Master of Orion 1+2

I have been playing the Civilization series for years, but I am fairly new to space 4x games. I've heard lots about MOO2 being one of the best 4x games of all time, so I thought I'd give it a try. This game has great gameplay, depth, story and charm. It's a "good old game" that has held up really well; I now understand why many consider this game to be a timeless classic! If you haven't ever played MOO2, I wholeheartedly recommend trying this game!

MOO1: probably revolutionary in terms of both space sims and 4X games. no other TBS game i play manages a galactic empire in the same way but i don't really play a lot of strat games compared to some harder core gamers. playing MOO2, and playing hundreds of hrs of MOM reminded me that the "Civ" way of micromanaging your planets/towns is pretty tedious compared to what MOO1 did with its sliders UI various metrics. at least it's tedious UNLESS you go for very early win on the smallest maps. managing an empire with those sliders on each planet makes so much sense in hindsight after playing other similar games. MOO2: now this one really looks like it borrowed a lot of stuff from Civ games and MOM. instead of abstracted sliders for metrics on each planets, you gotta pick and choose to produce buildings for each planet. and instead of the heroes that you can control individually like in MOM, you got starship leaders that you can attach to any ship that will boost the stats of the ship and other ships in the same group/fleet depending on their skills. There's even the Mystic X from MOM, who gets totally random skills each time he appears. on top of that you also got leaders that help manage star systems for you, giving you a boost in certain aspects of your planets, like increasing their production output or reducing pollution. overall, great and deep game, but like MOM, it feels too tedious once your empire get huge. in terms of difficulty , i found it slightly easier than MOO1, since this sequel allows you to design your own race for various minmaxed possibilities. also the computer player no longer can produce outrageous numbers of ships to wipe you out in early game like in MOO1. of cose ship battles are also more micromanaged than in MOO1, where ships of 1 type are all stacked into 1 grp,and it's easily to massproduce an absurd number of small ships. e.g. in MOO1, one of the best tactics if create stack of doom,with the smallest ship with Mass Drivers.

I don't write review very often but after seeing all the negative reviews recently posted I'm just gonna say that I probably spent thousands of hours playing MOO2, but that was a long time ago. If you like old style strategy games this is one of the best. I haven't played for awhile but I remember building different fleet's of ships and upgrading the ships with different weapons & items and customizing them was probably my favorite part, testing them out against a enemy in combat was great too. the Ai was decent and the strategy part of taking over the whole universe map and researching different technology upgrades was good. The first one is ok but the second one seems like a better version of the first one so i don't see much point in playing the first one although I found it fun to play around with after playing the second one to death. This is a great game and I don't think it deserves all the bad reviews, but these old style strategy game are hard to "get into" its even hard for me to play these games now.

I have spent countless hours playing both MOO and MOO 2, and I still have yet to get sick of them. $5.99 is a steal!

For a pair of 17-year-old and a 14-year-old games, these still play great. Moo may be not exactly pretty anymore, but Moo2 has never left my hard drive.... never