A Few Thoughts About 2006

First of all: Happy MOO Year!

Though in this post I want to look at 2006 once again:

Traffic
Our two MOO2 blogs, this one and lordbrazen.blogspot.com, finally achieved google page rank 3 in the last months of 2006:



I am hopeful that this achievement will even further increase our traffic in this year. Generally, I was already surprised about the traffic in 2006. I started to track this website in November 2005 with statcounter.com (see the counter in the sidebar) and visualized them with the so called ClustrMaps. In the last the few days I tried to animate these maps with the EasyGif Animator (shareware). Here is the result:



This is my first gif file. I would be very thankful, if anyone can propose a better tool which is able to compress the file without loss of too much quality.
Thanks to all visitors. There is far more traffic than I ever expected.

4X Turn Based Strategy
2006 was also the reincarnation of the Space Based 4X Turn Based Strategy genre. Who expected this after MOO3 was such a disappointment? Galactic Civilizations 2, Sword of the Stars and Space Empires V were released in 2006.

Galactic Civilizations 2 is surely a good game. But most of us MOO2 fans were disappointed that tactical combat was excluded. Additionally, a game without multiplayer is IMO boring after a few months. Besides the last point GalCiv2 is an ideal MOO2 successor for those MOO2 fans who preferred strategical combat (i.e., without ship design and battles). But who actually preferred that option? I guess less than one percent of us. There is some hope that tactical combat and multiplayer will be included in GalCiv3. There is even the possibility of an MP extension for GalCiv2 but I doubt that this will be happen.

More of us MP players were interested in Sword of the Stars (SOTS) since it includes tactical combat and MP. Several players considered themselves already as SOTS fanboys. But the demo was a disappointment. To put it mildly: The UI is at least controversial. These both posts on the quarter of three board lists a lot of good points: #262 and #267.

But the answer of the SOTS Dev Martin Cirulis was rather harsh: #290, actually the worst PR I can imagine. Most forum members were upset by his comment so it was no surprise at all that the host of the Quarter To Three forum, the freelancer Tom Chick, wrote a negative SOTS review.
Was that review biased because of this issue? I remember some guys in our community claimed that Tom Chick was spot on, but Martin Cirulis had his own version.

To sum it up: In the current state the game looks more like a riddle than a strategy game and because of the above mentioned quarrel I am afraid we won't see UI improvements in a forthcoming SOTS2.

Regarding Space Empires V: I have to admit that I have tested the demo just for a short while. Gusset wrote in our community forum that the tactical combat is restricted for singleplayer. AFAIK the Play by Web option is currently the most popular multiplayer mode and tactical combat won't make much sense there. There is also a TCP/IP mode but unfortunately it is still too bugged. But keep in mind that the publishers are well known for their support. I hope that Gusset, who has already tried some MP games, keeps us informed.

The year 2006 gave us three potential substitutes for our beloved MOO2. But my favorite is still MOO2 which has IMO the smartest UI and best balance between strategical and tactical elements. Actually, some reviewers called GalCiv2 the new MOO2 (and it had lots of good reviews). But when you look at the evaluations of the customers, you will see that MOO2 has still an edge. You may have noticed that I added some Amazon links recently (in this post and see also the bottom of the sidebar). Just scroll over them and the average customer review score will appear:



After 10 years MOO2 has still an amazing average of 5/5. GalCiv2 and Space Empires V have good but not overwhelming scores with 3.5/5, just slightly ahead of SOTS (3/5) and please let us forget MOO3.

Blog Upgrade
Additionally, I have upgraded my blog yesterday to the new Blogger (it merged with my google account now). Whatever that means exactly, you will have noticed that the old posts are now labeled. This tagging feature seems quite useful, for example try the labels:

DOSbox
Video
Battle Contest
10 years MOO2
Strategy
MOO2 formulae

Quite easy now to find posts that are related to a specific topic. I will probably add the labels to the sidebar soon.

Nevertheless, I am also a bit sceptical about this upgrade since there are some autoformats involved. Please inform me when you see any bugs after this upgrade.

Updated DOSbox Guide

I have updated the DOSbox Guide recently. I also added several screenshots to clarify a few issues.

Additionally, you can download my own dosbox.conf now. It works in combination with the default MOO2 directory: C:\MPS\ORION2

When you use this configuration you need just to read steps 1-4 and 8. The steps 5-7 explain the changes of my dosbox.conf file.

Master of Orion mobile

I have recently found two interesting posts:

Master of Orion on Pocket PC!!!

As long as I've owned a Pocket PC and known that there were emulators for it, I've longed for the day when I would be able to play Master of Orion on my Pocket PC (I discussed this a little bit here if you're interested).

Well, I just learned that you CAN play Master of Orion on your Pocket PC! Let me say that again: you can play Master of Orion on your Pocket PC!!! The miraculous piece of software that makes this possible is called PocketDOS.

What Is PocketDOS?
PocketDOS is a revolutionary program that allows you to run old DOS programs on your Pocket PC. According to the website, PocketDOS emulates a PC with an 80186 processor, 1 mb of RAM, VGA video, and "the standard support chips." There are a number of add-ons for this program, including some that make it possible to run Windows 3.1, emulate a 486, etc. [...]

and Master of Orion on Windows Mobile!!

So a while back (== a good few years!) I loved playing a certain PC game called Master of Orion (Remember it??). Now I came across the CD's for it the other day, and i was wondering if there was any way that I could get it to play on my phone (Orange SPV M5000 - basically the imate JasJar) - the phone runs Winsows Mobile 5 and I was thinking there has to be some way to get those old DOS games to run on it. [...]

