GalCiv vs MOO2 (for GalCiv 2)

Which is a drawback for AI as they can't have a good ship design

I agree with you, one advise don't buy MOOO3, it is the biggest waste of money that you have seen in your life.

I bought it and I am still kicking myself for doing it. I still cannot set the proper rules to play the game, there is no way to conquer a planet, the Xs are missing and no way to find them, the set migration thing works one time and doesnot works other, the Senate always elects the Orion as the best, and then suddenly you loose the game and when I check the statistics after 389 plays, I am on top on each one of them, and I still lost the game, of course The Orions won again. Very disappointed about MOOO3

The AI did come up with some pretty good (and EXTREMELY annoying) designs at times, although I don't know if this was by chance or by design!

Also, they always seemed to have more ships than me mid-game.

That's another point - the ship management is MUCH easier in MOO2 than it is in GalCiv, although the movement method is slightly different. You could quickly assemble/divide fleets, see where they were as a fleet, not as a collection of individual ships etc.

I'm not even going to go into how MOO3 sucked like an industrial vacuum cleaner

The AI in MOO2, seemed to cheat mor, i mean i would have better planets with allkinds of uprgrades, twice and many people and it would take me fore ever to build a battleship, while the MOO2 AIs would churn out one every 4 turns. If it wasn't for gyro destabilizers, tractor beams and bording, and warp dissapators i would never get past the mid game on hard. I could capture 3 of their battleships before builing one of my own. I do love the MOO2 game, i played it last month in fact, but now that i have Galciv down, the game play is much faster than MOO2 and there aren't any dern Anterrians decemating my best planets every so often. Also i don't like the diplomacy so much in MOO2 and would usually pick Repulsive to avoid that part of the game. You are definelty right aobut MOO2 having techs and even race characteristics that make new things possible instead of mearly improving a stat. I mean how cool is it to design a species that doesn't need food to eat?!

GalCiv 2 will have ship design and fleets (tied to logistics).

Will these fleets attack together? I mean, will they work so that if you have say 30 corvettes in a fleet, that you can destroy a battleship or dreadnought and not lose the whole fleet trying? I'd imagine it would work something like the defense and attack values of all the ships added together when calculating how much damage is done to the battleship and how much damage is dealt to your fleet. So like 30 corvettes with 4 def each and 5 att each would equate to 120 def and 150 att. But that seems unbalanced, so maybe divide it by 4 so it'd be 30 def and 38 att.

MOO2 was not a Master of Orion game. It was Master of Magic in space. I hated almost everything about it.

The tech tree was awful in MOO2, while the original Master of Orion had the best tech system of any 4X game to date, including GalCiv. (Sorry Frogboy, just one player's opinion ). The "creative" option let you have all the techs in MOO2. Otherwise you had to choose, and there was usually a clear best choice at each level, rendering the tech path the same for every game. Predestined and AWFUL.

The micromanagement was awful, too. Spend all your gaming time controlling minutiae in the hope of picking up enough total benefit to perform well. The AI bonuses at high difficulty were overwhelming. The diplomacy was a total joke (MOO1's was MUCH better, in more ways than I care to take time to describe now).

Then there was the combat. Turn-based combat was fun, and the MOO2 combat system brought some new and interesting elements to the table, but it was so LONG. In MOO1, the more abstract combat, a la HOMM style, was simple and silly, and had some loopholes, but you could finish it quickly and get on with the game. MOO2 combats always dragged, and there was no way to set your formation or do anything strategically useful, always the same default formation, which stank. Ships in the middle always engaged first, and there were less tactics than the game promised. In short, it was so predestined, they would have been better off to have left it abstract.

Then there were the Antarrans. Don't even get me started on the Antarrans. Worst game mechanism of all time.


I disliked MOO2 not for what it was, or did, but for what it wasn't. It wasn't a sequel to the original MOO, and that disappointed me quite bitterly. MOO3 failed in large part because there was too much MOO2 in it, and not enough MOO1. They tried to be all things to all players and ended up delivering nothing. Once the Master of Magic game elements were brought into the franchise, it began to stink like a rotten fish. SimTex should never have merged the two franchises. They were each good separately, with different strengths and appeals.


GalCiv benefits greatly from the many things it abstracts. GC has thrived where MOO3 failed because of the abstractions. The two games went in opposite directions, and the GC approach has won out. In point of fact, GC's gameplay is closer to that of Master of Orion than MOO3's! Incredible but true!


