Category: 4X Space

Arcs – Leder Games takes it’s shot at Twilight Imperium and Eclipse

I have been waiting for Arcs since the kickstarter announcement with some trepidation after playing and being pretty lukewarm on Oath which was a fairly expensive game to which has been sitting for a long time on the shelf after a mere 4 plays. I can happily say after 4 games of Arcs that it was well worth the price and wait, especially with the Blighted Reach expansion. I have no idea if it will dethrone Twilight Imperium (or more importantly to our group, Eclipse), but I have some thoughts on this game after about 10 hours of playtime so far, discussions with the play groups (one group more dirty casuls and one as heavy as they can get).

Base Game

Arcs base game comes in a Root sized box and is moderately complex to learn a due to a player’s operations economy being controlled by a card bidding mechanism echoing Twilight Imperium’s role selection mechanic. At it’s core, players play a card from their hand to give them operations (stuff you can do with your pieces) for the turn, a lot like A Study in Emerald except that the first card played during a round effects the cards and operations that the other player’s can play for that round. There is NO trick-taking in Arcs, and if you read or watch a video where someone says that there is, they don’t know shit from shinola as we would say at the Sheepshead table. That said, players of Bridge, Hearts, Euchre, et al will see some similarities in the way cards are played but it is thin and more in the spirit of those games than anything mechanically borrowed. Operation types come in suits, and players must overplay the lead card in the lead suit played in order to get a full set of operations from that suit. For example, if someone plays a Construction card with a 5 on it, the other players must play a Construction card with a higher number, or have a reduced number of Construction operations that turn. Players can also play a card from another suit to get a single operation from that card during that round. While mechanically different with the lead, follow mechanic, it’s a bit like the COIN games where certain players that got operations cannot play any for the next turn or turns.

Victory points are scored by players who fulfill that hand’s Ambitions which, a bit like bids in Bridge, are selected by the leading players at some point during the hand. These include stuff like ‘most stuff blown up,’ ‘most enemy agents captured’ or some accumulation of resources over the other players. The fight over being the lead player is both to get the most out of your operations and to be able to select the ambitions you want to go for during the hand rather than the ones the others want to go for.

With all that, Arcs seems like a card game, but it’s not. The real game involves players running their operations, whether moving ships around and attacking, building stuff or controlling the various parts of the guild in a set of mechanics exactly like bidding for cards from Study in Emerald. The way the Ambitions work can allow long play combos that score massive points in areas the other players may have completely ignored earlier in the game.

My favorite part of the base game and where Leder Games really showed their smarts is the battle mechanic. Part of me thinks LG would like to go back to OATH and use Arcs battle dice instead of the Attack/Defense dice. In Arcs, only the attacker rolls the dice. They have three types to choose from: all out attack, raid and skirmish. Each one has some risk/reward that players have to mull over before rolling. All out attacking can do as much damage to your own fleet as to the enemy’s but you will hammer the crap out of them regardless of your own damage. Skirmishing has no risk to your ships, but has a good chance of not doing much and Raiding gives some ability to steal things from other players with some big risks. It’s a tough decision in the game to make and yet it resolves VERY quickly. Of all the parts of Arcs that are good, the dice combat is great.

Blighted Reach / Campaign game

with Dr pepper product placement….

While fun, the base game isn’t super compelling for me– it lacks the meat on the bone for this type of game, and isn’t a ‘smash everyone in the mouth quick’ game like Nexus Ops either. Base Arcs is also extremely reliant on the cards you get and can be very frustrating turn after turn when you just don’t have what you need to do anything and the other players do! it’s not like Euchre or Sheepshead where you get some bad hands but, if you play right, you can mitigate the damage. In base Arcs, a couple rounds of bad cards and you are going to struggle with cobbling together any type of points. It’s fun, but for the time it takes, I would rather throw down Root or Study in Emerald.

The base game IS a good base for Arcs’ massive and completely insane expansion, Blighted Reach. I’ve only gotten one game of this but it was between 4-5 hours long, so I got a solid feel for what this game has to offer in it’s full form. While longer, it is superior to the base game by a wide margin.

