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RE: [Video Games] THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO STELLARIS [2.2 LE GUIN]
Master of Orion clone? I put it on my wishlist. The latest MOO sucked, so might be interesting to see what they did with the 4X space genre.
Oh, Hades no.
Master of Orion was a turn based 4X game with a focus on space combat as the primary means of Empire interaction and a relatively limited scope of sets of planetary buildings. Your political set up mainly define how you earned money and gave you a few special powers. (And yes, the latest MOO absolutely sucked. I can make a cogent argument that MOO 3 sucked and was a terrible disappointment back in the day, but that's a different post.)
Stellaris has a lot more in common with the other Paradox grand strategy/real-time games in terms of level of abstraction and means of interaction between empires. Planet side development is more like province development in Europa Universalis 4, and balancing the political preferences of your population as a whole or making use of them to shift into more useful government systems is part of play.
Very different types of gameplay there.
Honestly, if you want to have more fun in the 4X genre at this point, you either have to go back and play those original games via emulation or jump into new approaches to interaction with those mechanics. Endless Space 2 is a far better 4X turn based game than pretty much most of the entries since MOO 2, and I might even give it the edge because of the role-playing/story embedded into the traditional architecture. Star Ruler 2 was an incredible real-time 4X game which never got the recognition it deserved for introducing real-time diplomacy and mechanics built around resource transportation. Stellaris slams right into grand strategy rather than "strategy" and bring something very different to the table.
The best thing about being a gamer in the modern world is that if you have even a little bit of curiosity about something, you can pull up tons – hours – of people playing games you've never heard of to find out if it's something that looks like fun. My measure is to see if I find myself screaming "you're doing it wrong!" at the screen. If I am, I probably want to play the game.
Yeah, I liked MOO2 the best. But I still liked MOO3 alright. Just not as much as MOO2. The new MOO was just plain horrible though. The best part of it was the voice overs...and some of those were also the worst part. I don't think I even finished it once. I ended up restarting it several times, but didn't play all the way through more than once, if that.
But, I think with a bit of change, it could be an alright game to play. But I think they pretty much abandoned it when it became obvious it wouldn't be successful, which was entirely their own fault.
I have looked for open source 4X space games many times, so I probably do really miss those days. Perhaps I should buy this one, since it's on sale for 75% off on GOG, but with crypto so far down I've gone into extreme savings mode. $10 now isn't much, but if I wait for another sale when I have far more money, it's a lot better. I think for now I'll see if there are any more open source games out now and wait.