Remnants of the Precursors Review

Disclaimer: Since interviewing Ray Fowler for the eXplorminate podcast back in 2020, I’ve spent a long time playing the game to assist in its development in close communication with the developer. Ray has become a good friend of ours over the years and regularly contributes to our community, typically dispensing invaluable wisdom on why the original Master of Orion is the greatest 4X ever made. He selected my Let’s Play series as an early tutorial for the game, and Rob and eXplorminate are thanked in the introduction to the manual and so before you read this, I must disclose that relationship and potential conflict of interest.

While I endeavour to review the game as objectively as possible and consider myself mostly immune to nepotism, I consider it amusing to follow in the footsteps of games journalist Alan Emerich, a man not only involved with the development of Master of Orion, but who unsurprisingly gave it a glowing review on launch. He was right, of course, and so am I! – Ben

INTRODUCTION

A long time ago, in the far flung past of about 2018 and while undergoing the world’s most bizarre midlife crisis, a strange thing happened to me. I know not of my transgression, but an ancient, invisible god of video-gaming arose from the depths of hell and cursed me with a dreadful, unending compulsion to find the “perfect 4X”. This turned out to be an all-consuming past-time, one that took a terrible toll on my body, mind and wallet. After exhausting multiple credit cards, student loans and several kidneys in this futile pursuit, and with a growing suspicion that a crack addiction might have been the more sensible life choice, desperation finally compelled me to exchange yet more body parts for Steam copies of Simtex’s seminal space 4X titles Master of Orion (MOO1), and Master of Orion 2: Battle at Antares (MOO2).

Wiping the condensation from the viewport of my iron-lung with my one remaining paw and expecting very little, I booted up MOO1 through DOSBox. I immediately noted its quaint VGA graphics and sound, dutifully played through about fifty turns with little idea of what I was doing, thought it was quite interesting and then fired up the sequel. The reasons why these games were so venerated even twenty five years after the original was released quickly became apparent: simple turn-based gameplay, memorable characters, bright and colourful graphics, customisable ships and colonies, and excellent tactical combat. Sat in front of me were two rather fine, if somewhat geriatric, space 4X games.

Without extensive playtime in each, MOO2 is initially the more impressive of the pair, with excellent graphics, top quality sound and great gameplay: it still stands up today even amongst the titans of the genre, so it is unsurprising that it was this game that stole my attention away from what I considered to be a fun, but dated ancestor. After a little reading, I discovered that many people considered MOO1 to be the superior title, and so armed with a little borrowed enthusiasm and having read a few guides, I kickstarted my wheelchair and embarked upon a new quest! To master MOO1!

I’m old enough to have encountered the original Master of Orion the first time around, although at the time of its release I was a Warhammer addicted teenager and the possibility of owning even a IBM 386 PC felt unattainable, and so it’s important to note that I don’t nurture any nostalgia for MOO beyond a general familiar fondness for games of that era. I was thus able to examine it with some sense of objectivity in comparison to contemporary titles doing the rounds at that time (Stellaris, Stars in Shadow and Endless Space 2, mostly).

After dozens of hours of playing Master of Orion, I discovered that the hype was real.

In this world, success in life often boils down to whether or not you “know a guy” in any given situation. Where MOO1 is concerned, I know not one guy, but two. Not long after my initial MOO1 binge, I discovered another wayward, game-addict 4Xplorer by the name of Rob who ran a website, and asked me to jump on his podcast, pretend to know what I talking about and waffle about strategy games. In turn, this Rob bloke knew a guy named Ray Fowler, and Ray was working on a remake of Master of Orion named Remnants of the Precursors, abbreviated ROTP. I took a look, and ended up getting very hooked. And this game did not require any more bloody, invasive surgery to finance, as it was completely, utterly free.

Ray even released the game on Christmas Day, and in giving out free gifts of this quality and on this kind of scale, puts Santa Claus and the meagre lump of coal he pollutes my stocking with every year to shame.

Famous karate expert Sun Tzu once said “For one to know the quality of a remake, one must thoroughly understand how good the original game was.”. He was probably talking about Chess or Ping-Pong, but I feel that this timeless Taoist advice transcends genres, so let’s follow it and take a look at Master of Orion!

The First Space 4X

In Remnants of the Precursors game manual, Tom Chick is quite correct in his observation that MOO was “basically created from whole cloth” in having no obvious historical template to work from. Computer strategy games set in space were not uncommon in the 1980s and early 90s, but few bore much resemblance to Simtex’s classic, considered the first example of a Space 4X game. This ever-expanding subgenre owes a debt of gratitude to Master of Orion (and its popular sequel Master of Orion 2) and it takes little effort to reel off a swath of varied titles that followed it; MOO sired more bastard children than Genghis Khan.

These myriad efforts range from cookie-cutter clones of MoO2 (Astra Exodus) and thoughtful iterative redesigns (Polaris Sector, Stars in Shadow, Interstellar Space: Genesis) to more complex works punched out from this old blueprint that look superficially similar but play very, very differently with greatly expanded scope and features (Star Wars: Rebellion, Stellaris, Distant Worlds, Star Drive, Endless Space).

As Sid Meier’s Civilization laid the groundwork for historical 4X and Simtex’s flawed diamond Master of Magic was arguably the first proper fantasy 4X (the excellent Warlords came first but lacks the scope expected of a bona fide 4X), Master of Orion is a fertile design that nourishes the roots of nearly every fleet-based space 4X branch. There are some notable exceptions: the excellent Galactic Civilizations by Brad Wardell’s Stardock, a game much closer to Civilization than it is to Master of Orion is one, and RTS/4X hybrid Sins of a Solar Empire is another.

Over time however, Master of Orion 2: Battle for Antares proved to be the more popular and memorable game. It was bigger, better looking and more expansive in scope but marred by questionable changes that saw Steve Barcia’s team lift unnecessary features and design principles from Civ, via Master of Magic, presumably to give the game a broader, mass market appeal. The result was a scrappier, micromanagement heavy experience compared to MoO1 that nonetheless went on to sell like hotcakes and, for good reason, remains a fan favourite to this day.

A firm grasp of how the first two Master of Orion games were received, and the subsequent influence they projected on this odd mutant branch of PC strategy game, aids in understanding the appeal of Remnants of the Precursors to diehard fans of the genre. Master of Orion 2 was very successful, and excellent in its own right, with beautiful presentation and fun gameplay but it’s direct successor Master of Orion 3 was … well, different is a polite word for it, and launched alongside a rather murky controversy regarding journalistic ethics that predated GamerGate by a decade and upset the fanbase greatly, and thus MOO2 was to remain firmly enshrined in the minds of fans as the last “true” Master of Orion game for many years, a point made by Ray on our podcast a few years ago and a theory that sounds reasonable to me.

For the benefit of newcomers to the series, or those who skipped the first game in favour of the sequels, let us briefly examine Master of Orion and its game mechanics, since they are almost identical to Remnants of the Precursors, and then turn to the improvements made in the remake afterwards. Analysing why it is that Master of Orion is such an incredibly good game design, the flaws it had, and where and how it has aged, is crucial to understanding the scope of the development team’s work and the subtlety, taste and respect with which it has been executed.

Master of Orion

After setup options are completed, MOO procedurally generates a galaxy of stars with varying environmental conditions, from the entirely uninhabitable through to Garden of Eden-like Gaia worlds that naturally support a high population. The player selects one from a list of ten races, each with different abilities and characteristics, then picks up to five AI opponents. In-play races are each granted a singular part-populated homeworld away from the others, a couple of scouts and a colony ship, and at least one habitable planet within travel range, and then the game begins. The game is strictly turn-based, both on the strategic and tactical battle maps. Players then proceed to build industry, colonise new planets and reach out to their neighbours, with either open arms or nuclear weapons.

So far, so 4X.