I love games where you do not engage with all of the mechanics of the game with a single or even a few play throughs (hello Bios Megafauna and Pax Renaissance!). Arcs has this in spades (trick taking pun detected). The expansion adds four major things to the base game: the Imperial regency/ fleets, the blight, event cards, and best of all: Fates.

The Imperial fleets and Regency which does not allow players to fight each other early game and taxes the game by sucking much needed resources from the Reach to the Imperium. I was quite worried about the complexity of this addition as there is a first Regent who has to run a set of operations in a little booklet periodically in the game and the activities and effects of the Imperial fleet seems pretty daunting at first, but it’s all plainly and logically designed. Since there are regents, of course there are rebels (outlaws) who can attack anyone anywhere (but don’t get the protection of the Imperial fleets).

Secondly is the Blight, which is some alien entity that spreads from planet to planet, much like the Amoeba in the old Amoeba Wars game from the early 80’s. This had very little effect in our game, but again, you do not see all the game’s mechanics in a single play through (or even a campaign).

Third are Event cards (gasp! is this really a Cole Wherle game?) that add the much needed roller coaster aspect to Arcs that was totally missing in Oath (and is not needed at all in Root). These can be mitigated pretty easily by the players, but when they fire off, they can do a lot of damage to everyone. They are triggered when a player plays an Event card from their hand and some dice decide whether the Regent governs the reach or an event takes place. Players have some control over whether the events happen most of the time.

Lastly are the Fate cards, which are most analogous to the Aliens from Cosmic Encounter but not only do they have different rules and cards, they have their own way to ‘win’ as that Fate through the entire campaign. At the end of a game (in the campaign) players “Resolve their Fates” and determine if they can (if they won their Fate’s goals) or want to continue with their original Fate into the next game or draw new ones. Where have I read the exact phrase “Resolve fates at the end of an Act before” ? Tenra Bansho Zero! If Leder Games wasn’t familiar with the Karma system in TBZ I would be uncannily surprised based on this part of Arcs.

Fates are the part of the game design where Arcs goes from a somewhat normal 4X space game with interesting mechanical flourishes into one of the most monstrous and insane games I’ve ever played. Each Fate has a path through the Acts of the campaign games that must be abandoned if the player fails to meet their Fate’s objectives, at which point they choose from Fates only available in later Acts of the campaign– and these are much more aggressive and dangerous Fates to the Reach AND the other players. So, if a sad sack of a player takes the high hard one from the other players in the game, you can bet they are going to come back with the nastiest Fate they can choose and anal-ly re-thread the occupants of the Reach as much as possible. The amazing thing about FATES in the first game of a campaign is that they can and will often have common goals and the objectives of one may compliment the objectives of the other. While under the thumb of the Imperium (or as outlaws too), players may work together to further their own goals as there is no winner until the last game of the campaign. One player may WANT another player to outlaw and attack the Imperium to free up some of those juice resources taxed away for Imperial use.

All that said, how does the game play? It’s smooth, has lots of interesting choices but for ‘modern’ game sensibilities, it’s extremely long (for older gamers, it’s not that long at all compared to some of the true monsters), and I won’t pretend the complexity level wasn’t daunting at first. You are not going to be able to get an Act (game) in a campaign on a school night unless you plan to start early and GO LATE. I think the fumbling over the rules in a group’s early games will be replaced with ANALysis paralysis and negotiation in later plays, so I would guess at minimum you are looking at 45 minutes to an hour per player. This length puts Arcs in a completely different realm than Root and Ahoy, and joins the mega-game zone like Republic of Rome, Twlight Imperium, Warrior Knights, Here I Stand/Virgin Queen and AH Civilization. I couldn’t be happier about that! With Arcs, we do not have a game that will compete with Root or Eclipse, both of which can be played in an hour and a half to two hours, nor with deeper but shorter games like Study in Emerald or Pax Renaissance that can be completed in about an hour with experienced players. If we bust out Arcs, it’s because we want to play a long, in depth game with a lot of player interaction.

