Off the top of my head, I’ve played Spaceward Ho!, Stars!, Empire of the Fading Suns, and just one afternoon of Master of Orion 2. Unfortunately, I only remember Stars! really well. I played Stars! off and on for like 3-4 years. (SH! was too long ago and was on a Mac which I never owned, EFS was buggy from what I remember which made the game last about a week before I gave up, and my foray into MoO2 was during the peak of my Stars! life which of course killed any prospects for it to be deemed a good game.)

When Ben, George, and I played Stars! as a team that one year over the internet (Team BMG rules!), George and I literally spent 5 hours a day on this game doing our turns. That is a huge time sink, but it was justified because of the near-perfect gameplay. The ability to see the rules in action and to think several turns ahead is a direct result of having simple rules presented clearly to the players. No behind the scenes number-crunching; all the formulas were readily accessible for logic freaks like us to really dig our teeth into it. It was like Chess played much more slowly and much more complex. Simple rules leading to complex gameplay, right?

Anyway, this article is supposed to be about Master of Orion 3.

Where’s the Micro in my Macro?

I’ve been playing it for about a week now. I started and restarted 5 times before getting enough of a hang of the details to feel like I had a good start. The first 4 times, I would get to about turn 50 or so and realize that I hadn’t set the Tech to how I would’ve liked, or I hadn’t defined Planetary Development Plans, or that I hadn’t tweaked the Tax Levels, or any number of things which I didn’t do mostly because I had no idea how to tweak them or what they affected. This is probably going to be the biggest gripe from most fans of strategy games. QuickSilver, the developer, has mistakened Macro-Management with lack of information.

They have this thing called Planetary AI controlled by Viceroys on each of your planets. You sort of set some guidelines with Planetary Development Plans (by saying things like if it is a mineral rich world then mine like crazy), but the Viceroys make all the decisions as to exactly what to build. I don’t mind this so much, but no where in the manual or on the web or in the hint book or anywhere can you find out exactly what they’ll do based on what guidelines you give them and their planetary specific situations. Funny, I always thought the goal of good Macro-Management was to automate a lot of the Micro-Management methods, not to take it completely out of your hands and make you stab in the dark with your policies.

In two of the games I played (and then terminated prematurely) my people were either starving or didn’t have enough minerals to make the stuff the Viceroys were telling them to make. This was happening even after I set in the Planetary Dev Plans to build Farms or Mines. I eventually had to just go to each planet manually and override what the Viceroys were building. Um, excuse me, how is this different than Micro-Management?

Lame-Ass Combat

Yep, it sure is. Combat between starships works like most RTS games; left click select, right click attack or move, etc. Unfortunately, once you get into a combat screen, the default zoom level is so close that you have to scramble to zoom out and select your guys. Unfortunately, the maximum zoom-out level is so low that you then have to scroll the map around until you find your enemy before you can right-click on them to attack. By then the computer has already launched a volley of missiles and fighters and you are shit out of luck if you die before you even find the enemy. There is no radar/minimap. The combat is on a 2-Dimensional plane but for some reason they made it isometric to give it that faux 3D look. The ships are *tiny*; you’re basically watching some dots fire at other dots.

Then if you are assaulting a planet with transports or if you are defending a planet and they have ground troops you are taken to the Ground Combat screen. Can we say rock-paper-scissors? I don’t mean the good kind of rock-paper-scissors like in Starcraft where some units are good vs. air but suck vs. ground and you have to be able to adapt to your opponent so that you maximize your efficiency in killing. No… I mean the crappy roshambo where you just click on an attack formation and HOPE the enemy randomly chose the defend formation which is weak vs. your chosen attack formation. There’s something like 20 choices (Massed Assault, Sweep, Flank, Ambush, Ruse, etc.). It’s anybody’s guess what they all actually do or what their formulas are.

User-Interface From Hell

Goddamn, this is why I’m going back to grad school. I KNOW I don’t know everything there is to know about good UI (in my case, good ways of presenting info for learning systems), but why can’t others see they need to do some research and learn from set standards?? The UI designers at QS obviously don’t know that consistency is king. If you have a button do something, DO NOT make it do something else during certain situations!

