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Why should the definition of "game" change when the medium is electronic?

(Hint: It doesn't)

Vendetta wrote:Why should the definition of "game" change when the medium is electronic?

(Hint: It doesn't)

Because the term "computer game" has a meaning that is not equivalent to the term Game.
This is why things such as chose your own adventure games or games like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft and others still count as computer games even though they either have no actual goal or objective to complete or they have no challenge, and no way for the player to "win".

Vendetta wrote:You say it's a "simplistic approach", but "where is the player's attention and is that the most valuable thing to do" is literally the hardest problem for a 4X game to solve. It's the whole reason people still say with a totally straight face that MoO2 is still the pinnacle of the genre (despite also not having a good answer to that problem), because most other games have gotten it so far wrong. (Even now I tend to bounce off allegedly "good" space 4X games because the consequence of streamlining out the late game micromanagement that bogged MoO2 down is an early game with little to no player input)

I still feel that a game should be able to do more than one thing and do them well. But what I find simplistic, at least in part, is "The player should be involved the most in the thing which makes the difference between victory and defeat, that is the point of playing the video game after all.", as you put it. Its the idea that its all about winning that's off-putting. For me its at least partly about the setting and the narrative. If all I cared about was winning, I could just throw darts at a target and see how many times I hit it instead of investing 50 bucks or so in a good computer game.

But I'll agree with you insofar as I loathe excessive micromanagement. I don't mind (and actually enjoy) being able to micromanage what I want to micromanage. But I don't enjoy having to take hours micromanaging every little thing.

However, I don't think their is only one correct answer to the issue of what to focus on.

4X games don't actually have a lot of "exploration", the way they express discovery is in the mechanics. When you find out that the system next door has an Ultra Rich Huge Gaia planet that's not the majesty of stellar cartography being expressed but the mechanical expectations you have for that planet type and how it's going to interact with your empire. It's not finding out what's there, it's finding out what you can do with it or, as you gain more experience with the game and know the possibility space better, figuring out how to optimise the position you have found yourself in.

No comment on this right now.

However, the larger the engagements the less regular and significant those individual contributions are going to be. This still doesn't solve the problem that if the player is expected to manage each and every one of many hundreds of ships then that turns into a massive time sink which is going to be monstrously repetitive and dull, even when the mechanics work at a smaller scale (again: Master of Orion 2. Late game combat is horribly dull because there are simply so many ships involved in each fight and there's no actual tactics involved, you won when you built the right combination of weapons and systems and the enemy never even gets to move, but early game combat requires much more variation because the scale is smaller.)

Agreed, except about MoO 2 because I haven't played it and can't speak for what its like).

I'm not suggesting that players should have to micromanage every ship in a vast horde, and I don't think Purple was either from what I read. Just having them effect one elite unit or something like that.

Automation doesn't really help either. Either the automation is good enough that the player never has to interact with that level of the game (in which case it shouldn't be there and the bits the player does interact with should be developed better), or the automation isn't as good as the player can manage by manually doing it and so is a disadvantage to use*. This is why the "autoresolve" button is basically the "lose this easy fight" button.

I disagree. I think its good to have automation to take care of those things that are necessary for a large, complex game but that the player doesn't wish to or can't focus on at the moment (because the player can't be running every world in their vast empire simultaneously.

Now, the automation might be crappy, but that would then make the player prioritize where to spend their efforts. That could be part of the challenge of the game.

The systems and mechanics to successfully deliver on the management of ships as individuals inherently make the game worse at being empire management.

I don't see why it should be so.

Why do you think Paradox games don't even try to simulate combat beyond watching some bars go down? Because that's not what they were ever trying to do and doing it would make them worse at what they were trying to do given the scale they aim for.

Its fine for Paradox to take that approach if that's the kind of game they're trying to make. And I do recognize that you can't do everything, that at some point you must prioritize. However, I still think you're being too narrowly focussed.

* This happens because the developers hadn't actually explored the possibility space by playing competitively and so the AI values what they dartboarded as having "value" not what actually shakes out.

Perhaps that is a failing of the developers and they should take more time to test their games.

