Master of Orion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Master of Orion | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Simtex |
| Publisher(s) | MicroProse |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS, Apple Macintosh |
| Release date | 1993 |
| Genre(s) | Turn-based strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
Master of Orion (MoO) is a turn-based science fiction computer strategy game designed by Steve Barcia, developed by Barcia's company Simtex and published by Microprose in 1993. Although Alan Emrich coined the term "4X game" (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) in his review of the game, Master of Orion was not the first in this genre - Civilization was published in 1991 and Reach for the Stars in the early 1980s.[1][2]
The purpose of the game is lead one of 10 races to dominate the galaxy through some combination of conquest and diplomacy. Despite the game's title, conquering the Orion system does not automatically provide victory.
Master of Orion is a member of Gamespy's Hall of Fame and GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time[3][4]
A prototype was developed under the name Star Lords and was released as freeware in 2001. So far there have been two sequels, Master of Orion II (1996) and Master of Orion 3 (2003); and the open source game FreeOrion, is also also loosely based on the Master of Orion series. There are differences in gameplay between the games. Some games enthusiasts prefer the original Master of Orion to any of its sequels.
Russian science fiction and fantasy writer Sergey Lukyanenko uses the names of the Master of Orion races in his trilogy Line of Delirium.
Contents |
[edit] Computer system environment
Master of Orion runs under MS-DOS or Mac OS. The MS-DOS version uses memory management techniques which are incompatible with Windows 95, Windows NT and their descendants including Windows XP and Windows Vista. One can create a customized MS-DOS environment under these operating systems, but this can be tricky;[5] it is safer to run the game under a DOS emulator such as DOSBox, and this approach also allows users the normal benefits of Windows environments such as task-switching via ALT+TAB.
There is no need for a CD-ROM or DVD drive as the game was distributed on 4 floppy disks.
The game's screens are 320x200 pixels and in 256 colors - in the early 1990s computers had very limited graphics capabilities, and most monitors were only 12-inch (30cm) or 14-inch (35cm). Sound was also simple - weapons effects and a few MIDI tunes.
There is no multi-player mode, only contests against AI opponents on the user's computer.
[edit] Gameplay
[edit] Victory conditions
There are two ways to win - exterminate all opponents, or get elected as the supreme leader of the galaxy. To get elected, one needs two-thirds of the total votes. Since each empire's votes are based on its population and abstentions count as votes against both candidates, getting elected requires some combination of conquest and diplomacy.
Despite the game's name, conquering the Orion star system does not automatically win the game. The planet in the Orion system is extremely valuable since artifacts left by its former inhabitants provide some very advanced military technologies, one of which players cannot research for themselves; and research is 4 times more productive there than on most other planets. However in order to colonize Orion one must conquer the Guardian, a warship that is much more powerful than any that players can build.
[edit] Stars and planets
The software generates a map randomly at the start of each game; the player's only influence over the map generator is the ability to choose the size of the galaxcy and the number of AI opponents.
Star systems have at most one colonizable planet, and a few have none. Planets vary in four ways:
- Population capacity, which can be at least doubled by various kinds of terraforming.
- Mineral wealth, which has a great influence on its industrial productivity.
- Some planets with "normal" mineral wealth contain artifacts left by a long-departed advanced civilization, which double research productivity and usually provide one free technology advance to the empire which first discovers the planet. On Orion, research productivity is quadrupled, and the conqueror receives four technology advances.
- Habitability. "Fertile" and "Gaia" planets increase population growth rates, while "hostile" planets halve them. There are 6 types of hostile planet, which require increasingly advanced research to colonize - the technology for colonizing the most hostile planets costs 37 times as much to research as the technology for the least difficult of the hostile planets. This has the effect of extending the exploration and colonization phases for much longer than in most 4X games.[6]
All planets can be terraformed and also upgraded to "Gaia" planets with the right technologies. These improvements dramatically increase planets' population capacities and hence the potential size of their economies.
[edit] How planets' economies work
Everything, even research, is based on industrial production. All citizens are capable of industrial production, but are several times more productive when assisted by factories. There is a limit on the number of factories a unit of population (notionally 1M individuals) can operate, but you can increase this by researching and building upgrades.
Players can allocate a planet's industrial output between: building more factories or upgrading them to allow more factories per citizen; building or upgrading the planet's defenses (shields and missile bases); research; spaceship construction; or ecology (pollution control, terraforming, increasing population growth). Finally, a planet's output can be directed to the planetary reserve (treasury), which can then be transferred to other planets to boost their output, at a penalty of 50% of the investment.
Pollution is a serious constraint on economic growth in the early game, but you can research technologies which reduce the cost of cleaning it up, to the point where it becomes insignificant in the end game.
