Master of Orion 2 tips

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I am new to this game. Bought it, after seeing it was *probably* the game that inspired this later Star Trek clone that I enjoyed.

Love it, but have lost TWO games as Psilon.

Anyone wanna give me your BEST tips?

Play as Psilon.

Am doing.

Also, tried custom variations on them, with artifact planet, and "telepathic" bonuses for a single game.

Psilon. Pre-warp. Huge galaxy. Don't colonize shitty planets until late game. Once you encounter ai give them useless tech to keep them happy and friendly. Then expand and research until you feel comfortable enough to assrape the galaxy. Win game.

Don't turtle (too much and especially on larger galaxies on harder difficulties) and don't neglect your space fleets. Specialize your worlds (use governors to do so)
If you wish to attack aggressively, push the rocket building tech until you can build basic missles with MIRV. These will help you assrape anything near the beginning (save for antaran attacks).
You shouldn't stop there of course, but it's a good milestone to reach early, from my experience.

To build your manufacturing base, research the appropriate techs, but also remember that you can use captured enemy worlds as a source of workers: sakkra as food farmers, meklars for manufacturing, klackons as general workers - this is where the early aggressive strategy can come in handy.

I actually recommend that you don't play psilons too much. While they are a fun and balanced race, taking Creative is a bit like choosing Fast Shot in Fallout, it's an easy advantage that makes the game shallow.
It's okay for your first playthroughs, to learn which techs are worthwile, but I think it's more interesting in the long run when you have to make tough decisions as to what to research.

For this reason, I'd recommend that you dick around with random races a bit more.
Generally, your picks should depend on your game settings. Home world bonuses and penalties are only worth it for small galaxies and the penalties can be mitigated by quick expansion.
It's a generally good idea to prioritize research, population size and production when building a custom race.

You can try selecting a steep penalty to, say, growth, farming or trade, then plan to counter it with other picks (farming can be slightly countered with cybernetics, trade penalty with democracy), or by planning your research (you can counter farming
penalties with planetology, growth penalty can be countered with housing and researching cloning centers).
Or choose a narrow specialization and see how it is to play a charismatic race that has shitload of money and spies on everyone.

Once the game starts getting heated, don't build planetary defenses. They are extremely counterproductive to an effective defense as they turn the planet into a target, so even if you win the battle, you still lose. They are far too weak to hold off a gigantic attacking armada and too poorly optimized to do any meaningful damage. Even the orbital is guaranteed to get slagged, but it's not on the planet and you need it to build stuff, so it can be rebuilt: Getting the planet slagged as collateral damage is much more expensive. Spare no expense to jack an Antaran ship: Getting the right goodies early (Xenotronium, Damper Field) will make you invincible. Early on, a spam of single-shot missile scouts is your best warfleet: They are quick to build, so you can slam them out in between producing infrastructure, and early enemies don't cope well with massive rains of missiles. Just load those suckers with as many single-shot launchers as you can pack in, then shoot and scoot. They're also the only things that can effectively damage Antarans early on, on the off chance you can't manage to take them alive. Missile spam will save your life: Enough shitty missiles will kill anyone, and if you actually have GOOD missiles, they're just plain lethal as defenders as even the shittiest planet can churn them out in a single turn, which is critical when you have basically no intercept capability and your enemy can strike anywhere without warning. No matter who you're playing, spam those missiles.

Obviously, if you don't turn your planet into a military target by foolishly planting defenses on the surface, you won't really need planetary shielding, either. A spam of missile boats will have a much greater throw weight in missiles compared to a missile base anyway, because missile bases always use the "best" missile, which is NOT the same as the missile the packs the most punch-per-unit-space. Missiles are worthless piecemeal: You must put an overwhelming number of missiles in the sky at once. Mnogo Missiles!

Also, play as the custom version of whatever race you find most annoying. That way you'll have them and the AI won't. Don't play Psilon. Play Genuine Imitation Darlock Psilons. Those guys are so annoying. You WANT the AI to be Psilons, ESPECIALLY if you aren't going the creative route: Someone has to invent all the stuff you need to steal.

Early in the game you get double launchers (fire twice in one round, but it takes 2x rounds to reload). I used them to create the "Loki One-shot" (Named after the clan battlemech with as much pod space as a mech 10 tons heavier, but ****-all for armor". Create a ship with as many 2x loaded missle launchers as possible (it should be a bunch) with double launchers and then a couple of a different class of "anvil" ships with the heaviest armor/defenses possible. Turn one you unload the Loki O-S's and then warp out. Meanwhile your "anvil" ships stick around to "direct" the missles; i.e. remain present so that the missles can reach the target. The amount of firepower your missle ships put out should be enough to decimate any comparable force, and if not, you won't be taking much damage so you can retreat and try again. Early you have to be careful how to direct your vollys, later the missles will auto-retarget if the initial target dies.

