Microprose Master of Orion II Strategy Review

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Visitors rate this review
4.00 of 5,
3 votes

Price Paid:  $10.00 from EB

Summary:
Why are there not more reviews for this game? This has to be one of the finest games ever, and by for on the grounds of replay ability alone, the best 4X game ever, EVER! Come on! This game rocks, and it's old as dirt! They can't, and won't come out with a better game anytime soon. Why? Because they keep making these sorry pathetic excuses for entertainment that simply look pretty on the outside, but have no depth. I have a few other choice words for those posers, but I want this review to get posted. Anywho, the only other game that came close in my opinion was Galactic 2 something or other, I cant even remember.

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Price Paid:  $5.00 from From a Friend

Summary:
Master of Orion is a great game. Sure it is not some flashy, high quality graphics game, but its a game that is more into the actual events in the game. You manage your empire though several differant things, and once you mastered all of them, you can master the game... or better yet, Master Orion.
With the options given to you, the game is able to be played simply on several levels, from small nation, to enormus empire.
Diplomacy is something else though. I do find it rather easy to deal with other empires to easy, but I learned how to make it better by declaring war (after all my defences are up) and then trying to end the war as soon as possible, this way they arn't as predictable.
Online play was very confusing, but i usually dont play online since most people dont even have this game.
All around, this game clearly should represent almost everything there is to almost all sci-fi technology.

Out of all my games I have owned since 1998, Master of Orion 2 has been the most played and all around favorite game of mine, and for you people who like to mock people who say this by saying "oh they must have no games then"... well i have alot of games that are very good, and top quality, from command and conquer series, to a large library of Microsoft games and more. Master of Orion series is truly the game of games.

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Summary:
Summary

The true test of a great game is one that remains challenging every time you replay it, and Master of Orion II is definitely a great game by this definition. It has resource allocation, empire building, map exploration, tactical and strategic combat, good AI for non-player races, challenging research choices, and lots more. Most of the reviews have covered the features of the game, so I will focus more on specific features of the game.

One extremely good feature about MOO2 that I seldom see mentioned is how very player-friendly this game is. Everything has a helpful pop-up explanation just by right clicking on the item. World production can be set to Auto-Build, which is helpful when you have a lot of stars in your empire. You use the mouse for everything, other than typing in names of things.

Setting up a New Game.

To start a new game you must select the Difficulty, Galaxy Size, Galaxy Age, Number Players, and starting Tech Levels. You also get to select the options of Tactical Combat, Random Events, and Antarians Attack to “on” or “off”. To get the full flavor of the game, all options should be “on”.

Next you have to select a race, either one of the 13 standard races or custom design your own race. To start with, take one of the standard races. The easiest races to play are the Psilons (research), Silicoids (colonize almost anything), Klackon (production), or Sakkra (fast population growth), or Humans (diplomats and leaders). Later you will want to experiment with designing your own race.

Designing your own race is one of the neat features of the game. Trying out different racial abilities is a sure way to make each game unique. To custom design a race, you select a picture of one of the standard races. Keep in mind that the picture won’t matter to designing your race, but it will prevent that race from being one of your opponents in the game, so if you don’t like trying to keep up with the Psilon’s research, pick their picture and keep them out of the game. You get 10 picks to design your race. If you take negative attributes, you get extra picks. I recommend taking the -10% ground combat, which will give you 2 extra picks. Technology development and leaders will more than offset the ground combat penalty. The -20 ship penalty gives you 2 extra picks too, but I don’t find that trade-off worth it. You don’t want to penalize your production, revenues, or research, so on to what you DO want to pick.

Democracy or Unification is a good pick: Democracy gives you increased research and revenue, with a penalty to spying; Unification gives you more production, more food, and better spying, but no morale bonuses. In the Special Abilities section, Creative is very powerful, letting you gain all three improvements in each tech level, but expensive. Uncreative greatly restricts your research, but gives you 4 extra picks. Uncreative is frustrating but fun: you can get the items you can’t research by exchanging tech with other races, demanding tech from them (at the risk of going to war), or by conquering other worlds or capturing ships. The other very powerful ability is Telepathic, which uses up 6 picks because of all the useful bonuses it provides: spy bonus, diplomacy bonus, plus conquest of population without resorting to ground combat, and conquered population never revolts. Large home world and Rich home world are useful since most of your early production will be at your home world.

