Can’t speak about Jeff, but I sure added it to my GoG wishlist.
Need to stop dying landing in inappropriate places in Starflight 2 for the time being.
Dude, you can’t land on gas giants, stop trying. There’s nothing down there I keep telling you!
MOO2 is probably better in many ways - art and graphics, style, music, atmosphere. But MOO did have at tighter design. The late game of MOO2 was just tedious, and in many ways the combat just wasn’t as satisfying for mashing large fleets against one another. You could field hundreds of ships in MOO!
SotS - which I still maintain as the best of the bunch - in in many ways a modern incarnation of MOO1. (It could have used a better design for the trading system, and this is actually something some of the more recent mods fix. I’d love to extract that part out as its own mod. Sadly the issue with huge fleets isn’t resolved, but you rarely deploy massive numbers in one location anyway.)
With all this talk I fired up MOO. I think I’ve played it just a bit in the past - not enough to really know the ins and outs of playing. I think I used a medium galaxy, 5 opponents, normal difficulty and I just lost as the humans. I need to actually read the manual so I know what’s going on. I mean, I definitely understand the basics but I’d like to understand it in more depth.
It seems like its a good game. The biggest aggravation was not easily being able to see what solar systems I already scouted, and which ones have planets I could settle. I didn’t like needing to look at the separate map screen with the 3 different view buttons. With the very dated look at was cumbersome to keep track of where I needed to expand.
That all said, I’m ready to do some reading and try a 2nd game.
My science officer begs to differ: he systematically claims there is gold down there!
I started a game last night and my kids watched it intently. They named the planets and the ship designs and added their thoughts on what we should be researching. When it was time for bed, they both complained loudly that they wanted just one more turn. My daughter said 'I like this one, but I love Master of Magic." I feel good about my job as a dad, I must say :)
You’ve done well. Very well.
Aliens have nothing on Fantasy!
My friend thinks Birth of the Federation was better than both.
Your friend is out of their God damned mind.
I liked MOO 1, but my only problem with it and the reason I prefer MOO 2 over it is because of the ‘stack of doom’ that contained multiple ships designs that had over 9999+ each and once I figured out that all you had to do to win the game was avoid that stack and take the enemies home world.
Which is why you need the Black hole generator. 3 single ships carrying that destroys stacks.
After you hit it with bio terminators. That late game missile base plus planetary shielding was a tough nut to crack.
Elite halfling slingers could have taken on the Antarans any day.
Didn’t need the Black Hole Generator. Just send out disposable ships to track their SoD and send your fleet to conquer their home world. Once I figured this out the game never got past the middle part. Thus it became boring to play.
I did better in my second game of MOO. I was one of the 2 front runners for a while, then it went to hell. The humans cancelled our non aggression pack because they needed more space even though we were very friendly and had a nice trade agreement going. The Psilons kept their end of the bargain and remained friendly.I did pretty much wipe out 1 race, but the 3 others decided I should die when the humans wanted a less friendly arrangement.
I think I should have been building a bit more ships and defenses to stay competitive.
FWIW each race has a set of predefined behaviors. You can scramble this at the beginning of the game (well I suppose you can scramble it any time but it makes the most sense then) with ALT + P. This may not matter now but you may want to down the road. Any race will back stab you if they feel it gives them the best chance of winning (and it also depends on difficulty). Humans and Psilons are among the more reliable races though.
I’ll have to keep that in mind if I get to the point where I need to shake things up. It’s humbling to lose 2 times playing a 4X on normal difficulty! Does MOO cheat much on normal or are things pretty even?