Maybe this is technically not the right forum, but since it's a spiritual successor, I think it's alright...
Anyway, I've been the world's worst beta tester during the last few years. The game has gotten a lot of additional content since I last played, so I want to make a Let's Play/Review/First Impressions thread about the game to make me stick with it for a full playthrough again. I'm also going to highlight the key differences with MOO. The game is still in closed beta, with a Kickstarter and public beta coming soon. If you want in on the closed beta, you can message Jeff Graw here on RB (hurleybird on Steam).
Remember that this is a beta so things will change in the final release.
Let's start with the game settings:
Most of it should be self-explanatory. In the difficulty options, you can select AI smarts and AI resource bonuses independently. I selected the Master difficulty which is the AI at its best and no bonuses. Ail worked on the game AI. In case you haven't heard of him, that means this is no ordinary 4X AI, and it will be a challenge. I'm confident that I can beat it, but we'll see.
Currently, the only races available are Humans and Spixnih, a spider-like species. The other races can still appear as opponents, though. The Humans have a discount on fleet maintenance and the Spixnih have faster pop growth. Leader/Honorific/Government are all cosmetic. They're just text strings that appear in the game.
Onwards!
Oh no, it's got starlanes, which people hate for some reason! There are lots of connections here, though, and you can move off-lane with a speed penalty. You can also turn them off under "Advanced Options" when starting a game. There are lots of customization options and some presets: "Default" (for the intended experience), "Classic" (more like MOO) and "Streamlined" (quick and simplified game). If that's not enough options, you can also customize the formulas used by the game, as they're all stored in human-readable text files. Well, as human-readable as math formulas get, I suppose.
Looking at the colony screen, you'll see that there's no ECO slider. You pay the cleanup costs automatically and you can't clone population. A terraforming slider appears when you have the required tech.
I don't want to start any science investments before knowing the surrounding planets, so I leave everything as is and send out some ships:
There's a glowing circle in my player color to show my range. A neat interface feature: if you send only one ship, the game will immediately select one ship of the same type so you can give your scouting orders quickly. KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant borrowed that feature for the improved interface in 1oom, and for good reason! Now it's a bit of waiting...
The better planets in Dominus Galaxia are guarded by independents. Here we have some space pirates. They are the weaker type of enemies and can also be payed to go away. The very best planets are guarded by Remnants which are stronger and won't negotiate. In DG, you start with a healthy sum of reserve money, and your population automatically generates more, so you don't even have to do reserve spending like in MOO. (You still can do that, though.) I'm still a bit short, so the pirates are going to fight. I set my ship's behavior to retreat and auto-resolve the combat... and it turns out that the ship got away! In my previous games, ships were hardly ever able to survive pirate encounters, so that's nice!
The pirates are guarding an ocean planet with 80 max pop. I also discovered some undefended planets, which means that they're rather crummy, like here:
Abydos is in the same ballpark and Qyx is an inferno planet that needs advanced planetology tech. Note that once a star system is explored, the star on the map is replaced by a picture of the main planet! Let's colonize those two planets minimal planets... but we don't start with a colony ship, so how do we do that? Easy, just click Colonize World:
We don't need colony ships, just send over the population directly! You first select the destination, and then you get a list with planets you can send them from. In this case, that's only the homeworld. Sending transports costs a bit of money: 10 per world you send from and an additional 2 for each point of population. DG has more money sinks than MOO, but also more sources, so that's fair.
If we don't need to build colony ships, can we just swarm the galaxy? That doesn't work because a new colony doesn't increase your logistics range by itself. First it needs to build a space port (which replaces the ship building slider). Once that is finished, it contributes logistic range and gains the abilities to produce ships and ship off population. It's a bit strange if you're used to MOO, but I think it's a good decision. Transporting population is rarely important in most modern 4X games, so it's better to draw the player's attention to it than to leave them wondering why their new colony won't grow.
This is another part of the game that can be customized: you can chose if you want to build colony ships or spaceports (or both, or even neither).