Colony populations operate factories to generate Production, a proxy resource dispersed throughout the player’s industry with excess converted into cash as Billions of Credits (BC). Production is first spent on building more factories, cleaning the waste they produce and hothousing population, erecting colony defence infrastructure, ship production, research, and finally converted to BC as a currency for covert operations, diplomacy or stored in the treasury where it may later be spent on a colony to speed up general Production output.

It is here that a veteran of the subgenre, scrutinising Master of Orion with an eye for irony and an awareness of the inherent problems in space 4X, will notice the first of a series of features that set it head and shoulders apart from nearly every successor title, whether by direct lineage or in spirit: innovations of the parent, if you will, lost on the children it bore afterwards.

A colony’s Production spending is allocated proportionally across five categories using sliders, divided into SHIP (ship building), DEF (missile bases, planetary shield generators), IND (factory production and refitting), ECO (waste cleaning, pop growth, ecological engineering projects) and TECH (technological research). All industrial, economic and technological activity is operated with sliders and structured in linear fashion with new functionality added as research targets are met, rather than purchasing and incorporating new features in that compositional, additive system we see more commonly nowadays. Allow me to illustrate this point.

Funds directed towards Ecological spending first cleans up industrial waste and any excess is collected in an empire-wide treasury. After certain research goals are hit, further funding improves soil fertility and terraforming (boosting the planets maximum population), then grows population through civic spending. The Production sliders are carefully set to allocate just the amount of funding needed for each tier of effect. Exploring the research tree will periodically unlock Ecological technologies and the opportunity for more advanced operations which gradually increase the colony’s maximum population limit and reduce the minimum spending necessary to clean industrial waste each game turn.

Defence and Industrial allocations utilise a similar linear tier-based system. Ship and Tech are different: BC allocated to fleet building funds construction of whatever ship design is currently selected, and Tech sends the funds to research, and that’s it.

Subsequent space 4X games, from Master of Orion 2 onwards, did away with this elegant, streamlined system in favour of the Civilization model that Simtex first borrowed for Master of Magic: colonies have a set of statistics and slots to construct buildings which alter those stats or add new functionality, with players tasked with micromanaging something that was once performed with a single click of a slider.

With the benefit of hindsight and several decades of knowledge of the 4X genre’s perceived structural flaws, this seems like a massive step backward. Master of Orion 2 forced manual placement of dozens of buildings on each colony, in each system, to get a basic functionality out of them and leading to the dour adage of “Build Everything Everywhere!”. In Master of Orion, a player never runs out of “money”, but a small industry will produce everything slower and limitations to functionality and empire-reach are instead alleviated by technological advancement.

Population is moved between colonies via transports using another slider, and colony growth is maximised at around 50% population with a bell curve-like distribution of growth either side of that: new colonies therefore grow incredibly slowly requiring the player to manually ferry population from established colonies for efficient growth. The exact same method is used for invading enemy colonies: the player builds neither ground troops nor transports, one slider does it all. This colony population management is necessary on lower difficulty settings but micromanaging it to a high degree is essential at higher levels: leaving colonies to grow naturally without player intervention will quickly result in being outpaced by rivals.

Ground combat is played out when troops invade a hostile colony: it is a simple affair where millions of colonist square off against millions of defenders, adding various modifiers based on technological advancements and racial characteristics, and then rolling dice to determine a winner. The law of large numbers applies in these battles but surprises can happen, where a small garrison of desperate defenders can hold off many times their own number of invaders if suitably lucky.

Ship design and fleet management blend together into a curiously spartan affair and it may initially seem unclear as to whether this is a consequence of the memory limitations of personal computers in the early 1990s as much as being an “economy of design” feature to facilitate a smooth gameplay experience. Ships are built upon several hull sizes, from Small to Huge, and components such as engine level, weapons, shields and targeting computers are dictated by technological advancements. Ships may field four types of weapon with an unlimited number of each per slot, and three types of special component.

Computers, Armour, Shields, Manoeuvring Engines and ECM Jammers have their own dedicated bay, and are increased as technological advancement allows. Components each have a hull size and power cost, and so a late game Large size hull with Ion engines may house 126 early-game Lasers or 11 late-game Heavy Phasers, with each having their own benefits, drawbacks and preferred targets. The exact component mechanics regarding engine power, size and space are a little arcane and beyond the scope of this review. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t really understand them either but that’s because when mathematics are required to enjoy a video-game, Ben will turn it off and go play Koikatsu Party something wholesome instead.

The player is limited to only six different designs, whether warship, scout or colony vessel, and each fleet may house only one stack of each design type. To compensate, stacks can theoretically hold an unlimited number of ships (in practice this was limited by the PC’s word length due to a casting error, for more info see DeltaV’s code analysis of Master of Orion), and a typical end-game economy can pump out thousands of fighter-sized warships each turn. Fleets are freely combined and split as necessary but may not be disbanded. Instead, a design must be retired to scrap redundant ships of that type.

As contemporary games typically allow the player to field many more design types, this might initially feel horribly limited, but here we discover another of Master of Orion’s unique features: tightly interlocking, meaningful game mechanics instead of stuff piled on for the sake of more stuff. Let’s first examine how Master of Orion handles research to unveil why a small ship design count is not a miserly limitation, but a fine feature.

Master of Orion’s research tree is split over six categories (BP funding is again allocated by slider), is partially blind, organised numerically via tier and randomised. This means the game randomly selects the techs available for research at the start of the game and any missing must be stolen via espionage, captured from the factories of conquered colonies or traded with rivals via diplomacy. The game presents the player a choice from a selection of available techs in each category at Tier 1 the first-time research funding is initiated, and then again after each advancement is made. When a technology of a higher tier is researched in any category, selections can be made from available techs in that new tier. Note that the Psilon get more techs in their initial pick than their rivals do.

Furthermore, each technological category also dictates a number of other mechanics: climbing up Computers also controls strength of espionage rolls, Construction has the side-benefit of miniaturising ship components, and so on. Furthermore, racial bonuses and penalties exist for researching certain categories, meaning the Meklar’s advantage in Computer tech not only provides access to battle computers earlier, but also translates into excellent espionage and counter-espionage abilities as a secondary effect: clearly Linux users where the rest of the galaxy are still force-closing the “Update to Windows 8 Now!” popup each time they boot their ancient Windows network.

This overloading of features is a common theme in Master of Orion and is likely to stump first time players and lazy types who haven’t bothered to read the manual.

Since research access to certain technologies is not guaranteed, and the player has a maximum of only six ship designs, he faces tough choices as the game develops. Do I scrap all three hundred Gatling Laser fighters in favour of the new and superior Neutron Pellet Gun knowing that doing so will reduce my perceived fleet strength and risk a declaration of war from those hawkish Alkari on my borders? I desperately need better Battle Computers to break through the racially boosted beam defences of those pesky birds but I have no way to research them: do I risk a diplomatic incident and a war on a second front by stealing them from the catlike Myrrshan or am I willing to trade them for Improved Robotic Controls with the Sakkra, knowing that doing so will allow them to fully capitalise on their natural population growth bonus by allowing their superior colony sizes to control more factories, pump out more Production and eventually, even more of those transport spamming frogs?!

When hostile fleets clash, tactical combat is played out on a grid. Each design type organises its ships together into a single group, meaning a maximum of six stacks of ships for each contender. Weapon choices are dictated by tech level, with early game options restricted to beams, missiles, and bombs for attacking missile bases on enemy colonies. Technological advancements do not merely increase damage: some weapons hit a whole stack, advanced missiles travel faster, a Repulser beam pushes enemy stacks away to prevent them firing back, and other neat effects that take advantage of the geometric characteristics of grid-based combat.