(Examples of that possibility space exploration are the way David Sirlin balanced SF2 Turbo's HD remix. If people in the testing team came to him and said "X is OP" his response was "OK beat me with it, or at least make me fear it". Also in the design of Castevania SOTN, a boss design wasn't finished until the person who designed it could beat it without taking damage)

At least they tried to test it.

Wow, another game we literally have no idea about beyond a title that gets people exited because games made in the 90's were good (at the time, try to play them now with no nostalgia factor and you'll quit after 15 minutes because the graphics, control scheme, and overall game mechanics are so outdated due to decades of progress it's not at all enjoyable due to the game mechanics and it being a 4x game as opposed to Tetris or Caterpillar which are simple and timeless) and the name alone will guarantee sales and if the studio gives enough access, sucks the right metaphorical cocks, and pays the reviewers in ad space (or just cash) it will get 8+ reviews even if it's godawful.

I just hope it's not another sloppy turd like Fallout 3 who people will play repeatedly and defend to the death, cause 'FALLOUT'!!! as if the name is a talisman against crap.

Flagg wrote:Wow, another game we literally have no idea about beyond a title that gets people exited because games made in the 90's were good (at the time, try to play them now with no nostalgia factor and you'll quit after 15 minutes because the graphics, control scheme, and overall game mechanics are so outdated due to decades of progress it's not at all enjoyable due to the game mechanics and it being a 4x game as opposed to Tetris or Caterpillar which are simple and timeless) and the name alone will guarantee sales and if the studio gives enough access, sucks the right metaphorical cocks, and pays the reviewers in ad space (or just cash) it will get 8+ reviews even if it's godawful.

I just hope it's not another sloppy turd like Fallout 3 who people will play repeatedly and defend to the death, cause 'FALLOUT'!!! as if the name is a talisman against crap.

I agree with you that MOO 2 is exactly as you describe, but strongly disagree on MOO 1, whose UI and game mechanics, and ability of the AI to deliver a satisfying opponent are on par with if not better than many recent 4x games. Of all old games, MOO is one of the few where literally only a graphical new coat is needed to be brought up to speed.

Flagg wrote:I just hope it's not another sloppy turd like Fallout 3 who people will play repeatedly and defend to the death, cause 'FALLOUT'!!! as if the name is a talisman against crap.

The FO1 and 2 fanbase hated #3, they were just outnumbered by new or Elder Scrolls fans who liked it. Fallout fans used to be infamous for vitriolic hate against any and all attempts to move the series beyond the first 2 games, e.g. the poor reviews and sales of FO Tactics, which the Internet realized a few years later was actually a good game, just not very faithful to the FO universe and aesthetic. I don't think you could have used a worse example of blind loyalty.

Flagg wrote:Wow, another game we literally have no idea about beyond a title that gets people exited because games made in the 90's were good (at the time, try to play them now with no nostalgia factor and you'll quit after 15 minutes because the graphics, control scheme, and overall game mechanics are so outdated due to decades of progress it's not at all enjoyable

Speak for your self. I still tend to break out Civilization III, Space Empires IV, KOTOR and UFO Enemy Unknown* and play my brains out. And I enjoy them far more than modern games with "up to date" graphics and stuff. Some things are, a you say timeless. However what fits into that category is very much a thing of personal taste. It's not really about nostalgia but about what style of game, game play, art etc. hits your personal sweet spot.


* The old one, not the new one.

I still tend to break out Civilization III, Space Empires IV, KOTOR and UFO Enemy Unknown* and play my brains out. And I enjoy them far more than modern games with "up to date" graphics and stuff. Some things are, a you say timeless. However what fits into that category is very much a thing of personal taste. It's not really about nostalgia but about what style of game, game play, art etc. hits your personal sweet spot.

Hell, I still play Civilization 2...and I'd play Civ 1 if it ran on Windows 7. I still fire up Diablo 1 and 2, I just played a couple levels of Descent the other day, and Dungeon Siege too. While I agree with Flagg that the graphics on some of these old games is clearly dated, sometimes the gameplay is simply so good that it more than makes up for a bit of pixellation. Diablo 1 is a perfect example. Even after 20 years, the Butcher sends a chill down my spine, and things still jump out of the dark and startle me...despite being crude compared to Diablo 3.

