What was the name of that game...?

You are probably thinking of Star Control. You get a Precusrors ship and can send probes to planets to collect resources to buy new ships(allied types that you have garnered) and upgrade your Precursor ship. they carried that series to 3 or 4 games then stopped.

I personally think it is one of the classics of the space genre. I would love to see a new release.. increased graphics and real time tactical combat(which it had, but the engine for it was , is pretty antiquated)... but I would be sad if they tried to revamp the actual mechanics too much.. see MOO3 regarding unneeded tinkering destroying a classic space game series.

Cheers!

Glad to know that I'm not the only one that thinks MOO3 was unplayable. MOO2 still rocks, though!

This game is the real successor to MOO2, much better than MOO2 frankly.

SD

sounds a lot like starflight - I played that on the megadrive but there was a dos version too.

you could stun and capture the critters, and sell them, right?

and suns were going nova and you had to find out why...

is that the game?

Star Control II

see MOO3 regarding unneeded tinkering destroying a classic space game series.

Amen to that. What a waste of a mega-franchise. Do you reckon they even played the game themselves? Personally i reckon they hired my companies new business team for a few days to beta test the game ( A bunch of useless data inputers who still don't know where their bum is) And is this symptomatic of todays gaming industry? By this i mean are the developers of games in most companies today merely coders or players themselves.

This game is the real successor to MOO2, much better than MOO2 frankly.

Pardon? I'm sorry, but the second half of your statement is wrong on a number of levels. let me explain.

Moo2 had tak combat - gc2 does not.
there was definitely more variety with weapons and planetary defences with moo2
And if i was coldly cynical and really nasty most of the best concepts in gc2 were boldly taken from Moo2. All that gc2 has added to the pot is lego ship building and better graphics.

Atari A.K.A. Infogrames hear me NOW! Remake MOO2, you won't regret it. All you need to do is improve the AI and the graphics and some more nice features would be cool too. Do this and the sin that is/was MOO3 will be forgotten!

later

Just in case you want to once again play Star Control 2, you can get a nice version of the game from http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ . I am pretty sure that that version of the game plays all the way through.

The group that made SC1 and SC2 did NOT make SC3. Much like MOO, SC3 was 'upgraded' graphically and basically made that game a total waste of time. The one thing that made SC2 so interesting was the player controlled combat and melee modes. Check it out and see what you think.

SpZ

Yeah, it's Star Control 2. Starflight didn't have a "mothership" that you upgraded, and the first Star Control didn't have resource gathering with planetary landers.

Hey thanks for the link!

Off to find the Snathi homeworld, now that we have the coordinates

Moo2 had tak combat - gc2 does not. there was definitely more variety with weapons and planetary defences with moo2 And if i was coldly cynical and really nasty most of the best concepts in gc2 were boldly taken from Moo2. All that gc2 has added to the pot is lego ship building and better graphics.

MOO2 did have tactical combat, but the AI couldn't use it. I always went tactical, because I would win far more games by planning how far away to be at the end of each turn...Or was that Space Empires IV?

I didn't like the tactical combat in MOO3; I always set it for automatic, so that my ships would launch fighters and missiles. Nor was it a good idea to force a player to choose to fight/flee without any information on who is engaging in battle. It was also poor design to insist that players assign this type of ship to this 'ring' and have so many of that type of ship in a fleet--the programmers were "playing" for the players. Then the players had to create hack ships that say they are one thing, but are loaded to be another. MOO3 sucked.

GalCiv2 has added, as was derisively noted, the best implementation of ship building that has been built so far; a definite step foreward. It has also lost some of the better features of GalCiv-1 during the transition to pretty graphics. Not so good.

Could someone else do a better job with GalCiv2? Not likely. Look what happened to Starfleet Command. SFC was nerfed into a first person shooter by a different team.