Master of Orion-Reboot

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GreenGoo
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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patch incompatible with save game file (no surprise really) so it will have to wait for another game.

Oh, one thing I noticed in the notes is the increased detail in the tooltips (and even some new tooltips). This is beyond great. When assaulting a planet, there is NO WAY currently to know how tough the enemy marines and tanks are, so there is no way to know how many of your own marines to bring/use. The fact that marines are a 1 shot deal and can't be reused really makes the decision on how many to send in all the more important. Sure I could use all of them, but that means I need to build more for the next colony. Or I could guess too few, and fail to conquer, resulting in a lost turn and another attempt, this time with less marines than I started with.

Really looking forward to more details in general.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Just to confirm the leader survival pods, I just had a fleet wiped out that contained 4 leaders. They are all now "returning" which will take 4 turns. Nothing of my fleet was left to pick them up. This would have resulted in them all dying in Moo2.

I had been slowly chipping away at the edge of the Nazin empire after the Alkari bribed me into going to war with them. They were the top ranked empire in the game. They finally showed up with some ships (over 30 frigates, 20 destroyers, 10ish cruisers and a single battleship). My fleet of 2 BBs and 3 CC's killed 25 of them with mirv'd pulsons (as per the bug list, these are about twice as powerful as they should be), most of which were frigates, although I did get a couple of cruisers. The game is really not well equipped to handle individual weapon targeting and such, and my missiles weren't dauntless, so trying to get enough, but not too many, on different targets were a chore. I eventually gave up after the first two waves of missiles. I never had a chance at winning, I just wanted to do enough damage to slow them down.

I'm left almost completely defenseless, but the enemy fleet is so far from the interior of my empire that I will have an entirely new, and more powerful fleet built by the time they arrive, which they probably won't because the ai is just not very bloodthirsty, no to mention he can't really risk losing that fleet, as it appears to be everything he's got.

Was a fun fight, and probably the first real fleet engagement that I lost. Given the nature of intergalactic movement in the game, my fleet got cutoff with no real way to get back behind our front lines. I could have run deeper into enemy territory, but I was curious how the fight would go down.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I'm just playing normal difficulty and I've never come close to fleets like that. Even my Orion take down fleet doesn't have that many ships. It does however, have 2 Titans and 3 Battleships plus a dozen mixed smaller types.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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dbt1949 wrote:I'm just playing normal difficulty and I've never come close to fleets like that. Even my Orion take down fleet doesn't have that many ships. It does however, have 2 Titans and 3 Battleships plus a dozen mixed smaller types.
Yeah, well the ai tends to start building early, and then just adds to the fleet over time, which results in the mishmash of ship types and sizes. The Conquest score number is far more intimidating than fighting the ships that create that number actually is. I will say that even the frigates, which didn't seem too scary, were very hurty. They had ion pulse beams and mirv'd merculites, I think?

I only had 5 combat ships total, all of which were just brute force missile platforms.

My new fleet on the way back to the front line (the ai never even retook the systems I took from him, weird. They do have full static defenses, but those shouldn't be any issue for a decent size/tech fleet) is comprised of 3 Titans, 2 BB's, 3 CC's with a bunch more in transit to catch up to it.

2 of the Titans are pure carriers, because I like the idea of carriers. I expect them to be completely neutered by point defense in the first 30 seconds of combat. :? But that will be ok because everything else I've built is phasors out the yingyang. I've completely dumped missiles, with only the occasional torp for colour. I never use torps so I thought I'd bring some just for fun. This fleet should absolutely eat the vast majority of tiny ships in the first two firing rounds. After that...well, I've built for toughness, plus I'm cybernetic, so I'm hoping my ships will come through alive at the end.

Pollution is slowing down my production. I'm uncreative which resulted in planetary production doohickey instead of the core dump (-150 pollution/turn) so while I can get some impressive production numbers, they come with enormous pollution costs. I can get production bursts until I need to reduce pollution, but sustained production is not great.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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You design your own ships? I haven't tried that yet. I also haven't tried to "take command" of the fleet during battles. I just autobattle it. I really need to learn to do that.
I've finally gotten a handle on the pollution problem but I still wish they would get rid of it.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Well great. I beat the Orion ship and now it won't let me colonize ORION or the system next to it.

