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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2566 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So I played master of Orion 2 for the first time last night, because my brain was too fried to do anything productive.
It's pretty funny going "oh, so this is what endless space, starsector, Stellaris, and all those other games were copying. Like reading Larry Niven for the first time when you only knew the Pratchett parodies.
It turns out I was copying its leader system for a management game I'm working on without even knowing it.

It's honestly a better game than most of the modern ones. The graphics still look great, interface just needs a bit of work: dealing with the horrors of racial integration is even worse when there's no way to tell which race gets + and - what on different planet types without shipping them there and testing.

MoO II is a good game. Balance isn't perfect, but in that "most options arguably lie somewhere on the Pareto frontier, even if it's a very small portion of the surface" way. (...with the exception of some of the custom racial traits.)

I do wish the singleplayer AI had been fleshed out a little more; a pretty common complaint about games of that era.

dealing with the horrors of racial integration is even worse when there's no way to tell which race gets + and - what on different planet types without shipping them there and testing.

If you're talking about the stock races, there's 13 of them and only a couple of planetary traits (high/low G, aquatic, subterranean, cyber, litho) that are mostly obvious from the racial portrait. You learn pretty quickly.

I do wish the singleplayer AI had been fleshed out a little more; a pretty common complaint about games of that era.

Era? I've yet to play a single 4X game with a decent AI, which is by far my biggest gripe with the genre; Low difficulty gets boring quickly, high difficulty is about taking advantage of the quirks of the AI. So far I usually have most fun by using medium difficulty, lots of arbitrary self-constraints and/or other obstacles, such as very frequent and aggressive barbarians/pirates.

Modern 4X AI tends to lack adaptivity. AI of games of that era tended to lack subsystems altogether.

(For instance: MoO II has creative/uncreative races. Normally you pick from one of ~3 choices in tech, uncreative gets one randomly, creative gets them all. So how do normal AI races in MoO II pick tech? ...completely randomly, as though they were uncreative.)

Lacking adaptivity is a great understatement. I've played multiple entries in the genre in which I was at first amazed, only to find out that the AI is barely functional for several factions - it gets stuck on a small number of planets, utterly mismanages holdings in a way that even a static AI could do better or is completely incapable of running a war in a meaningful sense.

It took me faaaar too long to realize how poorly Hearts of Iron's AI handles convoys. I can't imagine what it's mangling on the less visible fronts.

Yeah, a lot of it is learning which traits are genetic vs government and how they combine (pollution when only some races on the planet are toxic tolerant, etc.)

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