allliefreemore

Unlike a lot of buyers I've never played Master of Orion 1 or 2 before so I came in with very little expectations. I am a Civ player and I have really enjoyed Civ 4 and Civ 5. (Civ 5 I liked even before the expansions!) I bought this game to pass the time away before Civ6 comes out. I like how the mechanics between this game and Civ5 are very similar so it's very easy for me to pick up UI-wise. Graphics is pretty like Civ5, but the alien character art is even cheezier than Civ's and some of the advisors are VERY annoying! Luckily, you can turn them off, so I would still give the overall presentation of the game a 8/10. But good graphics by itself does not make a good game, especially a good strategy game. After 6 hours of gameplay, I feel more frustrated than satisfied. Empire management: My new colonies keep starving and its very tedious to keep them fed. There's a lot of unnecessary micromanagement and trying to have even a moderately sized empire is very painful mid-late game with lots of pointless clicking around. Combat: I cannot get my ships to attack a specific ship. Instead, they just sort of glob-attack randomly the enemy which turns the entire fighting experience into a mindless click-attack. So I mostly just auto-resolve combat. I think the developer should have just used an abstract combat like Civ rather than this pseudo-rts which is time-consuming to play, but not every satisfying. Diplomacy: The game COMPLETELY FAILS for me here. Perhaps, I haven't play enough to master the optimal build paths for new colonies, and maybe other people who like RTS's will like the combat, but this game has the absolute worst, and most mind boggling AI interactions ever. For example; my fleet often gets randomly attacked by AI who I have friendly or neutral relationships with. This is almost excusable as just bad AI, but this is the first game I ever played where getting attacked is not an act of war! This is just not bad programming, but REALLY POOR GAME DESIGN and really incomphrensible. This completely breaks the immersion factor for me. Hopefully, in the future the devs will release more add-ons which makes the game enjoyable, like how Civ 5 has really grown with expansions, but as of right now, I cannot recommend this game.

This game is not quite a classic, but it's competently done. I feel the AI has taken a small stepbackwards compared to the previous version, but other facets of the game have been executed competently.

This is a boring game that takes several steps backwards in the genre. The tactical battles are much worse than both master of magic, a 20 year old game, as well as heroes of might and magic, another 20 year old game, and ages of wonder a 10 year old game. There's very little thought or strategy in any of the battles. Where are range, line of sight, fortification, terrain modifiers? There isn't even a little bump of hill in the map to create choke points or any form of stratetic combat placement. In reality, its a rts clickfest, just click attack over and over again, minus any of the excitement. The non-battle portions of the game is also done very poorly. The city builds are very uneven and you'll find your cities doing nothing for longs periods of time. Hence, they feel really stagnant.