MOO 2 PreFAQ [Born Dec 5, 1996.]
Mantainer: Fuwah Chez
Source: http://pages.nyu.edu/~fqc4951/moo2.html [HTML]
/moo2.txt [Text]
[HTML Version is updated much much much much more often.]
Any additions, questions, and especially corrections, are welcome.
News: I'm going to read the manual now to see if maybe it's got useful stuff.
Hum. Hum. Maybe the strategy guide would be nice, because it would have all the
leader stats, I'd guess. But it somehow seems unfair to steal it. So I guess I'll
depend on my little pieces of paper (and any submissions are helpful. :) )
[I. Heroes]
a) Ranks
1. Colony administrators
2. Ship leaders
b) Chart
I've been scribbling down the stats of heroes. It tends to
be a bloody pain. Maybe it's time to dig into the LBX's.
For descriptions of what the trait does just right click on it (in the
game, not here.)
An asterisk basically means the trait is a super-trait; when the hero
advances levels that trait goes up a lot more than normal.
Remember that my experience and bias is mostly against CPs. Multiplayer
tactics must change - for example, the psilons in multiplayer may find
themselves quickly bashed up by aggressive players. They need room to
maneuver, well don't give it to them! And the human's charisma
advantage would find itself diminished, when your main opponent _will_
be the other humans. Personal charisma would work _much_ better here. Oh
yes, read up on Sun Tzu for psychological tricks. While much of it is
somewhat antiquated (okay so, I need 20 weight units of rice to walk a
team of 5 horses and 20 men over 30 li. That sounds real helpful), there
are general concepts that are most useful. I'll attempt to work it in.
A) Pregenerated
It's not only the player who customizes races. MOO2 races can have different
picks than usual. Check embassy reports for details.
Psilons: Of course! Creative is bloody powerful! The player,
besides mantaining a huge lead, can ignore trading techs
with the computer. Disadvantage is that one loses the fun
on which tech one should choose. You'll win, but it's less
fun.
Sakkras: Many have noticed that Sakkras tend to overwhelm
the other (!)AIs in games. In small galaxies, the balance
of 2 colonies per race will be soon shattered when Sakkras
invade one or two. In larger galaxies they'll be grabbing
huge chunks of real state.
Elerians: {idea from Greg Lary
I recently started up a game with the Elerians. They are
feudal (1/3 ship cost) and telepathic, so any ship cruiser-sized or
above can mind-control, that is, take over a colony completely
without the use of transports. Most instructive. I blitzed
fairly quickly to get a small fleet sufficient for taking out
a starbase (which, early on, is about the only defense they can
afford) and quickly took out most of the competition.
Elerian's -50 research production (from feudalism) places it
squarely in the Blitz category.
B) Wishlist
** Wish ** Save custom races. Further customize custom races: race
names, and race _picture_ (I can see a big headache in this one,
deciphering the bloody LBX headers.)
C) Other people's favorite races.
{From: rcjohnso@prairienet.org (Rob C. Johnson)}
1)Kinda-like the Vorlons 8-)
6 pts High G: troops are twice as tough (Vorlons are hard to kill)
6 pts Telepathic: get +10 spy and +25 to diplo and easy easy to take
over worlds (keeping supplied in transports takes quite a few
command points!)
4 pts Cybernetic: healing ships, don't eat food but do eat production
(Vorlon ships organically heal)
-3 pts -.5 food: don't need so much food, so not so bad
-4 pts -.5 Bcs: I can survive on this budget... barely. gotta get all
the money buildings tho
hmmm left 1 pt over, so that was Large Homeworld.
the favorite tactic with this species was to board enemy ships.
all you need is transporters and a big enough gun to knock down
enemy shields!
[Note that telepathy allows an immediate use of captured ships/starbases.]
2) Klingons? [Turtleheads!]
-4 pts Feudal: cheaper ships! [1/3rd normal cost] love that.
-4 pts -.5 Bcs: We don't need no stinkin' monet!
-2 pts -20 ship defense: Klingons ATTACK, they don't DEFEND
4 pts Warlord: extra command pts, more experienced (altho I didn't
check, I've heard from others it doesn't work).
[It works on new units, but it doesn't instanteneously raise the
levels of existing units.]
6 pts High G: extra tough warriors
hmm, don't recall what the other 10 picks were. probably some
ship attack and spy bonus (I really like spy bonus 8-))
[III. Strategic issues]
a) Maximizing production
1. The basic strategic bit for production-based games.
As in MOO1, it's basically a game of production. I flourish at
maximizing production, but one can't understimate wielding your
blunt instrument with finesse.
There's a few main stats on the game.
Resources:
Money, Ships, Population, Planets.
Production:
Industry, Food, and Tech.
(?) Haven't found the effect of surplus food production. I know
traders translate it into cash. What about others? Can't seem
to find any use except as a buffer.