Ship design is meaningful: the Alkari’s natural ace piloting skill raises beam and missile defence scores: with less need for shields or electronic countermeasures respectively, they can field hordes of smaller fighters that rely on daredevil dogfighting to avoid damage. Opposing them with large ships armed with only a handful of very powerful weapons is suicide, unless your shields are so strong that the fighters cannot break them. Designing a huge ship with dozens of smaller guns and good battle computers will wipe such fighter fleets out rather easily, but in turn would do terribly against a well shielded, auto-repairing capital ship stack. Picking the right tool for the right job becomes of paramount importance since only six designs are allowed at once. The AI uses an algorithm to pick its designs, ensuring it always has a colony ship design, a fighter and a bomber in play and periodically deleting out of date designs, with some little cheats to help it remain competitive (for exact details, see here).

Covert operations are slider driven, with a general defence budget protecting your own empire while each known rival race has its own allocated for setting up spy networks. Spies can hide, allowing the player to see critical empire statistics including Fleet Strength, Population, number of colonies and more, sabotage enemy factories or missile bases to prepare for an invasion, or to steal technologies. A good espionage roll can allow the player to pick a technology category to steal from, with a particularly excellent result giving her the opportunity to frame another rival and sour relations between the two targeted factions. A poor roll can fail, while a terrible one will alert the empire to her covert hijinks and cause a serious diplomatic incident.

In another break from the tradition that developed long after Master of Orion’s reign ran its course, diplomacy is not only meaningful, but essential to winning the game. Victory is achieved via a Galactic Council convention and a vote on who should rule the galaxy. Two thirds of the population of the galaxy must select one empire to declare it winner, and the AI factions will generally pick whoever they like the most.

Being at war with too many rivals can be disastrous if they collectively hate you enough to band together and control enough votes to win one of them the game. Players can manipulate how other empires feel about them via gifts of technology, lucrative trade treaties which gradually increase relations and BC to the treasury, and threats. That said, players with monikers like BATTLEMODE are more likely to just yell “Blood for the Blood God!” and glass every enemy planet they come across until they control enough population to win outright, saving on all that boring diplomatic crap.

This singular victory condition was designed in part to avoid the genre-wide issue decried by the community at large, where the player feels compelled to slog the game out to the bitter end to claim that prized Victory screen in the knowledge the game was won hours before, and works well in that regard. The player can ignore the vote, of course, and is instead tasked with taking on the entire galaxy in a blood-soaked ROFL-stomp of epic proportions: with everybody allied against him this is not always an easy feat.

Diplomatic wrangling is no mere interface for setting up treaties either, as a rival’s tolerance for the player depends on the sum of their general in-game interactions. Wars, espionage and trade all weigh on your relationship with your galactic neighbours and a poor dice roll after an ill-advised espionage attempt on a friendly power can break an alliance and throw the sector into a devastating war. The leaders of each empire have their own personality types, and racial rivalries prevent certain friendships developing: the birds and the kitties rarely play nicely together, as one might expect, and nobody trusts the Darloks with that shady “non-corporeality” thing going on. Pacifists will avoid war if possible, while militarists will build large fleets, and each type react differently during diplomatic encounters.

Master of Orion’s diplomacy system, though generally well done, came out the oven prematurely and felt a little under-baked and prone to player exploit; despite being a core component of gameplay, it is likely the wonkiest cog in an otherwise well-knit mechanism. The issues with the system could have been ironed out and polished with later updates but that kind of post-release work was unusual in 1994 and Simtex had moved onto newer projects by then.

It is lamentable that this system has barely changed in all the decades since MOO1 released, and is routinely tacked onto every space 4X we’ve seen since (with a scant few exceptions) without any of the interlocking support systems that made MOO1 work so well in the first place, ensuring that all of its flaws and few of its benefits are felt. For the majority of 4X games, this unfortunately boils down to being a system of cheesy exploits enabling the player to delay a war with a neighbour until they are comfortably ready for it, or magically transform one technology traded from a rival into eight others in the space of a single turn, only to repeat the process on the next one.

Player choice and compromise affects nearly every interactable element of Master of Orion: after destroying the last Bulrathi fleet orbiting their homeworld, does the player temporarily depopulate many of their own colonies to send enough troops to reliably beat the bears’ horribly strong ground troops in an invasion, knowing that it might fail and that re-growing those lost populations will set their economy back several turns? Or do they just bomb them back into the Stone Age, along with their valuable factories, avoiding the need for a messy, risky ground war but resulting in many turns spent rebuilding and repopulating, and losing out on the research techs those labs contain?

Brief mention must be made of the presentation in Master of Orion. The star-map graphics are clear and functional, with a good hotkey driven user-interface that is let down by a lack of modern niceties like mouse scrolling, but it is in interactions with the AI players that the game really shined. The different character animations spring to life in all their 16bit VGA glory, and each have their own thematic lines of dialogue. The diplomacy system in strategy games exists as much to humanise the computer as it is a gameplay mechanic in its own right, and MOO’s effort works wonderfully in that role. Each race has its own General MIDI music theme too.

The AI in Master of Orion was surprisingly good for 1994, with different personality types, randomly assigned, driving each leader to approach its conquest in a unique way, and with higher difficulty settings providing it Production bonuses that made the game tough to beat without using exploits. However, the main difficult setting comes through choice of race. Some are stronger than others: the boffin-like Psilon gain a large general research bonus which allow them access to the best technologies much earlier than everybody else, making them a good choice for beginners. The wheeler-dealer Humans have large diplomatic and trade bonuses, and are also considered to be a strong faction overall.

To contrast, the enigmatic Darlok have a rather poor advantage affecting espionage while simultaneously being one of the most unpopular factions amongst their neighbours, who rightly perceive them to be inscrutable and disapprove of their rather nasty habit of rolling around in used cat-litter trays before diplomatic meetings.

In a game where diplomacy is so critical, having everybody hate you can physically hurt, and with such low relations, playing to their strength was incredibly risky: since the Darloks are less likely to receive techs via diplomacy and field weaker fleets for conquering colonial factories, espionage is their best bet for technological advancement. However, spy operations all force a die roll and even with their natural advantage eventually you’re going to lose one, meaning a further drop in diplomatic relations and likely a war, one you’re probably not ready for since you’re lagging behind your rivals technologically. Boy, were the Darloks tough! And they weren’t even the weakest race.

MOO also includes randomised game events that periodically plague the player, or the AI races, from time to time throughout your typical playthrough. Yes, I said plague: there is one positive event, as far as I remember, and the rest are utterly horrible and usually result in the downgrading of a colonies population, resource quality or it’s outright destruction at the hands of some cosmic, Godzilla-wannabe. The titular Orion is Gaia planet, home to a deadly guardian but a prize worth fighting for if it can be grabbed early enough.

All in all, Master of Orion masquerades as a simple game if judged on looks alone, particularly by today’s standards, but those appearances are deceiving and once that mask is removed, its streamlined, airtight mechanics are allowed to breath, and present a beguiling depth rarely seen in today’s efforts. It is certainly a war-focused game, lacking many of the role-playing features notable in today’s space 4X giants like Stellaris, but for the kind of game that it is, it is arguably still the best.

The wheel of time has not been particularly kind to it though. Other clones of MOO have incorporated mouse-wheel control of sliders but the current DOSBox version does not support this, meaning that the late-game becomes a real micromanagement clickfest as the player manually sets colony Production over potentially dozens of controlled systems. Genre aficionados and retro-enthusiasts won’t be bothered but this will feel painful to new players, used to the creature-comforts of modern UI design, and the “Church of MOO” will likely not gain many new devotes in the future.

The base game also contained unfixed bugs, certain small features that were not properly implemented, and required exploits if the player wished to succeed on the tougher difficulty settings (to see an expert play the game on the Impossible difficulty using several such exploits, Sullla’s excellent Let’s Play series’ on Master of Orion are most informative and entertaining).

