Looking for good graphics people

[guiguibaah]

I beleive it was either Aquitaine, Powercrazy or Geoff who said that if there is a function in the game that the player does not understand how to work it, or in what relation that function has with other gameplay values, they will consider that function to be a game bug and get frustrated.

Moo3 had quite a few of these functions. You could tweak value A and value B all you wanted, but you had no clue as to what they did in the game... the out of the blue function C would start to change but you didn't know why. That made the whole thing very frustrating.

[KurtGodel7]

I think the Key is to make shure that every bit of Complexity in the game serves a purpose. That of alowing the player to make an INTERESTING DESISION. To be interesting a desicion needs to be clearly for some overall strategy and to be atleast moderatly influential on the course of the game. Anything that dosent support that goal is baggage.

I'm a little worried that I keep agreeing with a guy who looks like Darth Vader, but I have to say that this statement is 100% correct.

[utilae]

I've paid close attention to the MoO3 proect. Alan Emrich talked about having rules simple enough that you could keep them in your head. But I saw someone on those discussion boards post an example of some of those rules, and they may have been the most complicated rules I've ever seen. The game, from what I understand, was becoming a Byzantine nightmare; a labyrinthine series of rules and equations almost impossible to understand. At that point, the project should have been scrapped completely, and started again from scratch. Instead, they chose to attempt to hammer away at the excess complexity; to simplify the game to the point where it would become playable.

The result was a game that still had too much complexity, yet lacked compelling features.

I don't know if the rules were ever simple or not, but if the GUI is not good in conveying those rules as simple, then the rules might as well be complex. In Moo3 they did this, and had a whole lot of useless features. The game was complex and chaos.

I think we have a shortage of good designers you know. Moo3 stuffed up. GalCiv, whats up with the space combat, you can create a ship in full detail, part by part, but combat is a non interactive show. Sword of the Stars lacks the core space 4x features (diplomacy, economy, spying) and has a 3d map which is impossibly bad. Space Empires V seems like the only good Space 4X game lately.

Starcraft 2 has come out. Now we need to watch out for Diablo 3 and Master Of Orion 4.

[Moriarty]

Moo3 stuffed up. GalCiv, whats up with the space combat, you can create a ship in full detail, part by part, but combat is a non interactive show. Sword of the Stars lacks the core space 4x features (diplomacy, economy, spying) and has a 3d map which is impossibly bad. Space Empires V seems like the only good Space 4X game lately.

I'll agree on Moo3, but the rest seem a little harsh. I don't want all 4x games to be identical. Variety is good.

- Galciv - you don't need fancy interactive content to make the game. Personally I auto space combat in most games if the option is there. Remember Galciv is a strategic game and space combat in inherently tactical. (Stars didn't have the interactive tactical either - great game IMHO).

- Sword of the stars - They complexified diplomacy in the expansion I think, but they seem to be going for "complexity from simplicity". It's diametrically opposed to Space-Empires. Some people must like this, or they wouldn't be working on their second expansion.

- Space Empires 5 - whilst a good game, it's easily the buggiest (depending on whether you call Moo3 buggy or just poorly designed ).

[loonycyborg]

- Galciv - you don't need fancy interactive content to make the game. Personally I auto space combat in most games if the option is there. Remember Galciv is a strategic game and space combat in inherently tactical.

This game is geared to be easy for AI - to point making it boring for humans: you manually allocate space on planets for buildings. AI can easily calculate what buildings it needs to build, while human players learn this through practice. Although this learning process can be fun at first, planet micromanagment becomes boring later. Also, three weapon(and corresponding defense) types have no qualitative differences.

IMHO games should be geared for human players, not for AIs.