MoO2 Diplomat screen problem

[WesFox13]

Hey, I bought Master of Orion II from the Atari website sometime ago and I was wondering, why is it that only a few of the races audience screens look normal while most of the others are just black screens? Like the Gnols have theirs while the Humans are just a black screen. Can someone help me with this problem?

[Stark]

Quick fix; now that you legally own it, download the DOS version and run it in DOSbox.

Otherwise, you're down to compatibility mode and praying. If you're using Vista it'll be even more of a pain in the ass.

Once you get it working play 'spot the hilariously bad design decision', it'll keep the game interesting.

[Joviwan]

Now I just have to know which bits are niggling at you, Stark. Not that I disagree with the idea, but I like hearing other people's criticisms of the games I've played and never eyed critically.

[Eleas]

Now I just have to know which bits are niggling at you, Stark. Not that I disagree with the idea, but I like hearing other people's criticisms of the games I've played and never eyed critically.

Now I'm not Stark, thank all the Gods that ever were, but MOO2 does have more than a few exploits that are completely game-breaking once you know of them, and they're not exactly difficult to spot. Also, some decisions are just plain bad choices. For instance, you may be king of the hill, your starbases armed with plasma cannon capable of decimating most enemy fleets on sight,,, then you capture an exotic technology from the Orions or the Antarans, and suddenly, your awe-inspiring firepower is exchanged for the utter crap that is the Particle Beam or the Death Ray.

[Vendetta]

Nothing beats the hilarity of shield piercing, armour ignoring phasers doing 36x their normal damage anyway. Mid game weapons which, with a few tweaks, can take down even the strongest Doom Star without serious effort. (and you get more shots than with Stellar Converters, because you can split your damage better)

[Stark]

Even game-breaking unbalanced shit aside, the AI couldn't play tactical battles for shit and the dip code was civ-level childish. Sure, most 90s games were the same (arguably MoM was worse in these regards) but MoO2 doesn't deserve a fraction of the nerd-jizz it recieves. Yes, we all played it in highschool and it was great. It's not 1997 anymore.

Ironically, while GalCiv2 is better in almost every way, it ALSO has some serious flaws. ZOMG!

[Eleas]

Even game-breaking unbalanced shit aside, the AI couldn't play tactical battles for shit

I thought that was because the AI didn't bother to do anything but spam half-assed ships...

[Stark]

Yeah, because the game basically had no decent AI; writing AI to design good ships was too hard, writing AI to fight tac battles properly was too hard, writing AI to manage dip properly was too hard. Face it, the AI was so crap it couldn't even manage planets properly, and that's the BASIS OF THE GAME.

[The Kernel]

Nothing beats the hilarity of shield piercing, armour ignoring phasers doing 36x their normal damage anyway. Mid game weapons which, with a few tweaks, can take down even the strongest Doom Star without serious effort. (and you get more shots than with Stellar Converters, because you can split your damage better)

Actually, by far the best loadout was to use auto-fire disruptors instead of phasors. Sure they don't have shield pierce but shield pierce isn't that useful anyway and when facing enemies with damper fields, hard shields and heavy xenotronium armor you are going to be thrilled with the higher damage potential of the disruptor.

Using a Doom Star with heavy disruptors plus all the important stack tech (Achilles Targetting, Structural Analyzer, High Energy Focus, Hyper-X Capacitor) as well as the good ol' Phase Cloak and Time Warp Facilitator means that a single Doom Star can take out dozens of high tech enemy Doom Stars in a single turn without taking a single hit. You can then recloak and do it all over again.

[Stark]

ITT more talk about how MoO2 was utterly broken please. I want to refer people to it when they say ZOMG MOO BEST EVVVAH.

[NRS Guardian]

There's also the fact that on the easier difficulty levels you could win as humans without hardly firing a shot just by allying with the strongest power, and helping to tech them up in exchange for planets or whatever. The idiot AI would actually give you just about everything you asked for except their capital just because humans are super-charismatic. That trait was very broken.

[Vendetta]

Anyone with any sense always had the Creative perk.

The custom race editor allowed you to to create some stupidly broken races.

I think the spectacular ease with which you can make something completely broken at every single level of the game is what makes people love MoO2. It's the Munchkin 4X.

[Steel]

Dont forget telepathic! Instantly make an enemy planet 100% yours with no dissent and no casualties. You could take the psilons and then take something utterly irrelevant like low-G and poor ground combat (which with telepathic you will never need) and then have a race that was creative (and thus nigh unbeatable in space) and telepathic, so didnt even need to fight on the ground.

Its a silly game.

[The Kernel]

Dont forget telepathic! Instantly make an enemy planet 100% yours with no dissent and no casualties. You could take the psilons and then take something utterly irrelevant like low-G and poor ground combat (which with telepathic you will never need) and then have a race that was creative (and thus nigh unbeatable in space) and telepathic, so didnt even need to fight on the ground.

Its a silly game.

Telepathy wasn't that useful as conquering a planet is just a matter of keeping a sufficient number of troop transports to overpower the enemy. Those racial points are better spent elsewhere...