Once your race is selected or designed, pick your banner (color), world name, and leader name and get ready to conquer a galaxy.

Goals. You have several goals. First is to survive, not a trivial matter in this game. Second is to conquer the other races. Third is to capture Orion. Fourth is to conquer Antares.

Meeting other Races. Diplomacy is important. If you chose Repulsive as a racial attribute (for the 6 picks it gives you), you don’t need to worry about diplomacy because no one will like you, or make treaties with you. Otherwise, as soon as you meet another race (a new contact will always announce its presence), go to the Races button, take a look at the Report on that race to see how aggressive and/or erratic the race is. Regardless, you want to make as many friends as you can and keep them friends (until you are ready to attack them, of course), so talk to the race and propose either Trade or Research Treaty. The new race will turn you down, but don’t be discouraged, immediately propose the other one and they will usually accept, then ask for a Non-Agression Treaty. Once you have their agreement not to attack you, ask again for the treaty they declined and they will now accept it, and then break off communications. With these treaties in place, your relationship will gradually improve with that race as time goes on. I don’t recommend alliances unless you have some reason to make an alliance. Your ally will eventually call on you to help out in some war, and will not be happy if you decline to declare war. When you are ready to attack someone, pick a race you can’t negotiate or with whom you don’t have a non-aggression treaty (you’re probably not too popular with them anyway). If you have non-aggression treaties with everyone, pick the smallest race, or someone who is Erratic, Aggressive, or Xenophobic, and demand either a star system or their best tech. They will either give it to you, if you are stronger, or will declare war on you, saving you the trouble.

Exchanging Tech. Most races will trade tech with you, if you have some tech that they don’t have and if they have something you don’t. Be warned the tech items they offer in exchange will depend on how good your relationship is with that race, and they never offer their best tech or even an equivalent tech. Once you select something you would like, they will demand something better from you. On the other hand, even an unequal trade is sometimes worthwhile to gain an important tech. You always have the option to turn down the deal if they want too much for the deal. My philosophy is to only trade for items I really need and can’t get any other way. I will give them non-combat improvements, on the assumption that they will use them to build up their worlds so I can conquer the worlds later. When trading with the Psilons, give them anything they want. They will eventually research everything anyway, so not trading with them will only keep you from getting things you can use. Once you conquer Orion, everyone will want one of the special items in trade, which you want to keep for yourself, so do any tech exchanges just before you conquer Orion.

Orion: You want to take Orion as soon as you can to gain Death Ray plus 3 more random powerful non-researchable techs, and the best planet in the game to colonize . The only obstacle is the Guardian, who likes to vaporize starships and is very hard to kill. Eventually you will have ships capable of killing the Guardian, around the time you get Phasors or Gauss Cannons. Save the game before you launch an attack on Orion. Make sure no one else takes Orion before you.

Antares. The Antareans attack a random world occasionally. Their attacks start small, with one (powerful) frigate, and each subsequent attack arrives with a bigger fleet. The Antareans try to destroy any fleet or starbase, then bombard the world. If you are the unlucky target, defend if you can, otherwise keep your ships out of harm’s way and just take the damage. An early starbase isn’t much help against Antareans, but a Missile Base can defend against early attacks because the Antarean particle beams only do half damage against ground targets and their ships don’t defend well against missiles. As your tech improves your armor and weapons, you can take on the Antareans with your fleet to defend your stars. Of course if the Antareans attack someone else, they’ve helped you weaken an opponent.

The Antarean homeworld is the last challenge. They have a strong fleet with Titan class ships and a monster Star Fortress. The Fortress and Titans have Reflector fields which will bounce beam attacks back at you, and Damper Fields to reduce damage. They fire Heavy Death Rays and Particle Beams with deadly accuracy, and will try to close and capture your ships. Save the game before you go to Antares.

