#master of orion

[retrocgads]

USA 1993

[gamingisalifestyle]

Master of Orion: Ad Astra Box Art by Elias Stern

[samueldays]

I am once again recommending Master of Orion (1993).

It's thirty years old, it originally came on floppy discs, and it's really good. The interface is crisp. The ship design system is neat. The technology research system is not your standard tech tree. It has helpful hotkeys like "Indicate next world that has enemy fleet inbound". It has antifeatures like "not doing a Cinematic Camera Pan for several seconds". It has detail while avoiding micromanagement by giving you mostly high-level control, and automatic reassignment of overflow when something like factory construction fills up.

I say it again because of discourse from a mutual's post.

hello gamer. you claim to want "shorter games with worse graphics that are made by people who are paid more to do less". in front of you is itch dot io, which has a "pay what you want" feature,

that… feels like an unfair take?

I don't want the claim as stated, I strongly suspect it's something said because it's catchy more than it's accurate, and I want to dissect its relation to things I do want, like MOO1.

shorter games

No, I want games with less padding.

I want fewer cinematic camera pans, and fewer cutscenes, and less of the dev team showing off their fancy tech demo, and fewer animations in the interface because the interface should have sub-second response time, and less loading time because the game should be smaller, and less grinding unless you're an idle game in which case it should be automated, and I want more automation and macros for things that are a waste of my attention as well as my time. Give me autoresolve for battles with weak enemies. Give me minions that can be sent to do things for me. Give me "repeat until" orders. Give me a dialogue meta-option that says "I've played this before, give me the TL;DR". Give me speed-up and skip buttons.

itch.io games have some of these, but also have less gameplay.

worse graphics

I'm close to agreeing with this, but IMO it's less about the graphics themselves and more about the 50GB graphics package and rendering engine that contemporary games like to include for little to no gameplay improvement, and then that enables lazy devs to think "another 3GB isn't a problem when we're already past 50GB" and the game bloats to 150GB as each dev includes a whole-ass library for one function, and then there's 10GB updates to download repeatedly.

I don't know if this is literally what happened behind the scenes, but a recent game like Baldur's Gate 3 did hit 150GB. Which also brings me to,

people who are paid more

I want developer studios to fire the movie team and redistribute their salary to the rest of the devs, with movie team describing the Thing that 'graphics department' has grown into.

A game like Age of Mythology doing in-engine cutscenes was cool when the engine was primarily a game engine and hands had eight polygons; these days it seems like AAA games also want to be movies and that means turning the game engine into a movie-maker, and hiring an entire movie team to render the 3D model of each character's armpit hair and the physics of how it moves in the wind when the character raises his arm.

Since budget is limited, that movie team comes at the expense of every other aspect of the game, like gameplay, writing, bugtesting, et cetera, and it still won't be as good a movie as an actual movie.

do less

See above. Less padding, less cinema.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Space Rampage

Space Rampage, Jack Spellington, 1997

Did you know there was going to be an Eve Online RPG at one point? That link has a thread with basically all the info you're going to get. There's a Twilight Imperium RPG if you like your games inspired by rules-heavy board games instead of rules-heavy MMOs.

Now imagine if someone decided to make a rules-heavy MMO into an RPG... that was also designed for a dozen or more players.

Space Rampage was designed for semi-competitive play at conventions, with games of 6-8 hours being standard. Jack Spellington (pseudonym), the creator, was of the opinion that the game worked best with 15 players across 3 tables. Each table's players tried to advance their civilization's cause in a set of mini-adventures. There was opportunity for alliances with other tables, and even characters shifting from one table to another as part of an alliance or through treachery. The game required a LOT of GM prep, especially when it came to keeping the tables in sync temporally.

Characters were kept simple: Body, Mind, and Charisma scores, percentile roll-under. Percentile skills in 12 different areas, starting at base stat -50% and going up to +50%. This simplicity is good, because every damn thing in the game added on top of those. You had weapons, armor, land vehicles, spaceships, bionics, symbionts, and more, all with their own 3 stats (except symbionts, which had 2 but also 6 new skills). It was good having unified mechanics. Some things really did call out for their own subsystems rather than getting squished into percentile roll-under.

Space Rampage was inspired by a much earlier game: Spaceward Ho! (the exclamation point is obligatory), which came out in 1990. SH! is a 4x game from before the term "4x" became common. You build ships, send them out to establish colonies where you build more ships, and eventually fight your rival civilizations. SH! has a lot of things I really like, and apparently I'm not alone - it's in the Macworld Games Hall of Fame. Space Rampage started development in 1991, but Master of Orion came out on Mac in 1995 and that resulted in some heavy revisions and major additions. SR was run at gaming conventions across the Chicago area about 2-3 times a year, plus a monthly playtest group.

There's no art in Space Rampage unless you really, really like data tables. The game never made it out of the three-ring binder format, but the ones I've seen do say "version 1.1", so Jack apparently considered it the finished version.

[silentartcave]

Necovember bonus (3/4)

[ninjonnyuszi]

Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars Kelwan, the Psilon Emperor fanart 👽✨🛸

You can support me on 🧡PATREON🧡

My online shops: ❤REDBUBBLE❤ & 🖤TEEPUBLIC🖤

Follow me on other social media: 💖YOUTUBE💖

💗INSTAGRAM💗 💙FACEBOOK.COM💙 💘PINTEREST💘

💚DEVIANTART.COM💚 🎶TIKTOK🎶 🤍TWITTER🤍

[sperlova-art]

Cliff Burton's first appreciation drawing with bass note of Orion like background ❤️

[leodoodling]

well a 23 year old game giving me some April Fools silliness