Master of Orion: Collector's Edition

This game is a disappointment for any fan of Moo2. It feels like playing crap like Galactiv Civilizations or Civilizations, but not like Moo2. I am writing this with big disappointment and would actually like my money back. Here are the biggest disappointments: - The developers abandoned free travel between space system. It's only possibly to travel to a pre specified number of systems and has to walk "space paths" from system to system. That's not only unrealistic and not fun and frustrating, but it also causes far less strategic depth than the original. Why would they take such a decision? I don't understand. - The developers abandoned trun based space combat. Instead the space ships fly in real time towards each other, shoot at each other and one party wins. It's not possible to take much influence. You don't experience the interplay of the weapons and equipments that was so important in moo2. It was one of the major reasons to design ships and try out new weapons that one could press the button oneself and see the effect, take a moment to think about it and then move on. I can't say how much I dislike the way it's done now. - Space ships move before turn end as soon as you click on a goal. What if I change my decision later that turn? It was a characteristic of moo2 that one could change strategy in a given turn and redirect ships if this is necessary. Now once you click the ship moves and is gone. - They abandoned maximum range and communication points. You can basically direct and fly through the whole galaxy directly. What a nonsense! - They abandoned one overview screen for all planets! You have to click on a planet to see what it's producing and to change it, keep in mind what all other planets are producing. This is lots of clicking and remembering. Another nonsensical choice. The whole game has a feel like the developers wanted to make it similar to Civilizations: There is no effort to preserve the true and important characteristics of MOO!

In the olden days, I was really into MoO I and II. The first installment because of its simplicity. The second because of a deep SF approach on Master of Magic. Even MoO II was not without flaws as, like the old Civilization games, it suffered from too fast progression. Scientific discoveries were done at such a rate that planets had an endless build-queue till all research was done. Discoveries were also significant in a way that your entire fleet was obsolete before it was even built. Together with a very strong (or cheating) AI, this actually made the game brilliant. You were always balancing between the build queues and the need to produce a fleet that could just hold of the aliens. Then came MoO III, a spreadsheet disaster with braindead AI. I never finished a single game. So here comes MoO remake. It takes flaws of the old games without a compensating strong AI, and throws in poor design choices of other games. It has the endless build queues, a broken AI (warning: incoming scout!), and it borrows near to non-interactive space battles from Endless Space, and star lanes from Sins of a Solar Empire. Star lanes were a answer to controlling a RTS, not a brilliant idea for a turn based game. And then the UI! Omg… all the (nice but) slow cinematics when changing menus, hiding of crucial colony info when opening the build menu, the inability to go over the ship space limit while still designing your ship. Why not handle space capacity just before you save a design? And the manual one-by-one transfer of population between science, food and production. MoO II did all better, 20 years ago. Okay, it is fair enough that MoO remake is better than MoO III. At least I finished 1 game before, … uninstalling … The devs call this game a passion project. I think they are in love. So much so, that they are blind to all the mistakes they are making. I’m sorry WG. Please, sell the license asap or replace the dev-team and take another year to make a worthy MoO successor.

When I first heard about a remake to Master of Orion, I was stoked! I loved the original games (not the third. That one we don't talk about. Ever.) and I can't tell how many hundreds of hours I spent in them. Master of Orion 2, especially. Then I saw you could pre-order a new Master of Orion and I saw that it was in Early Access and you could help shape how the new game could be. An interesting prospect for sure, I thought. I bought it, tried it and that's when things started getting weird. At first, the game was rather interesting. It was fairly balanced but it could do with more polish. Missiles were rather overpowered and you could make mincemeat of anything you came across. That was adjusted down to a more manageable level. No longer was it a race to whomever built the largest ship and filled it with missiles won. Development phases came and went and changes were implemented. At first, the Devs were kind of active and wanted feedback, then it all suddenly stopped. The more the game changed, the less fun it became to play. Feedback is seemingly ignored. The more you go over the game, the more you see what a polished turd it really is. The tech tree is a cramped thing of horror. They basically took the Civilization tree and tried adding all the tech Master of Orion has to offer, just packed it in there, and left it as is. Then changed tech around that makes no sense (Mauler Devices in Planetoid Construction? Really?). You have ship computers switched around in the tech tree. A stronger, more powerful one is researched earlier than a less powerful one. Same thing with hull plating. This whole game is filled with small things that should've been fixed easily a long time ago. This is not a worthy remake of Master of Orion. It's a ... hell, I don' t know. It's SOMETHING. Certainly not Master of Orion, in any case. You want the full Master of Orion experience? Play the first or second game. Stay far, FAR away from this one.

Real time battles? Come on...the turn based battles of MoO2 are one of the things that keep dragging me back to it. Love all the fights up to and including when you finally get that blessed Stellar Converter. Every 4x game that has real time battles always sucks...from personal experience at trying them. They obviously did not learn all that they should have from MoO3. Will have to wait for a sale before I try this one unless they see the error of their ways and go with turn based space combat. How about some turn based battles with hex maps? You would have my money in moments. Meanwhile, I will be going with MoO2 and those other proper all turn based space 4x games out there.

I have been playing this version of Master Of Orion since beta (I pre-purchased). At that stage the game was pretty frustrating to play sometimes, but I stuck to it simply because of the nostalgia of playing a MOO game again. I have finally started a post-beta game and it has changed entirely for the good IMO. I find the gameplay to be simple to learn, but will be hard to master, the graphics are fantastic and it doesn't melt my graphics card, the music is phenomenal as well. I give full thumbs up for this game! Give it a try and see for yourself!