Back onto the more immediate topic though, even back in the day I would still prefer MOO 1 over MOO 2 due to the fact that MOO 2 had too much micromanagement. If they could keep the overall feel of MOO 1 while updating the graphics and user interface to today's standards, I would be quite pleased.

Borgholio wrote:Back onto the more immediate topic though, even back in the day I would still prefer MOO 1 over MOO 2 due to the fact that MOO 2 had too much micromanagement.

Ultimately I think we can newer agree on this. You and those like you will always be pushing against those like me for wanting a game that in your eyes is too full of micromanagement and unplayable. Where as people like my self will and I will always be pushing back against you for wanting a game that's strait forward and dumbed down. And in the end, we'll just have to wait and see what the devs make. All we know for now that it's probably going to be a resource hog and suck.

Ultimately I think we can newer agree on this. You and those like you will always be pushing against those like me for wanting a game that in your eyes is too full of micromanagement and unplayable. Where as people like my self will and I will always be pushing back against you for wanting a game that's strait forward and dumbed down.

Sure, the preference between macro and micro management is the same idea as asking people which they prefer more, shooters or RPGs. It's just a matter of taste.

Believe it or not, that was one of the few good things that came out of MOO 3. You could micro-manage almost everything if you wanted...ground combat, space combat, planetary production, etc... Or you could let the AI do things and it did a (passable) job. So in that case it could appeal to either kind of player...macro or micro. But sadly, they had too many OTHER ideas they tried to implement, failed to do so, and wound up with a game that is still noticeably incomplete. But if the new MOO gives a decent AI but also lets you do a certain amount of micromanagement (especially in the early game when it's most important), it will be quite fun to play.

Purple wrote:

Vendetta wrote:Why should the definition of "game" change when the medium is electronic?

(Hint: It doesn't)

Because the term "computer game" has a meaning that is not equivalent to the term Game.
This is why things such as chose your own adventure games or games like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft and others still count as computer games even though they either have no actual goal or objective to complete or they have no challenge, and no way for the player to "win".

You are factually incorrect. Both Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress have goals to complete and loss conditions. That they also have a number of other things you can do in the sandbox the game environment provides doesn't mean the objectives and loss conditions don't count.

The Romulan Republic wrote:I still feel that a game should be able to do more than one thing and do them well. But what I find simplistic, at least in part, is "The player should be involved the most in the thing which makes the difference between victory and defeat, that is the point of playing the video game after all.", as you put it. Its the idea that its all about winning that's off-putting. For me its at least partly about the setting and the narrative. If all I cared about was winning, I could just throw darts at a target and see how many times I hit it instead of investing 50 bucks or so in a good computer game.

4X games don't really have narrative though, they have emergent stories based on the events in a specific playthrough, and their "setting" is more defined by game mechanical archetypes than any depth of storytelling (no matter what the races are called and look like there's "the sneaky one", "the fighty one", "the researchy one", "the buildy one", "the tradey one", and "the diplomatic one that nobody picks"). The "narrative" in a 4X game is how you the player interacted with this particular iteration of the game, and is emergent based on the way the game space was generated, how close given instances of the archetypes were, how many resources you had early on, what your tech choices were, etc. (eg. did you have to put up with Sister Miriam from the start of the game or only meet her cranky ass later on when you have the tech to put her in her place).

It's a very mechanics focused type of game, precisely because the attraction of it to players is how those emergent possibilities make every game slightly different. Even in SMAC, which is probably the most "setting" heavy 4X game, the setting is only there to add context to the mechanical traits the factions express.

And yes, it really is about winning. 4X games are fundamentally strategy games, and the core engagement of strategy games is to devise and implement a strategy which addresses the challenge the game presents in order to achieve a given goal. Players are fundamentally goal seeking, even if they claim to be interested in the setting or narrative they advance the narrative and discover the setting by working towards the given goals, ie. trying to win at the game. I bet you never went into Alpha Centauri thinking "well this time I'm just going to poddle along as a second rate power and let Diedre win instead, because it's just about the atmosphere".

