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I used to love Masters of Orion II; I would play as the Psilons, get a ridiculous technological advantage, and produce massive death-star like Dreadnought ships

I used to love Masters of Orion II; I would play as the Psilons, get a ridiculous technological advantage, and produce massive death-star like Dreadnought ships that could vaporize any target or planet in one mega-beam. The game had a flaw, though. The AI opponents would mass up hundreds of zergling-like very weak ships, and they would EACH get a turn in combat. So my 4 dreadnoughts would wipe 4 of their ships, then 296 enemies would fire individually and miss onto my mega-shields...then they'd be down to 292 after my turn...then 292 misses...and I'd leave the game for 3 hours until the battle finished.

chuckwnelson 7y ago
100% agree. Always loved playing the Darlok and stealing everything (especially you tech researching races). I always dreamed of recreating this in the browser with an online multiplayer component, but the battle system was always flawed in my opinion.
- hyperpl 7y ago
  Agreed re: Darlok. I have the most fun playing with them.
JohnFen 7y ago
> The game had a flaw, though. Yeah, the game (and the original) has a number of flaws that can make winning pretty easy. I've adjusted my play to intentionally avoid them. You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly. But when I want an easy win in MOO2, what I tend to do is to amass a large enough force that I can start just destroying planets. Because the number of ships you can have depends on the number of planets you have, and the AI is stupid, you can bring even the most overpowered enemy to its knees by avoiding direct fights with their forces and destroying their planets. Each planet that gets destroyed results in multiple enemy ships that go away because they can no longer be supported. The best way to play either of the MOOs, though, is against real life human players. They aren't stupid.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly. I honestly despise games that do this. I understand why they do though: writing a difficult AI can be quite hard to do.
  - criley2 7y ago
    Age of Empires 2 is an interesting case where the original versions had cheater AI, and the subsequent re-releases have taken the time to examine competitive meta and create new difficult AI that plays fair based on actually competitive tactics.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I actually agree with you, and tend not to play on the hardest levels because it irritates me so. But it is a legitimate option. My love for MOO and MOO2 is great, but doesn't blind me to the fact that the AI is dismal.
  - setr 7y ago
    the problem I think is that the cheater AI is unstoppable cheating -- his cheating becomes almost independent of his state within the game (true independence is the behavior of actual cheating), such that your path to victory really ends up being complete and total domination. You can't really apply normal strategies like crippling the opponent by poking the edges, or baiting a fight here and having a small force go around to there, or focusing down the infrastructure over the army itself; there is only the main body, and that's all that matters.. I think cheater AI is probably a perfectly good strategy; its just the implementation is never done that well, and it ends up cheating in a fashion that isn't actually interesting. Alternatively, the cheater AI could simply be given an aesthetic reason to validate cheating, instead of trying to pretend its a normal player -- eg AI war simply defines the AI as an overwhelming force; so overwhelming that it doesn't actually pay much attention to your activity, and that's the only reason you're not dead (your goal is to continue growing without letting the AI noticing). Total War and other 4X games generally have you playing where the AI is also generally unintelligent, but feels more fair, because everyone is in various starting states of strength. The cheating AI gets a set of arbitrarily strong units, justified because its simply a strong country 10x the size of yours. And then the amount of blatant, uninteresting, cheating that has to occur is much more limited -- if the AI is not sufficiently challenging, then it's generally simpler to increase his relative size, or resources, or production facilities, or whatever. What the AI does after that, after the game has started, becomes less important, so what cheating occurs becomes negligible from the perspective of the player. A 50% cheating bonus to production time doesn't mean much when he already started with a 500% bonus in resources and production. Games like MoO and Civ make the mistake of having everyone start at the same state, even when its just you vs the AI(s), because they don't treat the two differently -- there is only one setup, one goal, one victory condition, regardless of the number of human players. That is, they don't admit to the weakness of their AI, and try instead to make up for it "under the hood"; and when you as the player catch this cheating, and it's never that hard to, you feel inexplicably stupid to have ever thought you were playing a fair match, and losing/winning to fair rules. The same as when you catch a human cheating. Most other 4X games are defined as you vs the AI, and there's little to no multiplayer in the first place, so the idea doesn't trivially translate, but you vs the AI should probably be treated differently than a legitimate multiplayer map anyways -- as a campaign setup or a skirmish map.
Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
That's why you equip your ships with large numbers of missile batteries with the Dauntless Guidance System. Makes it so if 20 missiles fire, but it only 1 is necessary to blow up a ship, the other 19 will find new targets.
jkoudys 7y ago