GalCiv shows that the Stardock team understands that what the player spends time doing is the most important element of gaming, so I trust them to do a good job with the sequel. I would not expect to find many similarities to MOO2, one of the biggest gaming duds of all time.


- Sirian

I wouldn't describe MOO2 as one of the biggest gaming duds of all time. It was incredibly popular, and many people regard it as one of the best 4X games of all time. The same could not be said of MOO3.

It wasn't a sequel to MOO1, no, but it was an excellent game in its own right, in my opinion.

As I said, I didn't find the mangement difficult at all, and for me, the game is certainly not impossible, even at the highest difficulty settings (which I always play on).

I liked the Antarans. They added a new dimension to the gameplay as well as being a good backstory (but then, I'm a Babylon 5 fan).

The tech path wasn't the same by any means. It depends how you chose to play. Some techs were obviously better than others, and only very few (the biological weapons) were useless, but the whole point was that you could trade for or capture the remaining tech.

Yes, the massive battles involving a hundred ships on both sides could take a long time, but you could turn strategic battles off, and the computer would auto-resolve. But you lost the advantage of good ship design.

I loved both MOO1 and MOO2, and GalCiv, not because MOO is "MOO", but because all three are great 4X games. MOO3, I hated because it was just bad, not because it didn't have some of my favourite races in it or whatever. If the Drengin or Excaliburs or alignment aren't in GalCiv2, I'll still play it, as long as it's a good game.

Anyway, I shouldn't defend MOO2 as this is all opinion. There are doubtless people out there who think GalCiv is a pile of poo, but I don't agree with them.

There are certainly things GalCiv2 can hopefully take from MOO1/2 that were done very well (and things from GalCiv1 that could maybe be dropped!).

The things I most miss from MOO1 (also my favourite Space TBS, gameplay-wise, including GalCiv):

1) Ability to manage the economies of individual planets. Rather than a single slider for the whole empire, I would like to see a system where I can set everything globally with one set of macro sliders, and then go and tweak spending on individual planets that I want to have do something else. I'd also like the ability to lock the sliders on a particular planet so that when I go to play with the global sliders, that planet's allocations remain unchanged.

2) Ship design. MOO1's system was the best, IMHO. The energy/size/miniaturization dynamic meant that there was a meaningful reason to pick something other than the latest and greatest armament and defensive options. Other games never really recaptured that feel. MOOII retained the element of opening up new options in combat technology as the game progressed, but older tech lost its meaning more quickly.

3) Meaningful and relatively inexpensive planetary defenses. In combat, GalCiv is all about speed and offense. He who strikes first has a massive advantage. He who can decoy away his opponents or simply outmaneuver them can strike at virtually undefended planetary targets and capture them, often without any significant threat of the AI recapturing them. Planetary assault itself is trivial; it takes only a small amount of population to conquer a large enemy planet, or at least kill off the vast bulk of the population. Combat in MOO1 was more defensive in nature, with inexpensive missile bases forming a significant obstacle for both your opponent's fleets attacking you and yours attacking them. This made it possible to survive early-game bullying and raids by other AI empires, and made it much more of a challenge to wage a successful military strike at an enemy empire's economic base.

Ah, MOO1 and MOO2.... I actually liked them both although they were not the same. I wonder if MOO1 will run under XP?
Anyway, I thoughly enjoy GalCiv. While there have been some details abstracted away they do not seem to affect the overall enjoyment of the game.
I was playing Space Empires 4 a lot until GalCiv came out. I missed the unlimited ship designs, individual planetary micromanagement, race creation, etc. Until I discovered the depth and capability of the AI in GalCiv. Then I understood how and why some things were abstracted. Trying to write a generic AI that understands unlimited ship designs, planetary micromanagement and able to be tweeked to give the appearance of different alien intelligences is next to impossible. Player's eventually see through the AI settings and realize there is only one (although complex) AI algorithm behind those alien eyes. With GalCiv having unique and seperate AI logic for each race it allows the developer to add personality and depth that I have not seem in previous games.
All this points to the fact that the single player aspect of a strategy game is more important to me. Being a 40 year old gamer, I do not have the time to sit online for hours on end to play against humans. So a good AI system is paramount to the experience for me and Stardock as done a wonderful job with their 4x strategy game.
I know I chased a few rabbits there but thought I would throw my 2 cents.