Okay found out the problem. The Terrans (who own a nearby system) told me to not settle near them. I said no but apparently am still bound by it. I broke the non aggression treaty and "pop" my ships are back in my system and Orion is clear for them to take. I hope it's bug but probably not. :x
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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dbt1949 wrote:Well great. I beat the Orion ship and now it won't let me colonize ORION or the system next to it.

Okay found out the problem. The Terrans (who own a nearby system) told me to not settle near them. I said no but apparently am still bound by it. I broke the non aggression treaty and "pop" my ships are back in my system and Orion is clear for them to take. I hope it's bug but probably not. :x
You should only be honor bound by agreeing to those things. At least the espionage ones are. I can still spy after agreeing to pull my spies out (which I don't do). If they catch you after agreeing not to spy, the diplo penalty is quite steep, as it should be.

I have never even found Orion in my last 5 games, let alone defeated and/or colonized. I have no idea how that works in this game.

Auto-resolving is perfectly fine unless you want to get finicky with the combat. I don't even want to do that much since it's not very rewarding, although realtime combat is sort of fun to watch. Designing your own ships is important because beams are REALLY weak early on, most because you can't hit anything with them. They do good damage, but they never hit. Maybe they are more effective in auto-resolve, I don't know. Until you get decent targeting computers and/or battle scanners, you just can't hit reliably. I'd say at least Cybertronics (+75 to hit?) I'd stay away from beams completely. Or if you take the race trait.

So redesign your ships and put nothing but missiles on them, and mirv them if you can. Brute force wins the early game. Beams win the late game.

Some quick tips on ship design:

Things that always go on ships:
1) reinforced hulls
2) best Shields (moo2 class 1 were useless, not so in moo4)
3) heavy armor
4) best armor
5) best engines

things that mostly go on ships:
1) Dauntless (if using missiles)
2) Fast missile racks (missiles)
3) best computers (if beams)
4) point defense (fill in the empty space. Use best computers if you have a lot of pd)
5) anti-missile missiles (early game, fill in empty space AFTER weapons. Use pd beams late game. These don't do enough damage late game)
6) Augmented engines. (early game, frigates and destroyers). Ships are harder to hit, move faster in combat, move faster on map screen!
7) Bombs. Only 1 on the smaller ships (frigates, destroyers, cruisers). 2 on the bigger ships. Any more is a waste of space and reduce combat effectiveness. Needed for early killing pirate outposts, then scanners/astro-labs/weakening planetary defenses (marines/tanks). It is my understanding that version doesn't matter. So nukes since they are smaller than fusion/anti-matter etc. If I'm wrong here someone please correct me.


Things that sometimes go n ships:
1) Increase beam damage stuff (hyper-x capacitors)
2) Beam weapon size reduction (whatever it's called)
3) Battle scanners (beams)
4) Uh...memory failing me
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Orion in my current game was on the end of a spiral arm in someone else's territory. That seems...unbalanced. Oh well.

With economic win turned off, I may actually see the end of the tech tree. I've knocked the Nazin from the top of the hill, but the Klackon have had a huge growth spurt and now they are closing in on my population, while wielding bigger conquest numbers. I'll probably eat a few more Nazin systems then switch to the Klackons. There are like 200 systems to conquer. I don't want to have to do that to win, that will take forever. Not sure what to do next.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Honestly, conquering the whole galaxy seems like too much work. I think I'm going to try for a science victory next. Ironically, while you need a ton of research to get to the appropriate tech, you have to BUILD that tech to win, and the buildings are extremely intensive build projects. i.e. you need massive production capability (high, not wide) to win the science victory. Seems counter-intuitive, although theinterdepartmental blahdiddityblah interplanetary administration building helps by funneling a system's production into a system planet via the export item.

I have more than 1 planet that can build the first 2 science victory buildings in about 4 turns. I just need to research those buildings. Should be soon.

Looking forward to trying something different with my next game, especially with the bug fix code in place.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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15 turns away from researching the last science building, but it's still way faster than trying to conquer everything. It takes like 10 turns just to reach Klackon space even before I start conquering stuff.

Oddly, I have not had contact with the Mrrshan this entire game (they are currently in last place. They have a bad habit of biting off more than they can chew early on) which means no council votes. Now that the Klackon have caught up with me in terms of total votes there is no point to council meetings anyway.

