JamesWyatt: Check out... "Master of Orion Developer Diaries: Early Access" on YouTube.
Specifically the "Tactical Battles" portion.
[url=]https://youtu.be/v3pIMUZA3IU?t=3m11s[/url]

::Transcript::

We started with the Master of Orion 2 battles;that’s with the square grid,turn-based… we tried that.
We really tried that, we had a fully complete game.
And we realized that having to have a battle that has a duration of five to fifteen minutes every time you encounter an enemy ship; it’s pace breaking!
It really messes with the pacing of the game.
Each turn takes like ten to thirty seconds but every time you face a battle it’s like fifteen minutes.
We made a little test, a very fast test, of changing the whole game from turn base to real time and the first time that we showed it everyone felt like “OK, this is the path we should follow”.
Well after iteration, and iteration, iteration, and throwing everything away and starting again, we managed to reach a point in which the tactical battles were awesome.
We really care about the community saying that it was a terrible decision but if they were there throughout the whole two years of the development they would actually take the same decision as us.

So the answer is out there..

DeadlyDanDaMan: They think what is in the game right now is...AWESOME!? ARE THEY FREAKING RETARDED!!! It is the most useless combat system I HAVE EVER SEEN IN ANY GAME!!! The only thing I can compare it to, is rolling dice during Risk battles, that is essentially what this is, your input in battle means NOTHING in NewMoO.

JamesWyatt: Well after iteration, and iteration, iteration, and throwing everything away and starting again, we managed to reach a point in which the tactical battles were awesome.
We really care about the community saying that it was a terrible decision but if they were there throughout the whole two years of the development they would actually take the same decision as us.

sarge33rd: No. No it is NOT awesome, and no, it is NOT the conclusion we would have drawn. It is the single BIGGEST fk-up in the game, and there are many.

The pathing forcing movement from this star system to that one, past those 3 right over there, is insanity.

The lack of differences between this race and that one, is insanity.

The indifference of food production, is insanity.

So, what did you do right?

2 things....

the voice acting is superb. Bravo. Seriously. That is by far the best part of the game.

the ship design COULD be excellent, instead it is merely good. Why oh why, is there no difference in space for a gun with a single face firing arc, vs a 360 firing arc? There is at it stand now, zero reason, NONE, for not changing all guns to 360 firing arcs.

I bought this on release date, with extremely high hopes.

First issue, the install over wrote my existing MOO1 install. Thanks a lot. There went a game in progress.

I am at work right now. But once I get home, I will be refunding my purchase. (You said a 14 day money back policy, right? )

I'll watch the forums, and HOPEFULLY, though I have such strong doubts I wont bet on it, you will fix these maladies and I can try the game again in a year.

Until then...this one ranks right down there with MOO3. A travesty, of what could have been.

asadex: Next time it's better you read almost the game description before to buy it

sarge33rd: I did. And the trailer. I played MOO 1 as a new release, MOO2, and I bought MOO3 on release and put it on Ebay 2 days after I got it. THIS, is a disaster on par with MOO3, at release.

JamesWyatt: Check out... "Master of Orion Developer Diaries: Early Access" on YouTube.
Specifically the "Tactical Battles" portion.
[url=]https://youtu.be/v3pIMUZA3IU?t=3m11s[/url]

::Transcript::

We started with the Master of Orion 2 battles;that’s with the square grid,turn-based… we tried that.
We really tried that, we had a fully complete game.
And we realized that having to have a battle that has a duration of five to fifteen minutes every time you encounter an enemy ship; it’s pace breaking!
It really messes with the pacing of the game.
Each turn takes like ten to thirty seconds but every time you face a battle it’s like fifteen minutes.
We made a little test, a very fast test, of changing the whole game from turn base to real time and the first time that we showed it everyone felt like “OK, this is the path we should follow”.
Well after iteration, and iteration, iteration, and throwing everything away and starting again, we managed to reach a point in which the tactical battles were awesome.
We really care about the community saying that it was a terrible decision but if they were there throughout the whole two years of the development they would actually take the same decision as us.

So the answer is out there..

tad10: I have no desire for turn-based combat, it's clear the dev's tried it and found it wanting. I'm getting rather tired of armchair quarterbacks second guessing the decision by implying Dev incompetence, particularly when the rest of the game (as a whole) is in decent shape for early EA. They tried it, it was too slow. Not shocking at all considering the vast majority of combats in MOO2 are autoresolved because turn-based is slow and tedious.

medhchang: Guess I won't be buying this game.

No I have not played it. I watched a Youtube video of a reviewer commenting on a recent build for 25 minutes. When he showed the combat portion of the game it looked incredibly lame. Rope your units and toss them against the AI.

Fast but shallow space battles are not an improvement.

justinkerber: I bought it and I played the hell out of it and I have a couple conclusions for everyone.

1. Yeah, the real time battles are rather limited. However, the game is early access... Does anyone even know what that means anymore?

2. The game is rather polished. It's freaking stable. It runs nicely and looks great in 4K resolution. There are some text clipping off the page issues in the planet structures management screens, but the game is overall rather beautiful.
So, for an initial go at it, it's not bad. I have seen worse. Wasteland was basically a train wreck until almost a year after they launched early access. Don't even get me started on Sword of the Stars II... What the publisher did to the Devs pushing a unfinished product out the door... I still get sick thinking about how the game doesn't run stable about a thousand patches...

3. Look at the game, the menus, the information is there in front of you. There are places in the game that say "Not Implemented Yet". EARLY ACCESS

4. I found it rather enjoyable, it is a good time suck. The hours seem to bleed by. As you progress to turn 500+ the game doesn't dog out. Turns get a couple seconds longer, but not like massively so as I have seen in Galactic Civ or the Original Sword of the Stars around turn 280+ where the game engine chokes even with the PXE extensions and a high end rig with 4 GHZ i7 + all the ram you will ever need and (I wasted my money on 32 GB). Does it need some work? yes. Are they working on it? Yes.

5. This wasn't Xcom 2, which had a badass launch. Did that game have an assload of bugs on launch? Yeah it did, does it still have an assload of bugs? yeah. Is the AI in it pretty stupid? Yeah. That's a triple A title that people are falling over one another to congratulate. I own that one too, I switched from it to play this and I like it. It's a bit on the easy side, but the difficulty levels haven't even been implemented yet... The AI is more polished at launch than Galacric Civ's new game was (and I own that too). What a piece of shit that was at launch other than some amazing ship customization. I could sit on my ass on one planet, research all the techs and then take a couple super ships out and utterly Obliterate the crap out of Everyone in the galaxy on the hardest difficulty (I really need to revisit it to see if it got better after the new expansion).

Basically, quit your whining. If you haven't played it, then you should. It's 50 bucks, all games are that or more typically. I found it simplistic but playable and with a butload of depth. if you want the nostalgia of the old games, amazingly, when you buy this one on GOG, you get all 3 of them.

J