Nice idea, evolving your civilisation from the stone age to the space age, but this game is just way too chaotic. You will get very sick of the man with the thick German accent telling you "we under attack" every five seconds. I have to control all of my civilians individually. It plays exactly like age of empires except that its harder to make sense of what is happening and the epochs don't really feel that special.
This has nothing to do with settlers, instead, you stockpile resources in much the same way as age of empires and then purchase people or upgrades. Its not like settlers but its not really anything else either, the whole world feels drab and the gameplay is unrewarding.
Get this for MM 6. I played some of the releases after and I tried the earlier releases in the series but 6 is the real Gem. This is a really well laid out first person party roleplaying game adventure. Character creation and development is fun, the world is visually inviting and the graphics just sophisticated enough not to make your eyes hurt. The world is really well thought out, you're free to explore as you like or you can allow the adventures to prioritise your travels across the land. the game has retained just enough of the weirdness of the previous titles to count as might and magic but now has enough structure to make it enjoyable.
Dungeons and Dragons should never be used as a foundation for a computer game, the system sucked as a pencil and paper system and its even less appropriate for computer games. End result is alot of effort building a game based on a fundementally flawed concept in the first place. I get the sense that had they created their own rpg system that was appropriate to the game style this would have been an amazing game.
I had fond memories of this game, but in playing it again, I find myself battling rats in a tactical turn based system that moves at a snails pace. I believe the game becomes vastly more impressive as you go along but I just can't be bothered spending two hours punching rats to death to build my experience high enough to take on a gecko. Its also very frustrating when one of said rats actually gets the better of you and you realise you haven't saved for two hours as the auto save is very irregular and you will loose all that "progress"
This game is amazing, but I found that the alieness of the landscape, people, units and plot was very bleak and had me feeling moon mad after a few hours, which is just enough to figure out the basics of how this game works. I've played it a few times with the same results, I think its really wel put together but the bleakness of the world puts me off comming back to it.
In terms of tight game design for Master of Orion 1 i agree, this is the best game ever, every detail is deeply thought out. Perhaps the only disapointment is that there are not more options for setting up game parameters so that you can create particular scenarios but every game plays different anyway because of the way the game elements randomise and interact to create unique situations. Master of Orion 2 is not as seamless as the first one but has more options available, such as customising your own species and starting at different tech levels. Both games are very imersive but I don't recomend them for people suffering computer game addiction as it is almost impossible to stop playing.
The resource collection and city development in this game is very linear. Whats more you have to build roads between buildings before they can even be constructed, which feels limiting enough but when my builders got stuck on their own road and refused to make any further progress, I decided I didn't want to waste any more time on this game.
This game has some really nice graphics but they are poorly animated, the character's don't move smoothly. Its basically a settlers clone and isn't even as enjoyable as that. Its kind of tedious realising you haven't trained a baker after having gone through all the tribulations required to build a bakery. Combat is secondary and consists of hiring a band of warriors and sending them into enemy territory. There are no tactics involved. There are some really cute ideas such as the flying merchant who delivers your orders and your citizens having families but ultimately it has very little effect on the game and just adds uneccesary complexity.