Some nice to haves:

1) Empires cover the star map in their colour, often based around systems and sized based on population. This is a common thing in 4x games these days (starting with Stars! maybe?) and I miss it.
2) Fleets could also have some sort of visual representation on the star map, based on either fleet size (scaled for ship type) or combat rating. I'm tired of clicking on fleets to see what they contain and whether they are a threat or not. To make matters worse, the game notifies you of a "threatening fleet" even when it's a single enemy scout. Scouts don't have any offensive ability whatsoever.

edit: Psilons just offered me an alliance. I would like the ability to look more closely at their relationships with the other empires before accepting. On the plus side, there is a simple "allied/neutral/war" indicator for the psilons relationship with others, but it's not quite enough detail for my liking.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Tried a no pollution mod. Me like.
The not settling Orion had to do with not settling near a Human system. But like I said I had told them no and I actually read the manual (!) and it didn't say anything about it more that if you had agreed.

Just tried the Klackons. Came in second. :( They just didn't grow as fast as I thought they would. The negative research didn't seem to hurt too much.

In all the games I've played it's always the Mekkar and the Silicoid that are vieing for the top for the AI.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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7 turns until last building is available. I'm trying to piss off the Klackon. I refused a NA agreement, I have spies in their territory, I didn't bother re-instating our trade treaty. I just need something to do for these last few turns, but so far they haven't gotten angry enough to do anything about it.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I mentioned it earlier in the thread, but there is no visual indicator as to how far your scanners can see. Stuff you can see, you can see. Stuff you can't see, you can't see. Do you need to worry about that empty space might be filled with enemy vessels? Maybe. Who knows? Better plant a scout there just to be safe.

Oh, the Nazin sued for peace 20 turns ago just as I was about to ravage their systems again. The truce just ran out and I have multiple Nazin Titans on my border. Are they going to attack now that I've given them 20 turns to build? We'll see. I've moved all my combat ships out of the area so I'm probably 10 turns away from being able to do anything about it if they start causing trouble.

On the plus side, I am going to win shortly and they could conquer 10 systems and nothing would change my winning. So...shrug?

Combat is one of the more interesting aspects of the game though, so I'd hate to miss out.

I have the ability to build Doomstars for the very first time ever, but haven't even bothered to design one, much less build it. Chances are the game will end before the first one rolled off the line.

edit: So I'm allied with the Psilons, but the Alkari just begged me for an alliance and they are still at war with the Nazin. I agreed, so I assume I'm at war with the Nazin now.

But the interesting part is that the Sakkra just bribed me to go to war with the Silicoid. The Sakkra are doing just fine from what I see, so they shouldn't need my help, yet they must feel differently since their bribe was GINORMOUS as far as ai initiated deals go. At least 10 tech, some of it VERY good (I'm uncreative and missed a lot of decent stuff on the way up the tree) as well as 400 BC. I regularly gift the ai 1k BC, but to have the ai just voluntarily give away hundreds of BC has been unheard of up until now.

I'm going to accept the bribe because I can't ignore all that tech, but that means I have 2 wars on the go plus I've been antagonizing the Klackon for awhile now.

None of this matter since I'm 4 turns from researching the final building needed to win a scientific victory, but it's more interesting than the last 100 turns or so.
It's around turn 340 right now with the game coming to an end. No one, not even the tiny Mrrshan empire that I can't even see, have been knocked out yet.

edit: Core waste dump! No more pollution problems. Plus, gauss cannon. Phasor was still my highest level beam weapon which is more of a medium game weapon. While gauss is a cannon and not beam, they mostly use the same targeting mechanics, so I consider them shooty versus missiley. They are naturally shield penetrating so that's pretty powerful in the late game. Powered armor basically doubled your marine effectiveness in moo2, and I've been assuming the same for this game. Very nice.

edit: For the record, allying with the Alkari did NOT automatically put me at war with the Nazin.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I try to research an aiming computer first chance i get. I still remember that from MoO2.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Ok, game over on turn 349. The Bulrathi (custom race nothing like their namesake) have transcended. The Klackon lead in everything but science and money (we were about even in battle power, but I'm confident the numbers only created the illusion of equality).

I still had 6 tech left to research. I was playing uncreative with -25% research, so you can imagine how much pop I had. Despite that, the Klackon had more.