Later you can get a tech advantage, and dominate more conventientally, but this way gives you good early game leverage with small ships (normally I make the Loki's in smaller hulls for ease of building, it is not like they need armor, or shields, or really anything but as many double launchers as possible).

You don't actually need someone to "stick around", you just need to time your warp out right so that the missiles still plow into the opponent's face before the battle ends. Plus, you can just screaming in all directions: He can't chase all of them down, and even if he catches a few, who cares? They cost like nothing to produce. If you're producing them using tiny hulls, they will turn and move quickly, easily outrunning your opponent's slower, clumsier ships. If you cram some enhanced engines on them, it gets even more obnoxious. Think Spathi Eluders. The Spathi Eluder is pretty much your go-to design for an early-game ship in every game.

Do NOT rely on autoretarget: You must ALWAYS make sure to target enemies properly, because of one simple reason: Enemies who die, especially to the Super-Deadly Emission Guidance Missiles that will assrape opponents right in their tailpipes, have this tendency to EXPLODE. This is honestly rather awesome, but tends to destroy many of your remaining missiles nearby.

Speaking of enemies exploding, should you manage to get your paws on Quantum Detonator technolergy at any point in the game, immediately share it with anyone who will take it. You might even get something nice in trade, but if you can't, just give it to them. Even, and especially if, you are actively at war with them. You want them to have this. Why? Because the AI loves to install this thoroughly useless device on every single ship. Not only will this reduce the enemy's combat power by taking up space that could have been used for something useful, but it also makes for some really spectacular chain explosions. You haven't seen anything until you've watched a 300 ship AI armada all go up in a massive chain explosion caused by the destruction of one ship.

There's a lot of things you can do to make the game easier. But I suggest that the most important thing to make the game more interesting is to play a non-creative race and don't take the hive mind government type. Playing Klackons is fine though, their disadvantages compensate. It's also very important to understand how the maintenance system works - it's a soft cap on your fleet size, if you go over the costs will rapidly become prohibitive. You increase your limit with colonies, space stations and technologies. Smaller ships are faster to build but less efficient for command points, larger ships are the opposite. You can get more out of your population growth by using freighters to shuffle colonists from high population planets to low population planets (on the colony management screen, drag and drop).

Another thing to note is that the AI plays as a simulated alien civilisation, not a simulated game opponent.

I like choosing the darlocks, or a absurdly powerful spy uncreative custom race and stealing everything from the psilons and everyone else. It's more fun than just DOMINATING with creative.

I also prefer to play MoO1 - the fleet system is much more interesting (though battle leaders and ship capturing is mucho interesting in 2). You ain't going to be capturing antaran ships without a absurd ground combat rating + some techs though.

It's not useless if your race and fleet is pro at assaulting ships - when you capture one and dismantle it on a planet with a starbase, you get new tech that is on the ship. All antaran ships have it, and it makes capturing them a pain in the ass.

Production > Research. Its the universal truth of MoO2.

This is also the reason why psilons ultimately suck, despite from posters before may say. They encourage ineffective turtling strategies and over reliance on many techs. A big mistake. Creative trait is a huge point sink and is very much questionable. Psilons dont actually get much research bonus other that their +2.

To be competent and successful you have to remember that:
-population is the best thing ever,
-resource rich planetes are extremely important,
-even tiny desolate wastelands can produce a lot of research,
-having ships always beats having static defenses

For your pleasure I recommend subterranean (HUGE population cap bonus), unification (huge production bonus). Other traits optional. Dont waste points on creative, most techs are useless anyway and by the time they will give you an edge you wont need it.

Remember: early game advantage = late game advantage only bigger.

You make it sound so simple. Because research is the epitomy of late game advantage. You can build every single production upgrade, every single food upgrade, every single research upgrade, you can terraform your crappy planets to have more population, you can grow population faster, you can build whole new planets, you can build androids. Research works perfectly well.

Seconded. After all, all the technology becomes useless if you cannot implement it.
However, if you put in too research much, it'll get eaten by pollution, so don't overdo it.

True. In most of my games Klackons and Saakra are the races that dominate, not Psilons.

My biggest gripe with creative is that it "kills" a big part of the game - making smart choices what to research and what to steal.
It's a bit like repulsive - kills the whole diplomacy, and lithovore - kills all farming management. I recommend to avoid all three

Some more random tips:
Remember that with sufficient freighter fleet, you actually don't need to do that much farming. One planet filled with dedicated workers (natives, captured saakra) can feed the entire empire.

If you wish to focus on research or manufacturing, don't go straight for the +2 pick. Choosing a % bonus from the government is usually more powerful in the long run.
Actually, a democratic, +1 tech race without creative would give the psilons a run for their money.