Maintenance of ships, missile bases and spies is treated as a tax on all colonies production; players cannot make the software tax only the richest colonies.
[edit] The technology tree
Players can acquire technologies by research, trading, spying or conquest.
There are 6 technology areas:
- Computers: combat systems, factory controls, scanners
- Construction: reduced factory building costs, armor, self-repair systems for ships, reduced pollution
- Force fields: shields for ships, planets and ground troops; some non-conventional weapons
- Planetology: pollution control, terraforming, colonizing hostile planets, increasing population growth, biological weapons
- Propulsion: upgrades to ships' range and speed, some combat systems and non-conventional weapons
- Weapons for ships, planetary defenses and ground troops
Each technology area is divided into several levels, each of which contains 1 to 5 technologies which must be researched individually. To research a higher level technology, one must first possess at least 1 technology from the previous level. In theory one could research all levels of one subject area and neglect the rest, but this would be very unwise.
Players can research several technologies at the same time, controlling the allocation of research resources by means of lockable sliders on the Technology screen. One will generally obtain more advances for a given expenditure by researching a few technologies at the same time than by spending all available resources on one technology at a time; except that in the very early stages splitting research in this way would make achieving the first few advances a very slow process.
In each game each player is allowed to see a different random subset of the technologies at each level. On the other hand there are often alternative technologies that provide similar benefits. These features are meant to force players to adapt rather than follow the same favorite research strategy each time.[6]
[edit] Diplomacy
Master of Orion provides a wide range of diplomatic negotiations: gifts of money or technology; one-time technology trades; trade, non-aggression and alliance treaties. But the most effective way to gain favor with an AI player is to attack another AI player with whom the first is at war.
The game attempts to give the AI players a degree of personality by varying their facial expressions on the Diplomacy screen and by making them refer to past favors or misdeeds you have done them. AI diplomats are given a degree of personality by animated facial expressions reflecting their mood, and by refering to past interactions with the player.
[edit] Spaceship design
Players are allowed to have a maximum of 6 classes of ship active. A player who wishes to create another class must first scrap a class and all ships of that class. Each player starts the game with 5 pre-defined designs, all at the most basic level of technology; but has actual ships of only 2 classes, colony ship (for non-hostile planets) and scout.
Ships cannot be re-fitted (upgraded). The only free upgrades are increases in the travel range and scanning range of your ships; to take advantage of other new technologies you have to design a new class.
There are 4 hull sizes, each of which offers a fixed amount of space for components. Smaller ships are harder to hit, but they have fewer hit points. The main types of components that can be added to a ship are:
- Battle computers: increase the chance of hitting and the damage done by all weapons
- Shields: reduce the damage done by weapons, particularly energy beams
- ECM: reduce the risk of being hit by missile weapons
- Armor: determines the hit points of a ship of a given hull size
- Engines: these determine speed in interstellar travel, power available to onboard systems, and the maximum combat maneuverability available.
- Combat maneuverability: how fast the ships move during the battle, and how hard they are to hit, up to the mamaximum allowed by the engines installed in the ship.
- Weapons: missiles, beams, bombs and biological weapons
- Special systems: colony modules for landing on different types of planet; systems which improve combat performance; and special weapons, including some which damage whole stacks of ships rather than individual ships.
[edit] Space combat and invasions
Ships can travel to any star system within their range, unlike games such as Space Empires or Ascendancy where interstellar travel is possible only via "wormholes".[7]
Space combat always occurs in orbit over a planet - it is impossible to intercept enemy ships in deep space. All ships of the same class form a single stack, moving and firing as a single unit (unlike Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Orion does not allow multiple stacks of similar units). Players can control ship-to-ship combat manually or can at any time allow the the program's AI to take over by clicking on the AUTO button at the bottom of the combat screen. Space battles are almost always decided by numbers and technology rather than by clever tactics.[6]
If the attacking player wins the space combat, the attacker may bomb the colony or, if invasion ships are present, invade it.
It also possible to attempt invasions without destroying all defending ships and missile bases, but some or all of the invading ground forces will be destroyed before planetfall if defending ships or missile bases are present. There are no specialist invasion ships (like Stars!; unlike Master of Orion II, Space Empires or Ascendancy[7]); instead players simply send a large number of their own citizens, which reduces the population of the planet(s) from which they are sent.
Players cannot control ground combat; the result depends on numbers, ground combat technologies and (if one of the races involved is Bulrathi) racial ground combat bonus. But the game displays a screen which shows the number of units and the ground combat technologies used by each side.
Invasion is expensive, but usually provides worthwhile advantages if successful: if there are a lot of factories left on the planet, one can steal some of the technologies left behind by the previous owner as well as getting ready-made industrial capacity; controlling a new system extends the range of the invader's ships.
