Moo2!

[Folytopo]

Impulse is now offering Master of Orion 2 as well as GOG. I missed out on the original MOO and then did not but it used. I am trying it now and am very impressed.

First thing, what do people enjoy doing in this game? What are your favorite traits? What do you prioritize in ships?

[psilontech]

I generally go with heavy numbers of missile boats early-mid-game. Masses of MIRV'd 2x nuke-wielding corvettes is a terrifying thing to the A.I..

Unless I'm doing a special game. Trying to play the Borg is fun as hell.
Cybernetic, Telepathic, Unification, Repulsive are the core traits, I believe. A few others to round out point-usage.

Hell, as far as missile boats go, You can take out the Goddamn Guardian with a suitably massive number of MIRV'd Mercuirite Missiles. Only thing that can reliably take out those ****ing Antaran strike-forces before late-game, too.

[Derthric]

I am a wimp, I admit it. I use Creative in most of my custom builds. I forget most since I haven't been able to run the game on my past two computers, but I used Creative like a crutch. But having all that tech laying around, being able to sell Automated Factories to someone 3 or 4 generations of tech ahead of that for something 2x as advanced was always worth it.

As previously stated Missiles are the best early on, if you can mass enough of them at single targets like the Guardian or any space monsters you will run roughshot over them. Also once you have merculites you will see a small fleet and a missile base will smack the Antarans around on medium or less with ease.

Though my favorite was always in the late game, with Temporal Displacement Devices and Blackhole generators. Not much escapes that type of gravity well, specially not some overgrown cat in a doomstar.

Oh and avoid MoO3 if you value your soul.

[psilontech]

Oh and avoid MoO3 if you value your soul.

What are you talking about? They never made another sequel...

You're making stuff up.

You hear me? IT NEVER HAPPENED!!!:smallfurious:




...
:smalltongue:

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Emissions Guidance is a cheat code for 'win' with missiles. It ignores everything but shielding and goes straight for the engines, taking very little to make a ship blow up. It just doesn't work on most Monsters.

Plasma Cannons used to be really nifty, but they got hardcore Nerfed in the 1.31 patch. They're still viable, at least against Antarens, but not overly overwhelmingly so. Rapid Fire Phasors and disruptors are always fun. But the Stellar Converter is the best bang for the buck against Antares.

Achilles Targeting Unit + Structural Analyzers = WTFPWN on antaran ships. Hell, on most anything, once you get through shielding.

Achilles Targeting Unit + Shield Piercing phasors or Particle Beams. Defenses? What defenses? I believe Particle Beams even ignore Hard Shielding.

Phasing Cloak is a cheat when combined with energy torpedos and Time Warp Facilitators. Turn 1, advance but do not fire. Let them move. 1a, fire. Turn 2, do not fire, and let torpedos reload and phasing cloak to re-phase. Rinse, wash, repeat. Energy torpedos have unlimited ammo. Eventually, you will win.

Cybernetic Race + Automated Repair Unit + Damper Field. Makes your units nearly invincible. They need to do more than 20% of your ship's hit points in one round to even scratch the nano-paint. At quartered damage. Bring it on.

Telepathic is horridly powerful. Anything cruiser-sized or larger can simply Mind Control a colony.

Star Bases, Battlestations, and Star Fortresses can all be boarded, since all are immobile. Yes, you can fire at their own planet with their own defenses. Warning: Anatarans take advantage of this little foible in Hard+ in version 1.31 and later.

Point Defense, Auto-Fire, Continuous Phasors. They're some of the best anti-missile doctrine ever invented. Also anti-shuttle if you are facing Bulrathi and they decide to get cheesy.

[Eldariel]

I've played the game rather competitively before (you can check Orion Nebula (http://www.spheriumnorth.com/orion-forum/nfphpbb/) for more on that front) and it's tons of fun.


Race picks basically go something like this:
- Subterranean and Telepathic are pretty much the power picks for races of those styles. Telepathic is horrifically powerful in small galaxy blitz races while Subterranean is very, very powerful in any production races.

- You'll generally want to specialize your races. Production and science are the two most competitive specializations, with Production races generally taking over later on with more population, but Science races keeping up rather well as long as they find an early monster planet or two.

- Archetypal science race would be Demovores; Democracy/Lithovore/Artifacts Homeworld (with some Science +1) variations. Basically, every good race wants a population multiplier and Demovores uses Lithovore for that. It doesn't actually increase your population but as you don't need farmers, you effective population count is way higher. More importantly, you have access to all of them turn 1 so you can ramp up to 60 research points on the first round, truly speeding through the Prewarp start techs and getting early Auto Factories and Research Labs to compete with Production Races. Penalties tend to include Repulsive, Ground Combat & Ship Attack or Def (depending on how heavily you plan on relying on Missile Boats, though Ship Attack also determines Ship Initiative and thus you can't really afford penalty against humans).