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Visitors rate this review
5.00 of 5,
5 votes

Price Paid:  $12.00 from Electronic Boutique

Summary:
Master of Orion was one of the pioneers of turn-based space conqueror type PC games to hit the market a way back when PCs weren't anywhere near the mainstay they are now. The follow up to it turned out to be a very ambitious piece of work. The developers really pushed the depth envelope on this sequel, some say maybe they pushed it too much.

If I had to summarize in one sentence what you do in Master of Orion 2(MOO2), I'd say you have you colonize planets, build up your infrastructure, make ships and research technologies. That’s really compressing what you do into a very thin layer. Please note, this game is ‘very’ involved. It has a fair bit of micromanagement and the learning curve is the steepest I've ever experienced. Just knowing this will turn many off but those that are patient and get fun by learning how to play and refining their strategies will not be disappointed. MOO2 has a lot of replay value as a result of this.


Starting a game of MOO2

In MOO2, part of the replay value comes from the many options that allow you to customize the starting conditions of a game. You can choose to play any one of 13 pre-designed stock alien races each with their advantages and disadvantages or you can design a customized race of your own to play. To customize your own race, you are given a certain number of picks, 10 to be precise. You can choose from many bonuses(a production bonus, a spying bonus, tolerance to unfriendly planet environments) which use up a certain amount of picks and you can also choose penalties(can't negotiate in diplomacy, not creative in your research) which give you back picks. When all added up, you cannot surpass the 10 picks you are given at the start. You can also choose to use only a portion of your 10 picks which will give you a 10% bonus to your score at the end of the game for each unused pick. Other starting options include choosing from 5 different sizes of the galaxy(small to huge), 5 difficulty levels(tutor to impossible), up to 7 opponent players(either computer controlled alien stock races or real people) and 3 levels of starting technology(pre-warp to advanced). Other options include ‘Antarans Attack’ which for beginners I would recommend to turn off until they feel they need more of a challenge. I don’t understand why there is an option called ‘Tactical Combat’, but suffice it to say that you most likely would want this option always ‘on’ so that you can control and enjoy your space battles which is where the majority of the fun is going to come from.

Winning a game of MOO2

You can win MOO2 in three different ways. The most boring way is to win a majority(2/3 of all votes) in the Galactic Council. When a certain amount of the galaxy is populated(I believe about half of it), the 2 leaders with the most population will vie for control of the council. Leaders of all the empires(including the 2 competing) have 1 vote per population in their empire. Any leader can choose to abstain from voting. Abstaining means their votes do not count for either vying leader. How you vote could have repercussions on your diplomatic relations with either or both of the vying leaders. The second way to win is to destroy all of your opponents which is standard fare for most turn-based conquering games. The third way to win is to defeat the Antarans at their homeworld. To summarize the Antarans, they are a race of highly advanced aliens that live in another dimension. If you turn the ‘Antarans Attack’ option on, they will at some point in the early to mid-game pop out of their dimension with a certain size/strength fleet and attack someone’s colony. They usually attack one of the strongest players in the game. You will have some notice before they attack as they take a few turns to reach a colony after you see them appear on the galaxy map. If you are a novice, the Antarans may prove to be too much for you if you allow them to attack. You still have the option to attack the Antarans at their homeworld if you turn their attack option ‘off’ when you start a game. The Antarans are strictly an AI controlled alien race which you cannot play. They don’t build colonies. They are a nuisance factor that can at times greatly affect the outcome of a game in some way. If you choose to win the game by destroying the Antarans, you will first have to have the ‘Dimensional Portal’ tech which you can either research, trade for or receive from a leader you hire. You will also have to have a very strong fleet to destroy the Antaran fleet and star fortress at their homeworld.

Managing your Colonies

Most of the work that you will be doing is building up colonies. Building up colonies starts with scouting and locating an appropriate planet to colonize. The galaxy map shows all the star systems in the game at the very least. To actually find out how many planets each star has and the details of each planet, you will have to send scout ships in the beginning. As your scanning technology improves, the details of the closer star systems will show without scouting. If your race has the ‘Omniscient’ pick or if you are lucky enough to get a leader with the ‘Galactic Lore’ ability, then you will see all the details of every star system on the galaxy map all the time. Each planet in the star system can hold 1 colony with the exception of Gas giants which are not colonizable. Some planets have inhospitable environments(barren, toxic, tundra, arid, radiated, high or low gravity) which although colonizable will yield less productivity from your workers and maintenance costs may also be higher. Each colonizable planet has a certain maximum population allowable. The maximum allowable depends on many things like its size, the class of the planet(Terran, Gaia, Tundra, Arid, etc…) and also how much terraforming you’ve done on it. There are certain technologies like ‘Androids’ and ‘Advanced City Planning’ that can up your max. Each player starts a game with at least 1 colony, the homeworld. It will be up to you to colonize others. This brings us to your citizens, the workhorses of your empire.