So far after just 4 plays, Arcs base game is Ok, but with Blighted Reach, Arcs is a totally insane engine for a huge scope of play as well as a massive design accomplishment from Leder games. I cannot wait to get more games in. Time will tell if this hits the same spot folks want hit from Twilight Imperium, but I suspect we will be playing this game for many years.

Someone thought the El Grande marker was too smooth…

Total War Attila: Dane Campaign

Both because Sweden won Covid and I’m bored with Stellaris at this point (great game, just played out after 100 or so hours) and have gotten back into my true love: Attila Total War. Why do I love it? It’s a FUCK FEST. If you play on HARD (which you should), any faction start difficulty level listed as ‘normal’ or above is going to be a knife fight in a phone booth. I wanted to play one of the Nordic factions, either the Geats or the Danes. While the Geats start in what was Southern Sweden, I went for the Danes which have one of the best special abilities in the game, just beg to be played. They are considered to have a ‘hard’ starting position and it really, really is. I think they have the hardest start of any faction in the game.

The Danes have absolute trash starting units (these are many hundreds of years away from when they were viking), no way to create more cavalry in the beginning of the game and a pretty mediocre fleet. They also do not start with a walled city, but a mere village right around where Copenhagen is at. It appears at first that they are more protected than the Saxons, who are surrounded by enemies, but what I’ve found is that the AI factions seem much more afraid of the Saxons (which they should be) than the Danes, and attack constantly. I was in 3-5 wars constantly. The piling on the AI did when I was already beat down by another faction was amazing to see.

Later game, the Danes do not have great units either. They have good close combat infantry, but SHIT cavalry. Except for the special power of no sea attrition, Danes are like a shit version of the Saxons due to the lack of medium shock cavalry (Saxon Lancers) in a game that is all about cavalry.

The one thing they have going for them is that Danes do not give a fuck about being on the ocean for any amount of time. That means they don’t have deep sea attrition nor do they get sea sickness in battles when they attack from the sea. This means, pound for pound, you can destroy any army from any faction on the ocean and you can subsist with a massive army anywhere on the seas. For example, if food is short and your armies are taking massive attrition, just put them on some boats! This allows travel to strange places on the map no other faction from Northern Europe could get to and raid, pillage and subjugate. Think that many of the satrapies of the Sassinids are weak and soft and weakened by the Huns? They are– go sail there and kill them!

In many Total War games, you sort of sit back a bit, maybe make an opening aggressive move and then pounce on your neighbors who sort of sit there waiting for you to attack. Not so in Attila. There is massive pressure on all the AI factions to destroy nearly everyone nearby because of the threat of the hordes (Vandals, Ostragoths, etc.) even before the Huns even arrive in force. You have to be very careful. If you leave your capital undefended or take the L in a large battle that leaves your army decimated, others nearby will immediately attack. In this way, Attila is closer to Shogun 2 than the other Total War games. You make a mistake in Shogun, you get hammered.

I had like 4-5 starts with the Danes, sometimes attacking the Geats, who have a major city, sometimes attacking the Jutes (who are mostly friendly and get steamrolled by the Angles or Saxons) and sometimes taking out the northern German/Polish factions (Varnians and Rugians). ALL lead to destruction by one of the bigger factions nearby so that I needed to horde up (factions that lose their last city can horde up) or was just eliminated from the game outright.

sucks to be that guy.

This last game where I actually survived FTW. I immediately attacked the Varnians to the south, subjugated them (a mistake) and the Geats instantly attacked my capital and didn’t just take it over or loot it, they RAZED it to the ground, putting my remaining fleet and army into Horde mode on turn 3 or so. The Burgundians instantly took over my new subject (the Varnians) so I was left floating in the Baltic with a pretty big army and medium navy but nothing else and no territory. Instead of quitting I said “Freya’s bryst!” I’m going to see if I can make this work. I sailed all the way over to northern Scotland where a completely empty Pict city sat (right around modern Lairg) ripe for the taking. I snagged it quick and lo and behold I could recruit actual units that weren’t total shit! I made friendly with the Caledonians to the south as there are larger fish to fry in England, Ireland and Wales before squabbling over parts of Scotland.