What that means is that the design of the game should above all make the process of working towards the goals interesting, which is what I was talking about all along when I said that the design attention should be focused on whatever factors make the most difference between winning or losing. If you decide to make a game where success or failure hinges on sucessful management of hero ships, then you can do that, but that's a different game to a game where success or failure hinges on arranging the economy to build the biggest fleet.

The Romulan Republic wrote:I'm not suggesting that players should have to micromanage every ship in a vast horde, and I don't think Purple was either from what I read. Just having them effect one elite unit or something like that.

The simple fact is that in order for that one elite unit to be relevant at all, its power has to increase proportional to the number of units in the average engaement. If the hero ship is three times as powerful as any other and there are ten ships a side that's a very different proposition to the hero ship being three times as powerful and there are five hundred ships on each side. In order to maintain parity of relevance in the larger fleet engagement the hero ship is suddenly hundreds of times more powerful than anything else the player can possibly have, and so suddenly it utterly dominates the tactical level of play, the game has become a different game. It has become a game about that hero ship where all the other ships are of minimal relevance, because concentration of force is so significant a factor in strategy and so not only is the combat now about micromanaging the hero ship but the strategic layer is about making sure it is in the right place with the right chaff to let you use it effectively in combat.

And if the hero ship isn't any better than normal ships it isn't relevant to the player achieving their goals then working on it is a waste of the limited time and money available to the designers.

The Romulan Republic wrote:I disagree. I think its good to have automation to take care of those things that are necessary for a large, complex game but that the player doesn't wish to or can't focus on at the moment (because the player can't be running every world in their vast empire simultaneously.

However, if a system is so low on the player's priority list that they're always going to automate it no matter what, then it is better to abstract it out completely rather than having a whole set of interactions the player will literally never do but have taken up design time to generate and test (see: Convoys in HoI2. Everyone automates those because ain't nobody got time for that.).

Game designers are human beings with limited time, resources, and ability to focus. They should spend all that on the bits of the game that the player is going to use rather than diving down rabbit holes of design which nobody will see.

Also, complexity shouldn't be the objective. Depth should be the objective and the two are not the same, no matter how often people confuse them. Master of Orion 2's ship design is complex, there are lots of options and sub options, but not deep because there's a golden build which absolutely murders anything which isn't its direct counter (and which the AI can't even build ever). Depth is when the player always has more than one viable option and has to choose between them based on the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Hm. The problem is that there are very few successful examples of a game with a successfully deep system, where you can safely pursue multiple strategies from the same starting point and have them all work about equally well. Creating a "rock-paper-scissors" equilibrium is a lot easier (and is often used as a stand-in for true balance in strategy games for this reason).

But unless you make liberal use of hard counters a la rock-paper-scissors, it's very hard to create a wide palette of commensurate options without some of them being objectively better than others. Or, worse, without some of them combining synergistically to create a One True Build that is drastically superior to all competitors.

Purple wrote:

Borgholio wrote:Back onto the more immediate topic though, even back in the day I would still prefer MOO 1 over MOO 2 due to the fact that MOO 2 had too much micromanagement.

Ultimately I think we can newer agree on this. You and those like you will always be pushing against those like me for wanting a game that in your eyes is too full of micromanagement and unplayable. Where as people like my self will and I will always be pushing back against you for wanting a game that's strait forward and dumbed down. And in the end, we'll just have to wait and see what the devs make. All we know for now that it's probably going to be a resource hog and suck.

Purple, the thing you've been missing is that in this case, "you and those like you" (that is, people like Borgholio and Vendetta) are speaking for normal humans. You are not. The game you envision, with massive, repetitive management of every little detail of a massive array of tiny elements, will in fact bore normal humans and be totally uninteresting to them.

Insofar as you legitimately want a game that caters to your unusual mental structure, that's not a problem.

Insofar as you repeatedly refuse to understand that the majority of human beings will have no interest in the products you desire because neurotypical human brains do not work that way... you are in the wrong.