Here’s three specific things I hate:

To zoom in on a system you double-click on the star in the galaxy map. To zoom in on a planet you double-click the planet from the system view. To exit the planet view back to the system view you click on the star in the top-left corner. At the beginning of each turn you are presented with a Situation Report (SitRep). If you click on one of the highlighted events of that turn and it happens to take you to the planet screen of wherever that event took place and then you click on the star to see that sytem, you are taken back to the SitRep. This is lame. They already have the spacebar set to toggle the SitRep and there is a SitRep button ALWAYS visible on the top of the screen. To take away any way of getting to the system (and therefore to the galaxy) so you can see where the hell that planet is in relation to your empire… Man, they suck.

When you get to the planet view via the galaxy map and system view, you see the other planets of the system at the top of the screen and you can jump to any planet you own in that system from these icons rather having to click exit to system and then choose a planet. Great. But when you get to a planet view from the Planets Panel, instead of being able to click on the star or other planets in the system, there are three new buttons laid on top, one takes you back to the Planets Panel, the other two cycle through your planets in the order that you’ve set in the Planets Panel. Great feature, but why remove the other standardized buttons? Why not allow us all those options at any time? I don’t get it.

In the Planets Panel, you can quickly see what your planets are each currently building, what their unrest levels are, etc. But when you look at planets in the system view, you only get to see icons of what they are building (no unrest or other info, btw), and the problem with icons is that all your ships of the same hull size have the same icon. So it’s impossible to tell at a glance if you are building a destroyer class colony ship or a destroyer class ass-wiper. To see what you are building you double-click on the planet and then on the build tab, repeat this about five times and you’ve already had it with this game.

Game Mechanics?

So, by my 5th start I thought I had gotten a hang of the quirky “Macro-Management”. I was just polishing off a really weak race who made the mistake of declaring war on me early in the game and just starting to gear up a massive fleet for the rest of the galaxy when I won the Orion Senate vote and the game ended. Yikes! I had a majority over the incumbent New Orions who start out way more powerful than any other race because I was a rather diplomatic race and had lots of friends in the Senate. As it turns out, you only need 50% majority and there doesn’t seem to be any other requirements. It was barely turn 150 or so. I had barely begun to build up my planets. I was only like halfway up the tech ladder (it’s not a tree btw) (er.. at least I think I was.. no way to tell since I don’t know how high it goes–I was up to level 24 or so). So, I’ve read on the MoO3 forums that in an earlier MoO you could only win by vote after a certain number of turns passed and even then you’d need 2/3 of the vote by population from all races even those not in the Senate. Makes it much harder and way more gratifying. Was this game play-tested??

Conclusion

Obviously, this review isn’t covering enough of the basics to be useful to people who are interested in the game. For more general reviews, go to www.gametab.com or www.gamerankings.com. This review, on the other hand, is probably most helpful to people who’ve played the game and are as yet unsure why they haven’t embraced the game. There is a great game in Master of Orion 3 waiting to to be unleashed, but it just isn’t there yet. Maybe with better documentation we can set up the Planetary Dev Plans how we want and be rest assured that the AI is doing what we want it to do. Maybe with a patch these UI annoyances will be fixed and maybe you will be able to zoom out more in combat… hell maybe combat will start zoomed out! Speaking of patches. Did I mention this game is buggy? There is a known bug with the AI that currently makes this game unquestionably easy.

I’ve been reading your guys’ discussion with interest; I’m not ready to post my thoughts just now…but I do want to transcribe part of a song. My apologies for those of you to whom this is spam:

“Clockin knowledge means I’m weaponless
Don’t you step to this, I send Pharoah messages
like Moses takin my people on an exodus,
we on the run; I split the M-I-C open
kids try to follow but get swallowed in the ocean
creature of the truth, families we make a mockery
Ain’t no stoppin’ me, I fulfill all prophecies
Similar to David with the rock I slingshot
<> warrior, plus I’m ill with the poetry
You know it’s me, but you still can’t catch this
Put Silla on the mic, I lose heads like John the Baptist
when I rap this wack emcees feel the rapture,
I’m that fugitive style that your brain couldn’t capture
ever since the beginning of time, that’s to me like
‘That’s the first day, I wrote my first rhyme’
I’m still writing, I see you lookin’ at em
Don’t even think about bitin’
forbidden poetries of life, dig these
Yo ass couldn’t hide from me with fig leaves….”

