Master of Orion

Strategic eXpanse #26: Chris Keeling of Wargaming eXplorminate

Interview with WG Director. Discusses why pausable RTS at 10:00-11:00 and 41:00- "We had turn-based combat for the first year of the design, it wasn't fun or fast enough." Disagree with his Emperor comment at 42ish. Clarified later by Dev that some weapons are auto (beam weapons) formation based others are individual control (black hole generator).

Edit: Starlane rationale at 37:00-40ish. 1. Makes for stronger AI 2. Makes for more diverse galaxy: spiral, elliptical, not just a blob.

Phazael_sl said:

Jesus Tad, I would have figured that the whole Malaysian airlines fiasco might have tempered your zealotry a bit, but I guess not.

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Ship Design Article up on Steam MOO Hub

Steam Community :: Group Announcements :: Master of Orion

Section on weapon facing:

Weapons

The Weapons block allows you to not only add weapons to your ship but also determine how many of each weapon to emplace, their facing, and any special abilities if available. With these options you could make a specialized ship for planetary bombardment, a carrier, a point defense escort, etc.

.Modifiers: Available modifiers for a weapon will be shown. Modifiers may be toggled on and off with your weapons; you can give a particular weapon almost any combination of modifiers. Modifiers add special abilities but also increase the Production cost of the weapon and the space it takes up. Weapons placed in a slot need to be identical in all ways to include which side(s) they face. . Example modifiers include Point Defense, ECCM, Enveloping, Heavy Mount, etc.

.Quantity: You may pick how many of a particular weapon system to install on the ship. There is no limitation to a weapon load except the space needed to install them.

.Facing: Direct-fire weapons require facings. You may face a weapon to the front, left, right, rear, left and right, or 360 degrees. The last two will slightly reduce the combat effectiveness of the weapon because it must cover multiple arcs and cannot concentrate to a particular arc. Missiles have no facing requirements.

.Information: The bottom of a weapon selection will display the DPS, total Production cost, and space used/space maximum of the ship as it relates to the weapon(s) being mounted.

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Also Michael Bayification of Ships Confirmed.

And perhaps the secret of what happened to MH370 lies in the Gamma Quadrant?

Explorminate will also be having a gameplay session tomorrow morning EST with some WG on hand to answer questions. Pretty positive comments in their podcast, but then again it was with WG.

Should be here ->Explorimate Twitch

Edit: Paradogs stream starts at midnight PST tonight here ->Paradogs Twitch

Ice burn?

Gavinmad_sl said:

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Phazael_sl said:

Yeah being called a scared old man by a guy who won't leave his own house is not exactly burn material, especially when Sean-lite is the only guy in the thread agreeing with you.

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Neither part of that sentence better be referring to me.

Tarrant_sl said:

Huh, so I guess you really never did play the originals. LoL at hours long combat.

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Yes Grasshopper, if you are taking out a giant three-row Psilon fleet with only one or two doomstars combat can take an hour or more and be really boring. But feel free to add an "s" to my un-edited comment if that makes you feel better.

And now that I think about it, I probably should have put in the "s" on hours as combat can theoretically go on hours or even forever. There's been at least two instances I can think of where I've had to quit-crash a game because of a small one on one combat where the AI and I could both repair our damage faster than we could dish it out. I also remember a game where all I had was a planet with a planetary defense shield and damaged ground batteries and the AI didn't have a lot of bombs in its fleet, so several circles of ships surrounding my planet that couldn't do very much damage to it. That went on for a while too.

And fair warning, not curbing dick responses mean you can make dick responses in the shaw. You've been warned.

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Sweet, so you reply to my dick response with your own dick response and a threat. I see Rerolled has its own PC Principal approved Trust & Safety Council now and you want to be its Anita Sarkessian.

Edit: And if it wasn't clear: Shaw away buddy, more time to play MOO4. Cheers.

Phazael_sl said:

Yeah being called a scared old man by a guy who won't leave his own house is not exactly burn material, especially when Sean-lite is the only guy in the thread agreeing with you.

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I actually thought he was referring to your "I want MOO2 gosh dangit with no new-fangled changes and so does the entire world, I'm sure" post. But I wasn't positive.

It was a joke, and it referred to me just as much as anyone else in this thread, I like MoO2 just the way it is.

Eat shit.

Phazael_sl said:

That was actually my assumption as well. And I outlined what I would expect from a successful continuation of the franchise. Look at what they did from Moo1 to Moo2 and extrapolate from there. Moo3 should be completely ignored as if it never existed, similar to the SW prequels.

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You should listen to the explorminate podcast. The lead WG guy brought on the MOO1 Simtex team as advisors: everyone, including the original Simtex team all said the same thing: you can't just make a reskinned MOO2. Yes, I am sure you would like it, but you'd be in the minority.