For about five years we've been having conversations, and almost every time it comes down to someone telling you "this is not how human behavior normally works," you seem to blink, shake your head in disbelief, and repeat your earlier opinion. It's like questions of how people actually think and behave just don't compute for you.

It's a very worrisome pattern.

Simon_Jester wrote:Hm. The problem is that there are very few successful examples of a game with a successfully deep system, where you can safely pursue multiple strategies from the same starting point and have them all work about equally well. Creating a "rock-paper-scissors" equilibrium is a lot easier (and is often used as a stand-in for true balance in strategy games for this reason).

Most competitive fighting games are successful examples, so is Starcraft, Hearthstone is looking pretty good as well (not perfect, but ok).

A deep system isn't one where "all strategies work about equally well", it's one where all strategies are good in a roughly equal number of situations and bad in a roughly equal number of other situations, and the player needs to successfully determine what situation they are in and choose and execute an appropriate strategy.

If one strategy is good in the large majority of situations it doesn't matter how many strategies there are overall, you just do the good one and you win most of the time.

Simon_Jester, if you are going to make the claims you do in the last post you just made go ahead and provide evidence for them. Prove that a statistical majority of people think the way you believe they do and enjoy the kind of things you believe they enjoy. If you can manage that, you can than proceed to prove that I am the only human being on earth who thinks the way I am and enjoys the kind of games I enjoy. And make sure to include in your proof some viable theory that explains why hypercomplex games with a steep learning curve exist if I am the only human on earth that enjoys them.

You made the claim, now you back it up.

Purple wrote:Simon_Jester, if you are going to make the claims you do in the last post you just made go ahead and provide evidence for them. Prove that a statistical majority of people think the way you believe they do and enjoy the kind of things you believe they enjoy. If you can manage that, you can than proceed to prove that I am the only human being on earth who thinks the way I am and enjoys the kind of games I enjoy. And make sure to include in your proof some viable theory that explains why hypercomplex games with a steep learning curve exist if I am the only human on earth that enjoys them.

You made the claim, now you back it up.

Simon never said that you were the only person on earth who likes micromanagement. He said that most people don't like it...and he is correct. Imagine if you take a game such as World of Warcraft, which is enjoyed by millions due to how easy it is to just jump in and start playing. Pretend for a moment that instead of simply appearing at your last save point, you have to manually control your character through the steps of throwing off your blanket, getting out of bed, walking to the restroom, using the toilet, brushing your teeth, dressing yourself (not simply dragging a suit of armor from you inventory, but actually using hotkeys and mouse movements to put it on), leaving your house, pulling keys out of your pocket, locking the door...well you get the idea by now.

A large part of most games we play are abstracted out or macromanaged so the gamer can pretty much simply log in and play. Sure there are people such as yourself who could very well enjoy the "WoW Life Simulator"...but most wouldn't. To the typical gamer, micromanagement is a nuisance at best and game-breaking at worst. Having to take care of a bunch of "chores" before they can get to the good parts is not what people want when they buy a game.

Now if the micromanagement provided some kind of actual, significant, tangible benefit to the rest of the game...then it might be worth doing. But in MOO 2 and 3 for instance, micromanagement didn't provide a good enough return on investment to make the time spent worth it. When I was sieging an enemy star system with 10,000 ships arranged in nearly 100 battlegroups, and he had similar forces, there was no way in flipping hell that I would want to micromanage every single individual fleet combat...especially if this massive 10,000 vs 10,000 battle was just one of several going on at that given moment.

Regarding micromanagement. I dont really play that sort of game but have a few friends really into starcraft or strarcraft 2 or whatever it is the esport people are playing and they keep talking about how good "micro" this or that guy has (or did a couple of years ago, stopped paying attention to the details at some point). I guess it might be a bit of topic but to me it seems there might be lots of people enyoing it or finds it interesting.

Also who cares about win/lose conditions in for example paradox games (these I really like by the way)? Would they not be considered games if for example you take over an AI nation when the one you were playing was eliminated (removing game over/you lose screens)? The distinction seems very uninteresting.