Tenth Anniversary

Today is MOO2's birthday. Master of Orion II was released exactly 10 years ago: October 31, 1996. I have to admit that I actually can't remember that day: (a) Halloween was no issue here at all and (b) here in Germany, MOO2 was released roundabout 6 weeks later.

In the recent weeks I have mailed further MOO2 devs, unfortunately most seem too busy to respond. It also seems that the devs besides Steve Barcia (Metroid Prime, SSX on Tour) and Ken Burd (Dungeons & Dragons Online) left the gaming industry and were simply uninterested. Rob Corell is one exception. Here are some parts of our mails:

Rob: Sorry for the delay, but I've been trying to hit a milestone on my current project, Adobe Bridge.

I'm pleased to hear that people are still playing (and patching) MOO2, though I didn't have much involvement in it other than the awful network support (sorry!), sound, and a a few special effects. I was the head of a project called "Guardians: Agents of Justice" that was busily failing at the end of MOO2 development.

I wish Steve would make games like that again. Even though he fired me, I'd be happy to play his next turn-based game.

Ken Burd still lives pretty close to me and, last I heard, he was working on Dungeons & Dragons Online.

Hello Rob,

thanks for your reply. About the network performance: There is huge difference between DOS and WIN version here. So we have accepted to use the DOS version and the WIN version doesn't bother us much. But we have one hypothesis to explain the difference and I want to know if it is true:

MOO2 was first developed for DOS and in an later stage it was made (under time-trouble) compatible with WIN95?

Rob: It was definitely developed under DOS. I did the DOS network support, and don't even remember any Win95 testing for MOO2.

Further Mails from:
Russ Williams (AI)
Nieya Anjomi (QA)

Tenth Anniversary BattleTournament

Here are the final resuls (click it to enlarge). Congrats ALEXD! His EMG design dominated.


Rules
FAQ
Evaluation round:
First duels
Further duels
Results (screenshots of successful designs)
Qualifyings:
Groups (videos of ALEXD's battles, save files)
Further Results (video: ALEXD vs. Cabman)
2nd week (YouTube video)
Results
Final:
First Results (save file)

Battle Contest - Final

The final has started:



Download: Save

Battle Contest - Qualifying: Results

Results - (click it to enlarge):


The following designs are qualified:

Larsman4
Dmitry2
ALEXD1
ALEXD2
dottore2
Cabman1
ALEXD3
seb1

The finals will start next weekend. The finalists are allowed to update their designs until this friday 1200 CET. (But no relocation of invested RPs.)

Map Mod: Decent Rocks

I.) Introduction
This map mod creates the maps used in the DC mod for regular MOO2. This mod is called DecentRocks since the tiny and small rocks (i.e. Barren, Radiated, Toxic etc.) have now a decent size. See III. for details. Since StepNRazor had asked for it (see comments), I added an ORIONDR3 mod in IV.

II.) Installation
1. Find the Install.exe on your Moo2 CD and double click it to start the DOS installer. (i.e. INSTALL.EXE. If u dont have install.exe on your Moo2 CD use the win-installation and copy this rkernel.com file in your moo2 directory and proceed.)
b) Apply the v1.31 patch
c) Apply the v1.40 patch
Unzip the DecentRocks.zip into your moo folder. NO BACKUP IS NECESSARY! The new file (different file name) can coexist with the 1.40 patch.

Test the Oriondr.exe ---> Singleplayer should work already.

2. Multiplayer via DosBox:
Instead of orion2~1 (last line of step 8 in this guide, btw that is the exe name of the1.4 version) you can simply paste the exe name of the mod:
oriondr

III. Map Balance
The Orange Mod is quite popular among Aqua-Players. But obviously, those players who prefer Sub, Tol, Lith or Cyber dislike the increase of foodplanets. Therefore just the moderate change under a):
a) Brown Stars are defacto Red Stars now. This mod doesn't change any climate probability of any further star color!
b) I have removed all unguarded UltraRich planets. (They are rich or abundant now.)
c) UltraRich planets have now a basic prod of 7 per worker instead of the previous 8.
d) Tiny and small planets are now slightly larger. Basic Gaia size for tiny and small are 5 and 10 in regular moo. In this mod they are 8 and 12.
e) I have slightly increased the climate modifiers besides Terran and Gaia.
The effects of the modifications d) and e) are summarized in the following table.

MaxPop Values (click it to enlarge):

See this post for details how the max pop values are calculated.

IV.) Decent Rocks Planet Mods
Each system has exactly 1 or 2 or 3 planets in the following 3 mods. Asteroids and Gas Giants are removed.
OrionDR3.zip (contains OrionDR1, OrionDR2 and OrionDR3 mod)

Battle Contest - Qualifying: 2nd Week

This Battle Contest is heavily influenced by so called Rock-Paper-Scissors effects. Many good and playable designs are knocked out by specialized taskforces. One good example is ALEXD's NeutronBlaster/Transporters tactic against Seb79's unshielded titans. ALEXD has initiative and a sufficient ground combat value to raid and destroy these titans in the first combat round. See the YouTube video of this massacre:



You can also download the DOSbox video of this battle. (DOSbox videos have far better quality than YouTube.) But you need to install DOSbox (and its codecs) to watch it (see Battle Contest post below).

ALEXD has also recorded his other duels:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Starzkream781
If you want to watch them in better quality you can ask him on our IRC Channel. See the sidebar to join there.

Further results - Update 17.10. (click it to enlarge):

Chat

Lord Brazen embedded PJIRC (an open source Java applet IRC client) on his blog. By using it you will directly connect to our MOO2 channel: irc.quakenet.org#moo2. You can also enter from this blog here (and ALEXD's site): Just enter your nickname in the sidebar and hit the chat button. See also Stem's post for details and alternative IRC clients.