Personally, I was always fond of Creativity + Democracy to do an utterly insane level of tech rush, followed by Warlord as soon as I got the evolutionary mutation. This allowed me to turtle for a tech crunch and then come out guns blazing when I'm getting near the end of the tech tree.

Alternately I would sometimes do Creativity + Unification and then leave 2 points free. Then after evolutionary mutation, I would select Subterranian, thus providing me with a huge boost to population. Keep in mind, those planets don't get filled to their capacity all that quick anyway, so it's actually pretty painless to wait until Evolutionary Mutation to grab this benefit.

[The Kernel]

ITT more talk about how MoO2 was utterly broken please. I want to refer people to it when they say ZOMG MOO BEST EVVVAH.

It wasn't broken, it was just imbalanced, especially late game. That being said, the computer can still throw me for a loop sometimes on Impossible difficulty.

The biggest problem with Moo2 is the late game techs are open to abuse (stacking all those beam modifiers is just absurd) and the battle system really didn't work as turn based (especially during multi-player) because the user with the initiative would always win.

[Vendetta]

Personally, I was always fond of Creativity + Democracy to do an utterly insane level of tech rush, followed by Warlord as soon as I got the evolutionary mutation. This allowed me to turtle for a tech crunch and then come out guns blazing when I'm getting near the end of the tech tree.

That was generally my combo as well.

Tech rush to the first decent missiles, and then start building missile destroyers. (Large quantities of incoming missile fire generally make the AI run away and come back a few turns later, tying up it's fleets for an appreciable time at no threat to yourself)

[Darth Wong]

Personally, I was always fond of Creativity + Democracy to do an utterly insane level of tech rush, followed by Warlord as soon as I got the evolutionary mutation. This allowed me to turtle for a tech crunch and then come out guns blazing when I'm getting near the end of the tech tree.

Isn't that how everyone played? Hunker down until you can come out and stomp everyone flat with a massive tech advantage?

[Coalition]

My stunt was to build several Outpost ships, and send them out. It extended your supply radius, and the planets could not be colonized by the enemy. Later on when you send out Colony ships, and colonize a planet with an Oupost, it is treated as having a Marine Barracks already present. Even more fun is that an Outpost can be built on a Gas giant or Asteroid belt, while a colony can't.


What I would sometimes do is wait for two AIs to declare war, and wait nearby with Outpost and Colony ships. As they attacked and destroyed each other's colonies, I would go in and grab the planets.

The final techs, (Jumpgates that add +3 to your speed, and later the one where you get 1-turn transits between your colonies) let me really exploit those Outposts. I could send Colony ships to an Outpost, then either colonize the planet there, or nearby systems.


The key thing to get with Creative is a Defensive Spy bonus, otherwise the other races all steal the tech you worked so hard to develop.

[MKSheppard]

Moo2 for all it's problems was a damn fun game to play. Something that can't be said for MOO3.

[Stark]

Moo2 for all it's problems was a damn fun game to play. Something that can't be said for MOO3.

Irrelevant.

And no, it isn't fun to play, because it's LAUGHABLY EASY because it's HORRIBLY BROKEN. That wasn't important in the 90s when we were all teenagers, but saying it's 'better' than modern games is just rose-tinted glasses. It's a broken, unbalanced, zero-AI game that just has five million nostalgia points.

Isn't that how everyone played? Hunker down until you can come out and stomp everyone flat with a massive tech advantage?

Apparently, if you use the wrong 'race build', this actually doesn't work as you can't keep up with the research or industry of the other races. Once you get something from the broken stat pile (like creativity, research bonus, dip bonus, telepathy, etc) you pretty much automatically win unless you let the AI cheat enough. I found trying to play as those races with combat bonuses very difficult, for instance.

Kernel, nobody cares what happens on 'impossible'. At that point the cheating is just absurd. Late-game techs being unbalanced is only one of PILES of problems the game has (like no dip, broken race abilities, etc etc).

[MKSheppard]

That wasn't important in the 90s when we were all teenagers, but saying it's 'better' than modern games is just rose-tinted glasses.

So you're claiming that MOO3 is superior to MOO2?

I guess to Stark, spreadsheets of doom are more fun than exterminating planetary populations.

[Covenant]

MoO 2 is a great game, but it's time has passed in terms of torch-bearing quality. While I'd say it definately has a lot of great stuff in it, modern gaming is far more about multiplayer than it is about feel-good AI mashing. Things that weren't a big issue in the 90's, like the ability to reasonably assume you'll win no matter the difficulty if you choose for a half-optimal loadout, become game-breaking problems nowadays.

I don't think these are design flaws, I think they're just limitations of the era. AI is hard to do on a MoO2 era computer. But they do date the game and make it kinda stupid nowadays, so it's hard to understand why we haven't seen it totally eclipsed--even if we account for Nostalgia. Who honestly wants to play though the same tech rush over and over again? It's the same bullshit that earns burning hate when you see it in RTS games, Strategy games, or Roleplaying games. Rush to X, win the game. This is fun when you've never done it before, but once you have it stops being fun faster than, say, strategizing.

