I've played a lot of 4x strategy games in my day. I remember ripping the plastic off the original master of orion 3 and 1\4" floppies-- or was it a kind of papyrus? Details, details.
Anyway, I'm really digging sins. Lets face it though, I am really having a hard time coming up with a 4x game where I feel less connected to the inhabitants of one of my planets.
In the original MoO, you sent hundreds of millions... even the women and children... (especially the women and children?) to die horribly in combat on the surface of some craptacular alien world against some dinosaur type alien creature.
Oh no, the whatever are bombing some planet. Who cares! I'm bombing their planet. So "300" population dies. Who cares! I killed 400! And I blew up a factory, i hadn't built a factory on that world they bombed yet. Economic warfare at its finest.
Here is planet development:
Click click click click.... wait six minutes.... click click.... crap no bonuses, click click click click... click click click. My citizens don't even DO anything for me. Except pay taxes. But hell! Beating them would extract those taxes too, and im not allowed to do that! THey just sit on their precious little planets that I cleared and colonized, and then fly around the planet in circles endlessly like ants who just found a bunch of little mounds of cocaine to eat. And then, when someone bombs them (because I hate them too much to defend them properly) they just keep driving around the surface! But I got to hand it to them-- even when population gets to zero, if you stop the attack, they somehow grow back... from zero population. A healthy planet amazingly creates babies, i guess.
So lets see, citizens give me money, which they damn well should be giving me anyway.
They dont:
-give me crystal
-give me metal
-build my ships
-bother to find anythign worth a crap on the surface of the planet (might as well let the planet get taken over, then retake to explore it again?)
-research technology (somehow-- my people developed space travel in orbital research installations, before discovering how to build orbital research installations)
So anyway, my citizens suck, and I hope I can win the game in time that it doesn't matter that someone is bombing them back to the stone age.
~~thio
