Micromangement

[NacNud]

When looking throgh all the info in the goodies section I didn't really see anything that talked about micromanagement. For most games of this nature how this is handled can make a fun game annoying or take away the feel of the game. In moo3 the sheer number of colonies you would get in a typical game required that you use the tools provided to help manage your colonies. The down side to this was that after a while it seemed like i wasn't actually playing a game anymore. All i would do was sit back and hit the turn button and see what would happen turn after turn with little or no input from me for possibly hours on end. The other extreme is to try to do it all and spend days on each turn, also no fun. For all it's flaws it always seemed in MOO2 that i was a part of the game. Even if i turned on autobuild in colonies there was still enough for me to decide and manipulate on a regular basis that i felt like i was in control.

So i was just wondering if there has been any infomation available on this?

[Therlun]

i agree that the management is important, but IMO Moo2 completely failed in that area.
i never got why so many people love moo2 so much.
it is a boring micro hell!

either you have to look after every single one of your colonies every round, or you let the computer incompetentely handle it...
same with the battles.
orderen 3 ships is ok, but larger fleets were a torture.

there is not just the options "simple" or "micro-hell".
something complex can still be easy to handle, like the unreached, glorious Moo1.

[RobHuntingdon]

MOO2 had some things I liked and some things I disliked. I turned on autobuild when it no longer mattered... IE, when I was so dominant the incompetent AI just couldn't screw up enough to cripple me and I didn't want to mess with running all my colonies. Most of the rest of the time I had a fairly standard order I'd found worked for my prefered race types and I just went with that.

What you describe for MOO2 I ascribe to MOO3. Either total micro hell with way too many options that sounded cool at first but just were no fun to mess with, or an AI that did stuff that made no sense whatsoever. And still ended up with way too much minerals or food (or both). Or way too little. Never just the right amount.

But yes MOO1 did have some strengths that nobody has ever managed to equal.

RH
_________________
Robert, the Earl of Huntingdon

Tarry here, my merry men, whilst I seek what adventure await in yonder greenwood; but look thou listen for my call, for I will blow my horn if I become hard-pressed.

Adapted from Sterling, pg. 45

[NifluumHaloom]

Micromanagment can be good or it can bad. I think it is a question of your personal mood and eventually a question of balance depending on the underlaying game concept.

I wonder how much influence the Horizon engine is going to allow the player to have on the management level.

If a scripted story (like in a role-play-game) is indeed ought to be an important part of this game, the designers might not have laid the focus on extremely detailed mangement tools, but more on a comprehensive level.

How Horizon will be knitted, probably only know a few blessed ones.

[NacNud]

Therlun I agree in the early stages of the game you had to do most of the work yourself but even in the larger games the number of colonies you had was usually small enough to make it doable where with moo3 you quickly had more colonies than you could possible manage.

i would also agree that moo1 had one of the better systems I’ve seen. I also liked the system in Stars! where you could create custom build orders extremely easily and even create a customer default build orders for when a planet was first colonized.

I think like NifluumHaloom implied it's all a matter of balance of control.

And with any luck the number of the blessed ones with knowledge will increase when they start the beta.

[Sim-Mania]

One thing that is important whether you decide to micromanage your colonies or use the management tools provided by the game, is the information you recieve about your empire/colonies after each turn, and how well you can use the macro management tools at your disposal.

In Moo3 after each turn you recieved information detailing what had been built on each of your colonies, however, there was no quick and easy way to determine the status of each planet from that screen, which may influenece what you want the planet to build next.

This flows into the topic of better management tools, because if you had the right information, and new how each planet was travelling, then it would be easier if you had a way of selecting numerous colonies at the same stage of development and implement a build que, that could be tailored to your liking, and would effect all the colonies at once, instead of doing the same thing for each individual planet.

However, again I don't know if this would reduce the amount of finicky micro-management, yet I do believe, the information after each turn pertaining to your colonies, and the management tools in the game, have a huge impact on whether the game is eventually fun to play, or a pain in the arse.