-Binary Star, “Masters of the Universe”

I knew that when I posted a small reply the other day that it would open a can of worms, in the sense that it’s never a small discussion. I’ll post a longer and hopefully more detailed reply tomorrow. I’m gonna have to give some thought on your observation about the duality of race and Reed; obviously I never spent much time there, but I did have my own observations… Race issues in places like the Navy play out much differently on the surface… But I dunno, maybe one needs to apply differnt ‘lenses’ when looking at such vastly different structures, and maybe the underlying currents are actually different as aopposed to just more eloquently expressed or avoided…. I’ll get back to that too…

Right now, I have to figure out how to get one remote work with about 5 different pieces of equipment, each of a differnt brand and vintage (installed home theatre stuff for M’s family). This isn’t the best time to attempt to define what it is to be smart, f’ing POS remote…

Rates for business can be severely adjusted by call volume. Your typical rate of say 7 cents a minute is non-negotiable if you’re the typcial legal office or something. When you start getting into excessive call volumes you can get the carriers to adjust rates as they still bill $13,000+ at 1.8 cents minute (690K minutes plus other stuff…). The next tier at which they can consider moving rates is about a million minutes per month. But, these are commitments that companies make; should they only pull 200K min of calls, they get penalized for not meeting the threshold that month. What’s nuts is that there are companies that bill millions of minutes per month, every month… I guess the prevailance of cell phones and their included minutes which you get penalized for going over prompted the question… Didn’t think about that.

As for diversity in your sense; I’d agree that all groups tend stick to themselves. I don’t entirely agree that to find people with ‘simliar experiences’ and build a ‘sense of community’ that you have to look within your own ethnic group. Hmm… Not sure how to put it actually. I don’t have a group that I fall into without conflict, and that has it’s own implications. My race has put me in situations that really have nothing to do with the actual individual that I’ve made myself, but my experiences and the people that I call and seek as friends are entirely a consequence of that indivuality (which is of course influenced by the former, but, you know what I mean I hope). The matter of race figures little when I consider the people that make up my world, save when my race has become an issue to somebody else and I need to be understood. Fortunately, life is such that that is not a constant need…

Trying to express thoughts on the matter of race in so few words is rather challenging… Trying to collect thoughts into a presentable fashion is even harder…

A late thought: I actually have very few experiences in common with any of you guys. I’m more drawn to the possibility of enjoying someone’s intellect than I am anything else. That enjoyment can be had even if your not ever there to build a bank of simliar experiences. At one point or another we all have some generally common threads, and that’s good enough for me.

Uh… what happens when you go over that? Since you say you do 690,000 a month…?

Anyway, I know you’re bright, so don’t bother answering me if you don’t want to.

Speaking of diversity, and I know you mean of experiences, not just race, but… Robin and I were talking about the south bay a few days ago. I am always amazed at how Asian it’s gotten over the last 10 years. We were saying how strange it is to have a whole shopping center with only Asian stores and restaurants. All the signs are in Chinese, and of the thousands of people there, maybe three are white. This led to a discussion of how Robin found it odd that none of my friends from high school are Asian when I was obviously surrounded by them. But the truth was that 10-20 years ago, there actually weren’t that many Asians, at least not in Palo Alto. I think you’ll still find mostly white people there still (too much of an old money, prep boy with sweater around shoulders town), yet only 10-30 miles away towards Sunnyvale and San Jose it’s a completely different story.

Is it that Asians tend to stick together? IMO, hell yes. The family friends (mostly Chinese) I hung out with once a month while growing up were from other cities like Fremont and Los Gatos where apparently there were far more Asians around than in Palo Alto. For them, it was perfectly natural to go to Berkely or UCLA and keep hanging out with their Chinese high school buddies. For me, I just saw Berkeley as this huge segregated school, where if I attended I would no longer have any white friends. It probably wouldn’t have been like that, but I was so against the idea of groups sorted by color that I went to Reed. (When I finally got to Reed and Portland in general, once in a while I would freak out from being the only non-white person around…) Anyway, if I think about it and if I ask my friends, I don’t think it’s a conscious decision they make to gravitate towards other Asians (mostly Chinese–Mandarin speaking Chinese from Taiwan, specifically!). It just sort of happens. That’s the scariest part about it! That by default, a minority group continues its segregation and cliqueishness and indirectly its own stereotyping. Is this true for all ethnicities? I tend to think yes.

