Hello everyone,
Day 23, what’s behind the door ?
Two models today, the frontage of Darth Vader’s palace place and a tiny little TIE craft.
And a return of the Master of Orion 2 cd … I meant to talk about these games a while ago but got sidetracked. There are a few games to talk about today, first a bit of fantasy.
This one is Master of Magic, an all time legendary classic from the 90s again. This one was a real headache to run … As well as needing 4MB of system memory to give you enough Expanded Memory, it needed a huge amount of Conventional Memory too. It’s really good that those terms have been consigned to the dustbin of history and we don’t need to think of them any more !
So, what’s the game ? Think Civilisation. But add in magic and a fantasy world. You play one of 5 wizards, aiming to be the first to learn and cast the Spell of Mastery, at which point all of your competitors would be banished from the realm and you’d win. You could also banish them the traditional way by storming their castles. Instead of different civilisations with minor differences, you could play as Humans, Elves, Orcs, Halflings, Dark Elves and so on. The differences were much more pronounced, with certain races having buildings locked away from them. There were also 5 colours of magic too, which was probably inspired by the Magic the Gathering card game.
It also had a nice little tactical battle sequence, which was another major plus that set it aside from the Civilisation games. It’s a wonder that there has never been a Master of Magic 2, because this game had absolute legend status in its day.
Next up is Master of Orion (Moo).
This one was a space strategy and one of the earliest of its genre on PC to break through. You colonised stars, created fleets and attempted to dominate the galaxy again. One curious wrinkle was that the tech tree was randomised for each game, with some techs being locked out. That introduced a certain amount of variation between games. Another classic of its day and the follow up was Master of Orion 2 (Moo2).
I see someone was adopting my favourite colour in these games, the blood red banner. Whereas Moo allowed you to build incredibly massive fleets with up to 32,000 ships in a stack (each capable of firing multiple warhead missiles), Moo2 had a fleet point mechanic. The limit is off to the right there, the 23 ships owned (50 ships supported). Bigger ships needed more fleet points. Moo2 also allowed extra food grown on one planet to be moved by freighter to hungry planets.
Moo had some aspects which were better but Moo2 was the game I was hooked on for a couple of decades until Stellaris came along.
We don’t talk about Master of Orion 3.
There’s a new Master of Orion game out as well, I was too addicted to Stellaris to properly check that one out but … there’s a Steam sale on at the moment …
On Stellaris …
I still go back to Stellaris, although I don’t think it’s quite the game it used to be. Complication has been added, which is ok if the AI is equipped to play that complication. It’s felt like the AI might have been left behind a bit.
That said though, it’s still an incredibly good space strategy game.
I think I need to hit post now though (getting late !).
Stay safe everyone, be well.