A few turns later, my new colonies are settled and start working on their factories. Time to plan the next move. I could open up technologies to get more logistics range or terraforming. I could research weapons or build ships to fight the pirates. With the independent enemies, weapons becomes an economic tech, in a way. But actually, I want that ocean planet right now, to get the most of the Spixnihs' increased pop growth. I don't like paying pirates (less for strategic reasons, more because it just feels bad), but in this case, I swallow my pride and just save up and keep building factories.
With more population sent off to Ekseller in 2220, Mordon now has some unmanned factories. Clicking on the Adv button next to the slider brings up this menu:
The part that's important for now is that we can tell Mordon to not build more factories than the population can operate. The other options are for stopping when factories become too expensive: Factories don't have a fixed price. Instead, it increases with the number of factories relative to the planet size. Once you get to a certain level of robotic controls, it can happen that factories become so expensive that it's not worth building them everywhere. However, your early factories always stay cheep!
Excess production is shunted into research, so it's time to visit the Research screen!
This should be familiar from MOO, except that you can adjust all sliders independently. They're not absolute, but relative to each other, so Biology, Construction and Propulsion all receive equal amounts, and the other fields receive nothing. A nice convenience feature! DG also has a system to reward slow and steady investment which is very different from MOO's interest mechanic. Spending cuts take effect immediately, but spending increases take some time to manifest. (Note that this only applies to moving the sliders here, not to reducing or increasing your overall research spending.)
The little triangles indicate that Biology, Construction and Propulsion receive only half of what they're eventually going to get, because the starting setting had all fields receive equal amounts. The speed at which they move depends on your overall research investment, so you can't game the system by not spending on research during the adjustment period. I don't know if there are ways to game the system like with MOO's seed-and-trickle spending. So far, the best way seems to just select the fields you want to emphasize at the moment. I'm going with fields that improve my economy and exploration abilities.
I hit end turn and now the Science Spider has to stop browsing the web.
Huh. I thought that DG moved Eco Restoration up! If I had known that I might get it immediately, I would have opened research much earlier! The techs here should be familiar, except for Theoretical Biology. Researching normal techs doesn't unlock new ones in DG, you need theoretical research for that. Anyway, I go with Eco Restoration of course!
In Construction, I pick Factory Construction II for reducing construction costs by 19% and in Propulsion, I pick a logistics range upgrade.
I also start building a space port at Gordys, using stimulus spending from my reserve to speed it up. It's finished in 2230 and opens up some new star systems for exploration. Except one is just barely out of reach:
The red star turns out to have a tundra planet, the next one south is arid and I immediately colonize it from Gordys.
Eco restoration research finishes in 2238 and I follow it up with Terraforming II. The logistics tech finishes and that one annoying star becomes accessible now. Turns out that it has a barren artifacts planet
My next target has to be Theoretical Biology, I need a hostile environment tech ASAP!
As for new propulsion tech, I skip Nuclear Drives for Theoretical Propulsion and hope for better engines in the next rung.
Up north I encounter more pirates at an arid planet. I don't have the money at the moment...
In 2243, Abydos maxes out factories and starts building a space port. Also, Terraforming II completes. It works a little bit differently from MOO:
So you get a small flat amount plus some percentage of the planet's base size. The point of that is to make the base size more important. I'm not sure if I like that. I think it's cool that the size matters in the early game, but just kind of stops being important later on because planets are just blank canvasses for your terraforming engineers. Also, the more you terraform a planet, the more expensive it becomes. Terraforming costs can be reduced by a high level force field tech.
The colony at Orbis is founded in 2245 and I spot some fleet at the next planet. It's black, not grey so I suspect that it's another empire rather than independents. The UI just calls it an unknown fleet...
The last big event of this play session before I stop in 2250 is that I finish Theoretical Propulsion and get to research sub-light drives next. The wait has paid off!