Remnants of the Precursors

Remnants of the Precursors is a remake of Master of Orion focusing on updating the user interface, gameplay, ease of use and presentation for today’s 4X gamer, spoiled by nearly thirty years of innovation baked into their favourite 4X treats. Fans of the original might feel a rising bile that some mere pretender would dare to alter the recipe to such a beloved dish: most understandable, but after sampling the proof of this particular pudding, it turns out these fears are most unwarranted.

Changes to the formula are limited to essential fixes only and are well thought out. As with Seravy’s incredibly good Master of Magic mod Caster of Magic, years of meticulous iterative design work, testing and heated community debate in dark, subterranean grottos has gone into preserving the spirit of Master of Orion while making small tweaks to remove exploits and enhance features never quite fully realised by Simtex on its release. Unlike Master of Magic, which required noticeable changes to core mechanics to bring the awful base-game AI to a playable state, to much grumbling from veteran MOM enthusiasts, Master of Orion was already an exemplary product on release and only began to show cracks after hardcore fans had thoroughly min-maxed it to breaking point, and so required much less work to fix.

Restraint in keeping ROTP’s mechanics as an almost perfect copy of MOO1, resisting the schoolboy error made by nearly every developer of MOO-likes so far in overreaching to improve such a solid game design, is the clearest hallmark of Ray Fowler’s work here, work which clearly respects that lofty vision Simtex imagined for their magnum opus. But there are changes. Alterations to the game were made with close consultation to what Ray considers the most reliable source available, Master of Orion: The Official Strategy Guide by Alan Emerich and Tom Hughes, an epic 432-page documentation of game mechanics so detailed that Ray was able to completely rewrite the game code from the ground upwards.

Let us examine each of the most important changes between the original and the remake side-by-side. I’ll ask you to forgive me for what might appear to be excessive detail: a review of ROTP that skips them ignores the reason why it was developed in the first place.

User Interface

The meatiest of the non-aesthetic changes in Remnants are to the user interface and controls. In Master of Orion, the star-map takes up the greater portion of the screen and a sidebar to the right contains the game controls for colony management. There are star-map view controls on a toolbar at the top left of the screen, including a handy new radial graph lightyear measurement tool that is centred over a selected colony, and a coloured territory/travel range overlay. In the bottom left we find a nifty readout showing, at a glance and without the need to switch to their respective screens, treasury funds and a progress meter for each of the six research categories which click through to the Tech screen and feature a mouse-over tooltip showing exact targets and progression values. When non-essential espionage messages are available, an indicator displays this in the centre-left screen, and when clicked displays them in a popup which gives quick access to the Races screen to change spying operations.

A small series of tabs at the bottom provide access to Game (an options menu for game settings and save-game access), six other gameplay screens (Design, Fleet, Map, Races, Planets, Tech), the Next Turn button. The general layout in ROTP is almost identical, and so players of Master of Orion will feel right at home. However, several of the screens accessed on the bottom tab bar are very different, and now read Systems, Fleets, Designs, Races, Colonies, Tech (with Game and Next Turn in their traditional positions).

“Systems” (replacing Map) has undergone a significant redesign of functionality and is split into four tabs: Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate, an obvious nod to Emerich’s original review and a nice touch for 4X fans. “Explore” uses colour-coded crosshairs to highlight systems yet to be scouted, and indicate technologies or actions required to do so. “Expand” indicates scouted systems available for colonisation, with green systems immediately colonisable, yellow and red showing potential colonies with requisite conditions standing in the way.

“Exploit” shows owned colonies that require industrialisation to maximise Production output and “Exterminate” highlights both home systems not fully upgraded to a player-set number of missile bases and shields, and the colonies of races currently designated as enemies under a declaration of war. Systems also contains user-editable notes for each colony, a flag with selectable colours for categorisation and each has a separate history, logging notable events such as colonisation date and invasions; all useful tools for managing large maps and to aid player immersion.

Master of Orion’s Fleet screen previously displayed ship numbers by design type, and was responsible for deletion of designs, but its functionality was absorbed into the new Design interface in ROTP and is now redundant. It has been replaced with what is very likely the most radical change to the user interface yet. The Fleets interface selects and commands fleets, transports and shipbuilding on a mass scale, integrating both traditional mouse-selection and an innovative subtractive system of using “Select All” and then filtering down via a number of options.

With just a few clicks, all systems matching the filter selections may be swiftly adjusted together to construct a different design and alter spending, adjust rally points to a shared location or to coordinate transports to invade or bolster a colony. A new feature in ROTP allows the timed landing of transports from multiple colonies, cutting down on the time-consuming micromanagement required to coordinate invasions system by system, turn by turn. Fleets of ships may be selected and filtered in the same fashion, allowing the player to select all ships across the map of a specific type and then deploy them all to a friendly system.

This select/filter/deploy system takes a little getting used to but is well worth the effort as it is an efficient time-saver. I cannot praise this new mechanic enough: it is one of the most innovative developments to the space 4X subgenre in decades and developers of future titles, hoping to build very large maps while respecting the players time, should pay close attention. It betrays a developer that plays his own game most thoroughly and knows it’s mechanics and pitfalls inside out, who also wishes to cater for those eXpanders amongst us who wish to experience ROTP with very large numbers of stars and alien rivals. This system is less used at the start of a game as towards the end, where it becomes an invaluable time and effort saving device, and in a genre notorious for an odiously high player attrition rate as a campaign draws to a close, will help players over the finish line to see that glorious victory screen.

ROTP’s “Designs” screen is functionally the same as the original, giving tools for ship design and information readouts on their statistics. Ship design is a complex affair and beyond the scope of this review but appears to be identical to the system used in Master of Orion. As previously stated, ROTP incorporates the ability to delete designs (and with them any fleets using them) into this screen now.

The “Races” interface covers diplomacy, military intelligence and espionage and has also undergone extensive reworking to facilitate a smooth-flowing gameplay experience. An empire, belonging to either the player or the AI, is selected on the right and then four tabs encapsulate information gleaned by spies and diplomats, with the player’s own empire displays containing slightly different functionality.

“Diplomacy” provides critical information on the Empire: their home-world and leader, the AI script in use and diplomatic status. Ambassadors may be summoned to an audience, and there are displays showing a trade summery, an empire’s relations with the other players, an easy-to-read relations meter ranging from “we utterly despise you” to “hey buddy, let’s win this together!” and a list of diplomatic incidents with a numeric “Effect” score providing the player complete transparency over the effects of their interactions together; more on this important topic later. With the player’s empire selected, diplomats for all factions can be managed, counter-intelligence security spending can be adjusted and spies unleashed on foreign empires too.

“Intelligence” shows an empire’s known technology and hosts controls for the direction of covert operations. “Military” displays known enemy ship designs, overall ship numbers broken down by hull size and information on the tech level for planetary defences in active operation. Finally, the “Status” tab draws graphs indicating relative empire strengths and, new to ROTP, a history screen which plays a turn-by-turn recreation of their development, much like those that close out the ending of 4X classics like Civ and Dominions, but can be accessed at any point of the game, another nice feature for immersion (and perhaps for testing the different AI types available in-game).

“Colonies” (replacing Planets) still shows economic spending statistics and a list of controlled systems, but now boasts an expanded dataset for each planet organised into three different tabs. Shared amongst all three are planet name and population, the user-selectable flag and colony Notes. Ecology View displays planet classification type, population size, whether Resources are Rich or Poor and any waste present. Industrial View manages resources, factory count, total production, a planetary factory capacity percentage (generally a player will want 100% factories for each planet, so this readout is essential for identifying under-performing colonies) and finally a reserve column indicating where Treasure Funds have been allocated to the planet’s own pool.