But is this actually a problem? I mean we all really just want a sense of belonging and a sense of community, and if it’s to be had by hanging out with people with roughly the same experiences as you then you’re bound to end up with people of your own ethnicity, right? I mean there’s a difference from natural segregation to imposed segregation and prejudice, right?

An interesting side effect, tho, of the mass conglomeration of Asian people in Sunnyvale and San Jose is that you end up having the possibility of visiting another country right here in America. Seriously! Well almost. What is definitely true, however, is that the food is amazing.

These are worth looking at even if one is not inclined to vote. The world is such a diverse place, it’s so easy to get pigeon holed though… This obviously isn’t a shining star in the pusuit to illustrate that point, but a nice packaged glimpse at what I know I sometimes overlook.

In other super exciting news, I found that I can get rates of $.0175 per min for a half million minutes a month to the UK! This is fun because I was asked to find an alternative to a VOIP solution that’s currently in use, and VOIP is classically much cheaper than traditional switched networks (though not mature and plagued with QOS issues). Took 3 weeks to get that, and it’s $.009 better than the VOIP. At 690,000 minutes, that actually means a little. What it means in reality though;

I AM THE MAN!

heh… No comments please, let me bask…

IKEA SOMERVILLE.

A long and twisted story. Just look at the timeline!

Damn, I accidentally erased everything I had just typed…. guess I’ll retype it all…

So, I’ve been gone all weekend with a coworker (Scott) down at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose and visiting my parents and brother in Palo Alto/Sunnyvale.

Gas prices are about $2.10 for the cheap stuff down there. In Portland they are about $1.90 or so (but might be higher now since I last looked 5 days ago).

While down there, I saw a bootleg copy of Hero, Jet Li’s new HK movie which came out about a month or two ago. It was pretty good, definitely better than most if not all of Jet’s American films. Breathtaking cinematography; it was heavily influenced by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The characters weren’t as well developed I thought, but still worth checking out if you get the chance. I’d love to see this movie in theaters or at least a legit copy since the one we saw was done with a video camera and the contrast was set too high so details were lost in the bright and dark areas. What was the worst, though, was the guy with a chronic cough who must’ve been sitting right next to the camera. I don’t get why the pirates didn’t redo it…

Scott and I went over to my friend Song Gong’s house for a bit, after the three of us went to the conference expo together, and we watched my brother’s copy of Shaolin Soccer. My god, this movie was excellent. Released back in 2001, they keep pushing back the US release date, now slated for August 2003. Go watch this in theaters when it comes out. Or do like I did and buy the DVD from some Asian movie place.

Coincidentally, Chris, I had Krispy Kreme fresh for the first time on Sunday, too. I’ve had it before like a few hours old; not the same! Robin ate a dozen or so of them over the course of a weekend last time we were down in the Bay Area; they didn’t impress me then. This time, right as we (my friend Song Gong and I) walked in, they handed us each a free donut. Still hot, melt in your mouth. Pretty darn good. We ended up getting half a dozen more, but I brought three of those up for Robin.

While Scott and I initially went for the conference, we really went down for the food. On Scott’s list was In-N-Out. On my list were Hot Pot City (pictured above… no I don’t know who those people are) and Ba Mu Yuen (my best guess for the English version of their name) which is a place that serves Chinese hot beef noodle soup.

So, Hot Pot City is kinda like Chang’s except that you bring all the raw meat and seafood and noodles and stuff over to your own table and dump it all in this pot of boiling water. Around the pot is a flat grill covered in tin foil where you can bbq your meat if you would rather go that route. The meats come either plain or pre-marinated. Now that’s good eatin! Careful, though, cuz it’s also a good way to get sick if you accidentally mix up your cooking chopsticks with your eating chopsticks. I can’t imagine a place like this would ever work in Portland, or any place where the white devil dominates.