- Archetypal production race is, of course, Unification. Unification Tolerant Prod +1 is an example of a really solid production race. The population multiplier is, of course, Tolerant which more or less lets you treat just about any planet type as Gaia for purposes of maximum population. Generally you start by "Hiving" your homeworld; get a Colony Base, do 1 population Housing in there and use Freighters to feed the population to your homeworld. Expansion is also rather early with this style. Spying penalty becomes notably more viable with production races due to Unification-bonuses.


In general, you'll want one of Subterranean/Aquatic/Lithovore/Tolerant on every race, for sufficient population to keep up. Unification is probably the most powerful government (tends to focus on production and large pop) followed by Democracy (often uses BC bonuses and buys everything when exactly half way done) and then Dictatorship (which uses the extra race picks for some power pick combination but is obviously underwhelming as a government in and of itself) and then the poor, poor Feudal (which is only ever viable if you expect you'll never need to tech anything).

Then, rest of the picks focus on getting your production (either directly through production, or indirectly through BC) and science up and running. And then you have blitz races which just plan on fighting early with stuff like Telepathic/Ship Attack (beam blitz)/Warlord/etc. and the cool bonus picks (Large Home World is very good and popular).


I've always been a fan of science races myself (which is why I absolutely adore Very Difficult Choices (http://www.spheriumnorth.com/orion-forum/nfphpbb/viewtopic.php?t=613)-mod, which balances the race picks a ton, along with making tech decisions more complex than "Yes, I do need Automated Factories/Research Labs/Robo Miners/Planetary Supercomputers") and played more than my share of Democracy-races in their various incarnations. Spying races are also hilarious, though of course not as good in competitive playing but awesome vs. computer (though vs. computer, just taking -10 race picks and going impossible for massive score is almost equally hilarious; just replace the population in all your planets with some supercharged aliens once you've conquered some, and profit).



As for ships, there's a few very clear archetypes (though the exact equipment varies) that I use a lot:
- Missile Boats: Earliest really good ships available, these tend to involve lots of MIRV missiles (Nukes in the beginning) and thus require two tech levels beyond the Nuclear Missile Tech to build (and thus are available very early). MIRV has the best damage/size ratio of basically everything and you generally cram Augmented Engines in Frigates/Destroyers/Cruisers to get up to the skin. Vs. PD weapons you'll obviously want some Hard non-MIRV dummy missiles to draw the defensive fire to connect with the actual payload and later ECCM becomes borderline necessity. It's worth noting that these are incredibly efficient against spacemonsters since they lack shields (aside from Guardian) and thus don't reduce the damage from each missile. To kill Guardian, you need at least Merculite Missiles (since Class V shields absorb Nuke damage and thus hitting it with a ton of nukes is hardly profittable).

Once available, Emission Guidance System is insanely efficient, dealing direct system damage, but the opportunity cost is very high. Still, the "Firestarter" shell with few dumbfire missiles to draw fire, then few MIRVs to clear shields, and then EMG missiles to wipe the target out can be frighteningly efficient. Fast missiles tend to be a must too, btw. Also, you can hold fire of your "dummy missiles" in tactical combat, just launch MIRVs, then move forward and launch dummies so dummies hit first, if acting at a distance. Fast Missile Racks and 2x loads on missiles are musts for maximum firepower (if available). Note that you can certainly use Torpedoes here too, though they tend to be somewhat worse.

- Beam Boats: Well, these are equally obvious; crammed full of best beams you've got, generally with most enhancements and Battle Scanners (and later Hyper-X Capacitors, Achilles Targeting Units, Structural Analyzers and all that). These are early on great for Ship Attack +X races; later on, once computer tech develops, everyone can use 'em. You start off with fully enhanced Lasers; NRD Continuous Auto-Fire Lasers (Heavy Mount depends; each laser deals more damage that way so you pierce shields better and it has more range, but you get less total damage than out of an equivalent amount of Normal Mounts) and proceed to Enveloping Fusion Beams. Mass Drivers are a great Laser alternative and often my preferred weapon with Beam Bonus races (Auto-Fire, of course).

Then you have Neutron Beams (which are actually more useful in a different kinds of ships), Phasors (Auto-Fire Shield Piercing Phasors are another midgame killer build), Graviton Beams (nice if you can pierce armor), Gauss Cannons (which are in an annoyingly good tech and thus hard to get without Creative or Spying, but they are still default NRDs with Auto-Fire available), and eventually the almighty Disruptor (which eats Mauler Device and Death Ray for lunch; AF Disruptor is just the best in the game). After their nerf, Ion Pulse Cannon is quite uninteresting.