This is where it got odd but fun. There’s a lot of water between myself and the Geats and Rugians at this point and one figures they would be too busy fighting themselves to come at me. Yet, a few turns later two stacks of Geats and their navy show up and land in my new Pict-provided province in Scotland! By this time, I have a city and a couple army stacks so they don’t attack– they raid around and I am able to catch their armies apart from each other and destroy them. Just as I am done sweating the Geats, the Rugians show up with the same thing! I rushed my fleet back which had been scouting the situation in Southern England as Rome collapses: seeing that both the Franks and Saxons had destroyed the remaining Romans on English soil already. I barely got my armies back together enough to make the Rugians siege but not attack. They sat outside and froze for a couple seasons and then set to raiding like the Geats did. I baited them with a small army and got their armies separated and then separated their heads from their bodies in the same fashion.

Meanwhile, I sent my fleet over to check out what was going on in the Nordic countries and someone had been very naughty. After the Geats razed my province and came to attack me in faraway Scotland, someone had attacked them and razed their province! Razing cities is a very rare thing to do for any AI faction other than the Huns, so someone must have been very angry at the Geats, which were now a very weakened horde that I would deal with in time.

So there I sat, with the Geats gone, the Rugians defeated, for now and of course, the next turn the Ebdanians (Irish) declare war. I have dealt with these guys before as the Saxons and they are nasty, but can’t hold up well to heavy infantry or massed cavalry, relying instead on hiding and TONS of archer units.

i do enjoy the simple pleasures.

I tried to sneak around the West side of England with a large force, only to have the Ebdanians show up marching through the Caledonian lands to the south right towards my city. While they didn’t siege the city, they destroyed some buildings and then I had to chase them down through the Scottish highlands for a few turns before slaughtering them. Now, I was mad. I took everything I had and headed across the sea between Scotland and Ireland, caught the Ebdanians king and trapped him in a city which I seized and occupied, on the same turn crossing back to Wales and driving the Ebdanians out of there as well.

The Ebdanians had been busy and had exhausted their armies taking out the Saxons and Franks in southern England with both London and let’s call it Canterberry all controlled by the proto-Irish. It usually takes a huge fight to get London as England is a mosh pit of Romans, Saxons, Franks, Jutes and Angles until someone settles it down by sword point, but I was able to sneak in and capture it against the weakened, Kingless Ebdanians. At this point I have taken Ireland, most of Southern England, Wales and the northernmost tip of Scotland. Unless the Franks or Saxons come calling, I should be able to mop up or ally with anyone that’s left, which, after having been routed out of Denmark by the northern German tribes and backstabbed by the GEATS, is quite a come back, which is what this whole game is about. From this point it’s just about keeping everyone else away and building up a super strong economy in England while the continent burns due to the Huns and the hordes. Once things settle down a bit, as long as you can cripple or destroy any invasion fleets that come near, you can invade pretty much anywhere on the continent and walk over everyone. The rest of the campaign, while moderately exciting from time to time– isn’t worth detailing as it’s just wait, build up the economy… and crush.

Next up for me is the Himyar. They have the crazy Age of Sigmar masks!

Total War on easy mode: Conquer England (or Spain).
Lady Victory

Juan Gimenez

Juan Gimenez passed away last week. He was the illustrator on Jodorowsky’s METABARONS among many other comics. For me he represents the style of marvel’s EPIC magazine and Heavy Metal from the 80’s in it’s best form.

METABARONS is totally insane sci fi. Reminiscent of DUNE in it’s parts, but taken to a totally new level of extremes. Like most of Jodorowsky’s comics, it gets a bit TOO straight to the point without much in the way of sub-plots or supporting characters (similar to Royal Blood). However, it’s highly recommended and pretty cheap to pick up. The art is, of course, over the top awesome.

Master of Orion – review

First off, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to play and review a new Master of Orion game.  From my youth, MOO1 is still one of my favorite games and frankly stands the test of time just fine vs other 4X.  Props to NGD for taking this project on and putting the resources and time into this game that so many people love.  The shoes they are trying to fill are vast and were filled with space piss from MOO3.

