Master Of Orion II for Dummies

[MetalCraze]

For me actually. Are there any worthy (fan)sites with hints, tips and tricks and some kind of quick-start guide to quickly learn the basics of the game?

 

[Fenril]

That would be stealing your fun, you need to have had at least a couple of failed games before you are able to win easily.

Fortunarely Moo2 has plenty of options to customize to get the kind of game you want, if I remember correctly.

If you want guide imput go to fucking gamefaqs or something.

 

[MetalCraze]

I don't want to win. I started to play only very recently and I just want to know if it is normal that for several dozens of turns "Housing" did really nothing to be noticeable and if clicking turn button for several dozens of times at the beginning of the game (because you have no other options) is normal too (seems like a waste of time for me, or probably I'm not hardcore enough or forgot/miss something). As well as the research menu. F.e. by default it supplies only military options, but when I click f.e. on construction button I see that there is an option to research automated factories, but clicking on it does nothing (I can't switch from any military option to it). Now I understand that I probably need to meet some criteria or something but even after I continuosly research military stuff the game just throws more military stuff to research at me (which is really awesome, but I want to make my poor, rock eating world... you know... more socialized or something).

 

[bardon777]

This should help, spec chapter 6 & 7:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin ... 7873/14668

 

[Destroid]

Also, you can right-click on just about anything in the game to get an explanation.

 

[bozia2012]

Kids these days...

 

[MetalCraze]

Also, you can right-click on just about anything in the game to get an explanation.

I know that. I'm new to MoO2, that doesn't mean I'm new to PC gaming or global strategies in particular.

 

[sqeecoo]

This is an excellent guide that tells you (almost) everything you need to know:
http://masteroforion2.blogspot.com/2005 ... guide.html

Warning: it makes the game almost too easy against the AI - it's designed for multiplayer. You get great insight into the game though, and you don't always have to play "optimally".

 

[MetalCraze]

I won't read it all though, I'm not interested in an easy victory, just some basics about game mechanics to get the party started.

 

[spectre]

Might be helpful if you told us what you haven't quite grasped yet.

A few hints (tl;dr alert):

(o)Especially on higher difficulties it is preferable to make one's own custom race.

Suggested Picks (meaning, the ones I use mosto f the time (-:
Cybernetic - Eating 50% Production and 50% food is a mixed blessing, but allows you to ignore farming (useful, cause you can feed a whole world using Hydroponic Farms and Freighters. Later in the game,

Creative - must pick on higher levels, imo. Unless you want a challenge. It's a totally different game if you cannot research *everything*, so you might try some time what it's like to have to exchange technology on a regular basis.

Subterranean - Additional space on planets is great, as it boost your overall empire effectiveness.

For penalties, I say it's safe to go for ground combat penalties, perhaps handicap you ships a bit.
Food production penalty is good coupled with cybernetic (or lithovore), growth and income penalties can be fixed with research and setting a few planets to bild Housing/Trade until desired results.

Good but not stellar picks:

Different governments other than the standard Dictatorship are nice, but each has its quirks. Unification, on the one hand, would be perfect for max production race, but it invalidates morale bonuses (and penalties to be fair) which, later in the game can give above 50% efficiency bonus

TheMocracy gives muniez and the all-important research, but comes with an espionage penalty, for which you have to compensate asap.

Feudal comes with a penalty, because it handicaps research. Though it an be interesting for a ship aggro game.

Home world improvements - they are cheap, so feel free to give yourself an edge while buiding up, if you have an extra point or so.

Picks I'd Avoid:

This is just my personal opinion, but I find Lithovore overrated. At 10 points why not pick unification and a bouns to production?

Repulsive - problem is, it simplifies diplomacy (which is already quite simple). Why dumb down your game more?

Uncreative - Research is uber in MOO don't handicap yourself that way.

Research & Production penalties - this can be made up for, but you're essentially crippling your early game. Not good.

Production bonuses - this may be just me, but I don't find them that useful, outside special circumstances. Also, you can quickly research buildings to simulate these effects (and you'll get plenty of opportunieties to reasrch such upgrades for yourself, so that a meager +1 might go unnoticed in the long run) .

Overall: look for combos and capitalize on them. See what it's like to have a race with bazillions of cash with Income bonus + democracy + fantastic taders, or a Unification + Production bonus + Cybernetics production behemoth.

(o)This game rewards research big time. Invest in it a lot, ideally have all your "poor" planets focus exclusively on it. Avoid penalizing your research at all costs. Uncreative IS a crippling drawback

Things you'd rather research early:

Battle Pods - the extra space is imperative to design a good ship.