- Boarding Ships: There are a few ways to build Boarding Ships depending on your Tech. Transporters are obviously awesome (though countered by Hard Shields), you generally want some soldier killer like Neutron Blaster or Death Ray available, and if you don't have Transporters, you use something like Tractor Beam to stop the enemy ships (or you can try to blast the engines but that often blows up the ship too).

Obviously Ground Combat bonuses kick in here, and being Telepathic makes this twice as lucrative since you can use captured ships in the same battle. Then you can scrap them for tech and such, or keep using them, however you desire. These are really quite simple; disable enemy ships or blast the shields and board them. Troop Pods and such are rather obvious here.

- Assault Shuttles: These are basically Boarding Ships built like Missile Boats; you cram something chockful of Assault Shuttles, have as much ground combat bonuses as possible and go to town. My preferred way of capturing Antaran Ships (which you then scrap for epic tech). Not much to say about these that hasn't been said in Missile Boat or Boarding Ship section.

- Carriers: Mods tend to make these viable, and in normal game if you happen to score early Particle Beam or Neutronium Bomb, either Interceptors or Bombers (and both help Heavy Fighters) get supercharged. Basically, take a ship, cram it full of smaller ships along with some light defensive weaponry and go to town.

- Defender: Well, I tend to deploy few ships that are meant to counter whatever the opponent is using; if opp goes heavy Missile Boats, some Pulsars or other AOE damage effect is very key. Wide Area Jammers and Warp Dissipators also find natural home here, and I sometimes even cram Scout Labs in these. Generally rather small ships with some free space for lots of maneuverability to take out the problematic projectiles wherever possible.


Then you have some stuff like Plasma Webs, Black Hole Generators, Stasis Fields and such which get deployed in more special circumstances, and are insanely good for AI stomping. Then you have some system comboes like much of what Shneekey covered (Phasing Time Warp is lol). There are some defensive combinations like Shield Capacitors + Hard Shields + Multi-Phased Shields (obviously combined with high level shield tech) which helps a ton against all sorts of shield piercing attacks and crew killers and transporters and such, and the generic "titan" setup with Reinforced Hull + Heavy Armor + Damper Field + Energy Absorber + Automated Repair Unit + Displacement Device + etc. on a Doomstar chassis to profit of the ~40k+ worth of HP, and so on. But that, of course, tends to be cutesy.

And some upgrades like Inertial Nullifiers and such tend to be counters for some strategies, and others like Reinforced Hull, Augmented Engines (speed grants various bonuses in addition to, y'know, speed - ship attack, defense and initiative) and Battle Pods are just put into every ship you get, and later on stuff like Sub-Space Teleporters. Also, AI's inability to deal with such (or design efficient ships in general) means it just can't win lategame. I've destroyed entire AI fleet (which had to be fought in multiple battles and constituted almost solely of Doomstars) with one single ship 'cause it was the Disruptor design built for maximum damage. Though I don't deny that being tons of fun.

Oh, and Star Gate + Warp Interdictor = opponent can't really attack you anywhere efficiently (since you have 4 turns of advance warning and your fleet can be anywhere in 1 turn; you even get to refit ships to counter whatever they're bringing) without some way to stealth their ships.

Oh, and Enveloping Weapons are insanely good against missiles. Never heard o' missiles with shields :smallwink: I personally love good well-rounded capture ships with some Neutron Blasters & Transporters and some defensive weaponry; why break it when you can make it yours? Of course, those tend to be a relatively late build but meh.

[Folytopo]

So is the best strategy to just let the Antares take small colonies and have missile bases, star bases and other defenses rushed at major worlds?

[Eldariel]

So is the best strategy to just let the Antares take small colonies and have missile bases, star bases and other defenses rushed at major worlds?

Generally, you don't want to let Antarans take anything. You also don't want to waste resources on building defenses early on (at least in Pre-Warp), as that's when you should be expanding, building population (1 Pop Housing) and building infrastructure and researching key techs. Generally, a fleet of low tech ships can handle the early Antarans you face though, especially on faster starts (Advanced Start gives you enough firepower basically alone). If you went Assault Shuttles, you can even capture some and gain huge profit (since Antaran Ground Combat is good, but the ships are small and thus you can just overwhelm them).

Things like Enveloping Weapons, MIRV Missiles and anything targeting the engines is a good way to fight them off. Though if it's just the smallest ships, you can let them hit a low-tech planet and bombard it without notable damage; Antarans will disappear after the bombardment. But frankly, I never had trouble dealing with them.