So, I’ve got over 30 hours into the new MOO and I figure it’s about time for a review.  I just finished a medium sized game and I’ll use that as a backbone to discuss various systems in the game and how they work.  I have a lot to say, but I’m going to keep this at near exactly 2000 words!  This is PRE-ANTARAN update, which changes the game in a few ways (and crashed on me too much this weekend to update this review).

If you don’t want to read further, I like the game and I cannot see going back to MOO2 ever again.  MOO1: I would play that again for kicks, but there’s a lot of jagging around getting it to work right in DOSBOX with the himem sys and shit like that.  The new MOO is an easy game to play, it’s not extremely complex and it plays fairly fast, but it’s a slow game compared to MOO1.  You will finish a medium size game in about a week of playing a couple hours a day.  This is in keeping with what MOO1 was– a lighter (and awesome) 4X game.  It has elements of MOO2, but not overwhelmingly so.

This is what the fuck I'm talking about.
This is what the fuck I’m talking about.

This is not a review of multiplayer.  Haven’t gotten a game of that yet. Maybe soon.

Aliens!

First off, I like playing Humans.  I’ve always felt that the AI attacks the player-controlled races more than the others, and Humans have some abilities that stave that off so you can better choose when to go to war.   They are fairly average in everything except shield tech, diplomacy and trading but really what do you need the most?  Money.  So this is with the Humans.  Think they are boring? Fine.  I also dig on the Meklars for just out producing everyone (even the Klackons).

The other choices are pretty standard because originally, they SET the standard! Most of the alien races, in MOO style, equate to some sort of animal.  Dogs, Cats, Birds, Ants, Lizards are all represented and the designers didn’t hold back in the redux trying to make them NOT be directly anthropomorphic.   A few of the aliens don’t fit the animal mode, and generally these are the stronger races in the game.  Psilons, Darlocks, Meklars and Silicoids are all stranger aliens.

Darlocks looking good
Darlocks looking good

Planet Management

I lean towards the Total War style of ‘base’ management as in, I don’t want to do all that much of it, nor do I want to deal with a bunch of CIV style tricks that are required for optimal play. I just want it to be enough planet management to feel like I’m making interesting choices, and not too fuckn detailed.

I miss the sliders, but planet management in the new MOO is fairly easy.  You pop open your planet and move your little guys around from farming to science to production (sorta sliders) and queue up what you want to build.  Planets, based on their size and environment, dictate the capacity of the little guys you move around.  Switch your environment for the better or pollute the shit out of your planet until it’s envirofucked (like our planet earth), and your amount of little guys goes up and down.

Buildings are pretty much what we had in MOO2.  Hydroponic farms, Automated factories, research facilities, planetary shields, missile bases.  What MOO does well is not having the same building being rebuilt in an incremental upgrade, like the lazy design of having Missile Base v2,  Planetary Shields V, etc.   When you get a tech level that allows a new type of planetary defense, it’s usually something very unique and non-mutually exclusive from what you’ve already built. The old building doesn’t go out of style to build, because it’s usually cheap!

Pollution is an important, but not too annoying concern.  Production planets where you constantly build stuff get polluted and you need to dedicate time to clean them up.  Leave pollution to hit a certain threshold and the planet will turn to shit, population will die, less production in the future.  Simple and also a useful mechanic for disasters and invasions/bombardments.  There has been an update since I started this review where  you cannot explicitly ‘work off’ pollution like you used to could– so I’m not sure how that effects the game, yet.

System Management

Moving out from the planetary level is the system level that can hold multiple planets.  Systems are just like the ‘points’ in MOO1, except they have specific points within them where they connect to other systems.  Your ships can only move from systems along these ‘tunnels.’

You will need a colony ship to inhabit the other planets in your first system, you can’t just jump people over there with transports.  This means it’s as costly to colonize in-system planets as out of systems.