Your citizens’ duties are either to make food, produce goods or generate research. Depending on your race’s abilities, you may have bonuses or penalties to how much food, production or science each population generates every turn. For example, if you are the Psilons then your citizens have a bonus to science but a penalty to production since the Psilons are a low-gravity race. If you are the Klackons you have a bonus to production but are uncreative in your research. All the 13 stock races have their bonuses and penalties or you can custom design your own race as mentioned. There are many advancements that can improve your food, production and research output. The majority of these improvements are accomplished through your research. To give you some examples, soil enrichment will increase your food output per population, a robo miner plant will increase your production and a research lab will increase the amount of research points you earn per turn. Another thing which affects your citizen’s output is morale. Morale can be affected by a number of things like being conquered but not yet assimilated, certain structures like marine barracks, Holo Simulator, having mixed races in a colony and certain forms of government amongst other factors.

The colony screen is the screen you will be using a lot of. It shows all the colonies in your empire which you can sort in a variety of ways. It is up to you to assign each population for each of your colonies to either make food, production or research. Your first priority is always food. Make sure everyone is fed first and then you can decide how to divide the rest of your population between production or science depending on what your needs are at the time. If you really want to finish that planetary missle base soon, then you can assign the majority of your populous on production. If you want to finish that research project on pollution processing then you can assign the majority to science. If nothing is pressing then you can equally distribute your citizens between production and science. Production can be used to make colony structures, spies or ships. It can also be converted into currency(BCs or billion of credits) from trade or additional housing to boost population growth. Your empire’s currency is all pooled into one lump sum. The benefit of this is if a colony is building something and it will take many turns to complete, you can opt to pay for its completion in the next turn using BCs from the empire’s pool. For example, it will take 25 turns to complete the building of a star base. You can choose to wait 25 turns or pay 500 BC now to complete it in the next turn. Alternately you can choose to build for a few more turns and pay a lesser amount to complete it in the next turn. Once you get the hang of this game, you will be doing this a lot because if you don’t you will quickly fall behind in the tough games. The other important part of managing colonies is your tax rate and freighters. You can set the tax rate anywhere in the range of 0% to 50% in increments of 10%. The tax rate is applied to your production and the BCs go into your empire’s currency pool. Don’t set the tax rate too high for too long or else it may negatively affect morale. Freighters are ships that transport food or people between colonies. Food that is in surplus in one colony can be shipped to another that needs it. You can also distribute your population from a full colony to one that you just colonized which needs population. A common novice mistake is to not have enough freighters in the early stages of the game to make sure food surplus is distributed to the needier colonies.

Researching Technologies

As stated earlier, research is one of the three things other than food and production that the citizens of your empire provide. Research is tracked in points and your citizens will provide a certain number of these every turn. These points are applied to whatever current technology you chose to research. There are 8 fields of research in MOO2(Construction, Physics, Chemistry, Power, Sociology, Genetics, Force Fields and Computers) and you will be required to choose a technology from one of the 8 fields to which your research points every turn will be applied to until you make the breakthrough. Each field will have either 1, 2 or 3 choices but most of the time its 3 choices. If you haven’t picked the ‘Creative’ or ‘Uncreative’ race trait, then you have to choose from the 2 or 3 choices presented for a field. If you are creative then you will receive all techs in the field you chose when you make a breakthrough. If you are uncreative then a choice will be randomly picked for you at the start of the game for every field. Don’t fret though, if you are uncreative, you can look ahead and see what choice is upcoming all the way up to the top of the tech tree so you can plan a strategy in these cases. As you would expect, as you move up the tech tree, the technologies have a greater benefit and also require more research points to get a breakthrough. One downside though is you can only research one technology in one field at any one time, however you are not stuck with whatever choice you made at the beginning. If you decide you would really like to research something else when you are halfway through the research of your current choice, you can just change your choice of tech. The amount of research points that your scientists had provided for your old choice will just be moved to your new choice and you continue from there in the usual fashion. There are many technologies that you can research and if you must choose your technologies for each field, it makes for an interesting game. One early choice has you choosing between a missle base and an automated factory. Depending on your circumstances you might need a missle base badly and in foregoing the automated factory you could put yourself at a production disadvantage early as compared to your opponents. If you choose automated factory instead, then you are taking the risk of being more susceptible to attack should that happen. However, all is not lost if you wanted both because you could get the other technology either through trade, spying, colony assault or in the case of ship technology through ship capturing. More on these later.

