Fractral said:
veloper said:
The Madman said:
veloper said:
Take Master of Orion 2, remove all the tactical combat, then replace all the interesting spaceship weapon variety with mostly cosmetic options, so all that's left is a prettier, but dull empire management game and then break even that. That is GC2.
Sometimes I wonder if the new blood enjoys watching paint dry, also.
I disagree, as do the majority of other people in this topic obviously. But then as I recall we've also been through this debate before so I know better than to bother asking why you don't like GalCiv2. Just try not to be so condescending about it, will you?
You don't need to ask me why, because I just wrote right here why I think so.
I don't really care about what a majority in a small thread would prefer, but I do enjoy pulling gamers into discussions.
I am genuinely puzzled how any fan of the genre could prefer GC2 over MoO2 or Armada 2526.
What's Armada 2526 like? And while I remember, I've had MoO2 sitting on my hard drive for the past year or so but I still haven't gotten around to trying it. Is it easy to get into?
OT: Yeah, GalCiv 2 is pretty good. The AI is surprisingly clever at times, and does some fun things like telling you when they've noticed you building up fleets for an invasion. The tech tree could use a little work though, among other things.
I think Armada2526 Supernova is the closest, recent approximation of MOO2, but it has it's own quirks and features to make it stand out.
Overal, the game strikes a balance between complexity and reduced empire management, that is a little less complex than MOO2 and with fewer clicks between turns on the empire management side, but it's way more varied and involved than games like GC2 and endless space and requiring much less busiwork than GC2.
The worst feature in Armada 2526 needs to be adressed before all the other points I think:
- unlike MOO2 you don't design the ships yourself, but you research predesigned ships and then some general upgrades for them. Compared to GC2 that basicly amounts to less trivial busiwork, but compared to MOO2, that's a really big downgrade.
The only upside to this is that turns progress much more quickly and that's nice when you're not in the mood for a game that may take many late evenings to complete.
The second caveat is the real-time (pausible) tactical combat, which may not be everyone's cup of tea. You switch from the turn-based starmap to a small scale battlemap as soon as enemy ships get in range, unless you choose to auto-resolve them. I don't really mind the RTC, as it still works well enough.
The similarity to MOO2 then is in the empire part of the game.
The starmap is taken straight from MOO2, with straight starlanes connecting the stars. So just like MOO2, ships take several turns to travel across these lanes and advanced techs are required to speed them up or to change movement orders while in hyperspace transit.
The planetery types and the planetary facilities are also very remnicent of MOO2. the races and racial features are varied and more than just a bunch of percentages. Even the gfx style is similar in tone and feel.
Big improvements over MOO2 are in the area of game balance:
+ wide sprawling empires incur additional penalties to the treasury and population approval ratings (somewhat like Civ4), putting a break on expansionism and maintaining challenge throughout the game
+ very big empires incur a diplomacy penalty rather than making every rival bend over backwards like in most 4x games, again so the game doesn't become a cakewalk in the end phase (this is somewhat similar to the mega-evil-empire feature in SE4, only less abrupt and more gradual)
+ tall empires (with more advanced planetery facilites) are actually a viable choice in some scenarios and even wide empires are forced to research and upgrade their planets to compete (unlike the flat model of MOO2 and SE4 end very much unlike the terrible inverse-model of GC2).
+ the AI is fairly competent at both the tactical and strategic/diplomatic part of the game, in part because it doesn't need to be able to handle optimised/specialized player ships (an issue in MOO2 and SE4) and because it can handle the map and mostly sticks to it's goals (GC2 issue).
Really cool and original is how the different races have different end goals for winning the game apart from wiping everyone out (size of the population, or more trade, or more happy faces, etc.), which makes the diplomacy part in this game the most interesting take of any 4X game to date.
It also makes actually losing the game a very real threat throughout the game, especially if you're not paying attention to what the opponents are doing.
