SpaceSimCentral

MoO went EA yesterday. You can find it on steam and GOG too.

I have of course been following this since it was first announced, and was initially pretty skeptical that this could be done right. (Now, keep in mind when you read my impressions, though I did play Master of Orion 1 and 2 way back in 1997, once Star Trek: Birth of the Federation came out I never looked back. I also didn't think that Master of Orion 3 was nearly as bad as it was made out to be.) Anyway, my initial impressions of this are extremely positive. It really does feel like a modern implementation of MOO2. The core game mechanics seem closer to MOO2 than anything I have played since BOTF. There do seem to be quite a few features waiting to be implemented, but the game in it's current state does not feel lacking in content. Ship customization is easy to handle, and there is a large number of interesting upgrades available through research. Combat plays out like a simple real-time strategy game, you can designate targets and navigation for individual ships, and there are special modules available which give some ships activated abilities. Combats seem to usually be over quickly, and do not feel like an insufferable distraction from the main game. There are two major negatives that I can see. The first is that the tech tree seems rather limited, and comes frighteningly close to Civ5 (I thought the techs in the Civilization games were just awful). So far there don't seem to be quite so many do-or-die technologies, so it's not quite as horrible as Civ, but it's still not good. The second is that there seems to be very poor differentiation between races. If this latter point turns out to be true, it may very well be the worst aspect of the game, but I need to investigate more to see if my impression is correct. (With this issue as well: not as bad as Civ, still pretty bad.) I'm really, really excited about both Endless Space 2 (given how wonderful Endless Legend was) and Stellaris; the prospect of having 3 good new space 4X games this year has me giddy.