One last note regarding ship technologies. When it comes to weapons and specials, you can ‘miniaturize’ these as you keep going up the tech tree in that particular technology’s field. For example, nuclear missle is in the Chemistry field and once you research this you will be able to equip your ships with them. They have a certain cost and size associated with them. Once you go up another level in Chemistry, the nuclear missles will miniaturize to a smaller size and cost allowing you to pack more of them into a ship. If you research yet another level in Chemistry, they will get even smaller and less costly to a certain point. You will also gain ‘mods’ as you do this. A weapon usually comes with no mods once you research it. As you research additional tech levels in its field, you will be given the option to add certain mods in the ship design screen. Modifications for missles include mirv(4 missles instead of one in each launcher), ECCM(to counter ECM), fast(reach target sooner) and heavily armoured(to better survive point defense). Modifications for torpedoes include ECCM, not reduced by range(plasma torpedoes lose strength with range), overloaded(does more damage) and enveloping(does set damage to all 4 shields and not just facing shield). Beam modifications include heavy mount(bigger version, does more damage), point defense(smaller versions used primarily against missles, fighters), continuous(better chance to hit target), auto-fire(fires 3 times with less chance to hit), armour-piercing, shield piercing and no range dissipation(most beams lose strength with range without this mod). Usually the more mods you can add, the better the weapon is but you will always have to weigh that against the additional space and cost that will be added to the ship in your design.

Ships and Combat

Here’s where all the fun is at. After all that colony building you will eventually develop an infrastructure which can build and support ships. The support for your ships comes in the form of star bases and possibly BCs. Star bases are orbiting space stations which house weapons and defense systems for protecting itself and the planet on which a colony resides. They also provide scanning for exploring near systems, monitoring the movements of your fleets and your enemies’. Each space station in your empire will give you a certain number of ‘command points’. You use these command points to support your ships. There are 6 classes or sizes of combat ships. The smallest are frigates, then destroyers, cruisers, battleships, titans and the largest are doom stars(kind of like death stars). The frigates cost 1 command point and doom stars cost 6 points. So each higher class of ship from frigates will cost you an additional point. Should you decide to build more ships than your command points dictate, then you will have to provide 10BC per turn for every point you are over. This does limit the number of ships you can have at your control. The designers must have felt that having tens to hundreds of thousands of ships in your fleet was a bit ridiculous as was the case in the first release of MOO. Star bases can eventually be upgraded to Battlestations and then to Star Fortresses which will give you more command points as well as more fire power and better scanning.

In MOO2, you design your own ships. Before I start on the details, you can have the AI make your ships and fight the battles for you by turning ‘Tactical Combat’ off but most people don’t do this because it removes the majority of the fun. Designing and re-designing ships is a necessity. You have to keep researching new technologies and incorporating them into your ship designs in order to gain an edge or just to keep up with your opponents. When you design a ship, you first select which size you want out of the 6 classes. Your best drive and best armour will automatically be in the design and is fixed. It is up to you to add weapons, shields, a targeting computer and specials to your design. Of course, you will only have so much space to add items and the cost in BCs to build the ship will be shown. A short list of weapons include the likes of lasers, mass drivers, fusion beams, graviton beams, various kinds of missles, various torpedoes, death rays, maulers and the ultimate weapon, the stellar converter. A list of specials include cloaking devices, transporters, troop pods for better boarding actions, security stations as extra defense against boarding actions, inertial stabilizers and nullifiers for better ship movements, heavy armour, hard shields as defense against shield piercing weapons, automated repair unit which repairs damage each round and a host of others that will make your head spin. MOO2 allows you to refit your old ships with better weapons, shields and specials or if you like you can just scrap your old ships for BCs in return. The drive on your ships will all automatically be upgraded as you research better ones, no refitting required. Better drives give you more movement points in combat and also improve your beam defense rating. Armour cannot be refitted nor automatically upgraded. This is the only situation where you have to build a new ship from a new design to get the better armour. Better armour will increase the amount of damage your ship can take before being destroyed and better shields will block and absorb more damage from non-piercing weapons.

