As much as I love Civ games, I miss two of them sorely: Master of Orion and Master of Magic. Both of these old Microprose games were the dog’s bollocks. After years of games, nothing’s come close to being a good game and I believe it’s for the same reason. In the old days, you had restrictions on programming that caused the developer to cut out ALL extraneous bullshit.

In Master of Orion, you control a civilization race and attempt to take over the galaxy. The limitation was that the more powerful you got, the more likely an evil race of alien creatures would come and annihilate your colonies, eventually leading to a big confrontation.

Every game since then that has tried to inherit the title has been mired in the depth of reality, not realizing this is a game. Galactic Civilizations over at Stardock is the closest inheritor to Master of Orion, but even so it’s got a 1 ticket to win strategy that many civ games have.

[Hint: throw all the race configuration points into Morale and tax the fuck out of your peeps until money’s coming out your ears. While growing your culture, tech-invest in Planetary Defense and troops. If you break the tech curve, it’s over for the AI races.]

Master of Magic is Civ with mages. Very powerful mages. Sorta like the CCG game only less expensive to win at. Might and Magic is the worse, palest imitator.

Now, with the RTS imitator, there’s no game that will follow behind it. So many players are about the agressive win vs. the long term sandbox, lost in meandering thought games. The market has died.

Sad, sad, sad….