By durable I mean, the fun doesn't wear out. You can play and replay and replay, and you don't just get addicted or obsessed, you develop a love of the game that lasts for years and years. Because there are always new possibilities; even after 300 or 400 or 500 games, you're seeing things you never saw before, finding yourself in situations you never encountered before, sometimes dying and sometimes pulling off miraculous escapes. There's more gaming pleasure in this little package than in just about anything you're ever likely to buy. So... jump on it!
...the AI is just a punching bag. It really just can't play the game at all. So, while I love the game, love the spells, the different races, the different ways to play, all the little touches of detail that make this feel so much like a fantasy "world"... it's not really accurate to call this a strategy game, because winning is just a matter of figuring out the AI's weaknesses and exploiting the hell out of them. Still, while you're still figuring out how to do that, a very enjoyable experience.
Both of these games are fantastic exemplars of the turn-based strategy genre, and given that there isn't that much created in it anymore, it's a lucky thing these both hold up so well. MoO1 is, for me, an outstanding game because it's simply and cleanly designed enough to have a real "boardgame" flavour about it. Depending on the settings, you can finish a game in a couple of hours, and the different races all give you a different way to play. The Psilons are basically an "easy" setting, but each race has its own appeal (even if just cosmetic) and the game unfolds differently depending on who you choose and how you play them. TBS can sometimes be a rather soporific affair; you make a plan at the beginning, then spend hundreds of turns clicking through various options just to implement that one "thought". MoO1 is much more dynamic than this; there are many moments of decision, multiple valid approaches... and it's fun to "fit" all the pieces of the game together in a way that leads to your triumph... or downfall. MoO2 is also a great game, although personally I don't like it quite as much. It offers a lot more flexibility, better graphics, more "flavour"... but there are some problems that go with these improvements. It has a more civ-like game design (especially in the way you build up your cities, oops I mean planets) and the result is that you can spend much, much longer playing one game... it's less strategically satisfying, often because you lose or win based on one choice made early in the game (and once again, the Psilons are virtually a cheat code). Still, even if the strategy is a bit less elegant than in the first game, the flavour is a lot stronger (I love the innovative use of pilots as bonuses for specific fleets - what a great idea! Why hasn't this been widely copied?) and if you like games with strong personality and strong sense of "genre", this might be for you. Certainly most people seem to prefer it. :) Since you get both in this pack, and for such a low price, it hardly matters which "camp" you fall into. If you like *any* turn-based strategy game, you're going to like one, or both, of these.
I really want to like this game. It's in a genre that could do with some more love, and the designers really went out of their way to innovate, in the setting, in the mechanics, in the way the battles are put together... but it's hard to look past its flaws. The 3D graphics have not aged gracefully and far from making you feel an atmosphere of terror or foreboding, it just makes you wish you could see what the hell is going on. There are serious bugs which have effects ranging from visual glitches on the screen to preventing the game from starting at all on some computers. Worse yet, though, is the fact that the difficulty and the design have been engineered in such a way that many battles can only be "solved" by one specific approach. This means that effectively each of these battles is a "puzzle" which must be tried again and again until you hit on the "correct" way to do it. It's this repetition which ultimately makes the game lose the crucial "fun factor" for me, at least. Nonetheless, if you're really hankering for a game in the mould of Jagged Alliance... well, there aren't many around, and this is one.
This unique RTS comes from Trevor Chan of the Capitalism games, and it shows in the thougtful way the economic system is constructed. Most RTS games (particularly of this era) have you collecting "stuff" (gold, lumber, &c) with peasants and then turning that stuff into units - 100 wood to make a trebuchet, that kind of thing. This game takes a very different approach. The primary resource of your kingdom are your loyal people - the key word being "loyal", because if you do things to upset them too often, they stop being loyal and they stop being valuable to you. So when you build a copper mine, for example, it's partly in order to make money from selling the copper products you can make in your factories, but partly in order to make your people happy by filling your marketplaces with copper goods that your people can buy. This way of thinking about what a "kingdom" is comes across in the whole design and philosophy of the game. It does mean a longer learning curve because many of the mechanics are unfamiliar, but there's something very satisfying about the way the whole thing fits together once you understand the way it's meant to work. All that said, this is not a perfect game. There are some questions about balance, the limitedness of the resources can lead to a situation where someone is a runaway leader and there's not much anyone else can do about it, and the computer opponents can be a bit of a nuisance with the way that they constantly seem to change their minds about whether they want to ally with you or demand your money. Nonetheless, I recommend this game to anyone who's interested in the RTS genre for a couple of reasons. First, it really is a unique take on the way RTS games can work; in these days when it seems every RTS is just a clone of something else but with marginally different graphics, it's exciting to play something with not just a unique design but a design that is based on an innovative philosophy. And the second reason is, so long as you can get over a bit of a hump in the learning curve, and don't mind some fairly rudimentary graphics, this game is an awful lot of fun!