Unification is a nice pick, but the fact that it kills morale effects is a double edged sword. You cannot get spiritual leaders to actually boost your productivity.

As Malakai said, population is everything. Whenever you evaluate a race pick, a tech or a combo it's often best to assess it from the pov of how many population points does it free up.
For example, biospheres are better than hydroponic farms, because they give you 2 population points, while the farm often free up just one farmer. Similarly, -1 farming penalty may seem like a decent balancing pick,
however it increases the total percentage of population that you have to allocate to farming. It can have a crippling effect, especially at the very beginning.

Research is the epitome of USELESS advantage. With production focus you can end games 200 turns earlier with a huge fleet of slightly outdated battleships. Or, more likely, end game earlier with tech advantage.

More production = faster colonization = more planets = more research labs and autolabs = more research faster than research focus race. Also dont forget that housing translates production into pop growth.

True but early in game cruisers are a viable alternative to battleships.

True, but he asked for tips. Playing production is easy mode, way easier than research.

Also my tips have basis in MP scene of MoO2 where production ruled always and forever.

Creative is the best talent, followed by tolerant.

I recommend a custom race with either democracy+creative or tolerant+unification. Always run with democracy or unification, the bonuses are just too good to pass up. Good negative picks are ship defence and ground combat.

The reason creative is so ridiculously good is that after the midgame, you have such an advantage from being able to have every tech. There are several tiers where non-creatives have to make horrible choices (missile bases versus automated production for an early example. Cloning centers versus soil enrichment is another.). High tech also reduces the cost of ship components, and allows you to build the higher tier production boosters earlier. This, combined with the fact that a well made high tech ship can defeat an entire armada of lesser ships makes research quite viable. It takes some knowledge of the tech-tree to pull of though.

Specializing your planets is very important as is getting a large population. Remember to claim as many planets as possible(but not shitty toxic ones). And always keep a few ships around(remember to refit to keep them up to date).

What do you guys do about taxes? Ten years after I played the game for the first time I suddenly realized I'd never actually bothered to tax my empires in the countless (singleplayer) games I'd played. I turned taxes to 20% and suddenly I could start buying everything straight up. Is there a general sweet spot?

Anyway, personally I always prefer going the tech route in 4x games. Technology is cool, countless ships and non-stop expansion is boring. I rather prefer long games, too. That said, I'd have to agree that it's probably a poor choice for a 'powerplayer' type of game. Pop growth and production means more colonies, more income, more ships, and ironically, more research.

PLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSMMMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

That is all. Once you have plasma the game is effectively over and you will win unless you are too busy planting flowers when you should be busy evaporating enemy ships.

Yeah, I once had a game where one AI conquered everyone but me. I had one colony, he had all the other systems and a fleet of 400+ DoomStars and other ships orbiting it. For some reason he left me alone though, allowing me to tech up. Eventually I managed to get about 15-20 DoomStars armed with plasma, that double-energy-weapon-damage equipment, two shots before recharge, teleport and the time stuff that gives you two turns in a row. This was unpatched, granted. Those 20'ish ships wiped out his entire fleet, over a few battles, without a single casualty, or more accurately without a single shot fired in return. Plasma was just ridiculous, though somewhat nerfed with the patch I believe. Pre-patch I seem to remember getting like 350 or so of continuous plasmas on a DS with highest tech levels, post-patch it was nowhere near that.

Plasma got nerfed in the patch most people don't install.

One battleship stocked with missiles will also handle like a slug and take like 50 turns to build, by which time it will be obsolete. It also can only be in one place at a time. It presents a single target in combat, one which cannot quickly turn around at the start of the battle and start running. The benefits of presenting a massive number of targets at once at that stage are manyfold: Missiles don't autoretarget yet, so the AI will waste tons of missiles shooting at a single scout, while your scouts are free to divide their volleys at will, or mass them against a single target. Even if the AI develops missiles that retarget, the death explosion of any downed scout will wipe half the missiles that were aimed for it. And who said anything about a "decent" fleet? I'm talking about a personal defense fleet that will be able to shoot down any early game annoyances and handle itself against even mid-game nuisances. If you want to make a DECENT fleet, you'll need a huge chunk of dedicated production to produce ONE ship that can be in only ONE place...and is not something you can conjure out of a hat in the approximately 2 turns of incoming. Cheap missile ships are simply more effective early on, and I'm not the only one to recommend this, as the other fellow's "Loki" ships demonstrate.