I disagree about micromanaging 'not' having a tangible effect in MoO2. That doesn't mean that having to do it wasn't annoying as hell.
And that was with at best what, half a hundred systems, none of them with more than 5 planets?

The big problem with Master of Orion II was that they modeled planets the way cities in the Civilization series are modeled- so economic development required you to specifically command each planet to build a series of specific buildings, and you had to constantly adjust the build queues. You couldn't just let a planet "cook" for thirty turns and expect acceptably good results.

Whereas Master of Orion (the first game) did not have this problem. The slider-based system made it easier to develop a planet with a few broad directives that would be followed efficiently for many turns, although there was plenty of room for fine-tuning if you wanted to do that.

Purple wrote:Simon_Jester, if you are going to make the claims you do in the last post you just made go ahead and provide evidence for them. Prove that a statistical majority of people think the way you believe they do and enjoy the kind of things you believe they enjoy.

Easily done- look at the sales totals of games that provide the experience I say people enjoy, and the sales totals of games that don't. Games that DO require you to do lots of massively detailed complex time-consuming tasks in order to accomplish basic game functions do not sell very well. Games that DON'T require that, do.

And ALL successful games do what Vendetta describes- they abstract out parts of the game that are not the logical place for the player to focus their decision-making process. Rather than force you to do idiotic things like run down a line of 10000 individual citizens telling each one to drink their morning coffee, they simulate the aggregate effects of all those individual actions, and allow you to make practical decisions that will have a more lasting and significant impact on what happens, on a scale the human brain can actually comprehend.

Whereas there are NO widely lauded and hailed games that work like your hypothetical examples. Even games like Dwarf Fortress, while massively detailed and intricately complex, do NOT just drown you in a sea of micromanagement- the individual dwarves pretty much do their daily tasks themselves with limited oversight from you.

If you can manage that, you can than proceed to prove that I am the only human being on earth who thinks the way I am and enjoys the kind of games I enjoy. And make sure to include in your proof some viable theory that explains why hypercomplex games with a steep learning curve exist if I am the only human on earth that enjoys them.

You made the claim, now you back it up.

Done.

Batman wrote:I disagree about micromanaging 'not' having a tangible effect in MoO2. That doesn't mean that having to do it wasn't annoying as hell.
And that was with at best what, half a hundred systems, none of them with more than 5 planets?

Ok well it didn't have MUCH of a tangible effect. You might win a close battle by the skin of your teeth if you micro it, or get better production if you micro the planet's build queue...but the mechanics for micro-ing were horrible. It just wasn't worth the time investment.

Grog wrote:Regarding micromanagement. I dont really play that sort of game but have a few friends really into starcraft or strarcraft 2 or whatever it is the esport people are playing and they keep talking about how good "micro" this or that guy has (or did a couple of years ago, stopped paying attention to the details at some point). I guess it might be a bit of topic but to me it seems there might be lots of people enyoing it or finds it interesting.

Micromanagement in Starcraft is different from a 4X game though. The concept of "micro" there refers to having a high degree of input skill and the ability to use that to rapidly input commands which turn combat in your favour (eg. using a Stalker's blink ability to move a damaged unit to the back of the pack where it can still attack but is out of range of enemy attacks). It's also not always relevant, having the most impact in small to mid sized engagements (though obviously the effects of winning those early engagements snowball because if you win an engagement you're free to expand whilst your opponent has to rebuild his army and yours is able to shut down his expansion).

Micromanagement in a turn based 4X game where there's no input skill component is "repetitively doing the same simple but long winded thing over and over again because the automation system can't be trusted not to fuck it up".

Vendetta wrote:

Grog wrote:Regarding micromanagement. I dont really play that sort of game but have a few friends really into starcraft or strarcraft 2 or whatever it is the esport people are playing and they keep talking about how good "micro" this or that guy has (or did a couple of years ago, stopped paying attention to the details at some point). I guess it might be a bit of topic but to me it seems there might be lots of people enyoing it or finds it interesting.

