Bugs, Feedback, Suggestions
WargameHarrier
12 Apr 2016
Found Bugs:
Not Clickable Buttons on Pre-Combat Screen (nothing new)
Probably change back to simply listing the number of cruisers, battlestars instead of showing a picture of each one until you find a fix.
Sometimes you can click a button behind, and get around it - normally you have to crash the game yourself and then reload. Most Annoying!
Blurring screens that don't unblur anymore
For example: you have 50 ships at Planet X and want to scrap the old frigates. Screen blurs and should show "do you want to scrap Frigate for x credits?"
Instead it blurs fully, then escape seems to do something, but you are left with a blurred screen showing the galaxy or whatever in the background. Unplayable from that moment on.
Sound Problems:
Minor one: When you disable the sound by putting master volume to zero, the next alien diplomacy interaction will reset it and sound is on again.
Suggestions:
Game Screen & Map:
- The Notifications should be filterable. No sense in having 300 "build x" messages while the important ones are skipped. Hearts of Iron Series does great there with you beeing able to filter every event with "popup, message, popup and hold game"
- Let us multiselect several ships and scrap them alltogether. Right now you can just scrap one ship at a time.
- Let us click a planet or asteroids saying "send free factory ship","send free civ transporter". Micromanagement sucks having to keep track of the stuff.
- Mouse over fleet should show quick info just as it does when you hover over a planet.
- Ability to turn off the autozoom to event or planet. When you zoom out of the galaxy full, then you have the "old" Moo2 map. I often use it to see what ships move where and then the map zooms to a planet where an unimportand building was finished and I have to zoom out each round again. Also often a special part of the galaxy (a system whatever) is important to me, and having that one in focus is much better then having the autozoom on unimportant event #5.
- setting a ship to guard mode should make it attack everything coming, not "sleep".
- ships should not take on the status of the point where they arrive. Let each ship have its own status and let us set it.
Bad Example 1: you send a cruiser to a position and let it guard. Then you want to fortify it with a factory ship and send it there trying to build an outpost. Factory ship arrives and goes to guard status.
Bad Example 2: you have a cruiser guard your planet. Planet builds colony ship - colony ship goes to sleep and you forget it.
So please change it so that each ship has and keeps its own status. But please make multiselect possible ;-)
- give an option to hide quick-starlanes via jumpgates. My Late-Game Map has lines everywhere
Empire Screen:
- I know the buying button is coming. Would be nice to have.
- Yes I would like to have the "freighters" from Moo2 back. I really hate having to create civil ships and send them around. It simply is a lot of work and micromanagement.
- If not this, then let us construct like 5 civil ships somewhere and let us click "send civ ships" sending them out just as we would have manually.
- More Filtering options
Planets:
- Send out colony ships easy with mouseclick
- Filtering options for enemy presence and more
Planet Info on Map:
- Planet population is off. Screen says 8 colonists from 12 are needed, but when you send a civ ship you notice that some slots are not yet free for colonists.
Planets and overviews should always show the "right now state" of technology. I am not interested if my gaia planet in the late game can host 20 colonists when it right now can only hold 10.
Production Queues:
- increase the number of slots and make them saveable.
AI:
- seems when you have a planet on autobuild it simply ignores pollution and builds everything except pollution reduction
- don't have scouts scout planets with monsters, they simply die. I don't use autoscouts anymore.
- AI does not attack my factory ships while I build cheap defense stations
- AI is too much into defense buildings, give it a decent building queue for planets, probably based on race (trading race goes for money mainly etc)
Ship-Design:
- I'd love to have more flexibility between special systems and weapons, for example building a heavy shielded ship with every shield and armor there is and less weaponage.
- Marine base on ships would be nice as well. Why send unprotected troop-ships when a 5 mile long battleship should be able to host thousands. Make it a special system with lots of space needed.
Research Screen:
- Doubleclick on a technique should simply close the whole screen and you can go on playing.
Others:
- Autosave for the last 1-10 rounds, not just 1
- Autosort saved games so the newest one is on top
- Option to delete saves
- Save our custom game options like victory conditions etc.
Races:
- let us save our customized race.
- Bring back the Antarans with force: One element I liked most in Moo2 was seeing the "antarans attack" screen and then praying they would not target one of my good colonies. Right now Orion and the Antarans are a joke.
- once a race destroys a planet diplomacy should react properly, probably even your own people going to unrest
Combat:
- Implement the artemis net again.
- Give penalties for fleets that just consist of big ships.
What I miss most:
- Leaders, Antarans, decent AI
What I like:
- Combat, especially the start sequence where all ships jump out of hyperspace ;-)
- very straighforward interface, just like Moo2
- Graphics is very good
- I like the "next ship, next planet" like Moo2, good to not forget things (if they just wouldn't go to autosleep themselves)
Even in this state I really like the game and did spend hours and hours with it. Am sure the devs will make this something that I'll prefer over Moo2. Good Job and go on !
Falkeleid
19 Apr 2016
I think here is the right place to drop in my feedback. I see a lot of consensus in the community on many things which should still improve, minus the three hot topics of tactical combat, starlanes and tech tree.
Master of Orion 2 from the 90s is what you call an evergreen in the music business, and some people still have it and play it even today. It consolidated an emerging new type of 4X-gameplay into a coherent, complex, personal experience. Statistics, battles, ship and planet building, ground battles, and characters to identify with, character data and portraits included. Many games tried to copy this level of perfection and failed. If there was one with a good potential to go new yet familiar routes in this genre, it would have been Ascendancy or Stars!, also from the late 90s, but sadly, those got never beyond what you could count as an "early access" state of development.