Automated Factory & Laboratory - so that you get a slight edge in both areas. Plus, they're really low on the tech tree.

Terraforming + Radiation shield - so that you can colonize any planet except for toxic.

Titan & Death Star construction - for the ultimate ships.

Tachyon Communications - for the added bonus that lets you have more ships without maintenance.

There are other, even more important ones, notice how the choices become even harder if you are not creative - should I get the better factory now, or trade for it, or wait until I can research the better one. etc.
Overall, if you're planning on fighting a war, focus your effort on better weapons (beam weapons or missles, there's many choices), otherwise choose resaerch that upgrades the area you feel is the most lacking at the moment. From experience, unless you need some boost in Diplomatic ability, you can ignore the Sociology branch.

Different research usefulness also varies from game to game. In a small galaxy, with lots of asteroids and gas giants, Planetary Construction is invaluable.

(o)Leaders - they are unfortunately random, but can really aid you in your early game (and their bonuses become massive later on). Decide what you need most at the moment, and plan ahead if you want to specialize whole star systems.
It all depends what strenght and weaknesses your race has, a spiritual bonus is worthless for Unification governments, Megawealth can fix your finances early on etc. etc.

(o)Spying. Don't neglect it. It can help you get an edge in research, and can also help win a war (by disabling a pesky star base for instance). You can even make two empires fight one another by framing them. Even if you don't want to do these, be sure to have a tight spy network. Messages that someone just stole your hard earned tech are plain annoying (and the sole reason Darloks don't survive long in my games).

(o)In ship design, it is simple. If you have bigger guns and bigger ships, you win. You should look for combos, just like in race design. Some are more obvious, some are less.

A few examples: Good shields plus Shield capacitors, Cybernetic Race plus Automated Repair Unit and Advanced Damage control for really tough ships.

Or, the component that doubles damage bypassing shields plus weapons with Shield Piercing Modification.

Or the uber combo of two components (at the end of Field and Power trees): one enables you to cloak your ship with 100% efficiency, but you have to skip the turn, the other which allows you to take two turns in a row.

(o)Don't neglect your protection, the AI will exploit it (especially on harder difficulties) and either backtab you with superior fleet or do agressive espionage. So have both bases covered.

And, best of all, have fun. There's lots of opportunities to do it in Moo2 - experiment with different combos and difficulties. There is a whole new level of fun, when you play as a physically puny Psilon, quickly rush some tech to crush nearby Klackons, then use them as cheap labor in your factories.

 

[sqeecoo]

Creative is not at all need, especially if you pick Tolerant. In fact, picking creative is quite sub-optimal unless you absolutely refuse to use missiles and want to go for some specialized ion-cannon strat.
A non-creative race can use its picks to hugely out-colonize and thus out-tech a creative race.

Repulsive is a great pick, since diplomacy is not very interesting anyway.

Unification is by far the best government, since you can out-produce and out-colonize anyone, and end up with so much planets you greatly out-tech anyone too. Democracy is fun if you plan a long game with only 3-4 systems. It's usually sub-optimal though. Any other government is suicide.

Population is king, and population-enhancing picks are a must.

 

[Destroid]

Well heres some tips then:

Build freighters early - you need 1 freighter to move 1 unit of food to a colony that can't produce any of their own.

To improve your range you can build outposts - these are drastically cheaper than colonies and faster than researching better fuels. Also if you colonise a planet that already has an outpost on it you get a free marine barracks.

Don't max out every colony on buildings - the maintainence will kill you.

Fleet control points are vitally important, you get more of them by building more starbases and from some techs. If you go over this limit you will rapidly become bankrupt unless you have a monster economy.

Research Class III shields as fast as you can.

Missiles are probably best early on, switch to beams later when you have better computers.

You can move colonists from one colony to another with freighters, this will use 4 freighters for several turns (good way to maximise your population growth).

Production is king.

Creative is a good pick for beginners I think so you can get a good feel for which techs are useful and which ones arnt - if you go into the game as a regular guy or uncreative you will find yourself with a whole lot of niche or garbage technologies. Repulsive is a bad pick to take while a beginner, makes the game a lot harder.

