Master of Orion, developed by SimTex Software and originally published by MicroProse, is a classic of the strategy genre in video games. Indeed, it's the game that prompted the coinage of the term “4X” for the subgenre of empire-building turn-based strategy games in which you eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Beyond just being a good game for its time, it's still engaging to play (as long as you're not expecting cutting-edge graphics) and features some elegant mechanics that sequels and remakes have strayed from (to their detriment, in my opinion).

It's a game from 1993

While Master of Orion looked and sounded pretty good when it was released, modern audiences may find it a bit quaint. It even has old-school copy protection: sometimes the game will ask you to look up something in the manual to confirm you actually have a legit copy of the game – back in those days copying floppy disks was easy but copying paper manuals was hard! (The modern re-releases have a PDF guide instead of forcing you to look things up). Even if you don't grade on a curve, some of the pixel art is quite nice, the musical themes for the various races and screens are evocative and thematic, and the sound effects for the various weapons work really well.

Race Into Space

Each game you pick one of ten species for your space empire. Each one has a minor edge in an aspect of the game mechanics that gives them a unique flavor (I'll talk about the different species as I discuss the different subsystems, to give context for what their bonuses do). You start on your earth-like homeworld with a colony ship, two scout ships, and a galaxy to explore. And of course somewhere out there are the AI-controlled empires with their homeworlds and their ships. Your goal is to rule the galaxy, either by destroying everyone else or by being voted leader of the galaxy.

Colony Management

The main interface with the game involves a map of the stars and a panel for controlling the colony that orbits the star you have selected. While it might be more “realistic” to have multiple planets around each star (especially since there's terraforming technology in the game) the simplicity of treating each system as a single element of your empire is a big benefit. Most of the sequels and remakes have gone the multiple-planets route, but it's not clear whether the extra complexity is worth it.

The way you control your colonies is with the sliders for each planet. You can think of them like allocating different sectors of your economy: Is your planet focused on building space ships? Defensive missile bases? Factories? Cleaning up pollution? Doing research? Often you'll find that you want a combination, so you can set the sliders to get just the mix you want.

The industrial output of the planet, the thing that gets distributed via the sliders, is affected by both the population of a planet and the factories there. As long as there's available space on a planet there's a natural population growth rate. The lizard-like Sakkra have an advantage with this: they reproduce faster than the other species so it's easier to get a lot of citizens on your planets. Each unit of population provides some industrial output directly, work they can do with their own hands. The ant-like Klackons have an advantage there: their workers are twice as productive as normal, which can give them an edge getting things up and running quickly without having to invest in infrastructure first. Each unit of population also allows a certain number of factories to operate, the multiplier is your level of “Robotic Controls” which you can increase via technological improvements. The masters of robotic controls are the cyborg Meklars (my personal favorite), they get a bonus to their Robotic Controls above and beyond their tech level, which enables them to have a lot of output once they get all their infrastructure built.

Many of the sequels, remakes, and homages to Master of Orion use a “buildings” model to represent the development of the infrastructure on each planet. While this works in historical 4Xs like Civilization or fantasy 4Xs like Master of Magic I feel it both overcomplicates things for a space 4X as well as works against the theme. When you're playing a space-based 4X game you want the feeling of the vastness of the empire you're controlling. The smooth abstractions of the original Master of Orion deliver that much better than games where you have to zoom in and make decisions like whether to build a “science lab” or a “deep core mine” on particular planets.

Pollution

One consequence of using factories to build things is that it produces industrial waste, at a rate that can be affected by your technological discoveries in the Construction field. If you don't keep on top of cleaning up the waste it can degrade the environment of your planet. Your productivity at cleaning up the waste can advance via technology as well, at the beginning of the game a substantial amount of your industrial output needs to be directed toward cleaning up your own pollution, but with enough research in the Construction and Ecology areas can make it almost negligible. In practice you mostly just let the ecology slider float to the default of keeping the planet clean.

