[Freeciv-Dev] What we can learn from MOO3

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

MOO3 is disappointing. This mail tries to search for some of the
reasons and I hope this allows freeciv to avoid them. First about the
game per se and later about the interface. The latter is more
connected to freeciv.

They removed the combat you know from moo1 and moo2. Big loss IMHO. It
was quite nice to see your new weapon perform: "They said this is
naturally shield piercing. Lets see. Yes it is is. Sweet. And the
enemy ship can't move anymore. Very nice....."

While the turn-end activities are phased (something we want for
freeciv also) it takes too long.

Technologies are anonymous. You get about 2 new techs per turn. Why so
many? They splitted Laser in Laser, Autofire Laser, Continuous Laser,
Laser Miniaturization 1, Laser Miniaturization 2 and Armor Piercing
Laser.

Technologies are chatty. You get 3+ messages per technology. They
added a filter (see below) so that you can manage this.

Planets are split into regions. Size (6-12) of planet is the number of
regions. So if you use half of the plant surface for research you can
end up building 12 research labs. A lot of clicking. For this they
added an AI (which is sanely on by default). However now you don't
have much to do as the planets build themself.

Taskforces (unit groups on steroids) were added. Rather complex. And
you have to first create a before you are able to move anythings
around.

They added an auto-colonize. You build the ships and the AI sends them
to planets. No auto-explore however.

So in summary you sit there moving your scouts around, do some
diplomacy, press turn-done (which takes too long) and let the
research-messages scroll by. Rather boring.

Now about the interface. They have managed to assign the right mouse
button exactly one function: dragging the main map. On all of the
other dialogs the right mouse button has no use. What a waste.

There are three help sources: 
 - a windows like
 (http://www.insidemacgames.com/images/moo3_008_l.jpg) build in help
 which contains an overview of the dialogs available and some
 background stories. Techologies for example aren't included.
 - tooltips: They only cover about 40% of the GUI elements and here
 mostly the obvious ones.
 - a tip-of-the-day style dialog called master. Good for the first
 time.

These helps are inadequate. Two examples: there are certain icons
which show sometimes and certain sliders change their color. I know
these elements want to tell me something. But I don't know
what. Another example is ship building: you want to know what were the
effects of spinal mount. No tooltip and it isn't included in the
general help. So you have to go back to the technology overview and
search. "... is this is maths, energy or physics?...". 

MOO2 in contrast to MOO3 had a very good help system: you got help if
you clicked with the right mouse button. And you could click on
everything. Really everything. If would be nice if freeciv had such a
nice system (freeciv still lacks tooltips for example) but from a
commercial I expected more.

Next point if the amount of actions to bring up the workqueue from the
planet list. In MOO2 you needed one double-click. In MOO3 you need one
double-click and 2 more clicks. In freeciv you don't need this much
access for the workqueue since you don't have this much to build
because of smallpox. In freeciv you need one double-click and another
click. But in freeciv you have also the
change-production-in-the-overview feature.

As I said before you get a lot of messages even if you only control 2
or 3 planets. To solve this the game divides the messages into 4
categories: green, yellow (building finished), red (new tech) and
color-less (combat, diplomacy). You can filter the messages based on
the color (see
http://www.insidemacgames.com/images/moo3_013_l.jpg). You can't
supress the color-less ones. This is something we can adopt in
freeciv.

My summary: they took a good game and made it more complex. Since this
game was than too complex they added features which enabled the player
to cope with the added complexity. This however made the added
complexity rather useless and also descreased appealing of the game.

        Raimar

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