Like many gamers, I have a stack of old games I haven't gotten around to playing, in my case mostly borrowed from my brother, who buys a lot more games than I do. Recently I installed a few of them, including Imperium Galactica 2. It's a pseudo-realtime galactic conquest game that's sort of MOO-esque. Has anyone else tried this one?
I found the colony management was simple, which in this case is good. How much money a colony earns per month is a function of how large the population is and how high you set the tax rate, and that's pretty much it. On a colony, you can build a variety of buildings, each of which requires a certain amount of population to staff and a certain amount of power, and which come in 4 main categories. Civilian buildings provide basic necessities like power, living space, and so forth, and then there are research/espionage facilities, tank factories/shipyards, and trade ports (which I haven't yet experimented with.) The nice thing is there is an auto-governer which you can set to automatically take care of building the civilian buildings you need, and he does a pretty good job so long as you have a bit of money kicking around. This means that you generally don't have to fiddle with your colonies unless you need to build some more research facilities or another shipyard/tank factory. Usually having enough money to do all the things you need to do is more of a constraint than having enough population to staff buildings.
The simplicity of colony management means you can leave day-to-day management largely in the hands of the AI, and only make decisions like where you're going to build research facilities vs. where you're going to build production centers, and so forth. That saves the player from the burden of a lot of tedious colony management that would otherwise have to be done over and over for each colony. I found myself thinking that the designers who worked on MOO3 could have benefitted from this example of a system that's simple enough that you can actually let the AI do most of the grunt work and not constantly need to go in and fiddle with things to get them to work well.
Unfortunately, other parts of the game that could stand to be more complex because they aren't quite so repetitious are equally simple. Research is one-tech-at-a-time and research rate doesn't depend on how many research facilities you have, which only helps determine what techs you can research. Instead you have 2 research speeds, slow and normal price or twice as fast and twice as expensive (thus draining money from your coffers at 4x the rate.) Combat is mainly a matter of who brings the biggest ships with the most tech, and there's little you can do to influence things except try to move ships that are getting hit hard out of the line of fire. Moreover, offense seems to trump defense quite thoroughly, since defensive ships and bases are not markedly better than their offensive equivalents, yet cannot be brought to bear on the point of conflict nearly as easily. In MOO this was countered in part by making bases upgradable but ships not; here, everything is upgradable to at least some degree.
The fact that offense is king combines with the mediocre enemy AI to ultimately bring down the game. At least in my test game, it was far too easy to surprise attack an enemy empire and rip their guts out. Do that a couple times and the game is over, even if the AI doesn't know it. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to convince the AI the game is over without actually going and wiping out all their ships and colonies... and since the maps are fairly large, that would take a while. So, while there are some good elements, and the beginning stages of the game where you're trying to juggle many different needs is interesting, ultimately it devolves into slog. Not interesting, challenging slog, just slog. As soon as you've built up enough capability to field a credible fleet, you can start blitzing AIs and the game is over. In that respect, the game is a disappointment.
Of course this is all after one partial game, and I haven't tried out everything the game has to offer yet. Perhaps someone else who has played the game can offer an opinion as to whether I've missed a key point. But at this point I'm thinking that the game won't have much legs for me.
I found the colony management was simple, which in this case is good. How much money a colony earns per month is a function of how large the population is and how high you set the tax rate, and that's pretty much it. On a colony, you can build a variety of buildings, each of which requires a certain amount of population to staff and a certain amount of power, and which come in 4 main categories. Civilian buildings provide basic necessities like power, living space, and so forth, and then there are research/espionage facilities, tank factories/shipyards, and trade ports (which I haven't yet experimented with.) The nice thing is there is an auto-governer which you can set to automatically take care of building the civilian buildings you need, and he does a pretty good job so long as you have a bit of money kicking around. This means that you generally don't have to fiddle with your colonies unless you need to build some more research facilities or another shipyard/tank factory. Usually having enough money to do all the things you need to do is more of a constraint than having enough population to staff buildings.
The simplicity of colony management means you can leave day-to-day management largely in the hands of the AI, and only make decisions like where you're going to build research facilities vs. where you're going to build production centers, and so forth. That saves the player from the burden of a lot of tedious colony management that would otherwise have to be done over and over for each colony. I found myself thinking that the designers who worked on MOO3 could have benefitted from this example of a system that's simple enough that you can actually let the AI do most of the grunt work and not constantly need to go in and fiddle with things to get them to work well.
Unfortunately, other parts of the game that could stand to be more complex because they aren't quite so repetitious are equally simple. Research is one-tech-at-a-time and research rate doesn't depend on how many research facilities you have, which only helps determine what techs you can research. Instead you have 2 research speeds, slow and normal price or twice as fast and twice as expensive (thus draining money from your coffers at 4x the rate.) Combat is mainly a matter of who brings the biggest ships with the most tech, and there's little you can do to influence things except try to move ships that are getting hit hard out of the line of fire. Moreover, offense seems to trump defense quite thoroughly, since defensive ships and bases are not markedly better than their offensive equivalents, yet cannot be brought to bear on the point of conflict nearly as easily. In MOO this was countered in part by making bases upgradable but ships not; here, everything is upgradable to at least some degree.
The fact that offense is king combines with the mediocre enemy AI to ultimately bring down the game. At least in my test game, it was far too easy to surprise attack an enemy empire and rip their guts out. Do that a couple times and the game is over, even if the AI doesn't know it. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to convince the AI the game is over without actually going and wiping out all their ships and colonies... and since the maps are fairly large, that would take a while. So, while there are some good elements, and the beginning stages of the game where you're trying to juggle many different needs is interesting, ultimately it devolves into slog. Not interesting, challenging slog, just slog. As soon as you've built up enough capability to field a credible fleet, you can start blitzing AIs and the game is over. In that respect, the game is a disappointment.
Of course this is all after one partial game, and I haven't tried out everything the game has to offer yet. Perhaps someone else who has played the game can offer an opinion as to whether I've missed a key point. But at this point I'm thinking that the game won't have much legs for me.
![[Image: mischief.gif]](http://forums.civfanatics.com/images/smilies/mischief.gif)