The game was a huge spiral (I think) with 8 ai empires plus me. The difficulty was set to extreme. I had ~35,000 BC at the end, mostly from trade treaties. I never once bought out a production item. I was regularly giving away 1000-1500 BC just so my trade partners could afford a new treaty (treaties last 20 turns then expire). I had more than 26 spies at the end (these get pretty expensive as they scale by number) working counter-espionage almost exclusively. My research generation was somewhere around 2k per turn which resulted in new tech every 3-7 turns (about right for pacing imo). I had somewhere around 30ish colonies, about 75% of which were gaia.

I personally feel trade treaties are broken. With the new bug fix code making research treaties behave like current trade treaties, I figure those will be broken too. I fully admit that there is something wrong with research treaties in the default game, as they become prohibitively expensive by mid game. I mean, literally no one can afford them, but if they turn out to be as easy as trade treaties, they will be TOO good. Currently they are just about perfectly balanced in the early game. Expensive, but with results that warrant that expense. Making them less expensive with the same results is going to be powerful.

I designed what I felt is probably the fastest builder race in the game, yet on Extreme I wasn't even close in the early game. When I had planted my 3rd colony (the first one that needs a brand new colony ship to be built first) the Nazin already had 5 SYSTEMS. Not colonies, but systems. I couldn't see inside the systems, but even if they only had 1 colony per system, that's still 5 colonies by the time I had 3. And the Nazin get ZERO bonuses to growth or production, so that's pretty crazy.

My race for anyone interested was:

Cybernetic (1 food feeds 2 pop, so you can have 2 workers on a new colony with no farmers. Huge. Feed an entire late game colony with 1 or 0 farmers just from buildings. Lithovore in all but name and growth rate (this is much faster)). The free ship healing (slow) is just icing.

+25% growth (ok for newish colonies, but brand new colonies have almost no food production, so less useful right at the start. great for not quite new to old colonies. Food savings over the growth of an entire colony is huge!)

+25% food production (huge for mid age colonies. Less useful for new or old colonies. Build pop on homeworld and ship it to new worlds)

+25% production production (always useful. Great for new colonies)

-20% production cost for ships (this is a bit of a sleeper trait. It's more awesome than it sounds, especially early game where you aren't producing much prod points and late game when Titans are regularly over 2k prod points and your largest production planets are only in the 50-100 prod point range).

-25% beam attack (can't use beams early on anyway. Can be countered with late game computer tech)

Small Homeworld

Poor Homeworld (removing this is about the only thing that could make my race faster, but not significantly so)

Uncreative - Random tech from tech that offers choice (you get the "good" one often enough anyway). This choice includes -25% research from pop. UGH! But I knew I'd have a huge empire with tons of pop and I needed the race trait points so...

Repulsive - Some minor negative diplo repercussions early on but once the first trade treaty was struck it was not even noticeable. I should point out that I avoided even trying to get treaties until around turn 150 or so based on nothing but my choice to ignore diplo, partly because of my decision to be repulsive. A completely painless negative trait. I was allied to 2 races by their choice at the end, and trading freely with everyone else. This trait actually prevents any and all diplomatic dealings with other races in Moo2. Here, it's barely a speed bump.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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dbt1949 wrote:I try to research an aiming computer first chance i get. I still remember that from MoO2.
Yep, but the problem is that even with the +25% to hit the first computer is just not good enough. In Moo2 laser cannons are (almost) never as good as nuke missiles, so there is no point in trying. With a LOT of skill and a LOT of effort, armor piercing lasers with battle scanners can just about beat a nuke missile player if he doesn't see it coming, and the advantage only lasts for about 15-20 turns, but mostly no. Like I said, the cybertronic computer (+75%) along with the weapons you get around the same tech level is where they start to be competent. Unfortunately you can scale the missile tech in moo4 faster than you can in moo2, so mirv'd pulsons are extremely powerful and can be reached much easier than in moo2. There is little point in building mirv'd nukes in moo4 when mirv'd merculites can be had in only another 10-15 turns. If you're in the middle of a do or die war, sure, those 10-15 turns are a lifetime, but otherwise, they go by in a blink.

I'm going to try a early beam using race in my next moo4 game. I'll let you know how it turns out. The game has a few road blocks to early conquest that may not be surmountable no matter what strategy you use, and I don't understand the game well enough to know how (or if) it's possible.

The interesting thing about moo4 is that all empires have the same theoretical max population size. There are no race traits that affect how MUCH population you have, only how fast you get it. This can in theory make races less focused on population growth be more effective than they were in moo2, but pop is still king in moo4, and getting there first is still a great (best?) way to win.

edit: My comments are based on competitive multiplayer games were a single turn could be the difference between producing 1 more frigate which is enough to fend off an attacking force or not, which literally results in losing the entire game. Min/Maxing in moo2 was imperative.