Military View adds a couple of columns for planetary shield level, missile bases, and what design is in production at drydock. Perhaps most importantly of all, the colony control sidebar is fully accessible from this screen! This small change drastically improves gameplay as your entire empire can effectively be managed from this one screen with no need to hop in and out of the main star map. Finally, the list of colonies is sortable by each column header so finding the most suitable location for your fleet’s finest shipyard is a doddle rather than a chore, and those in dire need of attention won’t go unnoticed for turns upon turns. Everything a player needs to know about a colony for strategic decision making is right here on the Colonies screen, and unlike MOO, all without ever needing to navigate away elsewhere.

Finally, the Technology Research screen organises techs via field and allows perusal of discovered techs while displaying pertinent information regarding secondary functions of each field (for example, Construction also shows the percentage of Waste Reduction and Ground Combat modifiers). The functionality here is mostly analogous to the original game, with a new option to divert excess colony spending to tech instead of the treasury reserve.

New turn information popups with messages from colonies now include the Colony Production management sidebar, allowing the player to make a quick alteration before closing the message so they’re no longer expected to memorise a list of needy colonies. These changes don’t look too exciting on paper but ensure ROTP is a joy to play where MOO was more of a labour.

Lastly, Remnants is part of a dying breed of 4X game that deliberately includes no tooltips, instead relying on a series of Help overlays accessible from most sections of the UI with the traditional F1 key, in support of a game manual. This might be a little jarring to younger gamers who’ve been conditioned to expect them everywhere, from video-games to their smart-fridge, but there’s really no need for them in ROTP: every piece of information required to play the game is organised neatly onscreen. I’m sure some bright-spark will complain that the Colonies screen is “spreadsheets in space”, a comment that was unfunny the first three million times we heard it and no more accurate here, nor relevant, than it ever was even directed at very detailed games like Aurora or Distant Worlds.

Mouse Controls & Hotkeys

In many ways, Master of Orion has aged gracefully. The graphics and sound are old but quaint, and the UI and mechanics mostly hold up to scrutiny. But even the most avid of retro-gamers will likely find the mouse-heavy control system quite cumbersome by today’s lofty standards, particularly in the advanced stages of a campaign where the clicking of slider positions and general map navigation are a recipe for Repetitive Strain Injury. MOO does have hotkeys but they’re limited to opening the various game windows and for navigating between planets, and while technically it can be controlled exclusively with the keyboard, using the NUMPAD to move a mouse cursor is beyond painful and a choice presumably made to satisfy hardware redundancy: by 1994, mouse use for home PC owners was ubiquitous.

ROTP has not only greatly expanded hotkey implementation to cover most of the original MOO commands and more, with improved mouse functionality for common operations, such as incremental Production slider adjustment and the selection of colonies, to be operated effortlessly with the scroll wheel. This one quality of life improvement alone is worth the entry price of the game (ROTP is completely free but for a moment, let’s pretend it’s not!). To nearly every element in Master of Orion that demanded hard labour from the player, the developer has added a little mercy.

Gameplay Changes

Master of Orion devotees will be champing at the bit, with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, to learn where ROTP has improved, or butchered, their favourite game. Gameplay and mechanical alterations are subtle and mostly involve the removal of exploits, and while there are too many to list in their entirety, I’ve picked a select few of the most important and noticeable.

Unarmed ships orbiting a colony no longer trigger combat, even during wartime: driving off an AI’s scout with your own was an exploit the player could use to ear-mark territory without spending BC on a military presence. Scouts and other unarmed ships now co-exist and an armed vessel is required to force them to retreat: endless scout spam was part of the early game meta for Master of Orion but now both the AI and player will be required to balance early colony development with warship construction if they are to hold onto the uncolonised systems they hope to settle, with some interesting new gameplay revolving potential early wars over such systems.

Technologies traded with rivals are now received into the player’s databanks at the end of the turn rather than instantaneously, preventing them from immediately passing them to every other empire that lacks it, alchemising that one technology into five new ones before the turn rolls. Tech brokering can be disabled or restricted to exclude non-allied empires in the game setup options.

In Master of Orion, players could part build a large warship design, switch over to a new one of a smaller size and then immediately churn out a tonne of ships that turn, leveraging the accumulated Production pumped into the previous build. The AI could not, and so ROTP removes this exploitative advantage: when a design is changed any Production previously allocated into building ships with it are held in a special “ship reserve” on the colony, and is then applied gradually turn-by-turn by increasing ship production by 50% until it is all expended.

An infinite money exploit detailed in the Official Strategy Guide regarding funnelling reserve to Ultra-Rich planets, adding a multiplier and then back out into the treasury MOO has also been fixed: in ROTP the production bonus of Rich and Ultra-Rich planets does not apply to incoming reserve, only that planet’s native Production.

Technology spending in MOO included a “research interest” equation designed to encourage players to balance their research over multiple techs instead of rushing them one-by-one. Unfortunately, the formula was flawed in such a way that precise micro-management of the research sliders allowed a canny eXploiter to increase overall research by 100% or more. ROTP has replaced this with a more straightforward system that grants the player a research bonus for a fully balanced spread across the fields, which gradually diminishes the more research points are pumped into a specific area, a neat solution which brings choices to the player’s table: do you balance your research to gain more overall research points over the long term, or forgo some, or all, of that bonus to quickly grab that engine upgrade you desperately need for an upcoming war?

There are numerous other small changes that assist in reducing micromanagement: in MOO, production put into defence would endlessly build missile bases until the player actively stopped the funding. ROTP’s UI includes a cap on the maximum amount of bases, rebalancing Production spending automatically once that limit is reached. The same goes for shipyards, so there’s no excuse now for blunder-building that extra colony ship you won’t need for twenty turns and having to calculate whether it’s more efficient to pay it’s maintenance until it is, or just scrapping it and rebuilding later. Espionage has the same player-set limit to spies too.

Diplomacy

Aside from much needed quality-of-life updates, squashing exploits and the design flaws that spawned them, perhaps the biggest and most noticeable changes are to the diplomatic game. Our examination of Master of Orion revealed a design tightly wrapped around player interaction with the AI factions and touching nearly every other aspect of the game: the economy, technological development, warfare and eventually even the game’s de-facto victory condition (percentage of galactic population owned) is all heavily influenced by diplomacy. MOO’s blueprint spawned dozens of copies of this system, the success or failure of which depended largely on whether that system was similarly tied as closely to the rest of the game it was transplanted into.

Diplomacy works in Master of Orion because it is necessary for victory: forget about it and even with a strong economic or technological lead, the player can lose because he upset a hostile bloc of empires, allied against him in the final galactic council vote. Careful expansion is not a feature of many space 4X games where rapid and endless expansion outwards is the order of the day, with stalls usually happening only when the player bumps into a bully, bigger and smarter than they are, and resulting in a frantic session of diplomatic cheesing to delay the war until they are good and ready for it. Master of Orion, in theory at least, required careful empire growth as alarming your rivals through unbridled expansion can result in a quick game over screen.

The inner workings of ROTP’s diplomacy system are relatively simple but with enough elements to ensure careful consideration is taken for actions that affect relations. Most importantly these systems are both transparent and (mostly) deterministic and therefore predictable: transparency is achieved through the aforementioned Effect list in the Diplomacy screen, where each interaction affecting relationship with a specific race is logged, and through a document called Diplomacy in Remnants of the Precursors that Ray has made available, an instruction manual describing the system which includes a detailed list of every Diplomatic Incident and its numeric value.

Determinism is broken only through leaders with the Erratic personality trait who have a randomised element to their decision making, but otherwise is completely predictable, ensuring players can learn to master diplomacy without any guesswork.

To a returning player the diplomacy screen is familiar, excellent graphics aside, and the underlying core gameplay is the same. Differences become apparent soon into play: AI races now have a memory, and will remember diplomatic incidents differently in accordance with their personality type. Pacifist nations will never forget a genocide of another species, where Ruthless types, an evil lot prone to such behaviour themselves, will get over it a lot faster.

