Master of Orion

Yeah, I loved MOO2 back in the days, but I think this one is streamlined and modernized so much that I prefer it over MOO2. Good graphics, nice race design, voiceacting, animations, compact nature of the game, antarians attacks, shorter play time... there is a lot of things this game got right. It's simpler and much less diverse than its predecessor, true, but if you want heavier experience, pick Gal Civ 3 or Stellaris. This has a different target and it, for the most part, hits it. It's also not very replayable since rockets are so good early - mid game that you want them every game. Plus, standard AI doesn't know how to counter that. But when you add some mods, you're back on track. Overall, I rate it a solid 7/10. Not perfect, not grandiose, but nice, compact and overall enjoyable experience.

The single player game is fairly entertaining and there are plenty of customization options for building your own race which makes replayability fairly high (4 of 5 stars for this). Although, in later turns of the game all the notifications tend to bog down your PC (I have a fairly high end PC and it still does this). That said, once again we come to a game that requires DRM (requiring 3rd party participation to use something is a form of DRM). Therefore, you do not get the "full-version" of Master of Orion unless you use Galaxy and the publishers own account login. This game should be marketed as a single-player game (priced accordingly) with the option to use DRM for mulitplayer.

Bought on Steam Early Access. Tested with: 4790k, 16 GB RAM, R9 290, 1 TB Crucial SSD. This is quite different from MOO1&2. It's got enough of the same content to feed my nostalgia bone a little, but it feels more like an Endless Space full conversion mod than like a real Master of Orion 4. On the other hand, despite its myriad faults, I like it better than MOO3. Most will agree, that is not saying much. :P This game feels about half-finished. Some aspects of the game, such as some of the ship models, the diplomacy screen, much of the planet/tech balance...are lovely. Great visuals, pretty good voice acting, mostly good game balance... Other aspects, such as...almost everything else...vary from decent to abysmal. Mods can improve the base game, when they're up to date...some will break with every update. There are a lot of bugs. Sometimes victory conditions can't be met, because the game simply fails to respond to a player accomplishing them. Huge empires eventually become next to unplayable, as turns take 5+ minutes to process; when you're about to get an espionage notification, or when the Antarans are sending a large fleet to attack, the turn will take even longer. Quite frequently during the turnover, windows will send a pop-up claiming the game is not responding—it never crashes, but it does grow steadily slower the bigger your empire grows. If you have the Omniscient perk, this can happen pretty early on. Large battles(hundreds or thousands of ships) take ages to load and play at very low fps; if set to auto, they tend to have very strange results, sometimes zero casualties to one side and 2,000 ships dead on the other. Also, auto-resolve will take upward of 10 minutes for a battle that size. There are a lot more minor bugs, but those ones are the big three that make it really hard to enjoy the game to the fullest. Why WG figures they're ready to sell expansions, I don't know...I certainly won't be buying them for a long time. I bought into the game in Early Access. I want to see it succeed, but it is still very much a work in progress. If you buy this, be aware...there is a long way to go before this game will be a finished product. It's very, very beta...if not alpha.

I had played this game in Beta, and I very much disliked it then. I received it for free a few days ago, and decided to give it another chance. My opinion hasn't changed. While the game has been polished since I had last played and many of its AI and balance issues have been fixed, the game is still a poor excuse for a Master of Orion game. Firstly, it barely brings anything new to the table. Not just as a MOO game, but as a Space 4X TBS as well. It just achieves the bare minimum. A pretty standard tech-tree and planet management system (which thankfully still allows for colonist transport and re-assignement), subpar ship customization options and a barebones diplomacy system. The diplomacy in particular is still a problem, as the AI is keen on making agreements it never intends to honor, or sometimes it's just impossible to have them accept even the most beneficial deals. All races feel the same, despite having their own unique traits and techs and ship design. Their differences feel superficial. Also, the pacing is all out of whack. If I move my fleets to the other side of the galaxy, they get outdated by the time they get there. Secondly, the game has a very poor atmosphere. Even MOO3 was a lot better in this department than this mess. The graphics look crisp, but that's it. The race design looks like I'm playing a game for 3-year olds. The voice acting is even worse. If I hear the Psylon announcer say "Director" in his shrill and annoying voice one more time, I'm gonna go into shock. Thirdly, the game has DRM. I'm on GOG because I hate DRM. Yet here it is. Playing the game requires a Wargaming.net account. As someone else mentioned, the EULA is exploitative and aggressive. There is a lot of tracking software that silently gets installed alongside the game, that you can't easily remove, even if you uninstall it. You can get some fun out of it initially, but it quickly grows tiresome and boring. I kept thinking to myself "Why not just play MOO2 right now?"

Master of Orion 2016 is a game I regret buying. My complaints started off as minor - can't rotate the galactic map, the colonization cutscene is repetitive and there's no way to turn it off, the advisers don't have enough dialogue, can't build hundreds of Doom Stars and steamroll the universe - lots of minor issues which could be overlooked. I kept playing, hoping to have fun, but things only got worse. The economy victory is bland (just waste lots of money instead of buying things your species needs!), spying isn't exciting, and I'm still not happy that certain races are locked unless you buy the Collector's Edition, an additional $20 at this time of writing. What next? Preorder to receive a bigger tech tree? Certain planet biomes are DLC only? But the reason I uninstalled the game came just minutes ago. I had started a new game with Pre-Warp (because I find it interesting to not start with any ships) and in less than 100 turns, the Antarans attacked my homeworld. In Master of Orion II, when the Antarans attacked a planet and you lost, they would bombard it and leave. They would NOT blockade the planet and stay in orbit and bomb you every turn! To quote the overused cliché, did anyone playtest this thing? Surely someone could have said, "Hey, being killed on turn 50 isn't bad luck, it's bad design? And while I'm at it, why can I change the racial colors? Why does the custom race option not show the default picks of the race you're customizing? Why does Subterranean suck now?" In summary, this game is not worth it. It doesn't fix any of the problems from the original, and adds many more of its own. It is not fun. Watch a Let's Play, or buy and play the original. Do not purchase this game.