During combat your shields will absorb damage first, then your armour and then the ship’s structure until the ship’s integrity is compromised and explodes. There are shield-piercing and armour-piercing weapons which help you destroy a ship a bit easier. There is also a chance that whenever damage is done to the structure that a system will be damaged or destroyed. For example, it is possible that your shield system, certain weapons or specials on your ship may be damaged or destroyed in an attack. The automated repair unit special can help you immensely in this regard, unless it gets destroyed of course. A notable mention is there are 2 attack systems used to calculate the chances to hit. There is one system which calculates an attack made with a beam weapon and one system which calculates an attack made with a missle or torpedo. Basically, any weapon that is not a missle or torpedo is considered a beam in this case. Beam weapons utilize a targeting computer on the firing ship which increases the beam’s chances of a hit. As you upgrade the targeting computer, the beam’s chances to hit get better. Missles and torpedoes have a self-targeting system onboard and do not require a targeting computer on the firing ship. As a result of this, missles and torpedoes can be jammed with ECM(Electronic Countermeasures) but this effect can be lessened with the ECCM(Electronic counter-countermeasures) modification installed in the missle/torpedo. Other combat goodies that I haven’t touch on include bombs which do good damage and never miss the target. You can also create carrier type ships which hold squadrons of fighters, bombers and combo fighter/bombers. The one caveat about missles and squadrons is once you are in a battle, you have a certain amount of them for that battle. Once you run out of missles or if your squadrons are all shot down, the supporting ship will not re-equip until you exit that battle and re-enter another one. With torpedoes, you have a limitless supply of them but you can only shoot them every other round due to reloading delays. You can fire your beam weapons every round as long as they are not damaged or destroyed.

Your ships have crew onboard who operate it. The more experience they gain in routine operations and in surviving combat, the more effective they will become. This translates into bonuses for ship offense, defense and boarding actions. They all start ‘green’ and can eventually graduate to elite status. If your race has the ‘Warlord’ pick then they can attain ultra-elite status and enjoy bonuses that non-warlord races cannot get.

Other than ship to ship combat, there are other forms of attack like orbital assault on a colony and invading a colony. When you attack a colony, you first will have to deal with its defenses that can come in the form of ships, star base and ground defense systems. If you are able to scan a colony, you will see all of its defenses listed in the galaxy map system summary before sending your attack fleet to the system. If you can’t see the defenses, then you will have to wait until your fleet arrives at the system to see its defenses. If you decide to attack a colony, you will have to eliminate all defenses first. In addition to a star base and ships, you might have to contend with a missle base, a fighter squadron base and a beam defense system stationed on the planet. After you eliminate all defenses, you can then decide whether to bombard the colony, invade it, do nothing and just blockade it or if your race is ‘Telepathic’ you can just take it over using your mind control capability. You can bombard the colony until certain structures and/or infantry are destroyed to your liking to soften it up for invasion or you can just bomb it flat destroying the colony outright. If you decide to invade then your infantry in all your troop transports disembark on the planet and fight it out with the defending infantry. Who wins will depend on many things like armour, hand weapon used, special equipment used like a personal shield, leader bonuses, race bonuses/penalties and of course, luck. If the attacker wins, they gain control of the colony. There is a possibility of the attacking side discovering technology that they did not have before taking over a colony. Be warned though, when you take over a colony it will be susceptible to rebellion. If rebels are successful, they will retake the colony and it will fall back into the control of the previous owners. When seizing control of a colony, you should fill it up to the max with your infantry, build a marine barracks and a alien control center(to help with assimilation) in the colony as soon as possible to reduce chances of rebellion actions. If your race is telepathic, then you will not have these troubles since mind controlling instantly assimilates the conquered race.