And we do not speak of Master of Orion 3; given it´s glaring shortcomings, most fans even deny that it exists. Funny, I count myself to that crowd and when I installed this new game from the package, I just clicked on Master of Orion 3, because, this one is the third one, right?
I have played two campaigns so far, one with a diplomatic victory, by paying to get the votes of the next biggest competitor, and a scientific victory.
The game does a lot of things right and gives me for a large part the good old MoO2 with modern, beautiful graphic and voiceovers. I am a total sucker for a nice, involving yet clean user interface, loved for example Ascendancy for that, and despite Paradox´ Stellaris probably shaping up to be a better and more complex 4X-game, MoO´s beatiful user interface and graphics won me over once more. However, I have to criticise that there are too little new elements, and the elements that are new all seem to go down the same unfamous lane of dumbing down complexity. The charm of MoO2 was that you had a fair amount of complexity, which was easy to handle at the same time. Give us something new and complex, not just something replacing and dumbing down old stuff!
- Tactical combat: Lot´s of fandom discussion here. Having been a fan of the super nerdy Stars! back in the 90ties, and also being roughly familiar with GalCiv, I can see the charm. Especially with added control options, I can have an almost turn-based level of control on distance and holding fire, speed and positioning. Did not figure out yet how to control the special equipment precisely enough (better feedback on pressed buttons is required in general pls), but with some refining I can see a lot of fun. Love the cinematic intro on each battle; maybe some more variety here? Seeing those missiles homing in, seeing them shot down by pooint defenses and then impacts in life-action mode, this never gets old for me. I also love the difference between unguided torpedoes and guided missiles. Dodging a torpedo salvo with fast ships can make a decisive difference (if the teleporter device would be quicker to act, I would love to use it also to this ends!).
- Starlanes, later the jumpgates: Also a topic for a lot of fandom discussion. Especially playing with a spiral galaxy, it seems that there is a race for unlocking those unstable starlanes in order to get to the unsettled center worlds. I treat it like a special game mode, and it is interesting, but I sure would like to have other options, including a “free-flight” option, or having racial options like Paradox´ Stellaris is going to give you on each race´s FTL-technology. However, I would have preferred a totally different route: Actual fuel use, refilling at gas giants. This would be more complex than MoO2 and a challenge for the oftenly under-represented eXploration part of the game.
- Really missing the freighter mechanics from MoO2. Exporting agricultural worlds are not possible to set up right now, blockades and moving population seem less logical without. Pirates would destroy freighters over time, adding incentive to really search for and go after them (maybe they should put pirate bases as re-appearing anomalies, also for a good reason to still have scout ships in late game?).
- Ground battles! Missing still. If they would evolve them into a tactical battle like with the spaceships, I would count this finally as a new game element! Yeah! Maybe even let us build our own dropship, with modules for airstrike, tanks and infantry units?!
- Tech tree: In MoO2, I always played with the “creative” trait, because I cannot miss things. However, in this new iteration of MoO, a bit more diversity in the current tech development for each campaign would be really nice. Maybe by adding a cost penalty, the more tech you have? Would make sense then to tech trade or have tech-treaties with other races.
- Currently, the micromanagement gets painful due to bad AI-build queues. I read that customisable auto-build queues are coming; good! They should make the list of buildings as part of the same screen; having to do extra clicks just to see and dismiss this list is awful.
- Looking forwards to the spy game! Please no dumbing down!
- Uber-planets are a nice new game mechanic, countering that late game symptom of having only gaja-type planets. Also, a galaxy without gas giants seems boring. Maybe some alternate use for them instead of turning them barren?
- More mid- to late-game incentives required: Right now it is just a grind or a rampage right after the first 100 turns. Economic collapses, diseases, diverging factions in your empire, special scientific findings leading to unique tech, and where are the invading Antarians?
- Government types? Religions? Inter-racial conflicts? Free movement of people/races between planets? Missing! Why!?
- I loved how Alpha Centauri played with the tropes and impacts of technology on society. How does cybernetics change your race´s culture? What about the impact of genetics, psionics?
- Viability of different combat styles? Would love to build some suicide frigates with quantum detonators and teleporters and screw them all! More transparency on combat data would be also nice.
- I loved in Alpha Centauri, where you could basically create your slave race by conquering a race and granting them peace in their most despaired last moment, or when freeing their leader: They could never again betray you. Maybe MOO could also include such a mechanic of creating a vassal faction out of a conquered race, instead of just exterminating them?
- Having figureheads makes a game more personal. Admirals, spy-chiefs, governors; any plans on adding that? How about unique ships, e.g. stolen from the Antarans (was my fun sport in late game MoO2).
- Right now I cannot upgrade non-combat ships if I miss it at the point when I get the tech upgrade.
- A pet peeve of mine since I played Ascendancy: Non-humanoid, non-podic races, please! And I want my favourite Trilarians and those telepathic dark elves! (Come on, in light of all possible alien diversity, nobody needs two human race portraits and voiceovers!)
- For mid-game, I would like to see which of my races does sit in which colony ship, please.
- Arming space stations and military outposts via the ship builder was already a persistent wish of the MOO2 crowd. It´s still not in.
- A ship arriving at a point with an inactive fleet makes that ship also inactive, without warning. Same with space factories after they finished a construction.
- Victory videos, please! Some reward and final acknowledgement for those long-fought-out games! Again, Alpha Centauri did this very well! But also the evil laugh about the “Master of Orion” was just great.
