>>5760944>>5740183>>5740208I have been playing a lot of Master Of Orion 2 I think the game gets better the more you play it but you have to adhere to very specific exact build orders or else you lose (lol it just takes 100 turns later for you to discover inevitable defeat). I still think the game is very RNG driven, the random events like advisors you hire or starting planets and diplomacy disposition of nearest alien races very dramatically alters the game. Also MoO2 does feel like a very aggressive constant push and expand game, it is there in the chart comparing races and I think the maintenance cost system is clever, it means the empire cannot just remain static and turtle down building infrastructure and tech (I liked to do this in Planetfall) because eventually the financial cost crushes growth unless you constantly push into new colonised worlds.
I was trying to develop a mental framework for 4X games, why they are so complex (lol vs my quake 3 mindset of grab red armour megahealth nonstop spam rockets LG grenades and plasma gun everywhere).
I came up with something like this, maybe you can use this idea to develop some cross-system 4X game attributes, a bit like STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA in dnd.
So abstracting away from movement and the map, a 4X game could be like this 4x4x4 decision cube
Acquire, Build, Conquer, Discover
Population, Fleet, Infrastructure, Tech
Might, Prosperity, Knowledge, Industry
It would actually be a (4x4x4) x4 hypercube, the fourth being Explore or movement, but I have abstracted away from that and the map etc for the time being. Discover here means research.
The idea is that the 4x game activities is essentially a route linking any three of these action-accumulation-attribute activities, eg.
Acquire-Fleet-Might, buy combat spaceships. In a historical setting this might be triremes or war elephants or galleons etc
Discover-Population-Knowledge, this might be cultivate governance, diplomacy or civic cultural systems, it could be espionage or hiring leaders
Conquer-Infrastructure-Industry, it is some form of economic siege warfare, or it could be sabotage of enemy production facilities
The reason is that in 4X games there is like an accumulation layer (so instead of dnd Roll Strength, you need to accumulate the resource route to the attrubute first). That is why it is a 4x4x4 grid (with another x4 for movement and map territory not shown here).
Does this framework make sense? Are then any strategic actions or behaviours that are not encompassed by this 4x4x4 approach? Could it be adapted somehow in a lightweight abstract storygaming manner, hmmm