Anyway, I've been the world's worst beta tester during the last few years. The game has gotten a lot of additional content since I last played, so I want to make a Let's Play/Review/First Impressions thread about the game to make me stick with it for a full playthrough again. I'm also going to highlight the key differences with MOO. The game is still in closed beta, with a Kickstarter and public beta coming soon. If you want in on the closed beta, you can message Jeff Graw here on RB (hurleybird on Steam).
Remember that this is a beta so things will change in the final release.
Let's start with the game settings:
Most of it should be self-explanatory. In the difficulty options, you can select AI smarts and AI resource bonuses independently. I selected the Master difficulty which is the AI at its best and no bonuses. Ail worked on the game AI. In case you haven't heard of him, that means this is no ordinary 4X AI, and it will be a challenge. I'm confident that I can beat it, but we'll see.
Currently, the only races available are Humans and Spixnih, a spider-like species. The other races can still appear as opponents, though. The Humans have a discount on fleet maintenance and the Spixnih have faster pop growth. Leader/Honorific/Government are all cosmetic. They're just text strings that appear in the game.
Onwards!
Oh no, it's got starlanes, which people hate for some reason! There are lots of connections here, though, and you can move off-lane with a speed penalty. You can also turn them off under "Advanced Options" when starting a game. There are lots of customization options and some presets: "Default" (for the intended experience), "Classic" (more like MOO) and "Streamlined" (quick and simplified game). If that's not enough options, you can also customize the formulas used by the game, as they're all stored in human-readable text files. Well, as human-readable as math formulas get, I suppose.
Looking at the colony screen, you'll see that there's no ECO slider. You pay the cleanup costs automatically and you can't clone population. A terraforming slider appears when you have the required tech.
I don't want to start any science investments before knowing the surrounding planets, so I leave everything as is and send out some ships:
There's a glowing circle in my player color to show my range. A neat interface feature: if you send only one ship, the game will immediately select one ship of the same type so you can give your scouting orders quickly. KilgoreTroutMaskReplicant borrowed that feature for the improved interface in 1oom, and for good reason! Now it's a bit of waiting...
The better planets in Dominus Galaxia are guarded by independents. Here we have some space pirates. They are the weaker type of enemies and can also be payed to go away. The very best planets are guarded by Remnants which are stronger and won't negotiate. In DG, you start with a healthy sum of reserve money, and your population automatically generates more, so you don't even have to do reserve spending like in MOO. (You still can do that, though.) I'm still a bit short, so the pirates are going to fight. I set my ship's behavior to retreat and auto-resolve the combat... and it turns out that the ship got away! In my previous games, ships were hardly ever able to survive pirate encounters, so that's nice!
The pirates are guarding an ocean planet with 80 max pop. I also discovered some undefended planets, which means that they're rather crummy, like here:
Abydos is in the same ballpark and Qyx is an inferno planet that needs advanced planetology tech. Note that once a star system is explored, the star on the map is replaced by a picture of the main planet! Let's colonize those two planets minimal planets... but we don't start with a colony ship, so how do we do that? Easy, just click Colonize World:
We don't need colony ships, just send over the population directly! You first select the destination, and then you get a list with planets you can send them from. In this case, that's only the homeworld. Sending transports costs a bit of money: 10 per world you send from and an additional 2 for each point of population. DG has more money sinks than MOO, but also more sources, so that's fair.
If we don't need to build colony ships, can we just swarm the galaxy? That doesn't work because a new colony doesn't increase your logistics range by itself. First it needs to build a space port (which replaces the ship building slider). Once that is finished, it contributes logistic range and gains the abilities to produce ships and ship off population. It's a bit strange if you're used to MOO, but I think it's a good decision. Transporting population is rarely important in most modern 4X games, so it's better to draw the player's attention to it than to leave them wondering why their new colony won't grow.
This is another part of the game that can be customized: you can chose if you want to build colony ships or spaceports (or both, or even neither).