I enjoy taking the opposite approach. Advanced start, impossible, Elerians, or any race with full negative picks plus telepathy. Rush out some cheap ships with no shields and piles of MIRVing nukes. Straight to the silicoid or sakkra (anyone with a good species and weak government), blast their starbase and mind control the colony. Immediately start shipping the population around using freighters, and the impossible difficulty works in your advantage, since you know have a super-species under your control. Properly managed you can outgrow anyone now. Keep the momentum up and steamroll anyone else who you can't be friends with and keep harmless.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  That's a great hack of impossible difficulty, love it.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Telepathy is such a broken trait. Mind control is way too powerful, and assimilation way too difficult to have it any other way.
  - jkoudys 7y ago
    Don't forget the advantage in negotiations, too. It's basically charismatic without the leader recruitment bonus. It also lets you control ships (including star bases) after you capture them, making a battleship full of assault shuttles often enough to take a whole planet. Just the mind control of the planets alone would be worth at least 6 picks, and it's buffed on top of that. Yet still, many players happily spend 8 picks so they don't have to choose between planetary missile base and automated factories.
conanbatt 7y ago
I think I have more than 10,000 hours on MOII. It took me literally years to understand the spy system (without googling it out). I've won in every possible combination: fully industrial feudals military, super rich charismatic weakling diplo win, techno-antares, custom ship building. The game has an amazing amount of design flaws for today's standard, but what a game. I think the only rival in complexity and replayability is Heroes of Might & Magic 3, one where I've put in 3x the time and each time I play it I discover something new.
- to11mtm 7y ago
  HOMM3 is still a game I'll play from time to time, it's half the reason I made a GOG account (Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games being the second). I was actually thinking of HOMM as I was reading this thread, although I was thinking about it because of the subthread on AI. The AI in HOMM3 was surprisingly good for it's time, with very few times where I would ever see it 'stuck' or otherwise play in a way that was unfair or overly 'brain dead'.
aidenn0 7y ago
FWIW the point-cost of the "Creative" ability was bumped at least once (maybe twice?) over the course of the patches for MOO 2, so any race with creative is overpowered in the original release (which is what most people played because who downloaded patches in the 90s?)
ianbicking 7y ago
If you pressed "Z" it would autoplay extra fast, making those battles progress at a reasonable speed.
uep 7y ago
I also enjoyed playing as the Psilons. It's probably nostalgia, but there is still stuff I miss from more modern games like Stellaris, that I think MOO2 did right. It was really only the late game that became tedious. There were tons of way to get cheap wins in the game. I vaguely recall there being tech (possibly from the Orions), that allowed you to cloak your ship. Enemies could not even target you while cloaked. There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had). With a single ship, you could attack, then cloak, and avoid all damage.
- max_effort 7y ago
  > There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had). Time Warp Facilitator. I installed it on each of my Doom Stars, along with a Stellar Converter that could vaporize pretty much any ship with one shot. One of my favorite games of all time.
- shoo 7y ago
  another cheap trick: in late game after unlocking terraforming & Gaia transformation tech, you could turn any colony into a Gaia world apart from a colony on a toxic planet. But if you had a second colony in the system, you could gift your toxic colony to an opponent, then attack it with a stellar converter equipped fleet, fire the stellar converter to destroy the planet and convert it into an asteroid belt, then get your second colony in the system to start an artificial planet construction project to turn the fresh belt into a terraformable barren world. It's a bit more Douglas Adams than George Lucas: apologies former citizens, you and your corrosive world needs to be vaporised to work around zoning regulations as part of the empire's galactic terraforming project. Another fun way to play the early/mid game was to try to advance up the tech tree by scrapping captured higher tech ships. You needed large fleets of disposable ships with lots of room for boarding parties, tractor beams to pin enemies, and if possible weapons with radiation damage to kill the enemy crew before boarding. It was particularly fun and frustrating trying to capture ancient-tech antaran ships in the early/mid game (the game designers were wise enough to equip antaran ships with the quantum detonator tech giving them a very high chance to self destruct nuke their ship's drive when you tried to board them)
LorenPechtel 7y ago
Yeah, the zerglings were a problem. However (hopefully I'm getting it right, it's been a long time), at max tech with the psilons: Stellar converter x8. Top computer (you need initiative), the tech to increase damage once you burned through their shields, increased hull space, the double shot tech. Note that to fit all this in you have to weaken the defenses, but it doesn't matter. This ship gets 16 shots that hit with full power all the way across the battle map--the zerglings almost never can do meaningful damage from their starting position. If they don't have Antares tech dreadnaughts die with two shots, anything else dies with one. A full Antares-tech design can take 5 hits before dying--but note that you have 16. In practice a fleet of 8 of these can take on anything the AI will ever field, losses will be extremely rare. Be careful with planets if you want to capture them, it's very easy to kill them by accident. Once I can build those I didn't even worry about the council.

chuckwnelson 7y ago

100% agree. Always loved playing the Darlok and stealing everything (especially you tech researching races). I always dreamed of recreating this in the browser with an online multiplayer component, but the battle system was always flawed in my opinion.

hyperpl 7y ago
Agreed re: Darlok. I have the most fun playing with them.