The player’s expansion will eventually rack up a rather large malus as their galactic rivals sense her imminent victory, and so, much more than in the original game, she must carefully navigate the final stages to avoid being piled on by her neighbours, either in war or at the Galactic Council. Different personality types act very differently in war too, with Militaristic AIs more likely to accept defeat if their fleets are destroyed, while Expansionists particularly dislike losing population to bombardment or planetary invasion. It is fair to state that differences in AI behaviour by personality type were also present in Master of Orion, but the system here is better fleshed out and properly documented.

Aesthetics

The UI has been refashioned to resemble MOO and is simple looking, as was the original, but the rest of the game is anything but that. Remnants of the Precursors has been lavished with wonderful graphics courtesy of illustrator Petar Penev, and they are nothing short of fantastic! When left for a few seconds, the title screen will cycle through much of the art Petar has painted and any player with a love of science fiction will be in for a treat, as the quality is very high and easily as good as anything we’ve seen in games with huge AAA budgets. Ursinathi ground troops resplendent with bear-shaped war masks roar in the heat of battle, feather-clad Fiershan warriors battle to the death in fighting pits, a high council chamber of Mentaran leaders deliberate their next political move; each is detailed and bursting with character.

In a climate where 4X games typically replace imagination with endlessly recycled sci-fi tropes, Remnants pulls out all the stops. Even the Humans, the sole faction played by 95% of the player-base in most space strategy games and usually relegated to some contemporary variant of either Captain Kirk or Commander Space Bimbo (like, totally my favourite! <3 ), breaks the mould with some decidedly unusual looking characters. The aliens are all wonderful and each picture paints them into a new little world for the imagination to run riot within. For a free game, you’re getting a lot of eye candy for your money and such efforts greatly aid immersion and in-game world building.

The playable races of ROTP are all beautifully painted and immediately recognisable from the original, and are genuine works of art, oozing emotion and betraying their racial characteristics long before any statistics are examined. Diplomacy, technological advancements and espionage for each faction are delivered with a similarly high-quality animation and although UI elements in tactical combat are perhaps the least polished aspect on display, are consistent with the rest of the game and include high quality art assets for the ships and asteroids.

Sound effect design is functional, but the score fairs better: music tracks are numerous and are presented as the usual “cats on synthesisers in space” we’ve all grown to either love or hate since the early days of space 4X. Each race, tactical combat and certain notifications, such as the “Scientists have achieved a breakthrough” screen and GNN reports have their own atmospheric theme.

Music styles vary, from the orchestral piece that plays on the star-map screen, speaking of endless expansion into the furthest depths of unexplored space, communication waves radiating out towards far suns, or a small child’s remorse on discovering his beautifully crafted snowman has melted overnight, to the bleepy, syncopated mono-synth driven number that accompanies the unveiling of a new technology, and sounds like a tired, disgruntled Windows Update trying to hack its way back into its own malfunctioning smart-home only to find his unfaithful wife face-down on the kitchen counter and plugged into a beaten up, rascally looking iPad.

I’ll concede the music is likely to sound completely different to someone who didn’t spend most of their adult life in a festival tent dropping liquid LSD onto their eyeballs and listening to Autechre at sanity-shattering volumes. I like it, and assuming you’re not the sort who immediate turns 4X game music off before playing, I expect you will too. A poor soundtrack can ruin a game, or at least force a hit to the mute button, but a well-selected set blends into the game seamlessly, enhancing the experience for the player at key moments as their emotions are stirred. ROTP is a triumph in this regard, it neither jars nor intrudes, and at suitable intervals a snippet leaps out to surprise and delight.

Credit must also go to the in-game writing: as with the art, the excellent diplomatic dialogue suits the speaking characters perfectly and lift their personalities off the screen and out of two dimensions. These creatures feel like real personalities, and in a game as war focused as this one, is essential in humanising the AI. There is a huge amount of in-game text, weighing in at over 60,000 words (nearly as long as this review) and professionally translated into over twenty different languages, a phenomenal achievement for a free title and one that cost the developer a fortune:

“I told Jeff (the writer) that I was now convinced that he secretly hated me” Ray says, “and wrote so much text in an attempt to bankrupt me!”.

He is incredibly proud of this translation work even amongst all the rest of his labours, and his dedication to pushing his game out to so many people across the world, and entirely from his own pocket with no hope or expectation of financial recompense, is an act of altruism rarely seen in the video games development industry. Better than Santa.

Finally, it is worth noting that Ray has changed the names of the in-game races to avoid any potential legal issues with the Master of Orion IP’s current legal owner. They’re close enough that players of the first game will recognise them, with suitable variations allocated to duplicated races on larger maps and a small price to pay for such a fantastic free game, I think.

Artificial Intelligence

Remnants of the Precursors open-source code gives license for programmers to jump in and change the game as they see fit. During the development of ROTP, several of the most dedicated modders had their AI work enshrined into the release version, say hello to the MODNAR and XILMI AIs, named after their respective authors. Xilmi (aka Ail) is known for excellent AI code contributions towards Proxy Studio’s Pandora and Warhammer 40K: Gladius – Relics of War, the latter having one of the most fun game AI’s I’ve ever had the pleasure to be beaten by.

Both provide an increased difficulty challenge with less reliance on giving the AI a Production-based advantage and as I’m less familiar with them I shall not review them individually here; I’d suggest that the general game mechanics of MOO/ROTP are rather delicately balanced as they are, and turbo-charging the difficulty will inevitably come at the expense of forcing the player into increasingly narrower, micro-heavy and more efficient playstyles if they hope to keep up. For those of you out there that aren’t happy unless the computer has your balls in a vice, they’re available in the new game setup options, along with a neat feature to watch ROTP play itself with no player intervention.

Readers are strongly advised to try these new AI bots when they’re ready for them!

R.T.F.M

The game manual that accompanies each download in .pdf format was penned by Tom Chick of Quarter-to-Three, a man with a legendarily eclectic taste in video-games, equally as home discussing the finer points of Master of Orion as he is some random anime crap he dug up somewhere on the internet. Writing a manual that people in 2022 will actually bother reading while remaining informative is no mean feat and since most of the information required to get up and running with the basic meta-game of Remnants is in there, I’d say he’s earned over 9000 brownie points and several gold stars in the process.

Is ROTP a Better Game than MOO1?

Judging the success of Remnants of the Precursors requires answering two questions. Firstly, what does it offer to returning fans of Master of Orion?

The short answer to this is that ROTP is essentially the same game with the cracks in its mechanism filled in, removing the need for exploits and micromanagement, and a fantastic lick of paint lovingly applied over the surface. Returning players who originally persisted with Master of Orion long enough to dislike the gameplay, rather than it’s antiquated user interface and presentation, are unlikely to find enough difference to change their minds, although I’d urge them to try, as this really is a much fresher feeling game than the original owing to the plethora of quality-of-life improvements. New players will be treated to a fantastic looking game with time-tested mechanics and a depth that belies its simple surface image.

The long answer is longer…

It is difficult to quantify the joy of experiencing the resurrection of a favourite thing in a new and beautiful form. Ray has stated before that he wanted to bring this old game to a younger generation of players who might not be willing to put up MOOs archaic interface and presentation, and in this regard I think the game is a success.

Game options can drastically alter the experience, but Master of Orion’s soul still shines through regardless of how the core game is modified. The original had the star-map size capped at 100 stars with just five opponents but ROTP’s maximum is 1,901,280 stars and 49 AI players, in my opinion utterly unplayable numbers but I’m sure some crazy out there (probably Ray) has done it.

Duplication of the alien races works pretty well but I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve not explored the more excessive numbers here: as with the AI mods, I’d have expected that the more one drives up the number of colonies and races to play against, the less well the old engine of MOO will hold together. That said, I’m happy to report that on a 225 star map and with 13 opponents, Remnants still felt very playable, and a more patient human might well finish such a big campaign. I’m less convinced by claims that the game is fun played with no AI opponents and purely as a colony expansion simulator, but the option to do so is there if you’re the kind of person that likes to play DOOM by walking slowly towards the exit, avoiding all the monsters and guns.

