Master of Orion III Preview

Finishing up the development of Master of Orion III hasn't exactly been a Sunday drive. At the beginning of the year, the game was still said to be on track for a June release, but things have gone off course since then. Early last month, Infogrames revealed that the release date had been pushed back to this fall to give Quicksilver time to streamline and simplify the design. The design changes that have followed are more than simple tweaks. Some of the unique design decisions made by the original designer to balance micro- and macromanagement made it so the game was doing "too much for the players" and just wasn't fun. But the team has gone through each part of the game to set things right. The result is said to be similar in gameplay style to the first Master of Orion game, which garnered quite a following when it came out in 1994. We talked to Constantine Hantzopoulos, the game's producer at Infogrames, to get a sense of what the final game will be like after all these changes.

Master of Orion III's interface has been streamlined so that most information is readily available through contextual menus.

The broad scope of conquest games like Master of Orion III--or even Civilization III--means that they're made up of many different components: diplomacy, espionage, combat, research, production, and management. While the separate parts of Master of Orion III have been working for some time, it was only late last year that the developers could put them all together. The streamlining process doesn't involve changing the individual parts of the game--it's been more of a rebalancing of how things come together. Part of this is just simplifying the game's interface. There were some 160 interface screens in the original design, and it wasn't always easy to find a simple bit of information, like whether your economy was turning a profit. That number has been cut roughly in half, and contextual menus make most screens directly accessible from the main view.

Some distinctive elements of the game's design have been cut or significantly reworked. The centerpiece of Master of Orion III's ambitious design was the concept of "imperial focus points," which was meant to address the pacing problem large-scale strategy games often have late in the game, when there's too much for a player to manage comfortably. In a real government, we'd expect a bureaucracy to develop to deal with the management headache of an ever-growing empire. Focus points meant that a player could only have so much influence on the game, and the bureaucracy--an extensive system of automation--would handle the rest. Unfortunately, the result was that the players would spend as much time considering how to manage an empire as actually managing it.

Colorful and detailed system views show you exactly what's going on in your empire, from troop movements to finance.

The good news is that the developers have found a way to keep the essence of the focus point system and get rid of the artificial limits on how much a player can control. The AI developed to run your empire is still in the game, and players can rely on it more or less according to taste. You can set broad, empire-wide policies for the AI to follow, specify a production focus for a given planet or system, let the AI handle space combat, or handle any given element yourself. The design is more open to different styles of play, and it still tries to cut down on the need for late-game micromanagement. Yet, there's the idea that empires are hindered by bureaucratic inertia as they grow, which the developers call the "heavy foot of government." Things just cost more for larger empires, so it's possible for smaller competitors to make a comeback, and dominant powers can benefit from keeping smaller allies around as efficient economic partners.