Alex Connolly
Member
Well...outside of staple turn-based empire builder standbys, it is solely a game of military conquest, so if you strip out certain elements of Civ, I suppose you could say Starbase Orion is similar. But if you know how Masters of Orion 2 played, you'd know how this one works.
A neat aspect is the fleet/ship designer, whereby you can customise all sorts of payloads and ordnance on a variety of different class hulls - also adjusting their passive modules; adding shields, fuel, point defense etc.
My finger has been on the verge to buy Starbase Orion countless times now...
I would love to play it (especially in mp)...my problem is that while I like a lot the setting, I do not like a lot 4x or resource management games (I do not like Civ).
I would prefer to sink in a story or at least have many 'events' during the game (like unexpected thing happening...like new destroyed ships discovered, black holes, alien invasions, diplomatic requests...) than manage countless 'lifeless' planets and the like.
On the contrary, every people I know with the game is hopelessy in love with it, and the devs are constantly improving it.
What do think?
You said the mp is solid....nice notifications? Multitask? GC integration? Realtime chat?
Sorry to ask but....you could have another adept here
Hmmm...well, there's no real story, per se. It's just a sandbox galaxy that you must make yours. However, there are random events - though not on the scale of, say, GalCiv2 - and you do find strange hostile aliens in unexplored systems (though these are simply basic, rather powerful early-game doorstops to colonising systems)...but what I can say in terms of an understandable reluctance towards management drudgery is that the UI saves this game in regards to keeping an eye on your expanding empire. From the Empire menu, you can delegate population of a planet into varying occupations and balances, shunt population between systems, fast-track planetary developments with the touch of a button etc. etc., which is where I do most of my work. I completely understand where you're coming from, but the focus of Starbase Orion helps to alleviate a lot of concerns.
MP is solid, yeah. Ranked matches allow for 1v1, 2v2 and free for all...as far as I know, you can't invite to those as it auto-assigns you either a fresh match, or to one waiting on the server for the requisite number of players. Notifications are fine. It runs on Game Centre, so in the custom unranked games, you can invite players on your friends list. There's a chat menu, works really well - you can access and utilise it any time you want, but it automatically pops up at the end of your turn in case you forgot to check it at the start of the turn. It keeps getting better and better, and as you mentioned, it keeps getting a lot of love from the devs. Well worth it.
