Master of Orion

GoG is trying to add DRM to games now apparently. Do not buy until this is removed.

The similarities to MOO1 and MOO2 are: The name of some races and it has different adjustable victory conditions. Multiplayer is available via GOG Galaxy but you have to agree to some horrendous terms like allowing advertisements to be displayed on your computer. Whats nice: The races have good looks; There is a cinematic view available for battles (which can be turned off when getting bored by the repeating viedeo sequences not really reflecting the battle You can design your own ships You have do tactical battles Whats not so nice: Race customization brings some game breaking things like playing Silicoid with other than lithovore pick results starving to death because they nevertheless start on a volcanic planet. When scanning your systems you always have to zoom in and out whole galactic map making the map a bit jumpy and hard to keep on your properties. When Antareans attack you need your whole fleet to defend a single system. If you fail just once they are going to destroy your empire. As long as you succeed in defending they return and attack another (random) system. Bugs are known and reported for over a year but neither the developers care to answer nor to fix them. In point of view the game has been abandoned. Even released I would consider the game status as still in development. Maybe some modders will make it up. The producers abandoned it - in my point of view

-A portion of the races were turned into DLC The game costs significantly more Some unique aspects of the DOS game were 'ravamped' to be more like Civ5 A lot of the tactical depth was stripped away for ease of access (something DOS solved with 'strategy mode') there's online-multiplayer DRM, no LAN support, and no Hotseat - so if you want to play with friends you'll need wifi and multiple copies I generally just can't recommend the game when MoO2 exists. It's a much prettier version I'll give it that, but great polish on a solid skeleton doesn't change that a lot of the meat we loved to sink our teeth into is gone.

This is a first impression, as I've only been playing for a couple days so far. As somebody who preferred the abstraction of the first game to the micromanagement of the second, I like the balance this one strikes between the two. Planetary production is unobtrusive (even if the autobuild still has some weird priorities), letting you focus more on the big picture. Turn flow is less rigid than before, giving more flexibility. As for the controversial new spacelanes mechanic, I find I like it. It makes early exploration and defense easier, and is an interesting alternative to the old fuel range system. Artistically, this game is a love letter to MoO 1. The race designs evoke those of the first game, and the music takes a lot of cues from it as well. The voice acting is as good as one would expect from a cast of this caliber. Overall, this game feels much more like the first, with elements of the second (and possibly third, which I didn't play enough of to really know) added. This is good if, like me, you like the first entry the best, but not so much if, like the majority, you prefer the second.

The game is not well tested and regularly freezes during battles. In my experience there is 75% chance the game will freeze if a large number of ships enter combat. Usually before the fight starts, sometimes in the middle of a fight. That makes it very difficult to achieve any military progress, especially at later stages of the game. Coupled with a rather unresponsive UI, it's definitely not fun. The combat balance is poor. Whereas in the original game small ships cold not penetrate immense shields and structure of a Doom Star (logically), the current incarnation suffers from what too many 4X games these days can't handle well - a large screen of small cheap ships is usually capable of destroying planet-sized heavily armed ships with fully upgraded shields and hull. In a standard (MoO) universe, it doesn't matter how many frigates you have - you simply can't even scratch a monstrosity the size of an entire planet! There's a number of other bugs, like weapons not firing or ships becoming uncontrollable and so on. The game is extremely poorly optimised and at later stages of a large scale gameplay (huge galaxy, several opponents) each turn takes around 30 second (or even more). At the same time CPU runs at 10-20% capacity. It's the old Civ5 problem of developers unable to design their game properly and thus the wait game begins. If you want to play MoO, bring a book. Overall the gameplay itself is not that bad and is rather close to the original MoO(2) in many aspects, however, some important parts of the game were changed dramatically and for the worse (removal of leaders, badly designed combat, Doom Star limit to 1 per race). The game will need extra work (especialy on bugs and optimisation) before I could recommend buying it. With all technical issues fixed, it could get a 4/5.