No, they won't. Enemies will not fire upon an unarmed planet while there are actual ships flying around: They won't even touch the planet until after the battle is over and they move onto bombardment. If you put defenses on it, the planet will get slagged by random stray bullets aimed at those defenses. This isn't a major concern early on when weapons are all very weak and not likely to inflict massive overkill, but when you start encountering giant battleships packed with enough firepower even in the AI's poor designs to put holes in moons, you do NOT want to be drawing fire. Since planets don't "die", the AI will pour an entire volley into that hapless planet, likely wiping it clean even when you win the battle. If the planet itself mounts no defenses, the AI will treat it as a noncombatant and ignore it. The starbase is still doomed, though. The AI is just too bad at designing them.

Who said anything about capturing Orion? I'm talking about stealing stuff from Antarans like 50 turns into the game. If you were unfortunate and got a useless thing ilke QD instead, you can still make that into something hilarious by giving it away.

If you're equipping ships with those kinds of high-tech toys, stick a Phase Cloak, Double-Energy-Shot, and Double-Move on it. At that point you need ONE ship to destroy EVERYTHING. Nothing can even touch you, because you fire twice, then cloak, before the enemy can even react. The cloaking turn where you do not fire also recharges your capacitors, so the next turn you can decloak and unleash another devastating barrage upon any survivors while the enemy mills around in helpless confusion, wondering "Where did it go?". Plasma's a nice midgame weapon, but doesn't compete favorably against things like AF-Disruptors and AFAP-Gauss because it doesn't miniaturize well. Plasma Spam is nice, but it doesn't enable you fight at 300-1 odds. Even a Titan loaded with AF-Disruptors will soon be able to clear its entire field of fire, leaving nothing but flaming debris with guns unfired because everything within reach of them is now DEAD. Selling Quantum Detonators to the AI helps, too, since you get really massive chain explosions as everything now explodes for triple damage every time, instead of simply disintegrating. If you acquire Antaran Tech somewhere, you can produce ships where dozens of direct hits from stellar converters serves only to piss them off: Energy Absorber + Damper Field + Heavy Armor + Reinforced Hull + Autorepair + Timewarp = invulnerable. A beast like that will shrug off thousands of effective damage without even flinching, capable of mowing through enemies by the thousands just by pressing Z.

Untrue and you provide bad examples. There are tech tiers where having creative is a huge boon but those you wrote arent those. Cloning centers suck donkey balls, are expensive to maintain and one little planet with medium pop 2/10 and an automated factory can get you 600k population a turn producing housing. You just freighter that population all over the empire, easy and cheap, doesnt need any techs too.

If you look closely on the tech tree you'll notice that most techs do nothing or are simply better previous techs. There are only several tech levels where having more than one tech is required.

What you wrote about governments is true however, they provide biggest bonuses and are definitely worthwhile.

Lower ship component cost comes from tech levels not techs, you gain it with reaching next levels. Its like weapon miniaturization, it also doesnt require any specific tech only tech advantage. Therefore its available to anyone.

Whew! There are some serious strategies on this game.

So, I rolled a Psilon race with a good planetary structure, and last game lost. Now, with these tips, I am going to go back and play a game, see if I win.

If not, I blame you guys.

J/K

Either way, I'm going to play Psilons for the beginning playthrough, both because the race is attractive to me, and because I'm attracted to see what options present themselves in research trees. I'm not as complex as you people at thinking out strategies, both because I don't know the math, and because I don't have a gaming manual, or much interest in reading one when I can watch people's playthroughs on YouTube and read strategies (different, and amazing) for winning here!

However, it should make winning a piece of cake.

I'm playing on default settings, with a HUGE system, and an Average tech tree, though I did choose only four races to begin with, and rolled for a good planet system, as well as decent planets surrounding it, as I'm a complete newbie and need a head start at learning.

If I lose a third time, I will come back with my results, and record the playthrough for YouTube so you guys can critique.

That leads me to my third question--do you guys know any good recording software for a GoG release (via DOSBox, I assume) for Master of Orion 2, both where I can record my voice (headset with mic) and the actual playthrough, in case I fuck it up and end up with pancake ships and a flattened system (worse than my flatscreen monitor, in fact.)???

A14.

Population trick:
Have a smaller sister colony in the same system. Have that system produce housing to encourage population growth, then ship them to another colony as needed.
This coupled with multiple sister colony strategy will ensure good empire growth.

Also, acquiring racial advantages of others is possible:
Capture a klackon colony and ship their colonists back to your home system. Breed them in one colony and use them as primary work force. Capture the weak Psilons and put them in research colonies. Breed them. You are their owner.
That is how you profit from being a good offense. Telepaths can easily take an early advantage this way.

Here's my LP if you want to read.

Farming management is something I hardly ever miss. Love playing lithovores.

Now if there were any means to properly genocide those stupid natives who keep producing food the master race does not want...

agreed. I wish there's a huge ass MOO2 mod or something. It's good solid fundementals down pat, but the AI can be a pushover unless you're playing on those highest difficulty. Then I'm out of ideas.