In-N-Out was good in that standard burger type of way. Sometimes you feel like a plain burger, sometimes you feel like a fancy burger.

Ba Mu Yuen was excellent. I can’t find Chinese beef noodle soup outside of the Bay Area. Here’s hoping Seattle has places like Hot Pot City and Ba Mu Yuen…

Gas is between about $1.75 and $1.85 around Boston. Katie and I went to a wedding on Long Island last weekend, and prices were kissing $2.00 for the low octane stuff. These days, I’m pretty psyched that my ancient SUV isn’t working, because I couldn’t afford to drive it around. My ’89 Jeep gets the same mileage out of it’s 18 gallon tank as Katie’s 10 gallon Accord. Maybe it’s time to retire the beast…

Anyway, has anyone ever been out to Long Island? That place is a hell hole. Traffic was a severe bitch, and everything required a trip on some parkway, expressway, or four-lane super street. The only good thing was that our hotel was 10 miuntes from the Hicksville IKEA, and just further down the road, I had my first Krispy Kreme doughnut. DAMN! Those things are definitely worth the hype. Katie told me that the first time her sister had one, she ate an entire dozen. Then she puked. I kept my numbers down accordingly…

It’s almost a given these days that people who haven’t gotten into hip-hop will have constructed a defense of sorts to use when they meet someone who is a fan. There are so many well-known examples of gimmicky, shallow, and just plain bad hip-hop songs that have become popular for one reason for another. These songs not only discourage potential listeners, they provide a clearly visible symbol for detractors of rap music to construct their arguments upon. It’s one of the frustrations of hip-hop fans that they have to constantly try to validate their taste by trying to fight through these arguments. This got me thinking about the albums on the other side of the spectrum: which albums are ones which I’d gladly display as good examples of the positive side of hip-hop? So I decided to pick a list of eight albums. For those looking to give hip-hop an honest try, I present you with this list, in no particular order.

A Tribe Called Quest — The Low End Theory

This album would also go on most people’s list of all-time classic albums. It’s accessible, with catchy and danceable beats. It has memorable lyrics, and Q-Tip’s voice goes a long way towards drawing the listener in. What’s more, it (like other Tribe albums) grows on the listener, sometimes for years. This is perhaps the best example of that strange phenomenon in hip-hop whereby a perfect confluence of wording, music, and timing can create an incredibly resounding moment which must be experienced in the right setting to be understood, yet seems to stick with almost anyone who has listened to that particular piece. These moments are the kind of thing that frustrate many hip-hop fans the most, because they make no sense and often seem rather ridiculous when explained, but become a part of a shared heritage when experienced. Cameos by Leaders of the New School and Brand Nubian are an added bonus. (look, kids, it’s Busta Rhymes when he wasn’t a freak!) The politics are relatively mainstream, in stark contrast to a lot of their contemporaries (see: Public Enemy, X-Clan), which makes this a perfect “gateway” album for new listeners.

The Pharcyde — Bizarre Ride to the Pharcyde

I can still remember when I picked up this album (always a good sign). More often than not, I’d see this album stuck in the midst of the collection of some rock or pop fan, nestled between Beck and Stone Temple Pilots. The strength of the storytelling makes its appeal universal. This album is also unique in that it takes hip-hop’s machismo and attitude and turns it on its head. Where most rappers will go to great lengths to advertise their sexual prowess and appeal, they tell a bittersweet story about their failure to catch the eyes of their potential mates. When other rappers spit homophobic lyrics and violent ghetto tales, the Pharcyde instead describe in hilarious detail getting caught in some of the most embarrassing situations you could imagine. They also offer unique perspectives on the familiar themes of the police and smoking weed.

Public Enemy — Fear of a Black Planet

While most would argue that “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” is in fact their breakthrough album, I think that Public Enemy’s third effort offers the best combination of politics, production, and accessibility. One of the things that struck me about this album is how the production is structured to keep building the momentum and power of the music, continuing for several tracks and inevitably culminating in one of several hip-hop classics: “Welcome to the Terrordome” being the first and “Fight the Power” the last. The interplay of Flavor Flav and Chuck D adds remarkably to this effect, with Flav providing the release, and setting the stage for another eventual tour de force by his more serious counterpart. In addition, the sheer endurance and consistency of this album secures it a spot on almost any list of rap’s all-time greatest hits.