At each tunnel entrance, you have the ability to build military installations or ‘listening posts.’  Military installations block any non-allied aliens from moving past into the system.  While easily destroyed, they are a good idea to build all over the place to stave off nasty surprises.  Anything built at the entry-points of systems will stave off the enemy for a turn as they will typically destroy whatever’s there instead of hitting the planets right away.

Overall, system management is more complex than MOO1 because there are multiple planets within each system.  However, fleets fight it out within systems and not just at ‘points’ in space, increasing the ability for tactical play.  Sometimes you will share systems with other races in harmony.  Most times not.

Galaxy Map

Outwards from the systems is the galaxy map. This is where most of the action takes place from a strategic level.  There are various configurations of galaxies, some of which start with a mosh, and some are turtle-esque.  What to watch out for is if your race is bounded by RED warp lines as these can only be traversed by your ships much later in the game.  I’ve been cornered off from most of the galaxy instead of thrown into the plague pit from the start and it’s a different game.

While most ship movement is forced along the warp lines, you can build jump gates that connect two different systems in a straight line.  Your ships still have to move at their rate between them, so it’s not instant.

I can’t find a way to AUTOMOVE built ships from my factory systems to the war front. Need to look into that.

Overall I dig the look of the galaxy map.

Make the fucking text bigger!
Make the fucking text bigger!

silicoids

Diplomacy

The diplomacy in MOO1 was built to piss you off so you attacked all the aliens relentless.  They would talk shit, make stupid requests and be generally annoying when you were trying to deal with them in any meaningful manner.  In newMOO, I found the AI not annoying,  more logical but more silly.  They still have stuff they say that will pysse you off, but not at the same level as the old MOO games.   You can make much better and more robust deals with them, and other than most strategy games I’ve played, they actually sometimes accept these deals instead of never accepting anything.  The “What would make this work” button helps a lot to speed up diplomatic actions and guesswork, which I appreciate.  Playing the Humans, I use diplomacy a lot, and have no complaints here.

Ship customization

MOO1 had two types of useful ships.  Big ones with the massive weapons that would destroy whole stacks, and small planetary bombers that you could build thousands of and clear out whole areas of space of aliens by bombing their planets, and leaving their fleets to rot.

The new MOO has almost an Ascendancy level of customization, where you add on modules and hope for micronization tech so you can fit more shit on a ship.  I really don’t care about this part of the game very much, so did little customization, feeling that if I built enough of the stock ships, it would be fine.  You do not have many ship slots, so if you build a custom ship type, it better fucking work well or you will be deleting it before you get many of them into space.

I think a key part of making custom ships is that you run them in real time combat.  Otherwise, just build and upgrade the base models and build enough shit to overwhelm everyone!

Combat

This is where MOO1 has it over MOO2 (and MOO3).  The way the turn-based system worked in MOO1 was excellent, where you could make a couple moves, then let the AI take over to finish off the battle with out dealing with the tiresome grinding and moving when you know you’ve won.  You could still see what’s going on with your weapons’ effectiveness, but you controlled what you wanted and then stopped when your control didn’t matter much.

In the new MOO, the designers chose to go the Total War route: real time battles.  I think this was a good move as certainly I have a shitload of mileage in TW games and really enjoy that part of the games the most.  Like Gratuitous Space Battles, it’s all about those key battles with massive fleets that take up the whole screen.  While the combat is certainly better than say, Endless Space, MOO2 and Birth of The Federation, I have some issues with it being sorta fuckin boring.

Coming to new MOO as a Total War fan, I expected the real time battles to have benefits to some tactics and maneuver.   In TW, you can win battles or cost the enemy dearly if you use the correct tactics for the situation at hand.  For example if you are a non-horse archer empire in TW (I pity you!) you’re going to be hunkering down in your castles a lot.  If you use your army to attack and destroy a horse archer opponent’s infantry (of which he won’t have much), he will have a very, very difficult time in later sieges against you, allowing you to whittle down the rest of the horse archers at you leisure.   So far as I can see, there’s nothing like that in the real time battles in MOO except kite around and shoot missles, which I’m not a fan of doing, it bores the shit out of me.   You can target specific ships and try to take them out, but I found in the games I’ve played that it just didn’t matter that much. You throw your ships across the void and just watch the explosions.  Making a couple choices here and there.  Overall I just run most combats without going into the tactical view.  I hope they improve this (just fucking copy Dominions 4).