JohnFen 7y ago

> The game had a flaw, though. Yeah, the game (and the original) has a number of flaws that can make winning pretty easy. I've adjusted my play to intentionally avoid them. You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly. But when I want an easy win in MOO2, what I tend to do is to amass a large enough force that I can start just destroying planets. Because the number of ships you can have depends on the number of planets you have, and the AI is stupid, you can bring even the most overpowered enemy to its knees by avoiding direct fights with their forces and destroying their planets. Each planet that gets destroyed results in multiple enemy ships that go away because they can no longer be supported. The best way to play either of the MOOs, though, is against real life human players. They aren't stupid.

inetknght 7y ago
> You can also mitigate the problem by playing on the hardest levels, which lets the enemies cheat shamelessly. I honestly despise games that do this. I understand why they do though: writing a difficult AI can be quite hard to do.
- criley2 7y ago
  Age of Empires 2 is an interesting case where the original versions had cheater AI, and the subsequent re-releases have taken the time to examine competitive meta and create new difficult AI that plays fair based on actually competitive tactics.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I actually agree with you, and tend not to play on the hardest levels because it irritates me so. But it is a legitimate option. My love for MOO and MOO2 is great, but doesn't blind me to the fact that the AI is dismal.
- setr 7y ago
  the problem I think is that the cheater AI is unstoppable cheating -- his cheating becomes almost independent of his state within the game (true independence is the behavior of actual cheating), such that your path to victory really ends up being complete and total domination. You can't really apply normal strategies like crippling the opponent by poking the edges, or baiting a fight here and having a small force go around to there, or focusing down the infrastructure over the army itself; there is only the main body, and that's all that matters.. I think cheater AI is probably a perfectly good strategy; its just the implementation is never done that well, and it ends up cheating in a fashion that isn't actually interesting. Alternatively, the cheater AI could simply be given an aesthetic reason to validate cheating, instead of trying to pretend its a normal player -- eg AI war simply defines the AI as an overwhelming force; so overwhelming that it doesn't actually pay much attention to your activity, and that's the only reason you're not dead (your goal is to continue growing without letting the AI noticing). Total War and other 4X games generally have you playing where the AI is also generally unintelligent, but feels more fair, because everyone is in various starting states of strength. The cheating AI gets a set of arbitrarily strong units, justified because its simply a strong country 10x the size of yours. And then the amount of blatant, uninteresting, cheating that has to occur is much more limited -- if the AI is not sufficiently challenging, then it's generally simpler to increase his relative size, or resources, or production facilities, or whatever. What the AI does after that, after the game has started, becomes less important, so what cheating occurs becomes negligible from the perspective of the player. A 50% cheating bonus to production time doesn't mean much when he already started with a 500% bonus in resources and production. Games like MoO and Civ make the mistake of having everyone start at the same state, even when its just you vs the AI(s), because they don't treat the two differently -- there is only one setup, one goal, one victory condition, regardless of the number of human players. That is, they don't admit to the weakness of their AI, and try instead to make up for it "under the hood"; and when you as the player catch this cheating, and it's never that hard to, you feel inexplicably stupid to have ever thought you were playing a fair match, and losing/winning to fair rules. The same as when you catch a human cheating. Most other 4X games are defined as you vs the AI, and there's little to no multiplayer in the first place, so the idea doesn't trivially translate, but you vs the AI should probably be treated differently than a legitimate multiplayer map anyways -- as a campaign setup or a skirmish map.

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago

That's why you equip your ships with large numbers of missile batteries with the Dauntless Guidance System. Makes it so if 20 missiles fire, but it only 1 is necessary to blow up a ship, the other 19 will find new targets.

jkoudys 7y ago

I enjoy taking the opposite approach. Advanced start, impossible, Elerians, or any race with full negative picks plus telepathy. Rush out some cheap ships with no shields and piles of MIRVing nukes. Straight to the silicoid or sakkra (anyone with a good species and weak government), blast their starbase and mind control the colony. Immediately start shipping the population around using freighters, and the impossible difficulty works in your advantage, since you know have a super-species under your control. Properly managed you can outgrow anyone now. Keep the momentum up and steamroll anyone else who you can't be friends with and keep harmless.