Thanks
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Yep, MOO1 runs just fine under XP

One thing I liked about the moo1 game was combat only at planets and fleet combat screens. Also, you could run the gauntlet with troop transports (Not easy with tons of missile bases but very dooable early with a few) and take over. It was one of my favorite Bulrathi tricks early.

Moo2 ended up much more like Civ (deliberately so) and that was it's downfall imo. I liked that Moo1 was a different more macro sort of game than Civ. Moo3 tried to go back to that but flopped. I liked the multi-planets in a system. I liked the 6 category, limited choice tech in Moo1. Also Moo2 tech wise was a race to the Stellar Converter. He who gets it first, wins. In Moo1 there was alot more consideration of Size and Power requirements vs Damage, Range, and such.



How does XP deal with the Emm386 (Expanded Memory) and highmem (extended Memory) requirements in its Dos emulator? For me to run it I can't run it with sound or I run out of "Conventional" memory even though Windows doesn't distinguish. I can't get it to get around that Dos Requirement in the Moo1 program.

For all its fault, Moo 3 did introduce a very interesting concept, one that I hope will be done right by someone sometime into the future. The concept of fleet, with multiple ships in various role, is very interesting for strategy gaming, even though it was poorly implemented in moo3. Also the notion that each race had a different environment preference is a good start to the kind of planetary model I would like to see.

~SDC~

One of the few areas I can think of for improvement in a GC2 is navigating the tech tree. Its hard to see an end tech you want to head towards and research accordingly. It is much improved now that you can "click the links" to see what techs follow or precede the one you're interested in. However, a screen that laid out the research tree and enabled you to click on an end tech and have the prerequisites line up in a research queue would help (cp. CivIII).

That said, I'm still trying to master GC1!

Copy the autoexec.nt file from /windows/system32/ into your MOO directory.
Edit this file and REM out all but the BLASTER= line.Create a shortcut to orion.exe, right click it & select properties.
On the program tab click advanced - in the autoexec box type the full path to your new autoexec.nt file. Click OK.
On the memory tab set EMS to 1024.

When you run install.exe set the soundcard up as Soundblaster with settings 220/5/1.

With a bit of luck you'll have a fully working MOO with sound. HTH

~SDC~

conquering the galaxy is always good... well, maybe I should say fun, but I do try to peacefully ensl... create an umbrella of brotherhood and understanding among all the species of the galaxy.

~SDC~

Does this mean that we will have tactical combat? Or will be the ship design like the unit design in Alpha Centauri?

Surely some people will have another point of view, even flame me, but I hope that there won't be a tactical combat in GalCiv2. It will give the human a great advantage on the AI. I have played some 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) games with tactical combat (Master of Orion (1 & 2), Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic (2,3,4), even if I am not sure that it fit in the 4X category) on solo games. And I have always found that I can have a better outcome if I play myself the combat. So if there is a tactical combat, I know that I will use it even if there is a auto-combat option.

In the above games, I have found 3 kind of tactical combats:
In MOO2, each ship was occuping a space on the tactical map. As the ships needs to be move individually, it could lead to long movement turn. the battle was between individual ships.
In MOO, you have up to 6 stacks of ships. Each stack has a different design. Stack were fighting each other and there was an interesting twist: each weapon could destroy AT most one ship. So if you have a stack ot 10 ships, each ship with 5 lasers beam, you could destroy at most 50 ships. And they were some weapons that allow you to make damage on all ship in the stack. And you must remind this when fightin a stack of 32K of small fighter with 4 hp. The death ray that was useful against planetary defense with 600 hp of damage was useless against lots of fighter.
In the various HOMM, you have stack of identical unit. but to the contrary of MOO, the damage are carried over the unit of the stack. So 100 damage to a stack of unit with 5 Hp results in 20 deaths.

Each kind of tactical combat have some strength and some weakness.

The design of unit in Alpha Centaury wasn't for tactical combat but to have unit with the caracteritics that you want for a cost that was based on the caracteritics. If I remember correctly, you choose the chassis (men, vehicule, aircraft ...), a special ability (spy, terraformer, freighter ...), the armor, the offensive value and you end up with the cost for the unit.

I would add that I think it would be great if in GalCiv 2, the AIs are able to play better the current game with the various option: actively cultural flipping, understanding the use of TS.
I think it shoul be better to close some holes in the AI instead of putting too much new features that make the game no longer fun: game mechanisms too complex to be fully understood (how works the destabilization in the current version?), too many features that give us a great advantage against the AI, AI not challenging due to loopholes not closed ...