Early Access is going to need work, but you should keep an open mind and check the state of the game in a few months after they've ironed out the AI bugs and what-not. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Phazael_sl said:

Tad, you and Gav are the only ones in this thread advocating for the change. The fact that they are making a big PR push on this front should tell you a lot. For most people who the Moo IP matters to, updating the graphics, adding some extra wrinkles, and tidying up the interface are exactly what they want. What they are doing with the core of the game (Star Lanes, RTS battle, ect) is not a part of either of the two successful entries into the series. And the fact that AI took a backseat to voice acting, graphics, and RTS click gimmicks speaks volumes about why a lot of us on this board won't go in on this game, especially at launch. If this were some new series and not mooching MOO nostalgia, this conversation would not even be happening.

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Are you fucking retarded?

tad10_sl said:

Ship Design Article up on Steam MOO Hub

Steam Community :: Group Announcements :: Master of Orion

Section on weapon facing:



Also Michael Bayification of Ships Confirmed.

And perhaps the secret of what happened to MH370 lies in the Gamma Quadrant?

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They are going for blob design. (Essentially your ship just has mass cap, and parts fill the mass. Put more armor in the ship for HP, puts more mass in the ship). The only placement that is really relevant beyond a 'ship ability' relevancy is gun facing.

If you put RTS in the game, it should work like Star Drive 2 or SoTS 2 had it work, where everything you place in the ship matters. You can physically surround your reactor with armor plating, then put non critical systems around that, then another layer of armor (So the non-critical systems can serve as HP buffers too). This made facing/direction in the combat screen much more important (If your armor is torn up on one side, or you lost guns on that side, you can shy away or have another ship cover that side.) Shield systems actually had to be placed well since they might not cover your whole ship (You might only want to waste the room on shields for your engines, for example, because you can surround the engines with armor)

It's too bad Star Drive 2's campaign layer wasn't that great and its AI was mediocre. It got ship design right though (SoTS2 also got ship design right, but in an even better way--their weapons used actual physics, so depending on armor types, ballistics could glance off, there was friendly fire, momentum ect. Was pretty fucking awesome. But the rest of the game was broken.)

In any case it looks decent. This and Polaris are pretty much the same game, right down to ship design (Polaris has more free form ship design, like Star Drive 2, but the internal components are still summed up on the battle screen so the direction of armor ect doesn't matter. Any armor you place in the ship simply gives it more HP; any components simply give it abilities, their physical placement doesn't matter--only that they fit into the space of the ship. So they are using physical space rather than weight/mass.)

Phazael_sl said:

Tad, you and Gav are the only ones in this thread advocating for the change. The fact that they are making a big PR push on this front should tell you a lot. For most people who the Moo IP matters to, updating the graphics, adding some extra wrinkles, and tidying up the interface are exactly what they want. What they are doing with the core of the game (Star Lanes, RTS battle, ect) is not a part of either of the two successful entries into the series. And the fact that AI took a backseat to voice acting, graphics, and RTS click gimmicks speaks volumes about why a lot of us on this board won't go in on this game, especially at launch. If this were some new series and not mooching MOO nostalgia, this conversation would not even be happening.

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An updated MOO2 with merely a graphic overall was never going to happen. If people want to play MOO2 they click on the MOO2 icon on their desktop and play it. Nobody in their right mind pays 49.99 just for a reskin, I am aware there are crazy people in the world who would pay 49.99 for just such a reskin but there are not enough to pay for the costs of development.

With respect to your "at launch" comment. I completely agree, if you're not willing to endure growing pains (and why should you be?) then you shouldn't buy the game on the 26th. It is missing races, the very important customize your own race option, espionage, race-specific techs, certain winning conditions and only has one AI setting ("Average"). It's an Early Access product and won't be polished for months. So yes, you and everyone else should keep your money, and see how the gameplay evolves by watching the occasional twitch/youtube video.

With respect specifically to the pausable RTS battle element that you all hate so much, I strongly suspect it may end up being one of the top selling points of the game if it works as advertised. We'll see.

So again, I'll repeat my suggestion above that you check back in in a few months.

It might be ok. Pausable arts tends to be pretty meh. Not a big fan of arts in general though, I prefer turn based 4x.

Lithose_sl said:

If you put RTS in the game, it should work like Star Drive 2 or SoTS 2 had it work, where everything you place in the ship matters. You can physically surround your reactor with armor plating, then put non critical systems around that, then another layer of armor (So the non-critical systems can serve as HP buffers too). This made facing/direction in the combat screen much more important (If your armor is torn up on one side, or you lost guns on that side, you can shy away or have another ship cover that side.) Shield systems actually had to be placed well since they might not cover your whole ship (You might only want to waste the room on shields for your engines, for example, because you can surround the engines with armor)

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Yes I would prefer that as well. Reminds me of old-school Star Fleet Battles ships.