We've even seen comparitively shit-filled games like Sword of the Stars and Sins of a Solar Empire exceed MoO in a lot of areas, but deliver an absolutely garbage-filled game experience. MoO only remains popular today because of it's high production values in terms of pixel art, the fact that a turn-based engine is probably still a better method of doing strategy gaming, and it's extremely heavy tech tree. MoO combat is poor, but it's still better than Sins or SotS, where combat is easy AND painful to watch or participate in. The Realtime element of it, and a number of other idiotic game design choices, also limit the strategy element to make it overall WORSE than MoO2. And that's pathetic.

It's not like it's a high bar. Just about any game today that was created to look sharp, properly do turn-based gaming, and give you a healthy set of tech options would do extremely well also. Look at Civ--that's all it does and people still buy it. There's barely any game in there at all, it's just one long tech tree, for fuck's sake. Even I like Civ, and it's because nobody with two braincells to rub together has done those three incredibly simple things and affixed them to a title with some actual gameplay. MoO remains as one of the better 4x games not because it's a great game, but because it was a great game, and no even passingly alright game has come out since.

It's the same with X-Com. The original X-Com and X-Com TFTD (which I think is a better game by modern standards) still play very well because so few modern games that do that kind of genre are at all any good. I think that UFO: Afterlight and that WWII game where you could shoot through walls and got the game-breaking powersuit are notable exceptions to that standard of low-quality.

[Stark]

So you're claiming that MOO3 is superior to MOO2?

I guess to Stark, spreadsheets of doom are more fun than exterminating planetary populations.

Stop trolling. There's nothing 'modern' about MoO3, it barely qualifies as 'a game' or 'finished' or 'working' and most of the MoO2 criticisms can be leveled at MoO3 - it just invented whole new piles of shit to add to it.

Cov, you're right that these issues are resutls of the game's time period, but that's why people talking about how 'awesome' it is and how games should aspire to be a 'MoO2 killer' it makes me roll my eyes. Many of these criticisms (no dip, no AI, etc) are equally applicable to almost all turn-based games in the 90s, and these factors are only really done well in SEV for dip options and GalCiv2 for AI, quite recent games.

[The Kernel]

Personally, I was always fond of Creativity + Democracy to do an utterly insane level of tech rush, followed by Warlord as soon as I got the evolutionary mutation. This allowed me to turtle for a tech crunch and then come out guns blazing when I'm getting near the end of the tech tree.

Isn't that how everyone played? Hunker down until you can come out and stomp everyone flat with a massive tech advantage?

Not necessarily. If you are playing in a big galaxy that's pretty much your only option as you aren't going to eliminate everyone quick enough for the tech disparity to destroy you, but in smaller games and especially 1v1 it can be very beneficial to go with racial picks that will allow you to build quickly (Unification and pop growth) and flood the enemy with cheap ships.

Early in the game it's actually pretty easy to build killer ships without much tech if you concentrate on getting decent missiles + automated factories and to hell with the rest of the tech tree.

Of course if you are playing 2v2 and 3v3 games for instance there's also a lot of benefit towards specializing in your racial pics since you only need one race to do the tech crunch and then just share the tech with allies.

[Covenant]

Cov, you're right that these issues are resutls of the game's time period, but that's why people talking about how 'awesome' it is and how games should aspire to be a 'MoO2 killer' it makes me roll my eyes. Many of these criticisms (no dip, no AI, etc) are equally applicable to almost all turn-based games in the 90s, and these factors are only really done well in SEV for dip options and GalCiv2 for AI, quite recent games.

Yeah, it's pretty much easy to blanket the entire genre with the same basic criticisms. Still, calling a game a MoO2-killer makes some sense, but only if we assume these people are talking about the game in the sense I am. A simple graphical update of MoO2 would really expose how thin the game is by modern terms, and I doubt anyone would like it very much. It still might be more fun than SotS, but I doubt it, MoO2 with good graphics would be closer to a cheesy free online game you download off some dude's text-and-pattern website.

Not that the game would need all that much work to become relevent again, but I think it's about time we start admitting that nearly every space sim is primarily about combat and not about diplomacy or economy, and make sure the combat model actually works. Even combat-centric SotS managed to fuck it up with it's tiny battlefields, bizzare fleet limits, and extremely wonky combat balance. Sins was far less advanced than MoO's combat model, and it sucked hardcore anyway.

This is one of the few saving graces--the fact that MoO had depth like the mix of structure, armor and shields along with independant values for each of the four facing directions and weapon firing arcs instead of 'shoot anywhere' beams. Space Empires has that stuff too, as well as the good diplomacy, so I'd say it's the closest we've ever gotten to a satisfying combat model in one of these things in a modern game. I still say give me Homeworld 1 graphics, an extremely crude 3D grid, very basic newtonian motion modelling for unit speeds/distances covered, and MoO's ship design depth and you'll have a really fun game on your hands right there. There's no way such a game is outside the ability of a company to make--it's very, very basic stuff here. People will buy it too, and they'll play it until the year 2030 and claim it's the best game ever.