Exploration and Expansion

Of course no self-respecting star empire has only a single planet, you need to get out there and start colonizing. At the beginning of the game you don't know anything about the planetary habitability of the other stars until you visit them with your ships (or, later in the game, develop some space scanner technology). When you do you'll find out what type of planet can be found there. By default, your people can live on Terran, Jungle, Ocean, Arid, Steppe, Desert, or Minimal environments. There are also environments that can be inhabited once you research the appropriate tech: Barren, Tundra, Dead, Inferno, Toxic, or Radiated. You'll also occasionally run into stars with no planets at all. The silicon-based Silicoids have perhaps the most far-reaching special ability in the game: they can colonize any environment from the very beginning of the game (and they also ignore pollution).

Range and Fuel

The range subsystem in the game controls where you can travel on the map. Rather than track fuel supplies on each individual fleet, the game uses another elegant abstraction: Your ships can go to any system that's “within range” of a system you control. And, naturally, that range is determined by your technological advances. You start the game with a range of three, which is often enough to colonize a planet or two, but to get a broader empire you'll usually want to research some of the range-increasing techs in the Propulsion area.

Research and Technology

I've already mentioned a few times that you can upgrade various aspects of your empire via research, such as your Robotic Controls level or the rate at which you can clean up industrial waste. All of that is controlled by the Research system. When your colonies have some of their industrial output directed to research via their colony sliders that all goes into a big pool which is distributed (via more sliders) to six fields of research: Computers, Construction, Force Fields, Planetology, Propulsion, and Weapons. Within each of those fields are a bunch of individual advancements you can discover, like Reduced Industrial Waste 40% or Robotic Controls V. Or, perhaps more excitingly, Neutron Blasters, Impulse Engines, or Anti-Matter Torpedoes.

An interesting aspect of the game is that not every development will be available for research for every player: even if you dedicate all of your empire's resources to researching Propulsion you may not have the option of researching Hydrogen Fuel Cells to give your ships a 4 parsec range (although you may have access to the more advanced Deuterium Fuel Cells that give you range 5). If you can't research it yourself there's a chance you may be able to get the tech via diplomatic trading, espionage, or a military ground assault, but you can't always guarantee that anyone else will have the particular tech you want, either. This means that you can't make your strategy too dependent on any particular technological advance, you need to be able to adapt to what's available to you. If you can't research any good missile tech maybe you'll need to field a more impressive space fleet rather than relying on ground-based defensive missile bases. If you can't research good engines and small weapons you're probably better off trying to build big, slow ships rather than lots of small fast ones. This lack of predictability in the “tech tree” contributes a lot to replayability: it's harder to get locked into any particular “best” strategies if you don't always have access to all of the elements you need to pull them off. While being able to chart a course through scientific and technical advances might be appropriate for a historical game like Civilization I find the need to actually explore the possibilities of science to be much more evocative, especially in a sci-fi game.

The Psilons are the best researchers in the game. In addition to getting a 50% bonus to their research point generation they're also more likely to be able to research each of the advances. Because higher tech things tend to be much better than lower tech things the Psilons are generally one of the most powerful empires in any game they're in (although it can sometimes be a struggle for the Psilons to have their infrastructure keep up with their technological edge – being theoretically able to build ships with amazing weapons doesn't do you any good if they take so long to complete that they're still in spacedock when your enemies attack).

Ship Design

I mentioned before that you could research things like Neutron Blasters and Impulse Engines, and the place you use those is in the ship design subsystem. This is probably the most complex subsystem in the game, which is a reasonable choice because cool space ships are part of what makes a sci-fi milieu fun. There are four sizes of ships, from small to huge, and each one can have a targeting computer, shields, electronic countermeasures, armor, engines, maneuvering thrusters, slots for 4 different types of weapons, and 3 different types of special systems. There's still some abstraction here, you only have to worry about how many weapons are on the ship, without extra complexity like firing arcs or actually placing the systems at specific locations within the ship. And the special systems are also used to implement things like your colony ships: if you choose to add a colony module to your ship then it's capable of colonizing a planet (assuming the module type can handle the environment of the planet), the game doesn't treat your colony ships like special units with different rules.

There are often a lot of meaningful decisions to make with your ship designs. You might be tempted to always use your top-of-the-line stuff, but the newest advances are generally also the biggest and most expensive so your ship might end up being more effective overall if you pick and choose where you're going to splurge. There's also a “miniaturization” mechanic in the game which causes older tech to take up less space as your proceed further down the tech tree, which can give older types of weapon a use later in the game – the weapons you used in your mid-game battleships can end up compact enough to fit in late-game fighters.