Versus ai almost anything can work, eventually, assuming you can stay alive long enough. From what I've seen the ai in moo4 is built around standard 4x behaviour. Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate and it does not want to exterminate before expanding For example). I am noticing the game is practically designed around giving everyone some early expansion room and time to use it before conflict starts.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Can't find out of Transdimensional and Natural Pilots speeds stack. Someone asked the question on steam and someone answered no, but they also said they are mutually exclusive, but since I can pick both (the game seems pretty good about preventing you from picking traits that conflict in someway) at least part of his answer is wrong, which casts doubt on the important part of the answer.

Hmmm.

edit: I literally cannot find the answer to this, and it's making me want to punch someone in the mouth.

Guess I'll test it myself. :?
Spoiler:
edit:

Bulrathi with no bonuses - frigate with no aug engines = 4 turns to every nearby system Can't test farther distance where minor differences in speed would be more pronounced because you need to discover first.

Alkari (Natural Pilots +25% star map speed) - 4 turns to every nearby system with 1 far away system being 7 turns. That can't be right.

Custom race (transdimensional) - 4 turns to every nearby system.

Custom race (transdimensional + natural pilots) - very close system = 3 turns. Far system = 5 turns. I feel like this is the same distance for the Alkari which was 7 turns. So...maybe they stack?

More testing to come. Unfortunately we never know how FAR a system is, just how long it takes to reach it. That makes figuring out speed a bit of a bitch.

edit: Ok, got smarter about it. Saved the seed number while I look for a map with a very long starlane to start. This should allow me to replicate the starlane for each race, which should then allow for differences in speed to be far more visible. Map set to HUGE in the hopes of some really long lanes.

I also confirmed that race traits are ON for each game.

edit: Seed of 10100 resulted in 1 lane of 4 turns and 1 lane of 7 turns for Bulrathi. Let's see what we can see.

Alkari in the same galaxy is 4 turns and 7 turns. W.T.F. Does this mean the Alkari speed bonus is broken? Will test with a custom race with the Natural Pilots trait.

Custom Mrrshan with Natural Pilots is 4 turns and 7 turns. Great. Damn it.
Custom Mrsshan with TransD is 4 turns and 7 turns
Custom Mrrshan with Natural Pilots and Trans D is 4 turns and 7 turns.

So...FUCK YOU UI. It appears that the ui is reporting incorrect times, so now I get to do the whole thing again with each and every race, except this time hitting end turn and counting to see exactly how many turns it actually takes.

Given that ships of ANY speed always take exactly 1 turn to move from anywhere within a system to anywhere else in the system, just moving to the warp point is the same for everyone.
Spoilered the broken tests.

Using galaxy seed 10100 for the "long" starlane.

Leaving scouts and colony ship at home, since scouts have speed bonus and colony ships have speed penalty edit: no they don't. Wait, yes they do, but race trait affects them as well. Duh. Frigate is base design without augmented engines.

Custom race with no speed traits, frigate arrives on turn 7.
Custom race with Natural Pilots, frigate arrives on turn 6. Better.
Custom race with Transdimensional, frigate arrives on turn 6. Expected as bonus is the same as Natural Pilots.
Custom race with both Natural Pilots and Transdimensional, frigate arrives on turn 6. Ugh. So the game lets you waste points on traits that have the same effect but don't stack. That's a shame.

All done. The game is over a year old. This information should have already been made available by some younger, more enterprising gamer. Just for that I'm not publishing and they can come to OO if they want this information.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Some quick notes:

1) As per our beams versus missile discussion earlier, it should be noted that lasers don't have ANY penetration. Since everything has at least the starting armour (Titanium) this means that lasers do even less than there already terrible starting damage. I've explained elsewhere in the thread but the short version is that penetration/armour * base damage is how much damage a weapon does. There is no top cap to this number but there is a bottom cap of 75% base damage. Since lasers do 0/armour * base damage = 0 damage, they instead ALWAYS do 75% base damage (which is 5 damage). In other words normal lasers never do more than 3.75 damage. Terrible even by starting game standards. Missiles have penetration of 5 so they will do 100% base damage versus Titanium. Base damage is 20.