[edit] The races
Players choose to be one of 10 pre-defined races - one cannot create customized races (the sequels provieded this facilility). The Klackons and Meklar have different types of advantage in industrial production; the Sakkra have very fast population growth; the Psilons are the best at research; the Mrrshans and Alkari have different types of advantage in space combat; the Bulrathi are the best at ground combat; the Humans have advantages in trade and diplomacy; the Darloks excel at spying and sabotage; and the Silicoids can colonize even the most hostile planets without any research and are not constrained by pollution, but are poor at research and have slow population growth.
Each race is above average in one research subject and below average in another, except that: the Psilons are the best at research in all areas; and the Silicoids are weak in all research areas except that they are above average in computers, which is useful for spying and sabotage.
Each race has a pre-defined initial relationship with each other race, varying from fairly comfortable to on the brink of war.
The races also have "personalities" which vary from one game to another when played by the AI. Their attitudes to other races can vary from honorable (reliable friend and unforgiving enemy) or pacifist to aggressive or xenophobic. And each has a major policy objective which guides their research and economic management; for example militarists build combat ships as fast as possible and prioritize technologies which have military benefits, while ecologists put a lot of effort into pollution control and terraforming. Their behavior varies from one game to another, because in both attitude and policy objective each race has a most probable trait and two less probable ones (9 possible combinations per race).
Since a single game can include at most 6 of the 10 races and each race's behavior can vary so much, the early part of a game can range from fairly peaceful to a whole series of wars. But any AI race will go to war if it thinks it has a significant advantage.
[edit] Random events
From time to time there are disasters or emergencies which are not caused by the player's actions. These can be disabled by means of a cheat code.[5] However, the random events can sometimes be advantageous to the player.
[edit] User interface
Initially the game was completely mouse-driven, but the version 1.3 patch introduced hot keys for many functions.[5]
Most of the main screen is a scrollable map of the galaxy. To the right of that is information about the last planet the player clicked on the map: "unexplored" if the player has not visited it; the maximum population and current owner if the player has visited it; the planet management controls if the player owns it. The buttons across the bottom access other screens.
Players use lockable sliders to allocate a planet's industrial output between ship construction (the icon for the selected type of ship is shown at the bottom of the panel), defenses, factory construction, ecology and research.
The Technology screen uses a similar set of lockable sliders to allocate research spending between the 6 technology areas.
[edit] Prequel and sequels
Star Lords, dubbed "MOO 0" by fans, was the foundation of Master of Orion. Star Lords was an unpolished prototype and never commercially released (its intro opens with "SimTex Software and Your Company present"). Steve Barcia demonstrated it to MicroProse and to gaming journalist Alan Emrich, who got so enthusiastic that he and his friend Tom Hughes helped Barcia to refine the design. Emrich and Hughes later wrote the strategy guide for the finished product.[8]
The prototype was made available as freeware in 2001, stripped of all documentation and its copy protection, in anticipation of the launch of Master of Orion 3.[9] Though crude, Star Lords is fully playable. Major differences to the finished game include inferior graphics and interface, simpler trade and diplomacy, undirected research, a lack of safeguards to prevent players from building more factories than they can use, and the use of transports to colonize new planets instead of designated colony ships.
So far there have been 2 commercial "sequels", Master of Orion II and Master of Orion 3; and also an open source game FreeOrion, which is based on elements of these. Despite the similar names, the differences in gameplay between the 3 commercial games are about as significant as the similarities.[10] And despite the sequels' more sophisticated graphics, sound and gameplay, some players prefer the original Master of Orion.[6][5]
Russian science fiction and fantasy writer Sergey Lukyanenko uses the names of the Master of Orion races in his trilogy Line of Delirium.
[edit] References
- ^ 5, 10, 15 Years Ago in CGW September 2003
- ^ Master of Orion III Developer Chat
- ^ Gamespy - Hall of Fame - Master of Orion
- ^ GameSpot - The Greatest Games of All Time.
- ^ a b c d Jon's MOO I Resources.
- ^ a b c d Sirian's Master of Orion Pages - The Player.
- ^ a b See the manuals for the relevant games
- ^ Master of Orion: The History of a Game Series.
- ^ The game is available for download on FilePlanet at [1].
- ^ 4X: Master Of Orion.
[edit] External links
- Star Lords a pre-release version of the Master of Orion download
- Master of Orion series at MobyGames
- Sirian's Master of Orion Page includes resources and full game narrations for the first Master of Orion
- Jon Sullivan's MOO I Resources page hosts information and downloads for this game
- Bladrov's Palace, another fan site, hosting a number of resources for the series (I-III)
- FreeOrion, an open-source, platform-independent galactic conquest game in the tradition of the Master of Orion games.
|
|||||