You go to war with the space fleet you have, not the one you wish you had

One interesting aspect of the ship design subsystem is that you can only have six designs “active” at once, and you can't modify or refit them once the design is locked in. That means you have to make some tough decisions about when to start using new designs, when to scrap old ones, when you have the slack to build up a new fleet, or when the ships that you built a long time ago aren't doing the job anymore. When you embark on wars of expansion this sometimes has an interesting punctuating effect, for example when your enemy starts fielding ships with more powerful shields the offensive power of your fleet may no longer be sufficient so you'll need to stop your expansion until you can build up a new fleet with the weapons you need.

Tactical Combat

When you do have your ships engage with enemy fleets it happens in a “tactical combat” screen. This is another somewhat involved subsystem, although there are a lot of simplifying abstractions, too. Most importantly individual ships can't move around independently. Instead, the six types of ships in your fleet move in “stacks” of however many of that type you have involved in the combat. Ships can also fire and move in any direction, there's no momentum or firing arcs, weapons are only limited by their range. It's a pretty elegant system that tends to deliver a best-of-both-worlds effect: you get a feeling of some tactical maneuvering without things getting bogged down, even including some flavorful sci-fi elements like being able to outrun slow-moving torpedoes, and when truly massive fleets are involved it feels suitably satisfying to see how much damage your giant stacks can do. All of the weapon types have their own visual and sound effects so the different techs register as feeling different from each other, not just different numbers in a spreadsheet. Some of the special systems can have interesting effects in combat, as well, such as the Automated Repair System which lets your ship recover hitpoints between turns or the Repulsor Beam which prevents ships from getting within one square range of you.

Most of the sequels, remakes, and homages have eschews the ship stack system and instead represent individual ships in tactical combat. While that certainly creates more visual spectacle it often results in either a micromanagement nightmare or the combat not being as engaging. Just because a computer can simulate a bunch of tiny spaceships doesn't mean your brain can keep track of all of that detail, and what makes a game fun is how you mentally engage with it. The abstractions the original MoO uses in tactical combat help keep it at the right scale to feel like a fun little minigame, neither a chore to handle or an entirely separate game-mode to master, but an engaging part of the overall MoO experience.

The Mrrshans and the Alkari have bonuses in combat. The birdlike Alkari have an advantage in the maneuverability defense of their small and medium ships, making them the perfect empire for seeing swarms (flocks?) of small fighters in action. The feline Mrrshan are natural hunters and have better accuracy with beam weapons, which tends to make them a bit more effective. Unfortunately these combat-focused abilities tend to be the most “invisible” of all the special abilities in the game because they are applying modifiers to a formula that happens somewhat “under the hood” so it doesn't have the immediacy of some of the other special powers.

Boots on the Ground

Blowing up enemy ships is all well and good, but to seize control of an enemy colony you'll need to land troops and have them fight it out on the ground. The game makes no distinction between military and civilian units, if your population gets in a fight they're all issued your latest tech in terms of combat gear, armor composition, and hand weapons and expected to fight. To invade you simply ship some of your units to an enemy planet, using the same interface you'd use to send a bunch of colonists to a friendly colony. Ships in orbit can also bombard before combat, which can destroy units of population as well as factories on the ground. The factories tend to be more fragile than the population, so if you want to capture the infrastructure intact you'll generally have to fight more defending troops. Capturing intact factories gives you an opportunity to claim some of your opponent's technological discoveries, which can be a good way to get your hands on tech that you weren't able to research yourself. The bearlike Bulrathi have a bonus to their ground combat rating, which gives them an edge when it comes to taking over planets.

Diplomacy

War isn't the only way to deal with the other empires, there's also a diplomacy subsystem. When one of your systems is within range of an alien system (or vice versa) you'll make diplomatic contact with them. You'll get a sense of their attitude toward you, and you can negotiate with them for things like non-aggression pacts, economic trade deals, or to exchange technology. Trading technology can be a useful way to get important techs if you're unable to discover them through research. While the diplomacy interface can seem a little bit primitive compared to some modern 4X games the fact that you can only trade one thing at a time and not make “bundle” deals tends to limit how much the diplomacy AI can be exploited. The human special power is an advantage in diplomacy and trade deals.