We certainly don't want Galciv 2 to be the new MOO3

The other thing you could argue though is that the AI is better at overall ship strategy (that is, keeping track of lots of ships, fleets and so on), so the human advantage offsets this. A lot of the time, when I have many fleets or ships in flight, I've forgotten what I wanted them to do by the time they reach their destination!

I always like strategic combat because I think it gives more of an "epic" feel to the game. I remember one game of MOO2 where my hastily constructed (read rush-bought) defence fleet of 15 battleships, led by one of my most experienced admirals fought off a huge Bulrathi invasion fleet of 50 or so titans with a loss of 9 ships. The surviving crews got a day off but they had to do it again the next turn against a smaller, following fleet. This time, I'd given them adequate reinforcements though.

I personally quite like individual ship battles. It's fun sending my flagship to the forefront in a desperate all-or-nothing rush.

A combination of individual movement but sensible auto-battle (along the lines of an RTS type game) might be workable though.

Anyone for Galactic Civilisations: Total War ? ;D

I don't think tactical battles are really in the cards for GalCiv -- they don't really suit the game as it stands right now. If it's still one ship against one ship, what's the point? If not, (a) how do you resolve a lot of small battles happening all on the same turn, without slowing the game down tremendously, and (b) how do you avoid the megafleet problem?

Tactical battles are all fine and good when there is a nodal movement/combat system, so that battles can only take place at certain locations. It doesn't work as well when you can have 100 ships fighting separate battles in 100 different tiles spread across the map.

MoO1 should work fine with DosBox... an Open Source "emulator" (findable at sourceforge). I just got finished testing Acsendancy... And, you will have SOUND, guaranteed, if you have sound on your XP system. MoO1 with sound is the next thing on my old time play list for my XP.

MoO1 was a great game. I liked how they balanced out various things in the game. Such as small ships versus large ships. And how technology not only let you go farther out from colonies, but also opened up new kinds of worlds you could colonize. It gave the game the feeling that you were really opening up what you could do.

MoO2, however, sucked in that regard. You always wanted the biggest ships (due to how their logistics/maintenance costs worked). And there was no big deal about what worlds you could settle. It just varied the cost a bit. Too much managing shopping list and going bigger is better in MoO2. That said, it's a decent game, in my opinion. Just not a worthy successor to MoO1. MoO3 was just... unfortunate. There is no telling what the game would be, if the original time had been able to do what they documented and contracted on paper. All things change... especially how long your creditors/backers will wait. It's always shorter then what you agree on.

"Fleet" roles never work. They are always neat to look at on the 3D tactical displays, but their never end up having any real meaning. Why? Because either the game doesn't have enough detail, or doesn't allow for a large enough fleet. Star Wars Rebellion had fleets, with ship roles and fleet tactics, for instance. And while they looked pretty, they didn't matter even 1% in the outcome of the fight. Same with MoO3 and every other game I've played with them.

When you get into fleets (stacked units acting together), you get into serious exploitation territory. Regardless of the game, players exploit the artificiality and the mechanism of the stack. That's something that StarDock will have to take a look at. Being in space, 1000 corvettes could all target the same 10 enemy ships, after all. And there would be more then enough "space" to have a stack of 1000 corvettes. If Star Dock allows them all to add their attack together, that's what people will do... just build the largest stack possible. If the "fighting stack" is limited by some ability (say, "tactics") so that your people had to research how to get X number of ships to work "together" as a fighting unit, then people are going to stack their biggest attack ships together (and complain, as space is freaking big enough for more, so a stack of 500 REALLY should permit more then 4 units in the stack to fight together, regardless of "tech").

But, I am not worried. GC2 will be a fun game. After all, it's going to be a StarDock product.

GC does suffer from something in this regard (I just had it today) - 100 Altarian Corvettes trying to take down one dreadnought. As they had difficulty damaging it, it took quite some time for 70-odd attacks to be resolved (I happened to have the screen in the sector where this was happening).

I know the fix for that... call up a different screen via your FUNCTION keys. I like to call up government or tactical screens. Then those 100 corvettes doing something (like, thinking about moving, or moving and attacking) happens/resolves VERY quickly.

I am a big fan of GalCiv and the original MOO1. In fact, I've started work on a Java version of MOO1. A somewhat-dated walkthrough is here: http://www.raykerby.com/jmoo and you can follow the progress of the project on my developer's blog here: http://www.raykerby.com/blog

One reason I like GalCiv so much is that they clearly devoted so much attention to the AI, rather than resorting to multi-player