I just wanted to write a short almost counter-review to all the childhood nostalgia and "old-school" references being thrown out in all the 4 and 5-star reviews. It has old-school traces sure but it's no BG2. If anything it reminds me of BG1 before its first patch. Monsters respawning just outside view (check), broken quests (check), melee is a death sentence but ranged is godly (check). One thing that BG1 did not have though is blatant typos ("Save succesful" is probably the most frequent thing you will ever see and it's spelled wrong) and some of the dialogue clearly suffers from translation. That said it is probably what you expect. Just don't expect your childhood nostalgia to hold up. And get a bow, for God's sake!
Luckily, these problems are now fixable and without them the game is competitive with GalCiv and the like, not quite to the legacy status of Master of Orion 1/2, but pretty close. At the very least its flavor is uniquely of the Orion series, which is definitely a plus in my book. I spent a long time waiting for Master of Orion 3, and my disappointment in the actual product was palpable. MOO3 allows unprecedented (for MOO) levels of micromanagement, but with the actual challenge at zero it backfires on it. I remember spending hours just clicking 'Next Turn' until I finally got to the top of the tech tree and in boredom went and wiped out all the enemies, which put up little to no fight. The problem in these kind of deep strategy games when the AI is terrible is much more than you would think. With no sense of danger or risk, you just pound next turn, slowly crawling up the tech tree, doing unnecessary micromanagement since if you have half a brain you're already ahead of the AI and making new and exciting ships to take out vastly outclassed enemies has no sense of excitement when you realize you don't even have to make your best ships to stomp out all other life in the universe. Yawning the whole time in this game only to hit a showstopper bug means you will probably never play it again. All the things that make complicated strategy games great become a negative when there is no challenge. However, if you go to orionsector.com or similar, and install the Unofficial Patch, which gets rid of almost all the known bugs, and find the AI mod that makes the AI not just sit there and wait to die, the game takes on a whole new life. The complicated gameplay now has a purpose and all of a sudden things aren't a chore any more they're a strategy. I will say it's not a perfect game even with the above, there remain a handful annoying aspects like micromanagement but nothing terrible, and the genre (4X) is not a crowded one even 7 years later, so I'd say if you're a fan of the genre/series, try it out, and before you ever start it install the above. Put in AI that sounds absolutely murderous and tone it down from there if necessary, keep in mind that the stock AI is essentially like playing against a lukewarm bowl of water so even if your AI mod description sounds insanely hard it's coming from that so there are probably weaknesses to exploit still. If you're a new player and do the above prior to ever playing it you will wonder why everyone hates it. I was almost too jaded after playing it unpatched to even give the AI/Unofficial patches a shot, but I'm glad I did, all of a sudden the additional management options became a bonus instead of a chore, the tech was hungrily consumed as soon as it came out of the lab to put onto needed warships to stay competitive.