 

[bgillisp]

Here's some stuff I learned playing the game in hot seat mode on impossible difficulty with a friend (we were sadisitic in those days):

Fedualist and +2 to research is not too bad a combo. The +2 to research almost negates Fedualists penality in the early game, and the Fedual bonus to ship production let me keep enough of an army up to at least look like I was able to defend myself if I was attacked

Creative I found not as useful as the other posters. Usually in a harder difficulty game I could trade for most if not all the techs I needed/wanted in a game. The exceptions were the later tier techs, as usually by that point in the game there were only 2 - 4 survivng races and we all seemed to research the same techs. However, I would suggest your first game (or couple of games) be with a creative race just so you can learn well what all the techs do and how to use them. After that, I found it minimally useful at best.

I found shields so worthless in this game as they blocked so little damage, and regenerated so slowly. I usually only researched them if I had an open slot there, which was rare. The exception are the planetary shields.

That's my $.02, hope it helps some

 

[Destroid]

Graviton beams are the closest beam tech to class 3 shields - they do 3-15 std and 5-22 on a heavy mount. A pulson missile is the other weapon available at this level, doing 20 damage.

That means the 3 damage block by class 3 shields reduces the damage you take by at least ~15% and substantially more than that against beams. This damage reduction functions even when your shields are down.

Lacking shields also makes you vulnerable to a range of weapons such as ion pulse cannons and graviton beams (both of which have extra effects if they deal damage past your shields). You are also much easier to board.

 

[MetalCraze]

Wow nice tips everyone, more than I needed tbh.
I started with the creation of my race of course, presets are boring. I'm not a total newb to such strategy games so by basics I've meant not such basics. Anyway I've called my race - "RPG Codex" which originates from the #fallout system to bring death to all human race which is Codex' secret goal. I took diplomatic and war-related perks of course (Warlord and Charismatic).
I already became an emperor of the galaxy on my very first "playthrough" (by building lots of cruisers with shitty weapons and zerg-rushing the race trying to get the throne to death, they even gave me techologies and a star system just to make me stop the rape which didn't stop me from taking that and raping them further) and it looks like there is more and more to game than that. I also enjoy how you can make every race in the galaxy hostile towards your opponent using bribe and diplomacy - and then watch how the mightiest empire in the Galaxy turns to ashes under the pressure of all races.

I haven't tried GalCiv2 yet though - so a question - is it on a par with MoO2 which I adore as of now?

 

[Destroid]

I have yet to find a more satisfying 4x game than moo2.

 

[GarfunkeL]

And when you get bored with MOO2 (crazy I know but it happens) you can pick up Space Empires V. I like it better than the GalCiv's. And SE V is not as dry spread-sheet gaming as the older ones were. It's mechanics are pretty different from MOO so it might take a bit to get into it (atleast took for me but meh, maybe I'm just retard).

In my Moo2 games, I usually just colonize a dozen worlds or so, build some ships to just defend myself and research my ass off. In the end, I build couple of Doom Stars with Stellar Converters and blow the rest of the galaxy away.

And while in MOO, huge fleets of small crafts could swarm big ships, that doesn't work in Moo2, so bigger is almost always better.

 

[Destroid]

In moo2 small vs big is balanced in that smaller ships allow you to build firepower faster, bigger ships fit much more firepower into your control limit. So depending on what is your limited resource, you build acoordingly.

 

[Monocause]

I DO recommend to try MoO3 when you beat the second one to death. The game gets lots of bashing, most of it is justified, but I think it's worthy to see the game's big potential. Even with all MoO3 flaws I love it, and feel it's a shame that the development didn't take a year longer to get everything done correctly.
Still I've spent hundreds of hours on this one and had lots of fun. If you'll try MoO3, be sure to get 1.25 patch first as the game is pretty much unplayable without it. Also, never play the game on easy. I mean, never. Somehow they screwed up the AI on that difficulty setting and instead of making it easier they made it nonexistent.
And I don't recommend playing on mammoth maps. That means you'll have fifty battles every turn and twenty bombardments and it just gets tedious; plus you'll spend 200 turns to conquer one opponent with his 500 planets. Once you get a grip of the game, try playing on small or medium cluster with max number of civs, gets really intense because of the need for aggresive takeovers and makes diplomacy actually important.

 

[bgillisp]

Graviton beams are the closest beam tech to class 3 shields - they do 3-15 std and 5-22 on a heavy mount. A pulson missile is the other weapon available at this level, doing 20 damage.

That means the 3 damage block by class 3 shields reduces the damage you take by at least ~15% and substantially more than that against beams. This damage reduction functions even when your shields are down.

Lacking shields also makes you vulnerable to a range of weapons such as ion pulse cannons and graviton beams (both of which have extra effects if they deal damage past your shields). You are also much easier to board.