Colony Leaders and Ship Officers

Leaders in MOO2 can greatly affect the performance of your empire. There are 2 kinds of leaders, colony and ship. You can have 4 of each kind of leader. During the game you will at times be offered services from a leader. Most of the time you will have to pay a fee up front and then a certain amount of upkeep every turn for their services. Sometimes a leader will be independently wealthy and will only ask for a fee upfront with no upkeep and better yet will contribute 10BC to the empire every turn. You will have to decide whether a leader has the skills that can best help your empire and at the same time is not too costly. The very cheap leaders will only have 1 skill and the more expensive ones will have up to 5 skills. Colony leader skills include bonuses to food, production, science, money, spying(internal, external or both), morale, pollution processing and population growth. Ship leaders skills include bonuses to beam defense, beam offence, navigation, ship’s drive rating, beam damage, ground troop combat rating both in an attack role or in a defensive role and fighter pilot offense/defense. Both leaders can possible have the wealthy skill mentioned earlier, a bonus to your trade and the famous skill. The famous skill will increase the chances of attracting other leaders and will also reduce the upfront fee by a certain amount. As the game progresses, the leaders that you keep will eventually gain a level. Combat seems to give ship leaders more of an experience boost than in peace times. Sixth level is the highest level a leader can attain and their starting level when they offer you services can be any level 1 thru 6. As they gain levels, their skills improve and this results in bigger bonuses for your empire. Should a leader be killed in ship combat or in an attack on a colony they are assigned to, they are gone for the remainder of that game. If you wish, you can unassign leaders in which case they are safe from attack but at the same time the colony or ship you unassigned them from will not receive the benefits from their skills anymore.

Other aspects of MOO2

Diplomacy allows you to negotiate many things. Diplomacy can be used to forge trade or research treaties. Once a treaty of this kind is signed, you will start with a negative amount of BCs or research points which will steadily increase to a point where you have a substantial bonus to your money or research as long as you stay friends and keep the treaty with the signing empire. Other treaties include a non-aggression pact and an alliance. A non-aggression pact states that neither side will attack the other’s fleet and fleet passage through the other’s empire is not frowned upon. An alliance means getting involved in each other’s wars. Any of the treaties mentioned can be negated by either side. Of course, a declaration of war on an empire will negate all treaties you have with them. Diplomacy will also allow you to exchange technologies. Depending on your relations with the other empire and the personality of the leader, you will be able to exchange technologies either on par or above/below it. The better your relations, the better your exchange could be. There are other factors which will influence this like Colony/Ship leaders which have a bonus to diplomacy and certain technologies which will grant you a bonus in your diplomatic relations. These diplomatic bonuses will only affect AI opponents of course. Human opponents will do whatever they want in negotiations. Other diplomatic actions include demanding a 5% or 10% tribute from an empire, demanding control of a star system as tribute, demanding that spying activities from a rival empire is stopped and offering a gift to another empire in the form of money, technology or a star system.

Spying is another part of this game. There are 2 roles when it comes to covert operations. Agents which try to uncover spying in your empire and spies which try to infiltrate a rival empire. Agents are needed to prevent and possibly kill spies from other empires operating in yours. Spies are used to steal technology or to sabotage a defense system or building. The 3 commands for spies are espionage(steal tech), sabotage(destroy something) or just hide. Agents don’t require orders but it is up to you to allocate agents to spying outside the empire or just keep them at home for defense. Research and leaders can help you with these spying activities.

