Bought on Steam Early Access. Tested with: 4790k, 16 GB RAM, R9 290, 1 TB Crucial SSD.
This is quite different from MOO1&2. It's got enough of the same content to feed my nostalgia bone a little, but it feels more like an Endless Space full conversion mod than like a real Master of Orion 4. On the other hand, despite its myriad faults, I like it better than MOO3. Most will agree, that is not saying much. :P
This game feels about half-finished.
Some aspects of the game, such as some of the ship models, the diplomacy screen, much of the planet/tech balance...are lovely. Great visuals, pretty good voice acting, mostly good game balance...
Other aspects, such as...almost everything else...vary from decent to abysmal. Mods can improve the base game, when they're up to date...some will break with every update.
There are a lot of bugs. Sometimes victory conditions can't be met, because the game simply fails to respond to a player accomplishing them.
Huge empires eventually become next to unplayable, as turns take 5+ minutes to process; when you're about to get an espionage notification, or when the Antarans are sending a large fleet to attack, the turn will take even longer. Quite frequently during the turnover, windows will send a pop-up claiming the game is not responding—it never crashes, but it does grow steadily slower the bigger your empire grows. If you have the Omniscient perk, this can happen pretty early on.
Large battles(hundreds or thousands of ships) take ages to load and play at very low fps; if set to auto, they tend to have very strange results, sometimes zero casualties to one side and 2,000 ships dead on the other. Also, auto-resolve will take upward of 10 minutes for a battle that size.
There are a lot more minor bugs, but those ones are the big three that make it really hard to enjoy the game to the fullest. Why WG figures they're ready to sell expansions, I don't know...I certainly won't be buying them for a long time. I bought into the game in Early Access. I want to see it succeed, but it is still very much a work in progress.
If you buy this, be aware...there is a long way to go before this game will be a finished product. It's very, very beta...if not alpha.