It's an honor just being nominated

Periodically there will be a galaxy-wide election where the leaders of the two most populous empires run against each other to be voted emperor of the galaxy. The empires each vote based on the number of citizens they have, and it takes a two thirds majority to win. Maintaining friendly enough relations with other empires so that they're willing to vote for you can result in a win this way, or you can win if your empire is just so dominant that you can deliver two thirds of the vote on your own (which can short-circuit some of the tedium of an inevitable conquest victory).

I Spy

The diplomacy screen also lets you control your espionage program. Here there are sliders you can use to divert some of your empire's production to supporting spies in the other empires. Spies can either attempt to sabotage the enemy (blowing up factories or missile bases, or inciting planetary revolts) or steal technology. Obviously other empires don't like it when you spy on them, so it can sour relations, but sometimes you really need that tech... The mysterious Darloks get a bonus to spying, giving them an edge in this aspect of the game.

Orion

The game is called Master of Orion, and in the lore of the game Orion is the home star system of a now-extinct high-tech species. Their world is a paradise, but it's protected by an ancient automated defense system: The Guardian. The Guardian is a single powerful ship that's tough to beat even with a fleet of mid- to late-game ships. However if you do beat it you get some nice rewards: You automatically discover Death Ray technology as well as several other advanced techs, and if you colonize the Orion system itself it's a gaia environment that has 400% research productivity.

Micromanagement

The rough part of most, if not all, 4X games is that the endgame tends to bog down in micromanagement. Master of Orion isn't immune to that. While it does have some features to minimize it, such as popping up dialog boxes that let you automatically update the sliders on all your planets in order to take advantage of certain techs when you develop them, it can still be tough to keep track of everything that's going on and deal with all the alerts that tend to pop up at the beginning of each turn. One system I am very fond of, though, is that you can set a colony to automatically send any ship it builds to some other system. I tend to use this to concentrate all of my empire's production to one or two systems that serve as rally-points when I go on offense.

True Artificial Intelligence is still science fiction

Although it's a fun game, the AI probably “cheats” a bit rather than being a complex algorithm that runs its empire the same way a virtual player would, there's probably a different system that gives the AIs what they “should” have at various points in the game. There's a somewhat infamous bug where AI empires can end up with fleets of 32000 ships, which is unlikely via conventional construction and is suspiciously close to the maximum number that can fit into a 16-bit integer (that said, it's rare enough that I didn't run into it while replaying the game in preparation for this review, even though I had hoped to include a screenshot). The AIs can also seem a bit erratic at times, although there's probably a bit of a method to the madness. For example, the AIs tend to hate it when you get into too dominant a position, which can mean it's sometimes wiser not to expand as fast as possible.

Conclusion

In case it hasn't been clear so far, I love this game. I loved it when it came out, and when I fired it up again recently I found it wasn't just nostalgia, I still enjoy it quite a bit. You may have also picked up on the theme that I've been hammering: the simplifying abstractions really help make the game great. In almost every area you can see a good argument for increasing the complexity: It would be cool to see all the individual ships in your fleet, it would be cool to have an empire where your rule over assimilated aliens rather than engage in extermination campaigns, it would be cool to have to unlock different size ship hulls via the research subsystem. Many of the sequels, remakes, and homages have tried to make it work, but in my opinion they all end up achieving a worse overall effect than the elegance of the original.

My argument is that while computers and game engines may be capable of dealing with the extra complexity, the gameplay and the fun of a game doesn't happen in silicon chips but inside your brain, and it's only comfortable to keep track of a certain amount of information at one time. If a game goes beyond that it's just sound and fury, it's not actually contributing to the gameplay decisions you're making (I especially dislike it when a big chunk of gameplay is dependent on intentionally obscure formulas like in the GalCiv series, if you don't know how something works it's much harder to make meaningful decisions regarding it). There's inevitably going to be a lot going on in a game about a galactic empire, but Master of Orion builds its mechanics to give you just the right amount of fiddliness in each area to reinforce the theme without bogging you down. This game's reputation as a classic is well-deserved.