You are literally the only person on the planet who has played Moo, since it re-appeared on GOG (and later Steam), at 320x200.
[quote=“robc04, post:115, topic:128875”]
Boy, if you lose the council vote and decide to fight on it can take a while to win on a large map - but I finally got a win on game number 3. I went on a slash and burn rampage so I wouldn’t have so many worlds to try and protect. I made a huge bomber that was fast, high defense and as many bombs as it could carry. I would have given it a cloak once it became available but by then I knew the victory would come so I didn’t bother.[/quote]
You don’t need bombs to destroy planets, FWIW. Some beam weapons will do it very well. The enemy planetary shield tech is a huge factor, though. If you happen to score the Death Ray it’s pretty moot. But the Maulter Device will do a pretty good job typically. Torpedos are actually also really good for this task (an incongruity IMO, one of the game’s few true examples of that). the benefit of Beams and Torps is that you don’t need to get as close, especially if you gt the High Energy Focus or the Stellar Converter (it’s the only range 3 beam weapon). Or, you know, torps.
Of course subspace teleporters can make bombing much easier. You get the idea.
The thing is, it’s not really about “sliders” versus “a production queue”. These are just UI represenations of how to manage certain mechanics. Setting aside the problems with Moo2’s queue/queues in general (no savable templates, no “smart” templates, too short), it’s about complexity of mechanics, or rather false complexity. This isn’t to say that everything about Moo2 suffers from this, it’s that some things do.
Take the movement of pop/troops in both games. In Moo, you just click on a planet, click “transfer”, select the destination, and voila. If it’s friendly, you drop people off. If it’s hostile, you engage in MORTAL KOMBAT (queue industrial beat). It’s an abstract mechanic that fits perfectly into the game. Not so with Moo2. Here you’ve got two separate items for transporting pop and soldiers. In both cases you have to build these things deliberately, and one of them (transports) is finite/used up once people land. The presence of both types of ships in the game is semi-abstract. You can’t literally fight them, but they’re still represented in the game world. There’s a lot of stuff in Moo2 like this. For it’s mechanical strengths and variety, mechanics like this just sort of jut out from the game. This is adding detail and micromanagement for no benefit.
The production queue stuff is fixable. For reasons surpassing human understanding practically the entire genre has ignored an evolution of the mechanic, one that I think started in SMAC (you could save templates). At least some games made them infinite, which is ok but not great. If you didin’t pay attention to the MooNew thread, it managed to make them worse than they were in Moo2 (the queues are shorter and there are many more buildings to build even on specialized planets, also game forces you away from planet specialization somewhat so it’s a triple whammy). A feat that should have been impossible. But the issues are there in Moo2 and it makes for a shitload of work.
Moo2’s mechanical differences are welcome from a “the spice of life!” standpoint if nothing else. It does do a lot of things well. For people who prefer the first, though, the increased amount of “chore” type work it adds represents a major fault. I play both games (once I exhaust my current run of Moo games I’l sidle back into 2, although I recommend the ICE Mod to anyone playing 2 these days). And I’ll enjoy my time with 2. But not as much as 1.