So 1 starting nuclear missile will do 20 damage every 18 seconds (plus travel time) unless shot down (which is difficult given the lack of targeting ability at the start) versus 3.75 damage every 6 seconds IF you hit (which is almost never).

Not to mention that beams have a damage drop off, so they actually scale downward as range increases. So in order to even do 3.75 damage you need to be right beside your target (which also helps with targeting at least).

There is just no comparison between starting missiles and starting lasers. At least in moo2 missiles took munitions that could run out, so if you could stay alive long enough, the enemy ran out of ways to hurt you. Moo4 has unlimited missiles.

This dynamic changes as tech changes of course, but it's slow to turn in the beams favour. Even my current race which is +25% beam attack is not going to use anything but missiles for awhile.

edit: Beams are directional, missiles are omni-directional. This can affect kiting tactics or slow turning rates in tactical combat. Both of which give the advantage to the missile.

2) The game is heavily weighted against colony ship spamming at the start. You can't ship food to new colonies, so until you have the population to farm AND produce, new colonies are almost completely useless. Having 1 useless colony or 20 useless colonies is the same. Without some tender loving care form your homeworld they could stay useless for 40+ turns. This helps even the odds between high production races and races that spend points on other things. In moo2 you could at least ship colonists early (once you got transports and built some. This applies to food shipping as well) but in moo4 you can't even ship population until you research civilian transports, which are actually a second tier tech, so you're going to take at least 10-20 turns before even being able to use these IF you prioritize them. And build ing those transports is expensive (production-wise) so it's a pretty big investment.

This is all designed to give non-builder races a fighting chance at the start, by pushing back the builders advantages until much later. And in fact this was completely noticeable and the case in my last game, where the cheater AI were able to out colonize me at the start simply because they didn't have to work within these game mechanics. I would say my builder race didn't really start paying BIG dividends until turn 75-90. It still paid little dividends before that, but it was really noticeable around turn 80ish.

It's interesting design and I like it, even if it hamstrings my usual play style. It makes other race designs at least a little more appealing. Cybernetic is REALLY hard to let go of though. It's just such a major advantage at all stages of the game.
Last edited by GreenGoo on Sun Sep 10, 2017 2:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I will say that because everything uses pop, and pop growth comes almost exclusively from food production (which is almost exclusively farming at the start), sometimes the best strategy is just to put everyone into farming and hit end turn over and over.

Not the most fun or dynamic gameplay. :?

I noticed in another game I played awhile back with a low growth rate that you can actually farm pirates. I would say about 50% of the time bombing a pirate base out of existence results in a population point in a nearby colony. This is explained as slaves liberated. This appears to be a totally viable way of population growth. New pirate bases can spawn under the right conditions very regularly, and they are easy to take out. There is no question that this can and did result in faster population growth than my natural growth rate.

Something to think about. This is almost certainly an intentional design decision to also help keep the low growth races competitive early on.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

Post by GreenGoo »

Since neutron beams are like a tier 1 tech, I guess we should use those instead of lasers to compare to missiles.

Neutron beams have penetration of 5, so they do 100% damage versus Titanium armour. They do 9 points of damage every 7 seconds instead of 3.75 every 6 seconds, but otherwise everything else remains the same. Damage drop off over range, inaccuracy early on, etc, etc. They still don't come close to the base nuclear missile.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Hilariously as I predicted to myself, my beam heavy race has encountered the Alkari first, the race best equipped to deal with me. I toyed with taking their portrait so as to remove them from the game, but decided against it. I took the Mrrshan as their natural enemies. It's like the game tries to screw you from the very beginning.

Stupid bird faces. Oh well, early conquest isn't really a thing in this game anyway.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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...and I just played 40 turns of a game with normal difficulty setting. I got in the habit of not adjusting it while testing fleet speed and forgot to change it when i started a new game.

I am annoyed. On the plus side I wanted to try -25% growth on that particular custom race, so now's my chance. :doh:
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

Post by GreenGoo »

I forgot to mention that mass drivers and gauss cannon do not suffer damage drop off at range. Probably self evident but worth mentioning anyway.

