Master of Orion: Collector's Edition

Long story short: this is 95% the exact...same...game as MOO2, except it's missing a lot of functionality, requires more strategic micromanagement busywork, and introduces a couple...questionable changes. When I say exact, I mean EXACT. Same planet setup, same population management, same buildings, etc. Missing? Tooltips for half the stuff. Half the races. Customization. Leaders. Boarding parties. etc. This is the area I'd forgive the most since it's early access. More strategic busywork. Pollution is back, but instead of automatically cleaning it, it builds up over time and you must shift planetary production queue to "cleanup", which works like trade goods in that it goes indefinitely. It will continue to go even after pollution is reduced to zero and it will not notify you of this. You must remember to check back. Very annoying. Another micromanagement nightmare is how population transfer now works. Remember how MOO2 had an abstracted freighter pool and you could automatically transfer population from the empire screen as long as you had the available freighter capacity? Now you must construct a "civil transport" which will subtract 1 population to give you a ship, which you must manually move to the destination planet, then select "deploy" once it reaches the planet to add one population. You must do this for every single population. Who thought this was an improvement? It's a nightmare and it can't be explained away with "early access". It's just horrible design. The new changes are questionable. Combat is now RTS, but has no functionality. Hardly any difference between participating in combat and auto resolve. There are now "star lanes" connecting stars you must follow, creating chokepoints and doing away with range. The game now simply ends after a certain number of turns with winner determined by score. So right now it's an incomplete version of MOO2 with no promising innovations in sight and a few changes for the worse.

First of all, I'm a real old school guy that played Master of Orion I and II as soon as they came out, so, with that in mind: The original Master of Orion was an amazing game obviously and it's probably the reason why you're visiting this page, not a lot of people transitioned to Master of Orion II from the first one, the game seemed a bit "too unnecessarily complicated" when compared to Master of Orion I (and it was indeed, much more complex) but after you threw in a couple more hours to understand the game, you were hooked, Master of Orion II was most likely, the best X4 Strategy game to ever come out until this day in 2016, I tried and wasn't a big fan of Galactic Civilizations or the other alternative titles, it seemed they were too much focused on delivering new graphics to a genre that proved graphics was, almost irrelevant if the gameplay was good and in that sense, Master of Orion II is still king. The new Master of Orion, I had high hopes for, especially because after the well, to lack of better wording, pile of crap that Master of Orion III was, you would imagine NGD Studios would say "let's not do this gain". Most of the game is very fun but, space fighting is non-existing, and the rest of the game didn't improve that much to the point where you can just disregard one of the most fun parts of the game, the space fighting! As a strategy game in terms of the negotiating, improving your planets, etc. it's all there, maybe the turn limit is a downfall to people that like to spend a ridiculous amount of time in their games (like me). Time limitations shouldn't be there, or at least be optional. Don't get me wrong, it isn't a crappy game that fails at giving the Master of Orion feeling, it really isn't, but the amount of depth this game has, and the amount of depth Master of Orion II had, unless many changes are made (particularly in the ship fighting system), I'd say, stick with Master of Orion II.

Just like when MOO3 was coming out I had high hopes, and just like MOO3 this incarnation falls short. Why for the love of Orion don't they just remake MOO2 with better graphics and a few tweeks (like to diplomacy). Well here is to waiting to another 20 years for someone to try and get it right.

This is not Master of Orion, it's only a little similar to it. Graphics and sound is good, I really liked it. But.... Global strategic part is very simple, it's ever more simple than it was in Master of Orion 2, were it was simple too. Space ships haven't flight distance, so you can flight whenever you wish. Food on planet is used only to grow, there is no such thing as starving. Remember how you colony starving on blockade in the original game. Or when some colonies was industrial centers relied to food import from other colonies. And what about races perks? There isn't now 'creative' perk which Psilons have in the original game, all races now equal and have a full research tree. Full research tree.... it's a really funny thing. It's became very short and condensed. Especially if you previously played in GalCiv3. Space fights - I'm sorry but this realtime crap is definitely not related to charming tactical fights of Master of Orion 2 which we, fans, all very liked. So... I don't see what this game can offer me, and I keep waiting for Predestination release. Predestination even in alpha is more MOO2 than this game.