![]() ![]() Windows 3.xwas just a memory hog that prevented a machine from dedicating all itsprocessing power to the game at hand. At the time,almost no serious Wintel gaming rig even had Windows installed thiswas the day of "High Memory" inDOS machines (everything over 640 KB was allocated as EMS expanded memoryor XMS extendedmemory) and custom boot disks for each game you played. The game was released near the end of the MS-DOS age. You can (and I did) spend days building galaxy-spanning empires,trying out the effects of some of the limitless combinations of shipdesign, research directions, and fleet composition. Did you go forlots of small, cheap ships? Only a few massive dreadnoughts? Somemixture of the two? Did you optimize your ships for fleet combat orbuild special bombers to get in close and overwhelm your opponent'splanetary defenses? These all have a significant effect on the tacticalcombat resolution sequences that take place whenever you find yourships occupying the same star system as an opponent's. Probablythe most interesting hook in the game is that you can design theindividual ship classes in your fleet, leveraging your besttechnologies into a mixture of offensive and defensive weapons, drives,and special gizmos. The size of the game board and number and skill of AI opponents canbe preset, and there are different ways to achieve victory. Youcan use your population to generate industry, research technologies,build ships and planetary defenses, and colonize newly explored worlds.As you expand, you come in contact with alien civilizations controlledby the computer and you can form alliances, trade technologies, or givebattle in an attempt to wrest control of their planets from them andenlarge your own domain. ![]() In MOO, you start out with one planet, two scout ships, and a colonyship, as well as a rudimentary level of interstellar technology. ![]() A turn-based sci-fi strategy game, it debuted in1993 and was one of the early progenitors of the "4X" genre (fromeXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate). One of my absolute favorites was a game called Master of Orion(MOO) by MicroProse. Others, like SimCity by Maxis, were the dawning offranchises that exist to this day. #MASTER OF ORIGIN FOR MAC BROKEN SERIES#Some are long gone,such as the excellent series of flight sims from Lucas Arts andSierra's Dynamix. There were giants in the earth in those days. Games, except arcade games andsimulators, were almost all turn-based, and if there was anymultiplayer support at all, it was almost always only of the "hot seat"type. well, there weren't any ofthose kinds of games back then, really. Before I discovered networked flight sims, first-person shooters,and real-time strategy games. I may have mentioned that my computer gaming days extend back aways. ![]()
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