[Derthric]

Generally, you don't want to let Antarans take anything. You also don't want to waste resources on building defenses early on (at least in Pre-Warp), as that's when you should be expanding, building population (1 Pop Housing) and building infrastructure and researching key techs. Generally, a fleet of low tech ships can handle the early Antarans you face though, especially on faster starts (Advanced Start gives you enough firepower basically alone). If you went Assault Shuttles, you can even capture some and gain huge profit (since Antaran Ground Combat is good, but the ships are small and thus you can just overwhelm them).

Things like Enveloping Weapons, MIRV Missiles and anything targeting the engines is a good way to fight them off. Though if it's just the smallest ships, you can let them hit a low-tech planet and bombard it without notable damage; Antarans will disappear after the bombardment. But frankly, I never had trouble dealing with them.

Towards the end they become much more of a pain because of the time waste of having to ground their attack fleets to dust every few turms. Once you figure them out for yourself they really never stack up to much, not with a well built fleet and a good commander.

And another thing, leaders. Don't ever accept anyone with a small amount of abilities, they'll just cost money and take up space. And don't let them stick around for the 30 turns of them sitting in your imperial lobby waiting for another interview. That takes up a slot, and if you have 3 of that type already another isn't going to show until you clear space.

[Eldariel]

Towards the end they become much more of a pain because of the time waste of having to ground their attack fleets to dust every few turms. Once you figure them out for yourself they really never stack up to much, not with a well built fleet and a good commander.

I find, in midgame you can just use Missile Base and Starbase/Battlestation/WhateverYou'veGot to deal with them. At that point, you generally have the production to get at least a planetary defense building out in time by buying, and once you get stuff like Star Gates out you just are everywhere at once so Antarans barely even matter. Though they are awesome sources of whatever tech you missed on Orion.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

As long as all they have are the tiny ships, you're okay with just a missile base. Even three of 'em will be taken down by a missile base.

Once they start getting larger ships, however, you may need a star base.

Once they get battleships, you'll need more than just base defenses to beat them, you'll need actual ships of your own.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Once you have EMG mods, the Antareans cease to be a big threat. Heck, by the time you get Plasma beams they really become a joke. Quad damage for naturally being enveloping rocks.

[Eldariel]

Once you have EMG mods, the Antareans cease to be a big threat. Heck, by the time you get Plasma beams they really become a joke. Quad damage for naturally being enveloping rocks.

You mean Enveloping Fusion Beams?

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Never really used much fusion beams once I get bigger guns. Damage reduction from higher level shields hits them hard. IIRC, they can't reliably penetrate class III shields

[Folytopo]

What point do beams become a good choice for ships? Is it when you can get large enough to have all the good upgrades on them?

[Eldariel]

What point do beams become a good choice for ships? Is it when you can get large enough to have all the good upgrades on them?

Beams become a good choice when:
- You can get all the upgrades.
- You have good enough targeting computers/enhancements to hit.

The latter depends on your race (those with Beam Attack Bonus obviously get there faster), but the former is the first limiting factor; you generally will not want to make a beam ship until you can at least get AF CON NRD Lasers or AF Mass Drivers. It's simply not cost-effective before then.

And yeah, Electronic Computers, Battle Scanners and Augmented Engines should be just fine for many races. If you have any Beam Attack Bonus, you'll definitely be alright. If you get Positronics, you're definitely fine.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

What point do beams become a good choice for ships? Is it when you can get large enough to have all the good upgrades on them?

I usually don't bother with them, except in a strictly point-defense anti-missile role, until at least Graviton Beam. Anything smaller just... doesn't do much. AF CO Phasors is where it really starts getting good, though.

[Winterwind]

I usually don't bother with them, except in a strictly point-defense anti-missile role, until at least Graviton Beam. Anything smaller just... doesn't do much. AF CO Phasors is where it really starts getting good, though.Lasers and Fusion Beams with upgrades are more effective in raw damage output than just about any later weapons (until you have really, really advanced technology, so you have a lot of miniaturization on these later weapons as well, that is), until level III shields show up (and if you're quick, this won't happen for quite a while after you're flying around with these weapons, unless somebody happens to go straight for them).

In any case, Neutron Blasters are awesome, and I definitely wouldn't draw the line at Graviton Beams. Especially when one considers how easy Neutron Blasters make it to overwhelm star/battlebases and capture ships.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Ion Cannon is a decent weapon if you are creative. It causes many core breaches after only 2-3 shots penetrate shield. Only problem is that it is ineffective against class 3 shields and completely useless against higher level shields. However if you are going up against someone with Dampener Fields (who aren't Antarean) they are super effective.

The reason I say it's good for creative is because you have to give up ion drives. At the fusion level you will want to take augmented engines. So if you take augmented engines and ion canons, you will be stuck with nuclear drives until antimatter. Plus antimatter torps are a pretty nice thing so thats a lot to give up for a weapon that will rapidly become obsolete.