Too Similar To MOO?

A few sticklers are still more than happy with the original and see no reason to upgrade: several years before release, I asked veteran MOO expert Sullla if he’d be interested in checking it out. To my surprise, he politely declined:

“For Remnants of the Precursors, the problem is that if I want to play a game that’s 99% identical to Master of Orion, I’ll just play Master of Orion. And if I want to play something different, I don’t want to play a game that’s 99% identical to MOO. That’s not a knock on the idea behind the project, it’s just not for me. Also I played a lot of games back in the 1990s, I find the 1994 era graphics to be super nostalgic and charming!”

I remember thinking that this was a little short sighted, and he was missing out on something he might enjoy, but I absolutely understand the sentiment on display as I feel something similar with my own favourite games, so carelessly rehashed in today’s gloomy graveyard of cash-grab videogame necromancy. I’m not at all excited at the prospect of yet another god-awful Jagged Alliance sequel when the original Sir-Tech Canada games are so good (the second title of which still surpasses anything made in the broader tactics genre to this day). From this perspective, and one of approaching the original with experience and nostalgia, such hesitation is understandable.

Original MOO fans are like the venerable, grumbling Longbeards of Games Workshops’s Warhammer Fantasy Battle, a slowly dwindling breed of hardy Dwarven grognards, who gazed out unto the world of modern PC gaming, recoiled in horror at what they saw, and so retreated back into the vaults of the RealmsBeyond forums, enchanting the doors with arcane CAPCHA glyphs and spells of forgetting, then sealing themselves inside for all eternity to argue whether Civ1 or Civ2 is the better game.

Such stalwart and faithful war-hardened soldiers, calloused and invested up to their eyeballs in all the exploits and cheese required to master Orion on Impossible difficulty, might show reluctance in trading MOO1 out for a tarty, younger model when they’re quite happy enough with the rough and tumble ministrations of their favourite old lady (apparently you can do wonders with no teeth, and some people get a kick out of Zimmer frames).

Actually, Ray testifies that the collective knowledge of the denizens of RealmsBeyond was a valuable resource in understanding Master of Orion inside out during the development of his game, so credit where it is due (and in doing so, I’ll hopefully avoid an entry in the Great Book of Grudges)!

The release version of ROTP mirrors the original in both the spirit of Simtex’s vision, and in the body of its mechanics, but the excellent presentation, exploit fixes and user interface improvements propel it far ahead of Master of Orion in the race to “Best MOO Game”. I feel that MOO1 is really of interest now only to those old enough to remember both Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain as living entities, and love either the retro graphics or the extreme-sport of slider clicking. Sullla is correct that Master of Orion is charming, but I think ROTP stands head and shoulders above it by comparison and after writing this review, I’m still rubbing the cramp out of my mouse-arm and cursing the lack of middle-button and mouse-wheel support after playing the original for a couple of hours.

Master of Orion is different to ROTP though, make no mistake, and not all the changes in the latter appeal to everybody. Examination of the code in the MOO1 source-port 1OOM, by Kilgore Trout Mask Replicant, gives us one example of this. The original game AI crunched thousands of attempts to fit everything it wanted into a ship design before settling on something that worked, and cheated with available space on the hull to ensure that if a player was fielding a repulsor to keep small ships at bay, they could magically field some Range 2 weapons to fight back a bit, components which would never normally fit.

ROTP does not do this: the AI plays by the same rules as the player, as far as I can tell (I’m familiar with Java and had intended to go through the game code myself, but my awesome mastery at stretching publication deadlines is matched only by Rob’s ability to shame me into getting things finished, and so I ran out of time for that). This fairness can result in the AI jumping into situations where it can flounder, where MOOs would not.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if they prefer a dastardly villain AI that cheats in order to be more competitive over an honourable knight that occasionally turns up to battle riding a duck and bravely wielding a bucket and spade. PC gamers are a tough bunch to please, and while openly waving a flag for an AI that “plays by the rules”, will kick up a terrible fuss at the occasional incompetence that inevitably accompanies that design choice. Despite decades of best efforts from genius AI developers the world over, in practical terms we still cannot have our cake and eat it: the AI either plays by different rules or it underperforms to most players expectations, unless the game is relatively simple, an adjective that does not apply to a complex genre like 4X.

The AI in the original Master of Orion was entirely geared towards player fun, rather than competence. It cheated, but it made efforts to look like it was playing fair: despite being omnipotent and seeing the entire map with no fog-of-war, the AI still sent out scouts to give the appearance of needing to survey planets. This is considered excellent design for people who know a bit about the difficulties of game AI, but once the veil has been rent aside, player fury is inevitable. ROTP manages to avoid this problem, and while it does inherit the issues that go with a fair AI, does at least allow for valiant modders to step up and have a go at solving this old conundrum themselves. I’m no slouch at MOO/ROTP and I think Ray’s base-game AI is pretty darn good.

Those Damn Space Monsters

ROTP’s space monsters are an early source of frustration and are routinely deactivated by neophyte players who watch in horror and frustration as their hard-won colonies are swallowed one by one. This is a mistake, as they’re relatively easy to manage with the right know-how, tend to cripple your enemies as much as they do the player, and killing them generates such a huge bonus to diplomatic relations with your rivals that leaving them on might well be critical to victory on the higher difficulty settings. The original beasts from Master of Orion were not half as well thought out, but they were less disruptive too, and Ray considers this one of the most radical changes between the two games. Those with a less adventurous palate, with no appetite for the dubious taste of Space Amoeba, can rest assured that the monsters can be deactivated in the game setup options.

And so despite some hesitation from a few die-hards, my own investigations seem to suggest that the community have largely embraced Remnants of the Precursors now, with enthusiastic reviews popping up in forums, postings on Reddit, in Discord groups and everywhere else that 4X players and developers congregate.

Comparison to Contemporary Titles

The second question to address: how does Remnants of the Precursors hold up against modern space 4X games for someone who never played Master of Orion?

In discussing both MOO and ROTP, I’ve often described the game design as tight: this is a lean, war-focused game engine where each system interlocks and complements each-other, with nothing extraneous to get in the way of the main goal of winning that Galactic Council Vote (or exterminating your all rivals like a real 4X player). Every action the player makes in-game and every event they encounter, with the exception of the new flagging and annotation system Ray has included in ROTP, is critical in affecting their chances of victory. This is in stark contrast to titles that provide lots of role-playing opportunity, closer to the sandbox end of the 4X-spectrum than to the pressure/puzzle side of things, like Distant Worlds and Stellaris, which typically dedicate resources to fluff and ship/race customisation options.

We’ve already seen that diplomacy is central to the gameplay in ROTP, rather than bolted on like a bad boob-job to salve an entrenched expectation that this concept is fundamental to 4X games. A similar consideration is that with only one de-facto victory condition, getting population to like you through peaceful means or through violence, MOO and ROTP break another assumed rule for the genre: that 4X games must have multiple victory conditions.

Following Sid Meier’s Civilization, nearly every 4X that followed it has multiple triggers to win the game, suspected to be one of the reasons why the genre has so many problems. Carefully constructing a tight game design is difficult enough with even one path to victory, never mind five or six, and balancing both the component systems to support them all without excessive micromanagement, while respecting the player’s precious time and expect a game AI to be able to provide a fun challenge is asking a lot.

Again, Simtex’s genius idea in “presenting a nice illusion to make it fun for the player” is shown once again in giving the player what looks to be two ways to win, despite these essentially being one and the same from a rules perspective, a distinction important only to the game mechanics and to the AI that has to navigate them.

