Why MOO1 Was Different

I am not sure where this "early attacks are over-powered" gripe comes from in this game at least because in MOO1 if you also didn't have some early fighting you might be crammed into a small space

Early fighting yes, early conquest no. You had to engage border skirmishing, but you did not want that to escalate into war. That is what sets MOO apart from Civ, by orders of magnitude: degrees of conflict. In Civ3, any combat triggers full scale war. :rolleyes: In MOO, combat and other provocations affect relations and add up on the "Means War" counter. Too many provocations, the conflict escalates into war. In MOO1, fighting to hold on to territory where your claim is weak or comes into dispute was par for the course, but full on war was suicide. Even if your core systems could defend themselves, you'd lose more than you gained in less secure areas. You might even be wholly eliminated.


and Sirian himself said that the best MOO game he ever had was where he was able to send his whole fleet against an AI to take their weakest world in the hope he'd be able to get enough reward from the conquest to be able to compete.

I was at tech level 30ish while my opponent was up past tech level 50. We were the only empires left in the game. I had nibbled away at some bits and he had swallowed whole empires. I had a third of the galaxy and he had over half. I had to coordinate a six-planets invasion vs his weakest world, because in MOO1 you didn't train ground units. You sent populations, as in up to half an entire planet's worth of population. Well, I sent six of those, or three entire planet's worth of population, on a suicide mission, knowing less than 10% of them would survive -- IF I WON THE FIGHT.

That had zero to do with rush-attacks pouncing on flaws in the game's design allowing disprortionate rewards for luck-based early gambits. In MOO1, there was no such thing.

MOO3 could potentially duplicate that. The biggest hole right now is the bug where the AI's simply do not train infantry. This leaves their planets wholly ungarrisoned on the ground in the early going, and that is made worse by any tech slowdowns.


In almost any empire game you get a certain boost from a successful early attack

Not in MOO1. Not vs any enemy's core. The fact that you had to send population into battle, not units, to take over anything on the ground, prevented the kind of cheesy "one transport worth of infantry" takeovers we see early in MOO3. This COULD BE fixed, but QS has thus far displayed no clue in this regard.


but look at my "game two" where I spent 90% of the production of my empire on warships in a failed attack. At the end of those 55-60 turns I was at least two levels behind in tech and had probably 50% les planets than other races who didn't fight early.

That only makes the problem worse, in a sense. Huge rewards and huge risks just pushes the results even further down the Luck Road. Blah to that, says me.

An early attack against an enemy colony or disputed territory should be on the table. It was in MOO1. What was not on the table was any kind of attack vs an enemy homeworld. THAT should not be on the table. That it is is a failure of both design and AI competence. This too could be fixed, but QS has not taken it seriously. I think they are too married to their vision of what they want the MP game to play like.


I don't think MOO3 is much different than other TBS games, I think some people are just jaded on some of the strategies that can be done that seem over powered.

MOO is VASTLY different than Civ in core design. In Civ, there are three types of production: food, shields, commerce. In MOO, there is only one: money. The money in MOO gets split up, branching out into food, industry, research, morale, terraforming, and now mining. The fact that you can spend ALL the money on research or all on industry puts a lot more swing into MOO's strategizing. There is less predestiny to the gameplay. At least, in theory. In practice, MOO3 has some predestiny to it because of imbalances in the gameplay and flaws in the rules -- plus bugs.

The most pleasant surprise from QS was the upgrade to planetary bases. That was a huge step in the right direction in terms of game balance.


Anyway, MOO3 still has a long way to go. The infantry bug may be fixable by offering Marines as a guaranteed starting tech, but even if that works, it's only a kludge. The cap on system ships continues to render them handicapped. One TF's worth at a time? They really need to fix that.

However, I said I would give this patch a fair shake. I still intend to do so. The final word on how much I invest into this game (in terms of time and energy) will rely largely on what QS has to say about their future plans for the game.


- Sirian