I have a deep love for the 4X genre, but I haven’t really been satisfied since Master of Orion. The first one. Spore actually kinda hit a good spot during the space phase, but as with the other phases it’s not really meant as an entire game on its own.
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So, are there any other 4X game I should try?
I remember Ascendancy… Meh. It got really unfun to manage colonies as time went by, too much jumping into colony view to place buildings. It also made the error of having space-lanes, meaning you had to play retarded 3d connect-the-dots to go anywhere, manually guiding your little ship along to reach a specific destination. Maybe I’ve forgotten its positive sides, I’ll admit it’s been at laest 12 years since I played it… but regardless of what good it brought it was still marred by that 3d connect-a-dot navigation. And the combat wasn’t good. And the colony building was boring. Yeah I wasn’t much impressed.
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There was also Master of Orion 2, that one was pretty good. But, again, it didn’t scale too well, building a new colony late in the game was a tiresome chore involving placing a lot of buildings. Even with all the governors on you still had to interact with the colony screens if you wanted to buy all the buildings and get the colony up and running in a decent amount of time. Like before I might be glossing over some of the specifics, but it certainly down a lot in the mid- and endgame phases. The combat in particular went downhill fast. Was it that ships didn’t stack up? Whatever it was, you’d end up with these big fleets taking ages to complete a single turn, everyone had to move around carefully. Zzzz.
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The original Master of Orion avoids all those problems. Sure it’s not a perfect game, but it is really well streamlined. The interface is simple, with a couple straight-forward editors for Ship design, Diplomacy and Research. And two “database” views, one of your Fleets and one of your Planets. There’s no colony view, no manually placing buildings, no spacelanes, no nonsense. The interaction with your colonies is entirely abstracted to a series of sliders, and… that’s it really. The endgame doesn’t slow down, if anything it accelerates as increasingly fast drives and sophisticated space sensors become available. It also doesn’t become a burden to make a new colony even late in the game, since it’s all just sliders anyway. At most you send over a couple million civilians to kickstart the economy.
For all its virtues it’s still an old DOS game, even though I think it still looks kinda nice (I don’t usually have any sort of nostalgia, but this is an exception). But to this day I’ve yet to come across an equally accessible and well-balanced 4X.