Re: Presenting Master of Orion, a space strategy game
Hi,
Thanks Xcline for bringing this to our attention. I'm so excited and yet so depressed at the same time once I mastered the interface. Elated because this is probably one of the most complex accessible strategy games that I've found, and depressed because this was first released in the 1990s, so I can't imagine how much more intricate modern 4x games are like.
Documentation feedback:
1. This game was basically unplayable for me until I understood how the filters could be combined using the view command. The way that the in-game command reference is written would only make sense for someone used to reading documentation for CLI tools, so I think having examples of usage in the accompanying rtf reference would be useful. For example, "v 6 u" shows all unexplored planets, "v YC" shows all your colonies and "v OFT" shows enemy fleets and transport in range of your colony's scanners.
2. It took me quite some time to figure out how the fs command was supposed to work, e.g to send 3 ships of design 4 to planet 5, you had to type "fs 5 0 0 0 3". An example would really be helpful here.
3. Its not mentioned anywhere that you could refer to planets in 3 ways: by numbers, full name or by an offset. So for e.g, both "l -2" and "g +1" work.
4. Could you add some info on how the governer works? Is it a feature in the original game, or one specific to this version? It sounds like it would be useful, especially on this game now where I have to manage 30 planets individually.
5. When viewing the output of the fleets command on your own fleets, the numbers are displayed in accordance to the ship design order that you have. How does this work for enemy fleets? For e,g "Dist 8: IN ORBIT [43] (99,176) Tao 0 0 19 0 0 0 Klackon". This could be a medium ship, or a huge ship potentially if the ordering changed.
Bugs:
1. attempting to toggle the planetary governer with gov causes the following error for me in some situations: "FATAL: lib_sprintf: buffer too small, need 12, have 12Cfg: saving configuration to '.\1oom_config_game_cmdline_nop.txt". This is also particularly nasty because it doesn't autosave for you on crash, so you get restored to the last save state. It keeps on happening on a specific planet, with 11 chars I suspect its a length limitation.
2. I sometimes see the display of incoming "phantom fleets" of my ships when I use the look command while on it. They don't actually show up on the fleets screen and ship count don't change when they supposedly land, so I think this is a bug.
There're some things that are much harder because all the information is presented textually:
1. I find it really hard to get a sense for the geometry of the galaxy just by using coordinates alone. I think this would be a major problem for these types of 4x games, and not having easy access to information like where the boarders of your sphere of influence are and where it is adjacent to enemies makes certain things really hard. Has anyone found a way around this?
2. Have you figured out how to control your ships manually in combat? So far I've always clicked auto resolve, but being able to manually control your own ships is critical for high level play and to properly utilize special devices which I don't think the AI can do for you.
Feature requests:
1. It would be extremely helpful if there was a filter for fleets with your planet as a destination, which can be combined with the O filter to check for invading enemy fleets. Otherwise, the best that can be done now is to crawl through the huge amount of output from the "v OFT" command. The look command should also show incoming enemy fleets on route to the target if you already have enough tech to be able to see that information with the v command. Similarly, some way of filtering output by race would be nice too.
2. Another related idea is to have automatic notifications that an enemy fleet is approaching one of your colonies that appear when you advance to the next turn.
3. I think other filters for the v command could also be useful though much less critical. E.g, by habitability, the presence of special bonuses like artifacts etc.
4. The technologies screen is missing a display for your tech level.
5. When given a choice to choose techs to research from, it would be helpful for the associated long description of the tech to be printed besides its name so that you don't have to look it up elsewhere.
6. The look command doesn't display the class of planetary shield present. I understand you do see that info in the original game.
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