Spying

It’s there, you put dudes on planets and try to do stuff. As you succeed, your spy starts to unlock more bad stuff he can do.  I didn’t do very much with spying in my games, but it seemed fine.  I’d have to play as the Darlocks to really get in on this as a ‘catch up’ mechanism.   I like all the different spy portraits for each race– there are tons of them and they are beautiful.

moo1

Aesthetics

Space monsters look stupid with the exception of the Guardian.  The alien portraits and animations, voice, all that stuff that gives the aliens character: it’s grown on me.  When I first saw the cat lady there was an OH JEEZ, yet MOO1 was campy and they’ve followed through with that.  There’s not much you can do when more than half the alien races are anthropods right out of the gate!  There are races I hated in MOO1, that I would always destroy immediately (Silicoids, Sakkra, Klackons) that I feel differently about in MOO1 based on their graphics and presentations.   They’ve captured the feel of the aliens, but if there’s one thing that MOO3 did well (and only one thing) it’s the alien design/animations.   It was great.

Ship designs are descent, but not really inspired.  We just don’t see the level of art here that Endless Legends has.  All ship levels have two types of chassis so at least you can tell your carriers from your warships, bombers from frigates, etc.

Overall, it’s functional, looks fairly good and most importantly, isn’t annoying.

Final thoughts

Unlike MOO3, MOO is not a cascade of space piss into my open mouth, nor is it the greatest 4X game ever made (like MOO1 is).  That said, MOO is a really good game and I’ve been playing since early release.  There have been a lot of addons and changes to the game that has fleshed it out quite a bit, so I don’t think they are done with development (and the recent Antaran patch proves it).  They have made some LARGE shifts in the gameplay based on player comments since early release, ripping out minor races and then putting them back in fixed up, which is pretty cool.  Despite having to suffer people pissed off because new MOO is not a direct rip of MOO2, over– very vitriolic complaints as people on the internet are wont to do.

MOO does not grab me like Empire or Rome 2 Total War* did where I can’t stop playing for months, but I do not believe that was the ultimate aim of the developers; MOO is a lighter 4X.   I can sit around on a Sunday, put a few hours in and get a good game going that I can finish up by early the next week with a few more hours of play.  The game has enough depth to feel meaty, but it’s light enough for me to just want to jump in and not feel like I have to relearn the spreadsheet like Civ players do.

Lastly, the game crashes and hangs up fairly often late game, and sometimes games cannot be recovered. This is no different than MOO, MOO2 or Birth of the Federation, but I think we’d all love if this didn’t happen!

mooundecided

*my favorite thing in TW games is the real time battles within the campaign context.  For example, to be fighting an enemy for a long time on the campaign map and finally catch their big army short or in a bad position where you can watch the slow, methodical slaughter of their entire force for 15-20 minutes or so is just my meat and potatoes.   Especially when you trap a huge amount of them in city streets and slowly grind them down where they have no where to run.  The battle was over in the first 5 minutes, the rest is just raw butchery.

Birthday MOO!

Today is my birthday. I am old.  I usually run 7 miles on my birthday but– man I gotta mow the lawn instead…

MOO is officially out today and I’m going to play a bit today despite the excellent weather.  I recommend it.  For CIV players it may be too simplistic, however.

We played THE CAPTAIN IS DEAD last night and it was fairly good.  I do not like the cooperative games like Pandemic (especially Pandemic) where really it’s a SOLO game and the presence of all players but the most experienced is superfluous at best.  However, coop games with hidden goals like Galactica and Dead of Winter are great games.   The Captain is Dead falls into the Pandemic style, but it plays fast, has a TON of asymmetry with the characters you each play.  I would actually play it again.  What’s more, it doesn’t have any DVD or sound shit to go along with it, because that is fucking annoying.

Anyway, happy birthday to me.  See some of you on SATURDAY for the drunken nerdery.