I tried stealth ships in the hopes that the trait would help me get in range before enemy missiles started to fire, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't do much, if anything. Will have to see if anyone has done any research into the trait. Not working as I hoped anyway.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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You had a long night my friend. :wink:
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I was looking around on how to invest in the galactic stock exchange. Hard to find but I finally did. I bought 6 shares and the next thing I know I have ten turns to an economic victory.
Of course it is late in the game and I do have a strong economy. Over 1000 bc a turn. 75000 in reserves.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Yeah, I actually read up on the economic victory condition, but I've already forgotten the details. :?

Getting old. You need control of the galactic stock market, which is easy to do because as far as I can tell no ai ever buys any shares, so buying a single share gives you 100% ownership of the market. And by ownership, it's more like buying shares in a mutual fund. You can trade shares to the ai, so that's one way for the ai to get shares.

As the overall GGP goes up, the value of your shares go up.

That's about it? Maybe a large % of the GGP, although what that % is I don't know. I've seen the victory conditions start in the high 30's or not until the low 40's.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Because of the way my current game turned out, I felt like it was a failure, but the truth is it's been a great back and forth brawl with the Meklar. I wish I had written about more of it as it developed, because it's probably the more interesting of the games I've played so far. Since I didn't immediately dominate I felt that I was "losing" but not really. I have 2 Meklar colonies, I've replaced my own terrible pop with the much better Meklar pop on 2 of my original colonies, and right now we're brawling it out.

I've installed the bug fix mod and like what I see. I can actually tell the comparative strengths of invasion forces versus defensive forces before I pull the trigger. That's huge.

The ai has been more stingy now too, demanding more for trade treaties than before. Unfortunately research treaties seem to be very strong. I am sort of keeping up in the tech race (still last) with a population that is -25% research and I almost never have any pop in the research field (versus production or farming). The treaties are enough to keep me moving forward, which is pretty huge.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I had my first war. It was against the cat people. I decided to try an invasion by marines. I went with 3 troopships. I thought about taking a fourth but I was anxious. I open the invasion screen and I see............... 13 ground troops and three armored.
:shock:
So I bombed the shit out of them and sent in a colony ship.
Ground invasions are not worth it. (except for mind control)

You know you can move your little population people around to where ever you want, right?
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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dbt1949 wrote: You know you can move your little population people around to where ever you want, right?
Yes, but this particular race and playstyle has more important things to do than research.

It's way cheaper and faster to bring 4 million marines and take a planet intact that to bomb it down to rubble and start over. It's why I stop colonizing eventually and just take whatever the ai has built for me.

Couple of notes on the bug fix mod:

He's added tech acquisition from conquest. I'm not sure if he's given a % chance or what, but so far I've gotten a new tech every time I've taken a colony. Good. Maybe too good.

The ai is WAY more chatty, making various trade offers, including tech trades, as well as just giving me tech at times (nothing too great, but the occasional good will gift from ai's with very friendly dispositions towards me. I'm repuslive, fyi). In fairness I give them hundreds of BCs so they can afford the trade treaties I want with them, so I've been gifting them a ton of money. They seem to value money quite a lot for some reason.

He's fixed the troop transports being 1 shot disposable ships. Now instead of picking how many troops to send in, you just send in all of them (you can no longer send less than all of them) and any marines left over are air lifted back into transport ships. Not sure what happens to the extra marines if your left overs are not evenly divisible by the number of troops normally on a transport. Might just stay on the planet? This is almost too convenient, but it's miles better than the old system, so "good enough" for me.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I have seen the ai ram my ships multiple times now to great effect. Well done.

Diplomat is the only race trait that provides a morale bonus (5%). It comes with free research labs tech. It's expensive, but morale is pretty important in the game. At least it's an interesting option. Even better it's not tied to the population unit, so on planets that are pure captured enemy pop you still get the morale bonus. Sweet.

Didn't take cybernetic this time. I'm surprised to find that I'm really missing the 5% repair per turn.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I wish Orion wasn't always on the other side of the galaxy.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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dbt1949 wrote:I wish Orion wasn't always on the other side of the galaxy.
Lol, seriously.

I have yet to even find it on any difficulty above normal.

I'm about 95% sure the galaxy generation is tied to the difficulty level, which is...disappointing. I don't want the game to be harder because I only find tiny volcanic ultra-poor planets. That's not fun.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I really want to start a new game but I haven't "won" this one yet. I like the starts of moo games more than I like the end game, so I always feel like a new game is calling me, but I like to at least have gotten a leg up on the ai before I quit. This game is a real drag out brawl because I feel like I'm using pea shooters versus much tougher meklar ships. I'm winning, but not super mega uber winning. I have lost my entire fleet multiple times, lost colonies that I took from the ai, and generally spent tons of turns just rebuilding my fleet and then watching it march slowly back to the front.