[Quantum]

I would like to see two different layers, one for planets - governers - that handle the economy of their planets with the player able to set priorities the may include the order of things built, and the second for the universal government that handles military and also territories. The military could be tied to one screen that sums up whats available for all planets, with the ability to look deeper if needed. The reason for the top government to handle terrirtories or outpost would be to build rushed defence if needed.
And I would prefer my governors to listen instead of doing the opposite.

[JosEPh]

[JosEPh]

Hmmm.... no answer after all this time.

Is it done yet?

Still waiting.

JosEPh

[Zaimat]

There are always positives and negatives to any system and some people will prefer one thing and others another. And I don't mean this in regards to just MOO vs MOO2 but other games in the genre as well.

Some people want to control every aspect of building a colony. MOO2 stands somewhere in the middle, where as MOO1 had very limited building options. MOO3 was plain intimidating to most people

When I started thinking about how to implement the colony design in Horizon, the most important factors were: no-micromanagement, easy to manipulate/understand and having strategic impact.

I wanted the colony development to be a small part of the total game, somewhere around 10% so a player only needs to spend a few minutes per hour of gaming going through his colonies and deciding how to manage them. It's not the focus of the game, this is not sim city. But those small decisions still affect how and what your empire becomes.

So specifically speaking it's more like MOO in design, there are no queues. But there are 'buildings' unlike MOO so there is more control and an economy. Each colony has a budget, income, grants from the empire treasury.

The colony development is divided into different areas such as: trade, government, farming, industry, research, defense, ship building. And you have control on what area to build. Typically homeworlds will develop all areas, where as small colonies will focus on one or a few specific areas since they lack the resources and population.

I hope that answers some of the question in regards to colony development
_________________
Horizon - Lead Designer

[Lexx_Luthor]

A planet would have thousands of factories. This is where Moo1's abstraction was realistic. Micromanagement requires a severe limit of only a few "factories" per planet. But, I guess its possible to call that an abstraction also, each realistic looking factory grafic represents a hundred "real" factories.

Moo1 had realistic numbers of factories on colonies. Moo2 had realistic looking factory grafix. Grafix keeps me interested for about one or two game runs. Numbers and as Zaimat point out -- relevance to strategic play -- keep me interested in...shucks I still play Moo1 on AMD Athalon 64 when I unplug my WinXP hardrive and plug in my old DOS 6.22 hardrive. Moo1 is so fast now, and it all fits in ramdrive and its still the most fun game even today.

[Zaimat]

I run MOO with dosbox (an excellent free dos emulator), you can adjust game speed and everything (by default it does a fine job too).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox

install, then type: mount c c:\moo and that's it.
_________________
Horizon - Lead Designer

[Lexx_Luthor]

Thanks, but I enjoy booting a pure DOS computer in an Age of Windows.

This is looking like a nice sim developing.

Just a thought...you asked for opinions about the pop colorful nebulae background screenery found in the Space Sims. I suggest nebula be restricted to young resource rich clusters of young stars. It makes astronomical sense, as nebulae are mostly caused by young supergiant stars in young clusters.

Best, this can give the player the feeling of being in a populated wealthy "city" so to speak -- when gameplay happens in a young and rich cluster, lots of colourful nebulae screenery along with the starry sky. When gameplay happens in an older star cluster or among single stars scattered around the galaxy, the player sees just black starry screenery. Intermediate nebulae intensity can be used for in-between these two extremes. Basically, use colourful nebula screenery for the resource rich star clusters.

Also, make the nebula screenery part of the strategic game map rather than just static background. If a player moves a short distance from star to star inside a rich young cluster, the nebula changes a bit (moving point of view inside the nebula). Nebulae should be visible far away into deep space, although much smaller in appearance (scale with distance) -- a sort of beacon giving a visual reminder of where the rich young planets and -- when they are colonized and developed-- where the population centers are.

Just another thought babble. Thanks.