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Ewanchyna: To start with, I'd highlight one aspect
of the genre and build the game around that. This helps to
rank what's important and what can be hidden by automation.
By providing a lot of automation you can get around many
micromanagement issues. As long as you provide a flexible
way to turn it off, you gain the high-resolution inserts you
need in a genre like this. I'm not saying you should skip
details, just automate things so the player doesn't have to
baby-sit everything. By providing an executive view of things
and allowing the player to drill down on particular aspects,
micromanagement is no longer necessary unless the player asks
for it. This, of course, requires a lot of coding.
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Emrich: In two ways. First, we introduce MACROmanagement.
Second, we add “Imperial Focus.” By macromanagement,
I mean we’ve taken the scale of the game “up”
a level. You actually make more strategic decisions and fewer
tactical ones in MOO3. That is, you’ll have to do real
politics in the Orion Senate and among your own civilization,
but you won’t be firing every weapon on every ship in
every battle. By issuing imperial edicts, you can set sweeping
policies for everything from production to domestic policy
and from foreign policy to the sweep of battle. Conversely,
however, MOO3 is richer in detail than its predecessors. And
players can get “under the hood” during the game
and really tweak some very hard core micromanagement stuff
if they want to. That’s where Imperial Focus comes in.
You can only do so many things each game turn; the rule is
'you can do anything, just not everything on a single turn'.
Yeah, you can mess with every single build queue on the third
moon of Grubb VII, but that’s one of your precious Imperial
Focus points gone for that turn. Instead, you could have issued
an edict to all Frontier Worlds to focus their energy on defense
construction, but you wanted to concentrate on just this one
world. The neat part is that a small empire can more easily
micromanage, while a big empire really must macromanage more.
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