True, but I found that by the time you get to plasma guns and such the enveloping feature of those weapons made a mnor 3 point reduction (10 at most with the best shield) so insignificant that it wasn't worth it. I usually always had the best armor in the game, and 3 points of 3600 meant nothing to me. Yes, there is vunerablilty to ion pulse cannons, but I found the computer AI was smart enough to put powerful weapons that took out the shields before firing the ion pulse cannons anyways, so was a moot point (lose my shields before they fire the ion pulse, or lose my armor then they fire the ion pulse. Either way I'm probably dead). And any human I ever played against did that as well.

Usually, if I found I needed shields I traded for them, but I focused more on killing the enemy before they could board or destory me. Plus, you can't have shields with hard shields (reduces all damage by 1/4) on the ship, which I got 90 - 95% of the time by the endgame.

Though I'm sure opinons vary. And I usually did manage to get class III or V at some point in the game via a trade (or a free research slot), just wasn't an early focus or mine is what I'm saying

 

[Nightjed]

the thing i always hated from moo2 is that if i either play turtle (researching everything a building and huge ass fleet but not exploring that much) or if i play expansionist (build bases in every single world and then terraform them) my game suddently stops after a while before im even ready to start the real fighting because those alien assholes decide that fighting sucks so "lets vote for it" and, of course, if i went turtle i lose and if i went expansionist i win, you are not even given an option to not recognize the new "universe government" and declaring war on them,
the game just suddently stops, gives you the finger and then you either lose or win depending on how many ppl you have in total, then the game gives you the finger again and game over, damn, thats so fun...

so if you really want to "win" without a sweat just concentrate in expanding, terraforming and defending the bases somewhat (the starbases are usually efective enough since you wont get into wars until the very end if ever), if you get aliens near you just be a jerk and build outposts everywhere, they wont attack them in the beginning giving you time to build the colonization ships

edit: actually just screw moo2 and go play master of magic, now that one is a classic, if the ai would just be smarter and STOP building EVERYWHERE which forces you to either manage 50k towns or lose fame by razing everything it would be even better

 

[MetalCraze]

the thing i always hated from moo2 is that if i either play turtle (researching everything a building and huge ass fleet but not exploring that much) or if i play expansionist (build bases in every single world and then terraform them) my game suddently stops after a while before im even ready to start the real fighting because those alien assholes decide that fighting sucks so "lets vote for it" and, of course, if i went turtle i lose and if i went expansionist i win, you are not even given an option to not recognize the new "universe government" and declaring war on them

Actually you can
First of all you can abstain and there is a chance noone will get enough votes if you didn't spend time sitting on one planet of course.
Second - when you "win" you can refuse to accept the title. In that case it is given to your opponent and the whole galaxy except your systems goes under his flag. After that you can fight his imperial machine.

Also it is possible to win by turtling till the end. On my first playthrough I didn't make a single shot - just was a cool diplomat and all - and all races except for my opponent voted to make me an emperor.
I reloaded though and didn't give my votes for myself so I continued the game further.

 

[Nightjed]

i got voted by 10% of the galaxy (+ my 72% :D) when i played expansionist and i spent most of the game terraforming and stealing tech i dunno why they liked me i never really talked much (but judging by mom's ai that suddenly hates you for no reason i guess its totally random), i thought if i abstained i would just let the other win, never tried it like that, it really pissed me off because i was about to kick some Ankaran (or it was Antaran ?) ass

 

[dragonfk]

Re Nightjed:

Antaran


Personally I find MoO a better game that MoO2. Ofcourse sequel has a number of improvements that I would like to see in MoO, but still I better like combat and planet management in the first part. Overally I find MoO interface a lot better than succesor. So I would get combat, planet management from MoO; espionage, research, planet administrators from MoO2 and diplomacy (senate!!), history, starlanes from MoO3. Ow and AI from GC2.

My perfect 4X game. Come on Stardock throw GC franchise to garbage and make me addicted once again to games with your MoO4!!

 

[MetalCraze]

You do know that Wardell said that GC3 will have tactical combat (this time for sure)? Now if only more people would've whined on stardock's forums about how game needs administrators/fleet commanders we would've a chance to get that ideal 4X game.
Also GC2 has some kind of senate too (except it is more like UN).
But yeah another thing I dislike about GalCiv is that it has all solar systems easily reachable by simply moving your fleet to them whereas in MoO you really need to -travel- to another system. GC2 has many other things that make it inferior to MoO2 though like easier planet management (no need to think about food) and only bonuses during race creation/development. It is hard to compare the two though as they are very different in many other things.