The Geryk Analysis
Master of Orion 3 rebuttal

This also explains game mechanics that seem like completely superfluous details. When doing research, you might run into a Project Overruns that cost money and time. In MOO3 as is it was released, this is just dumb. Since research is largely an automated process, the Project Overrun is just another way to rub the player's nose in arbitrary events that he can do nothing about. But what if he could? You could spend IFP's to overcome Project Overruns. If technology were a real priority at that time, you might have to forgo something else you were doing to get past this scientific speed bump. In that context, it makes perfect sense.

This also explains the constantly changing research allocation sliders. Being a scientist myself, I know that the best researchers are often the most independent ones. A hands-off research policy might see your allocation sliders jumping around all the time as your scientists followed whatever projects they felt like. This might yield the fastest results. But what if you want to lock those sliders down by holding guns to your scientists' heads? Great. They'll do what you say, but it will take a lot longer. In a well-designed game, there will be tough choices to make about when to get involved, because simply the act of getting involved will - you guessed it - require IFP's. In the game as it was released, it's just frustrating and pointless, because the removal of IFP's invalidates the whole exercise. The original model was built on limited player intervention, but now you can micromanage all you want.

It's possible that removing the IFP's was simply the logical response to what had become a completely unplayable design. The problem is that as the game stands, it has one foot in this abandoned model, and one foot in empty space. The revised design did nothing except rip out the foundation for all the other game mechanics, many of which now appear kooky. Why have development plans at all, if you let the player control individual DEA's? The answer is that the player was probably not supposed to control the DEA's in the first place. This fits with the magnitude of the numbers involved in game calculation. There isn't much difference between 3,778 production points and 3,771 production points because they weren't mean to be optimized to this degree. You were just supposed to be able to tell if your viceroys were doing a good job or not. The numbers are there for evaluation, not calculation.

Likewise, the completely anonymous space combat model is incongruous precisely because you can micromanage so many other tiny details of the game. In a design where you're constantly making interesting high-level decisions, it would have been micromanaged space combat that would have seemed out of place. Without IFP's, the effect is the opposite.

It's entirely possible that, as designed, the IFP mechanism simply didn't work. It's not hard to think of reasons for this happening: an inability to design competent and believably recalcitrant AI is just one of them. But it seems insane that a game designed around a single concept can take that concept out, but leave everything else that was based on that concept untouched. The bad AI, broken diplomacy, and ludicrously clumsy interface are all problems, and to some extent inexplicable. But in the context of Imperial Focus Points much of the rest of the design makes sense. It may have been incredibly ambitious and perhaps not feasible. It would certainly have been different. It could have been spectacular if it had worked. We'll never know.

Go to the Geryk Analysis archives