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Master of Orion 2, The Article About

Posted by on May 17, 2011 at 8:00 am

Gameplay, yo.

…each one of those stars open up into new trees of colonies! You’ll still find your duds — collections of asteroid belts and gas giants you can’t settle in– but the end result is a much more complex affair. For example, other non-hostile races can set up colonies on unclaimed worlds in your systems, splitting your claim. How do you handle that? Is that fun? I didn’t care much for it. How far do I really need to micromanage? Well, a bit further…

Rather than an abstracted, ‘more is more’ methodology, each colony now has discrete buildings that aid defense, give ecological bonuses, allow you to build bigger ships, and so forth. Taking the place of the planetary slider mechanics is the ability to divert individual units to a smaller amount of jobs: farming, labor, and research. While diverting your colonies’ workloads isn’t as nebulous here, it does feel more tedious. The new Colonies screen allows you to shape the workforce of your empire much quicker, which is awesome. Speaking of money and labor, you see those glowing grey seals in the far right column of the Colonies screen? Those are ‘Buy Now’ options. Have enough money and you can expedite virtually any project to a next turn completion, which is a great (if terribly expensive) way to rebuild lost fleets or planetary defenses, or get your foot on more fertile worlds than your opponents. Probably one of the best features of the game.

Joining you on your adventures are Leaders. You get prompts like the one above for the nearly talentless Director Emo above, but you’ll get some pretty talented (and expensive) ones as you go along. Employ them on your colonies or your ships and they modify their properties, but at a glance, they come with a weird gargle of random stats, which is thankfully boiled down with some helpful right-clicks. Colonial leaders made far more sense in my years playing the game because I rarely lost colonies. Sticking those expensive buggers on ships that I knew were probably going to be slaughtered in the field of war seemed a bit less productive, or even sensical.

Diplomacy is much more flashy and nuanced in Master of Orion 2. If those (normally nice) Trilarians just won’t stop stealing your tech, you can tell them that specifically, rather than just, y’know, declaring war on them. They show their changing moods toward you better this time around, but all are predisposed to love or hate you from first glance.

Jerks.

Much better.

Research is also flashier and more nuanced as well. For one, you don’t have divisions of research investigating a variety of subjects at once, you have one, and you research one thing at a time. This makes your choices more important, while making you feel like you’re accomplishing much less. Like the Creative/Uncreative stats I mentioned earlier, you may not even have the ability to research particular technologies because (realistically) your race just never thought to research them.

Like many other aspects of this game, combat is far more laborious this time around. In the first game, launching a ground invasion involved selecting one of your colonies, utilizing a slider, and clicking on the target planet. Easy. Now you have to build individual transports (which chips into your Command Point upkeep score that you need to maintain with your fighting ships), send them to an alien world, protect them so they don’t get blown to bits, and then deploy them. The resulting ground battles are far less exciting as what look like ants squirm across the screen with tracer fire stretching between both sides.

Space combat seems like it’d be more interesting in a much larger, more dynamic space, but you rarely use it, which makes a more confined space more logical. Your fleets don’t get excitably large until the endgame either so confrontations rarely feel epic. You certainly have a lot more options, including the ability to self-destruct ships to inflict potentially lethal damage on enemies, but I found I just set the battles to Auto and went through there. There’s even a mode where you can turn tactical space combat off and just duke it out with pre-fab ship designs if you so choose. Bizarrely, it’s turned on by default.


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