SkyMarshal 7y ago
That's a great hack of impossible difficulty, love it.
conanbatt 7y ago
Telepathy is such a broken trait. Mind control is way too powerful, and assimilation way too difficult to have it any other way.
- jkoudys 7y ago
  Don't forget the advantage in negotiations, too. It's basically charismatic without the leader recruitment bonus. It also lets you control ships (including star bases) after you capture them, making a battleship full of assault shuttles often enough to take a whole planet. Just the mind control of the planets alone would be worth at least 6 picks, and it's buffed on top of that. Yet still, many players happily spend 8 picks so they don't have to choose between planetary missile base and automated factories.

conanbatt 7y ago

I think I have more than 10,000 hours on MOII. It took me literally years to understand the spy system (without googling it out). I've won in every possible combination: fully industrial feudals military, super rich charismatic weakling diplo win, techno-antares, custom ship building. The game has an amazing amount of design flaws for today's standard, but what a game. I think the only rival in complexity and replayability is Heroes of Might & Magic 3, one where I've put in 3x the time and each time I play it I discover something new.

to11mtm 7y ago
HOMM3 is still a game I'll play from time to time, it's half the reason I made a GOG account (Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games being the second). I was actually thinking of HOMM as I was reading this thread, although I was thinking about it because of the subthread on AI. The AI in HOMM3 was surprisingly good for it's time, with very few times where I would ever see it 'stuck' or otherwise play in a way that was unfair or overly 'brain dead'.

aidenn0 7y ago

FWIW the point-cost of the "Creative" ability was bumped at least once (maybe twice?) over the course of the patches for MOO 2, so any race with creative is overpowered in the original release (which is what most people played because who downloaded patches in the 90s?)

ianbicking 7y ago

If you pressed "Z" it would autoplay extra fast, making those battles progress at a reasonable speed.

uep 7y ago

I also enjoyed playing as the Psilons. It's probably nostalgia, but there is still stuff I miss from more modern games like Stellaris, that I think MOO2 did right. It was really only the late game that became tedious. There were tons of way to get cheap wins in the game. I vaguely recall there being tech (possibly from the Orions), that allowed you to cloak your ship. Enemies could not even target you while cloaked. There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had). With a single ship, you could attack, then cloak, and avoid all damage.

max_effort 7y ago
> There was another tech that allowed you to get two turns (for each the enemy had). Time Warp Facilitator. I installed it on each of my Doom Stars, along with a Stellar Converter that could vaporize pretty much any ship with one shot. One of my favorite games of all time.
shoo 7y ago
another cheap trick: in late game after unlocking terraforming & Gaia transformation tech, you could turn any colony into a Gaia world apart from a colony on a toxic planet. But if you had a second colony in the system, you could gift your toxic colony to an opponent, then attack it with a stellar converter equipped fleet, fire the stellar converter to destroy the planet and convert it into an asteroid belt, then get your second colony in the system to start an artificial planet construction project to turn the fresh belt into a terraformable barren world. It's a bit more Douglas Adams than George Lucas: apologies former citizens, you and your corrosive world needs to be vaporised to work around zoning regulations as part of the empire's galactic terraforming project. Another fun way to play the early/mid game was to try to advance up the tech tree by scrapping captured higher tech ships. You needed large fleets of disposable ships with lots of room for boarding parties, tractor beams to pin enemies, and if possible weapons with radiation damage to kill the enemy crew before boarding. It was particularly fun and frustrating trying to capture ancient-tech antaran ships in the early/mid game (the game designers were wise enough to equip antaran ships with the quantum detonator tech giving them a very high chance to self destruct nuke their ship's drive when you tried to board them)

LorenPechtel 7y ago

Yeah, the zerglings were a problem. However (hopefully I'm getting it right, it's been a long time), at max tech with the psilons: Stellar converter x8. Top computer (you need initiative), the tech to increase damage once you burned through their shields, increased hull space, the double shot tech. Note that to fit all this in you have to weaken the defenses, but it doesn't matter. This ship gets 16 shots that hit with full power all the way across the battle map--the zerglings almost never can do meaningful damage from their starting position. If they don't have Antares tech dreadnaughts die with two shots, anything else dies with one. A full Antares-tech design can take 5 hits before dying--but note that you have 16. In practice a fleet of 8 of these can take on anything the AI will ever field, losses will be extremely rare. Be careful with planets if you want to capture them, it's very easy to kill them by accident. Once I can build those I didn't even worry about the council.