Heavy D — Big Tyme

Heavy D always put a great-sounding dance track as the first track on many of his albums, and “We Got Our Own Thang” is no exception. It marks this album as immediately recognizable, from the first second (see: the Humpty Dance), for anyone who listened to hip-hop in the early nineties. Heavy has the rare gift of being a talented lyricist and tunesmith all at once. While some tracks on this album were assured of being hits, based solely on catchy production, he also leaves the listener with long strings of lyrics that cannot be forgotten (“Height: 6-3, style: swing beat,…” and so on). The cameo line-up of “Don’t Curse”, which appeared on his next album, shows that his appeal across a wide spectrum of hip-hop listeners is universal: Kool G Rap, Grand Puba, Pete Rock, CL Smooth, Q-Tip, Big Daddy Kane.

Organized Konfusion — Stress: The Extinction Agenda

It would be remiss to compile any list of hip-hop albums and leave out representation of the darker side of the culture. Organized Konfusion’s second album is extremely important because it harnesses so effectively the frustration and tension that accompanies life in cultures where hip-hop is a central component. Because it centers on the causes, instead of the effects, of this tension, this album stands out, and did not recieve nearly the amount of critical acclaim which it deserved. Nevertheless, Pharoahe Monche’s re-tracing of the flight path of a stray bullet is nearly worth the price of the album by itself. As an added bonus, there are at least three tracks hidden among the general gloom of this album that, by contrast, radiate optimism and a sense of peace, showing that OK’s prose is as wide as it is deep.

The Roots – Things Fall Apart

It’s a hard call to choose just one Roots album because they have so much great material, but their most recent release has to be the best mix of lyricism, catchy hooks, and great overall production released in hip-hop in the past few years. The message to the Roots is so subtle that it is sometimes hard to find between all of the memorable one-liners (“we got a doctorate/in cold rockin’ it…) and get-it-stuck-in-your-head basslines (Dynamite, 100% Dundee, The Next Movement), at least one of which has found its way into a recent Volkswagen commercial. However, while Chuck D. will come straight out with his opinions, Black Thought and Malik choose to let their choice of specific words and topics speak to their mindsets. As an example, compare the rather mundane lyrical content of What They Do to the hilarious and, well, brutal caricatures found in the video. Perhaps the most interesting autobiographical element of Roots albums is the mini-diary enclosed in the jacket of each album.

De La Soul – Buhloone Mind State

Again, it’s a close call which of De La’s albums is the best representation of their genius. After some thought, I have to go with their most subdued work. If I had to convince someone of the incredible power and cleverness of some of the better vocalists in hip-hop, the first person I would quote would be Pos. Some of the double entendres and extended metaphors which he utilizes to make his point simply boggle the mind (to wit, check Stakes Is High, arguably his most impressive performance: “gun control means using both hands in my land…” or “neighborhoods are just hoods/cause nobody’s neighbors/just animals, surviving/with that animal behavior” or “these brothers no longer talk shit/hey yo, these ni**as LIVE it”). His autobiographical turn on “I Am I Be” is about as melancholy and personal as hip-hop gets, providing a counterpoint to their hyper-kinetic first two releases. Great stuff.

Mos Def – Black on Both Sides

This is the most recent release on the list, just as Mos Def seems to be the brightest hope for the future of interesting hip-hop these days. Mos Def’s lyrical style is reminiscent of Posdnuos’s, so I suppose it is fitting that he got his first break in the form of a cameo on Stakes Is High. This album is stacked from one end (Hip Hop, a very personal commentary about the artist’s personal relationship with the music) to the other (Mr. Nigga, a series of powerful insights about race and racism in the 90’s). The latter song is constructed so carefully that the lyrics almost read like a well-written essay. The thesis of the essay is never stated outright, but the message is clear to even the most inexperienced listener of hip-hop, a combination that makes this track universal to any person in any era. Add the seamless storytelling on Ms. Fat Booty to these two tracks, and you have three songs which could easily be hip-hop anthems. The remainder of this solid album is just gravy.

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Email: Ben Schrag

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Last updated: February 23, 2001.