A few turns later, my new colonies are settled and start working on their factories. Time to plan the next move. I could open up technologies to get more logistics range or terraforming. I could research weapons or build ships to fight the pirates. With the independent enemies, weapons becomes an economic tech, in a way. But actually, I want that ocean planet right now, to get the most of the Spixnihs' increased pop growth. I don't like paying pirates (less for strategic reasons, more because it just feels bad), but in this case, I swallow my pride and just save up and keep building factories.
With more population sent off to Ekseller in 2220, Mordon now has some unmanned factories. Clicking on the Adv button next to the slider brings up this menu:
The part that's important for now is that we can tell Mordon to not build more factories than the population can operate. The other options are for stopping when factories become too expensive: Factories don't have a fixed price. Instead, it increases with the number of factories relative to the planet size. Once you get to a certain level of robotic controls, it can happen that factories become so expensive that it's not worth building them everywhere. However, your early factories always stay cheep!
Excess production is shunted into research, so it's time to visit the Research screen!
This should be familiar from MOO, except that you can adjust all sliders independently. They're not absolute, but relative to each other, so Biology, Construction and Propulsion all receive equal amounts, and the other fields receive nothing. A nice convenience feature! DG also has a system to reward slow and steady investment which is very different from MOO's interest mechanic. Spending cuts take effect immediately, but spending increases take some time to manifest. (Note that this only applies to moving the sliders here, not to reducing or increasing your overall research spending.)
The little triangles indicate that Biology, Construction and Propulsion receive only half of what they're eventually going to get, because the starting setting had all fields receive equal amounts. The speed at which they move depends on your overall research investment, so you can't game the system by not spending on research during the adjustment period. I don't know if there are ways to game the system like with MOO's seed-and-trickle spending. So far, the best way seems to just select the fields you want to emphasize at the moment. I'm going with fields that improve my economy and exploration abilities.
I hit end turn and now the Science Spider has to stop browsing the web.
Huh. I thought that DG moved Eco Restoration up! If I had known that I might get it immediately, I would have opened research much earlier! The techs here should be familiar, except for Theoretical Biology. Researching normal techs doesn't unlock new ones in DG, you need theoretical research for that. Anyway, I go with Eco Restoration of course!
In Construction, I pick Factory Construction II for reducing construction costs by 19% and in Propulsion, I pick a logistics range upgrade.
I also start building a space port at Gordys, using stimulus spending from my reserve to speed it up. It's finished in 2230 and opens up some new star systems for exploration. Except one is just barely out of reach:
The red star turns out to have a tundra planet, the next one south is arid and I immediately colonize it from Gordys.
Eco restoration research finishes in 2238 and I follow it up with Terraforming II. The logistics tech finishes and that one annoying star becomes accessible now. Turns out that it has a barren artifacts planet
My next target has to be Theoretical Biology, I need a hostile environment tech ASAP!As for new propulsion tech, I skip Nuclear Drives for Theoretical Propulsion and hope for better engines in the next rung.
Up north I encounter more pirates at an arid planet. I don't have the money at the moment...
In 2243, Abydos maxes out factories and starts building a space port. Also, Terraforming II completes. It works a little bit differently from MOO:
So you get a small flat amount plus some percentage of the planet's base size. The point of that is to make the base size more important. I'm not sure if I like that. I think it's cool that the size matters in the early game, but just kind of stops being important later on because planets are just blank canvasses for your terraforming engineers. Also, the more you terraform a planet, the more expensive it becomes. Terraforming costs can be reduced by a high level force field tech.
The colony at Orbis is founded in 2245 and I spot some fleet at the next planet. It's black, not grey so I suspect that it's another empire rather than independents. The UI just calls it an unknown fleet...
The last big event of this play session before I stop in 2250 is that I finish Theoretical Propulsion and get to research sub-light drives next. The wait has paid off!
I've never seen such a bunch of compulsive backstabbers!
Thanks for posting, and thanks to Jeff for answering questions for all us curious MOO fans.