Ascendancy is an example of how gameplay limitations ruin the game experience.
In Master of Orion I you could have huge fleets of warships roaming through the space.
In Master of Orion II (significantly less successful if you ask me) there were a mechanics of "control" or smth along these lines, which limited you from having a large number of large warships by ramping up upkeep. I guess you could live with that.
Ascendancy is nice, but: You can only have N+1 ships, where N is number of your planets. This means you need to spend 90% of time developing planets (pushing "next building") with no ways to utilize your industrial output when not building a ship replacement. Boredom of managing insignificant colonies by hand is what ruins many 4X games.
It would be an understandable limitation if Ascendancy was a board game, but in a video game it's just a sign that game designers could not balance the gameplay.
Otherwise, great game. The music and the races are awesome. Tech tree is very funny.
Hah, you can just press M (I think it was M?) to automate the management of colonies. Never managed planets by hand as it's super boring and a bit pointless as you said. In general the late game is a bit bland as the AI is not very good even with the patch they delivered, but still it's quite a fun game and the 3D view was really innovative at the time.
In Master of Orion I you could have huge fleets of warships roaming through the space.
In Master of Orion II (significantly less successful if you ask me) there were a mechanics of "control" or smth along these lines, which limited you from having a large number of large warships by ramping up upkeep. I guess you could live with that.
Ascendancy is nice, but: You can only have N+1 ships, where N is number of your planets. This means you need to spend 90% of time developing planets (pushing "next building") with no ways to utilize your industrial output when not building a ship replacement. Boredom of managing insignificant colonies by hand is what ruins many 4X games.
It would be an understandable limitation if Ascendancy was a board game, but in a video game it's just a sign that game designers could not balance the gameplay.
Otherwise, great game. The music and the races are awesome. Tech tree is very funny.