Something interesting occurred to me in this game where I was trying to make myself fast right from the start. The game throttles speed just by its movement mechanics.

Without gates, you're stuck in lanes. Lanes always go through systems. Systems always take 1 turn to cross, no matter how fast or slow you are. So to get from 1 star system to another 3 systems away, you have to stop, cross a system, enter a new lane, stop, cross a system, enter a new lane etc etc.

Let's say I have a speed of 3 (distance unit/turn) and you have a speed of 2 (distance unit/turn). There are only a couple of lane lengths that I'm faster, otherwise we will take the EXACT SAME TIME to travel anywhere. I'm literally 50% faster than you are and I can almost never get anywhere faster than you.

Lane is 2? We both take 1 turn to traverse it, then we both cross the system, then enter a starlane.

Lane is 4? We both take 2 turns to traverse it, then we both cross the system, then enter a starlane.
Lane is 6? Yay, I get there 1 turn early.
Lane is 8? Yay, I get there 1 turn early.
Lane is 10? Yay, I get there 2 turns early.

Beside the obvious problem with that, lanes are almost always 4-5. Long ones are around 7. So for most of the map (like 80-90% of the map) we arrive at the exact same time.

Once gates are put in place, this changes, but then I'm only faster between my own systems that have gates. I'm still stuck going the slow way on offense. Defense I'm agile, but offense is a slog.

Bah. BAH I say.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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If you recall when I first started playing I whined about red starlanes that require pretty high tech to traverse, and these red lanes cut you off from the rest of the galaxy. This an intentional design decision to provide everyone who likes to expand and turtle with little conflict an opportunity to do so. Spiral galaxies have these red (unstable) lanes. This galaxy type is for those who like to play sim-galactic empire

Circle galaxies are more open, with multiple paths to get anywhere, have wormholes that allow your ships to teleport to the other side of the map. This galaxy type allows for early and often contact with other empires and all that entails. More trading, more conflict, more diplo, more skirmishes over choice terrain etc.

I'm still trying to find out what the hell the "cluster" galaxy type is or how it's unique compared to the other 2 types.

edit: Cluster seems to be similar to spiral in mechanics if not shape. Each race gets it's own mini-galaxy, or grouping of stars, wth red lanes connecting 1 cluster to another. So a different style of early isolation. Interesting.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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I may have to try the cluster type galaxies. Like you said I'm one of those who like to turtle.
One of my biggest weakness's is my failure to integrate with the other races. Diplomacy has always been my problem in every type of game I play. Even in Civ 5 I have this problem.
I guess it goes to my real life desire to be left alone.
I have noticed that space monsters don't necessarily appear on screen. Quite a shock for one's colony ship.
I did have a lock up a while back. The screen just stayed in "processing turn". Reloaded game with "continue" and it worked fine again.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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The thing about Cluster galaxies is that it can become a race to gobble up the unclaimed clusters once you get the ability to leave your native cluster.

I've also had several games where Orion spawns inside of my home cluster but yeah, I've also had plenty of games where I never laid eyes on Orion.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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dbt1949 wrote:I may have to try the cluster type galaxies. Like you said I'm one of those who like to turtle.
Everyone likes to turtle. I mentioned earlier in the thread that it's human nature to keep teching until you can't tech any longer. Why switch over to a war economy and build ships with tech X when 5 more turns of research will allow you to build ships with tech Y (much better). Not to mention without a lot of practice it's hard to know when you can beat an ai. Not much point switching to war only to find out you simply can't build ships capable of winning yet.

I fight this tendency simply because not knowing how to fight with what you've got could often result in a lost game. Everyone knows how to fight with doomstars equipped with stellar converters. Not too many people know how to fight with a dinner fork and some leftovers that have been sitting on the kitchen counter too long.

Why you would want to is a different question.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

Post by Freyland »

Is it the unofficial patch or a dlc that introduced the dinner fork?
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

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Freyland wrote:Is it the unofficial patch or a dlc that introduced the dinner fork?
Have you seen the workshop? What a mess.
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Re: Master of Orion-Reboot

Post by dbt1949 »

I'm hoping in adds those greyed out races that were in MoO2.
But I'll take a fork.
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