Loving a bad game
One of the first games I played as a kid was Master of Orion 3. While I would later learn that the game was horribly received at the time, and to date hovers around 49% favorable on Steam, and a 64 on Metacritic, I absolutely loved it. The ability to control your whole empire from a high level, while leaving specific development of buildings abstracted away helped to sell young me that I was to be more concerned with the overall fate of my empire than on exact positioning of buildings for adjacency bonuses, or worrying about specific spending on various projects. I was also incredibly interested in the faction influenced tech trees, with some fearsome weaponry available only to certain factions, requiring espionage to claim for yourself. Pretty much, I loved MOO 3 for everything that the fans in 2003 hated it for. It was a departure from the design choices of the first and second games, to which the newest Master of Orion returned.
What’s out there now?
For the last several months, I’ve had a burning desire to play 4X games I haven’t touched in a while. Fortunately, I had a few to choose from that reminded me of the joys I had playing MOO3. The first was FreeOrion, an open source 4X project heavily inspired by (obviously) Master of Orion. It’s about as close to that sweet MOO3 experience as I could find, in no doubt helped by their philosophy of design, keeping basic rules simple enough to explain to “a reasonably clever child“. Further, their emphasis on avoiding micromanagement was a great delight. Everything felt like it had a purpose in the game, very rarely did I feel that spending excessive amounts of micromanagement would be useful, or wish that I had an automation tab to do things for me.
I then played some Distant Worlds: Universe. Right off the bat, I was impressed by the scale of what the player could manage, all the way from empire wide policy to specific stationing of individual ships. With so much going on though, I either found myself playing with all automation turned off (and horribly failing), or with lots of automation on, and watched the game basically play itself. One feature I thought was really interesting was the use of the civilian economy interacting with natural resources, requiring civilian vessels to fetch raw materials from gas giants and asteroids, before delivering it to shipyards and planets.
Next, I gave Aurora 4x a shot. I tried it long ago, but never got too far, and goodness, I think it may well be the most complex of all the games I played and was also without doubt the hardest one to learn. In stark contrast to FreeOrion, or even Distant Worlds, I struggled to do pretty much anything on my own. Some time later with the wiki, and I think I had a feel for the game. While I didn’t get too far, I definitely enjoyed the empire building and the focus on economic development present early on in the game, all without leaving your home system. I’ll try it again another time, but after watching some gameplay tutorials.
Finally, I played what’s probably the most popular 4X at the moment, Stellaris. I’ve played a lot of Stellaris in the past, but I came back to the (unmodded)game after about a year and a half. It has a ton of neat features, including a reworked economy system, ditching the old tile based building system with one converting base materials into successively more refined resources used for economic and military purposes. The ability to create custom empires where the origin of your civilization, your government, traits of your government, and traits of your particular species was probably my favorite aspect of the game, leading to a huge potential for roleplaying in a gene typically defined by statistics.
Moving forward
After playing all these games, I still have a big passion for playing more 4X games. So, I figure, I’ll see if I can make my own! In the future, expect to see some updates on prototyping and design updates!