micromanaged. The game becomes more complex, but not in an elegant way. I don't want to manage maces and chain-mail and morale. I just want to play chess!
I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement?
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoI liked the micromanaging of buildings in MOO2 in the early game, but later game, when you're invading multiple planets, it definitely gets annoying. > I haven't really kept up with 4X games. Are there any that have tried to get back to the basic chess of MOO instead of bolting on complications that bog you down in micromanagement? Such a game would probably fail to achieve commercial success in today's world. It would be criticized for lack of depth.
- gilgoomesh 4y agoI think there's room for commercially successful games that lack apparent depth. I think the success of match 3 mobile games is an indication that the market is out there. But it's possible that it no longer overlaps with the market of self-selected 4X gamers.
- Ekaros 4y agoYeah, it's a certain type of trap. At first it is something to do and some near term goal that exist there. Later when you complete everything in a turn it just becomes exercise of going through a list of actions repeated over half-a-dozen to dozens systems. Maybe games should offer some tools for this, like templates what to build and what ratios and so on. You could automatically set one of these or have custom one made for those needing more special actions.
- CRConrad 4y agoA simple "inherit from parent" checkbox for each settings dialog? So you adjust all the settings for each, say, city in the first few rounds; then, when you have several countries, you click that box in each of the cities and from then on set it just for each country; later, click it in each country and just set for whole planets. If later you want to micromanage some specific city or country, just uncheck the box only for that one, and let all the other cities in the country / countries on the planet keep following the settings of their parent level. That's for geographical entities. But perhaps something similar could be set by inventing hierarchical levels for more abstract concepts like technological / economic / military / research strategies. Or maybe it doesn't even need to be invented; maybe they are already bundled together in sub- and sub-sub-concepts in some games? I don't know, I haven't played any games of this kind for... Since Civ 1 or 2, maybe mid-nineties. This came to mind because I've been thinking about doing something like this in a (totally unrelated) piece of software I'm designing in my head. [Edit: Tpyo]
- beefok 4y agoI feel the same way, but I also feel the same way about Civilization. I pop open a virtualbox + windows XP just to play Civ for windows edition.. Something I still really enjoy is Deadlock by Accolade, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock:_Planetary_Conquest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlock:_Planetary_Conquest You can get it off gog for $7! I recommend that version over the Steam version. It can be finnicky, but again, I play it on the XP Virtualbox!
- chaostheory 4y agoThey’ve massively streamlined modern Civ games. Micromanagement is nearly gone now.
- bitcharmer 4y agoNo need for a windows VM these days. Civilization works great on SteamPlay and Lutris.
- gbudee 4y agoYou may be interested in Slipways, which boils down the feel of a 4x, while playing more like an elegant engine-builder board game.
- npunt 4y agoAgree, no 4X game I've seen does a kind of 'scale with scope' gameplay. Ideally the number of decisions and considerations would stay roughly the same for each turn throughout the game, regardless of how big the empire gets. The decisions would simply get larger in scope, and it'd optionally let you dig in and make tweaks to certain parts if you wanted. I understand why nobody's done this (it's hard to do & requires having AI for each subsystem as well as the whole) but it'd make the whole genre much more fun. Right now almost all 4X games just stop being fun mid-game when their mechanics and flow just bog down in endless notifications.