This is for the original Total Annihilation (TA) fans in the room. When TA came out I can honestly remember only one game of equal importance. The name of this game was Master of Orion 2 (MOO2). Master of Orion 2 was of no direct relation to the RTS title TA, but was also quite amazingly fun and captured many hours of my life. To me they are step brothers. I recently found a copy of this game that you can actually run on Windows 7 for $6. Although MOO2 is massively unrelated to the discussion of PA, because it is a turn based strategy civ game with a massive number of extremely cool but unrelated mechanics I feel that for this very reason MOO2 is a valuable trope for discussion. You see MOO2 and TA came out within a year of each other and both games boasted awesomeness for the Science Fiction fan base. Some of the factors that made MOO2 such a great game was a very diverse selection of sentient alien races you could play, large galaxies to conquer, Death Stars (yup I said Death Stars), tractor beams, assault pods, missiles, lasers, point defense lasers, torpedoes, teleporters, shields, mind control, civil unrest, and much much more. You name it, they had it and it was done just right. I kid you not: ships had acceleration and turning radius like TA or Battle Fleet Gothic before there was a Battle Fleet Gothic. This was the first game to make both Star Trek and Star Wars spiritually come alive on my PC in massively fun and interesting ways at the same time. The game is a zoo of science fiction gadgets and technologies from our favorites plus just the right touch of Civilization. Probably the most important aspect of MOO2 was that it was the first game that I ever played in which I had the opportunity to not just conquer planets, but also to destroy them completely, leaving asteroid fields in the wake of my destruction. I know some of the Uber team hasn't played MOO2, because I raved to Sorian once about how great it is and he shared with me he hadn't yet had the pleasure. I know that a large portion of this fan base is young as Sorian or younger. I think I have 5 years on him. There are a lot of wonderful mechanics that don't make as much sense to the PA genre because PA is not a turn based game nor is it based primarily on star combat. However, MOO2 is full of cool concepts well worthy of your exploration. It's a great complementary game while you wait, like Airmech. I am going to make the argument that if you haven't, you should, and you should get cracking, because PA alpha is around the corner and you likely won't have time/interest to play a classic Indie SciFi Civ game once PA alpha is available. I am going to mar this completely spotless walk down memory lane by discussion what we can learn from MOO2. It was great because you could control everything. Every little decision added up to a great good. Some of it was tedious. There could have been better tools to provide build ques for similar planets etc, but the sequel which boasted automation galore was a horrible game. MOO2 was so good it was hard to top and the team that made the sequel failed by not capturing what was great in MOO2. So as you can see this unrelated game has many ways it relates in really cool ways. Hope you enjoyed reading this. I enjoyed writing it. TLDR: Good execution is good. If you haven't tried MOO2, the 90s were great for PC games and this is the best strategy civ game. PS. There is a hot seat mode for multiplayer, but MOO2 is best played single player. The game is just massive and multiplayer, played to win, is just ludicrous speed (slow in this case).
I also find MOO2 to be highly overrated, and a bad 4X game. I don't have nostalgia to cloud the games flaws.
Apparently you haven't heard of stardrive. It's a 4x RTS. But anyways I think OP makes a good point, there are things to learn from other games or genres. Though I kind of read it as OP fears they will change too much? If so, I disagree. Because if I want to play supcomm/TA I will just play supcomm or TA. Though I do think some things could be improved. Most of these things have already been addressed by uber. Namely resources. E rest is still too early to tell but I have high hopes after seeing the gameplay on the 19th!
That's why I offered the step brothers label. They are not related. Thank you. I am without fears in this regard. Uber is going to do a great job. I like new tech and pushing the envelop. I picked MOO2 to discuss partly due to the game itself being a paragon of awesome features that push the envelope of fun to whole new levels.
stardrive is single player only so it is not worth discussing or comparing. Also, saying a game has flaws without pointing them out is also a waste of space in this thread. I too see the potential for this game to scratch the 4x itch as well as the RTS and I too long for the day the 2 bleed in together. I wouldn't hope that PA could fill those shoes, but I do hope they facilitate the modding community's attempts to take that on. This game will need space combat in order to do that, but once it's there I'll join any modding team attempting this (I'm a programmer for what it's worth)
