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Master of Orion III is the kind of game that strategy game players have been saying they wanted for years: both broad and deep, with a minimum of eye candy and a learning curve so steep it almost feels like work. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
One thing that I (and apparently a lot of other players) am having trouble with is the shift in focus from micromanagement to macromanagement. Part of this is because previous attempts at creating AI governors to do the grunt-work have been idiotic and incompetent (Ascendancy, anyone?); we’ve become accustomed to watching them closely to make sure they don’t start building something we don’t want, or turning them off altogether. Thus we’ve been conditioned for over ten years to believe that AI can’t be trusted to manage one’s empire and that issuing build orders for every city/planet/whatever is normal 4X gameplay.
Now along comes MoO3, which hides all of this behind a layer marked "Don’t Touch, Viceroy at Work." Digging down to the level most of us are used to working at is difficult or impossible, by design. Unfortunately, this leaves some with a sense of disconnection and loss of control; if the AI is doing all the important stuff, what’s left for Emperor Dunsel? He is reduced to reading nigh-incomprehensible turn reports and hoping that he’s figured out how to ask (not tell) the AI to build more or less what he wants it to. And because there’s less immediate feedback at this more abstract level, it’s harder to learn by doing and more likely that he will give up after yet another game lost without really understanding why.
This may be a more accurate simulation of being a head of state, but it’s not the sort of 4X experience we’re used to. And it may not be as fun.
One thing that I (and apparently a lot of other players) am having trouble with is the shift in focus from micromanagement to macromanagement. Part of this is because previous attempts at creating AI governors to do the grunt-work have been idiotic and incompetent (Ascendancy, anyone?); we’ve become accustomed to watching them closely to make sure they don’t start building something we don’t want, or turning them off altogether. Thus we’ve been conditioned for over ten years to believe that AI can’t be trusted to manage one’s empire and that issuing build orders for every city/planet/whatever is normal 4X gameplay.
Now along comes MoO3, which hides all of this behind a layer marked "Don’t Touch, Viceroy at Work." Digging down to the level most of us are used to working at is difficult or impossible, by design. Unfortunately, this leaves some with a sense of disconnection and loss of control; if the AI is doing all the important stuff, what’s left for Emperor Dunsel? He is reduced to reading nigh-incomprehensible turn reports and hoping that he’s figured out how to ask (not tell) the AI to build more or less what he wants it to. And because there’s less immediate feedback at this more abstract level, it’s harder to learn by doing and more likely that he will give up after yet another game lost without really understanding why.
This may be a more accurate simulation of being a head of state, but it’s not the sort of 4X experience we’re used to. And it may not be as fun.