Master of Orion might well be tight because what it does is quite simple, and the end goal of the game, towards which all of its systems lend their combined power, is not to be an open-ended sandbox, but simply to be a fun game to play. ROTP contains a large toolbox of options that certainly push it more towards a sandbox experience than the original, but the core gameplay loop is still recognisable as the near-thirty year old wargame that Alan Emerich first coined the term “4X” for.

In this respect then, ROTP is closer in quality of execution to Proxy’s Gladius than it is to pretenders like Endless Space or Stellaris: by doing away with some player agency in limiting the number of ways victory can be achieved, it instead facilitates a more consistent set of challenges with mechanics and rules that are gradually unveiled in a constant curve each time the game is played, yet allowing for a great variety of novel challenges and predicaments that arise because of that tightness as each decision in each system directly affects all the others. More to the point, the AI can actually play it’s own game… (lookin’ at you, Stellaris…)

Compare this to successor titles, that instead laud the vague goal of “win” and then provide multiple paths to victory, usually with ad-hoc mechanical appendages stitched onto the core-gameplay engine in Frankenstein’s Monster fashion, to facilitate each new victory condition in turn and provide more stuff for the player to do, irrespective of whether this fits the rest of the game neatly or not and ending in the kind of bloat you get with a fully DLC’d-out Paradox title. MOO avoided this trap entirely and proved once again that bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.

Limitations of this sort allow the player to explore the game in a more focused way, discover its nuance and intricacies, lose, improve and win in a more predictable and stable environment than can be achieved with more open-ended games. There is also a certain delight that arises after the unveiling of great complexity from what initially appeared to be a rather simple picture, which was exactly how MOO1 hooked me in the first place, and a feeling that Conquest of Elysium fans know all too well. ROTP is the quintessential game for this kind of 4X satori: in gestalt fashion, the wonder and joy that comes from playing ROTP is certainly far greater than the illusion initially cast by of the sum of its component parts.

To answer that question then, ROTP is not only a better game that MOO1, but if we’re qualifying games by how tight or focused towards fun they are, it is probably the best fleet-based space 4X game out there right now and Ray is honestly a bit of a dick for permanently ruining a whole subgenre for me.

What it is not is a big expansive sandbox game with endless customisation of races, multiple victory conditions, oodles of scripted events and other role playing elements in the same vein as Stellaris or Distant Worlds. ROTP does compensate for this with its excellent world building by way of the high-quality writing, immersive and suggestive sci-fi art and great music, but ROTP and Stellaris are as alike as apples and oranges, and despite a superficially similar appearance they play completely differently.

I think the success of ROTP in gaining traction with a new fanbase will rest entirely in how it is presented to them with their piled-on preconceptions of what a 4X game should be. I enjoyed many LOLs eXplaining, to anyone stupid enough to willingly engage in debate with someone as obstinate and obtuse as I am, that any criteria prohibiting a strategy game without multiple victory conditions from qualifying as a 4X that then immediately excluded the one title that the genre-label was coined for was no criteria for a 4X game at all.

Yet some in the community still regard MOO as “a wargame, not a 4X game”. I think this attitude has to go if Remnants of the Precursors is to really spread its wings. In a sense, ROTP is older than 4X games are and boasts a pedigree that was only diluted with time, and if we dodge that label we can deflect some of the strawman arguments against it in the same way that one need not address a complaint that their apple doesn’t taste like an orange.

The other issue is that despite the graphical overhaul and the effort that has gone into the presentation overall, the game is still rather simplistic looking compared to its rivals, despite being a huge upgrade over MOO1. I make this point a lot and mean no offence to anybody, but there are a lot of 4X gamers out there who’ll refuse to play anything that hasn’t got expensive 3D graphics, even when the gameplay is much better than prettier titles, and I think the simplistic colour scheme of the UI, and the basic geometric circles and triangles of the star map screen from ROTP will be enough to dissuade some of them.

There are some extraneous screens from MOO1 that haven’t made the translation over to the remake, such as the colony screen showing a graphical representation of the missile bases and factories. I understand their omission as they looked a bit too MOO2-ish, but some might miss them for their immersion value.

Negatives

Some of ROTP’s main gameplay issues are inherited from MOO1 itself. Mastering the early game on higher difficulties requires a thorough understanding of population growth and encourages the player to micromanage colony development and transports, which can become laborious later in the game as their empire swells to galaxy-spanning proportions. MOO is primarily a fleet management game and even with innovative Fleet system, ROTP allows for game sizes that can eventually implode under their own weight. I’d argue that player attrition might well end up being significantly lower in ROTP than in other 4X games owing to its relatively streamlined nature, with the end screen appearing significantly earlier than it does in its peers.

As previously discussed, the quality of the AI varies greatly from competent to limp, and the difficulty of the game might be better expressed through race choice and the varying map conditions than the artificial Production modifiers granted to AI factions using the in-game difficulty settings. Most importantly, the game is fun to play even on Normal difficulty and for those wanting an extra challenge, there are plenty of options and mods available to suit.

Where it does differ from the original game is in how the AI varies: for the casual player I don’t think there’s much of a noticeable difference. For experts, I’d recommend examining DeltaV’s breakdown of Kilgore Trout Mask Replicants 1OOM code alongside the public-version of ROTP’s scripting to really get a handle on it as its beyond my current experience and research to describe.

The UI is great but not perfect: selecting planets when the map is zoomed out past a certain level can be fiddly if there are also fleets near to them, requiring some tedious scrolling in and out of the galaxy map. The control system in the game is good but does take a bit of getting used to: I sadly suspect that some will turn their noses up at a game that doesn’t have that same generic UI that’s seems to have become the template for everything that came since Endless Space. More fool them: the UI in ROTP is outstanding and contains innovations that other developers should take careful note of and hopefully incorporate into newer games. The Fleets tab and innovations in fast selections of fleets and colonies particularly is a stroke of genius and Ray’s UI expert deserves a medal for this.

There are still a few features that are not explained with the in-game help: I accidentally deleted a Star Gate from one of my colonies after clicking on the swirly icon a bit too hastily, and although “the burnt hand teaches best”, most players aren’t masochists. I do think it should probably be labelled when I hit F1.

Presenting a game with a UI designed for a VGA monitor in high-definition is always going to look a bit strange I think, and the tactical combat screen in particular stands out to me as perhaps looking just a bit too sparse for a modern game. I understand Ray wanted to keep things as close to the original as possible but I look at MOO1 there and think I prefer how that one looks overall. It does leave me wondering what the game could have looked like if he’d gone wild with the overall UI design, rather than constraining it to fit the original’s specifications so closely.

I must also mention that the final release version of the game came with a small drop in overall performance, at least on the computers I’ve tested it on, and where the galaxy map was once scrolling as smooth as silk, now seems to be a little slower, but it doesn’t really affect gameplay, probably won’t be particularly noticeable to a new player and is partly mitigated by turning off the galaxy map textures (which makes little visible difference to the game as far as I can see).

Conclusion

Ray Fowler’s Remnants of the Precursors successfully recreates Master of Orion for the modern era without any drastic alterations to the old formula, with scant few concessions to facilitate a smoother gameplay experience for the player, and in that he may consider his mission completed. The fact that it is free is just the icing on the cake. Credit is to be liberally applied to the wider community of gamers, grognards and modders who contributed to the project and helped shape this into the best game it can be.

The conflict of interest I’ve disclosed prohibits me from any kind of scoring but I hope I’ve made it clear that I like Remnants of the Precursors a lot and consider it to be an exemplary game design even if I cannot apply our usual official “eXemplary” stamp of approval on it at this time. MOO itself would qualify for this score but the care with which Mr. Fowler has applied the improvements is a step above that again.

Go and download Remnants of the Precursors now! It’s free of charge, with no strings attached. Master of Orion was one of the finest PC strategy games ever made and this is the definitive version now, in my humble opinion. It’s open-source status will ensure that it will continue to mutate into new and bizarre shapes, and a little Alkari tells me that a game called Return of the Precursors might already be in development too.