Boarding actions and ground combat can accomplish a few things. A boarding action, which refers to troops from one ship attacking an enemy ship, can either raid it or capture it. The purpose of raiding is to disable the ship in some manner. If your raid is successful, at least 1 weapon, defense or special system will be destroyed and depending on the gap in technology between the forces you could seriously cripple a ship or the entire attacking crew could be wiped out without a scratch to the boarded ship. Capturing a ship will require the attackers to completely eliminate all defenders. Raiding has better chances at success since it does not require you to eliminate every defender. Capturing a ship could add a very good ship to your fleet without the time or money needed to make it yourself. If the captured ship contains technologies that you do not have and would like to acquire, you can scrap the ship for BCs AND for tech you do not have. If the ship contains many techs you do not have, you may not discover them all on a scrap. This brings us back to the Antarans. They have technologies that are very good and not researchable. The only ways to acquire them is to either capture one of their ships when they attack you or if you manage to defeat the Guardian at the Orion system. Neither of these feats is easy, especially for the novice player. The Antarans have very good ground combat bonuses and as a result is very difficult to capture. The Antarans frigates are your best bet at capturing since it has the smallest crew. The Guardian is a Titan class ship packed with some good systems onboard. A totally automated ship which was built by the late Orions to protect their system from intruders. Should you manage to destroy this ship, you will win many prizes indeed. First, you will acquire 4 non-researchable techs that should put you in a very good position tech wise for the rest of the game. Second, you will acquire a very good ship by the name of Avenger which contains very good systems onboard. The Avenger is piloted by none other than Loknar, probably the best ship leader in the game. Loknar who is the last of the Orions, can be re-assigned to another ship in your fleet if you choose to. Last, but definitely not least, you acquire the Orion system when contains a huge, Gaia planet. This planet is heads and shoulders above all the other planets on the galaxy map. This planet will give you a significant food/production/research advantage in the game, if you can keep it from falling into your enemies’ hands. The earlier you capture an Antaran ship or destroy the Guardian, the greater your advantage over your opponents will be.

Another random element in the game that can alter its outcome other than the Antarans attacking, are events. Events can happen in many forms to any player in the game at any time. An event can be a space monster that attacks a colony, a star that will supernova soon, pirate activity which affects trade, an outbreak of a disease, a hyperspace flux which prevents ships from moving and a host of others that can sometime show up at the most inopportune moments. Most of these events can be dealt with in some fashion if you have the capability to(like diverting research points to cure a disease or sending a fleet to deal with pirates) and some just have to be waited out regardless.

The manual that is included in the full retail box is a very good manual considering what you can expect from a typical game manual. If you want more detail on how the game works, FAQs that you can find on the internet can help you immensely in this regard especially if you want to know how everything is calculated or have a better condensed reference at hand. Discussions on strategies, tactics and racial picks can be found in the alt.games.moo2 usenet group. Be sure to get the v1.31 patch to correct a bunch of bug and balancing problems from v1.0. There are still bugs in v1.31 but they are almost all logic bugs and not crashing bugs. MOO2 can be played in straight DOS or a WIN9x system. Some have reported issues in Win2k but it sounds like this is a matter of updating your video drivers. I didn’t talk much about multi-player but suffice it to say that these options like MODEM, NULL-MODEM, LAN, KALI and HOTSEAT play are available. However there is no play-by-email capabilities. I was disappointed that you couldn’t play by email as you can in Alpha Centauri. The word on LAN play is its a bit unstable. You may not find HOTSEAT a suitable mode of play for a game that takes a least a couple hundred turns to finish on average but some have managed this just fine. I believe your best bet for multiplayer is KALI over an internet connection but most likely you will be buying this game primarily for single player mode.

Conclusion

If there is any downside to MOO2, I’d have to say it’s the amount of micromanagement that is involved when building up your colonies. It takes a while to get a decent infrastructure setup, especially for novices. There are ways to minimize the micromanagement. If you choose a small or medium galaxy size with an appropriate amount of opponents, you can get into a fight relatively early without waiting so long for the for the galaxy to fill up and initiate contact with your opponents. Choosing a starting technology age of ‘advanced’ can also get a game rolling sooner instead of starting with pre-warp tech. The other possible downside, as mentioned at the start, is the learning curve. This is a matter of taste of course. Good games that have a high learning curve tend to stand the test of time, but that is only if you have the patience! If you dislike high learning curves or turn based games, then MOO2 is not for you. If you don’t mind, then MOO2’s depth and replayability is still one of the best around.

Vince

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Summary:
Literally the second best game I have ever played! (After the awesome BG series)Everyone must own this game...maybe I'll make it my life's mission.........