The Video Game Revue

Master of Orion 2

Yesterday I was chatting with Matt (you know, that guy who leaves the comments... actually, he's probably the only guy reading this, so you know who you are) and I realised that while I'd heard the term "4X" before in reference to a genre of games, I didn't actually know what it meant. He was kind enough point me in the right direction; Matt is good about that sort of thing.

4X stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate," and it refers to Empire-builder sims that incorporate those four elements--particularly the space-based variety such as Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations, but Civilization also manages to be recognized under this category.

As a young teen, I loved those kinds of games. I used to play lots of text-based empire-builder door games on BBSes, such as BRE/SRE and smaller ones that had occasionally been written by a sysop himself. I wasn't especially good at those games, but they were extremely enjoyable. They're great from a sci-fi geek perspective (ever wanted to play out your own Babylon 5 epic in computer game form?), but they also have aspects that appeal heavily to those who like "building stuff" games (SimCity) and, of course, strategy wargames.

The reason I bring all of this up is that after chatting with Matt, I went and played Master of Orion 2 for roughly six hours last night, which kept me up until 3 am. What a way to spend a Friday night. We've all heard of the Master of Orion series, or "MOO" as it is affectionately known, and MOO2 is largely recognized as the best of the series. I played a fair amount of the original MOO back in the day (not as much as Civ, SimCity, or X-Com, though), and I tried to get into MOO3 a few months after its release (was it the year before last already? time flies), when the retail price on it had sunk quite a bit. I'm not going to comment much on the various factors behind MOO3's terrible failure (it's a topic with a wide range of different takes), but I would like to say a few things about what makes MOO2 so great.

Perhaps MOO2's greatest triumph was that it isn't actually all that complex. The original MOO had adjustable number bars signifying the adjustable focus on agriculture, industry, and scientific development for each planet, whereas MOO2 borrows the more user friendly system of moveable citizen icons from Civilization. Another major component of MOO2 is the build queue, which allows you to set long-term policies for planetary development without there being a whole lot of details to crunch. The thing that really floors me about MOO2 is that compared with a lot of other 4X games (Civ in particular), there really isn't a huge range of things that any given planet can develop. You have to climb pretty high on the tech tree to get to the point of having a dozen different colony improvements to construct, and you generally only end up building about four different kinds of military units (although there are three different varieties of colonization units: outposts, colony bases, and colony ships.) I've also found that there aren't very many menu screens; the ones that are there are relatively simple and effective. The end result of all of these things, I find, is that MOO2 keeps the developmental details simple enough to allow the player to maintain a sense of the larger picture, and does so without trying to build "larger picture" features into the game.

In the classic style of old-school 4X games, though, MOO2 does not shelter the player very much from micro-management. It's easy to get to the point in MOO2 where there are many small developments happening every turn and there's a lot of busy-work involved in sorting them all out. Still, compared with Civilization or most modern RTS games like Age of Empires III, the amount of micro-management in MOO2 is hardly out of control. That isn't to say that the length of a turn won't tend to grow massively over the course of the game.

Anyway, you're probably thinking that all of this talk about MOO2 is all well and good, but that you lost your copy a long time ago or have never seen it on store shelves. Keep your eyes peeled--I was also one who had missed out on MOO2 back when it was first released, but I did manage to pick up a "classics series" copy for cheap at EB Games not more than a year or so ago. This is one game that any and every respectable gamer should have spent some time with.

posted by Parappa @ 11:26 AM