Micromanagement in Starcraft is different from a 4X game though. The concept of "micro" there refers to having a high degree of input skill and the ability to use that to rapidly input commands which turn combat in your favour (eg. using a Stalker's blink ability to move a damaged unit to the back of the pack where it can still attack but is out of range of enemy attacks). It's also not always relevant, having the most impact in small to mid sized engagements (though obviously the effects of winning those early engagements snowball because if you win an engagement you're free to expand whilst your opponent has to rebuild his army and yours is able to shut down his expansion).

Micromanagement in a turn based 4X game where there's no input skill component is "repetitively doing the same simple but long winded thing over and over again because the automation system can't be trusted not to fuck it up".

basically RTS micro is largely tactical with fast and obvious results regardless if you failed or not, 4x micro is mostly strategic and results are often nebulous and it can take several "turns" for the effects to show up, closest most RTS games have to 4x micro in economy management but in most RTS games the economy is very simple where as 4x games like civilization have very complex economies (cause that's where the game is) but often even in most 4x games basic admistrative maintenance can be automated so that you don't deal with too much input.

Been almost a year and the game is opening for early access in a week and a half. They just released a video with some of the A-list voice actors who provided their talent to the game.

http://masteroforion.com/news/voice-act ... r-of-orion

I swore to myself I wouldn't preorder a game after (ironically) MOO 3 came out. But I'm resisting the urge to throw money at the screen right now. The game looks beautiful and the voice acting is top notch. I must not give in...I must wait for the first reviews...

As a fan of MoO 1 & 2 (there never was a 3rd, all lies) consider me interested (as well as the upcoming board game for MoO)

Really a wonderful case of getting gameplay across both in a right AND wrong way is how XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012) pulled from UFO: Enemy Unknown (1993).

The tactical layer was overall, improved in many respects. Time-Units are artificial and breaking a single trooper's turn into 60-micro-units was far less intuitive than two actions, which it shares with many board or tabletop games of similar type. Particularly since it took half a turn to do the most important elements (firing a gun) for example. The decisions regarding squad size and 'pod' enemy deployment are indeed different, but it made a more streamlined experience that's been refined in XCOM2. Same with micromanaging EVERY POCKET my (potentially 26) soldiers have. No, just make an item and your soldier gets X uses out of it.
Nobody'll claim XCOM 2012 is more 'micromanagey' than UFO 1993, but you actually had more depth: Soldier classes and special abilities for example.

The part that went the other way is the geoscape of course. Managing research was still there and some inventory control, but the interception game became largely vestigial. Which is why it's a good loss in XCOM2(2016).

MOO can really benefit from thinking in these terms. Let's not talk about that Micromanagement Simulator Nightmare that was 3, which never existed.
--
1 was fast, streamlined and had extremely simple combat: Your 6 stacks fought the enemy's 6 stacks, and you adjusted sliders for pop growth, infrastructure, and production. Okay.

2 was more detailed, allowing intricate play and ship design decisions for a more detailed (IMO more satisfying) tactical game. You also introduced 'heroes'. Planet management became CIV-style 'add building X' to it.

Clearly, the updated model that'd streamline the experience would be like: You'd have 5 or 6 'stats' for a planet, such as infrastructure, shipbuilding, population, money generation, whatever. And you'd give orders as to which stat was to be upgraded next along a discrete line of pips, such as levels 0-5. The time to do so varied. Perhaps you'd leave 'develop money generation' s default orders and it'd tick from turn to turn until you made changes. Then, any special wonder-type items would be special construction as those are what you SHOULD be managing.

Remove upkeep from the equation, as it's an entirely trap mechanism that exists to hinder rather than enhance streamlining (and something I despised from GalCiv2). If Upkeep needs to exist, just make it an income reducer but don't create Space Debt Simulator.

Lots of people LIKED the individual ship control. Perhaps do one of those setups where you control individual vessels until groups of them start showing up. So if you have 4 frigates and a battleship, you control 5 units. But if you have 20 frigates and 6 battleships, perhaps that ends up as auto-grouped 4 5-ship Frigate squadrons and 2 3-ship Battleship squadrons, to maintain control, as then you're still controlling only 6 'units'.