Food is critical in the first stages, unless you play organic
rich. In mid/late game, one breadbasket planet can feed your
entire system, specially if you've bought all those hydroponic
and subterranean farms (+2/+4 food per planet respectively.)
Basically comes down to a very convoluted system. Lots of anything
means lots of everything else. But the most important two are
industry and tech, and I shift everything else to these two.
Got an extra 240bc's? Jump start a colony by buying automatic
factories.
Population generates money, consumes food, but can generate
food, industry, and tech. Industry can generate food, ships,
buildings (which means more tech/food/industry.) Tech, well,
just about gives everything. Yes, Clarke, it's *magic*.
2. We all love Data!
{Beowulf92@aol.com}
I tend to build MOST of the available structures in every colony. But I
have found a way to offset the incurred costs: once I've researched and
produced a single Android Worker, the morale of my entire _empire_ goes
up. I can then raise the tax rate to cover the building costs without
losing alot of production.
3. Excess production - Where does the rest go?
Planet is producing 500 industry units. Your ship/building/ect costs 490. The
ten that are leftover are bankrolled over to the next item. If there is no
other item, it will automatically add them to your treasury. What I've yet to
confirm is whether multiple items can be built on one turn. If this is so, it
makes it very efficient to use the *repeat build* button to build little gnats.
4. Bad situations - Okay, I'm doing _real_ badly.
The best reward, for me, is not quite winning, but learning how to win. So it is
a good habit to save games when you first start, and when you are in dicey situations.
Replay it until you win. While you will benefit from semiomnicience, because you already
sort-of know what's going to happen, it helps one learn _a lot_.
Note that the beginning of the game is critical - this is where
your decisions will carry the most weight, because they carry on through the
rest of the game. Example, if you find 100BCs in a planet, and are able to buy
that automated factory, you've gained at least 4 production (5 from factory, minus
maintenance).
b) Dirty tricks
1. You can have it - Not! (c.s.i.p.g.strategic, original poster
unknown.)
You are at war with the Psilons. You can't touch his well-defended
plannets. You have a sufficiently strong fleet orbiting a well-stacked
planet. Give away the system. Next turn, bloody well take it back,
and hope you get a few techs.
Tech acquisition during conquest seems to correlate to amount of
buildings in the planet.
Twists include giving back a planet you JUST conquered. Make
sure you've got lots of transports to fight back your own
troopers. :) I'm not sure which tech the troopers will have
in this case - I suspect your own.
2. Identity crisis.
Obviously, if you pick a race, the computer can't play it.
While creating a custom race you can prevent a race from playing
by picking its portrait. It was rather fun to play with two
psilon races, IMHO. Trading back and forth on everything. :)
3. Runaway!
Retreating fleets basically head back to their originating systems
(Is their speed affected by warp dissipators and the such?). There are
a few instances when this doesn't quite happen - If the origin of the ship
is the very same system where you flee from (possibly incorrect), and if
there is a spacetime flux. In the latter case my fleet disappeared. Hum.
C) Scoring
There's two types of scores, as in Civ. Well, it's one number,
but basically two ways to get the score.
1. Blitz and quickly conquer all the other races. Here is score is
basically population (conquered population counts double) plus a time
bonus, times a difficulty modifier (depends on picks and difficulty
level.) The heaviest weight falls on the time bonus (and the picks, if
you choose not to take them all.)
2. The second way is numerically larger, since you'll have a huge
population +100 for Orion, +250 (?) for defeating Antares, times
the difficulty bonus. There's no time bonus since one's been sitting
there micromanaging for quite some time. Ought to read NAFTA one of
these days and do something constructive. Let's see, printed up it's
a stack that's taller than my cousin, hum dense convuluted text, well,
you ought to finish before MPS releases Moo v1.3..
Best results in a huge galaxy.
D) Formulas behind the game.
1. Click on the icons in the colony's screen (not the spreadsheet)
to see the exact calculations.
2. Spying/Combat. Don't have any. All I've gotten is iffy results from
observation. A ground combat difference of just 5 is highly significant.
[IV. Technical issues]
Patches available at http://www.microprose.com/corporatedesign/techsupport/techsupp.html
or via ftp.micropose.com/mps-online/new-versions/moo2*
The paths are a bit hard to manually copy so it's just as easy to find
the main path (http://www.micropose.com) and then work from there.
Besides, they could redesign the page sometime and move the links.
A) W95 vs. DOS?
I've heard the DOS version to have substantial differences
from the Win version, both in gameplay, interface, and
most important, bugs. The former tends to be much more
stable and bug-free. It's hard to finger who has the blame.
Perhaps the video card has lousy drivers, or if it's a generic
driver, its implementation is loosy. Or maybe WinG/DirectX/2X/3X
(whichever it is) are still bloody well immature, and bugs
nonstanding, programmers have yet to figure them out.
B) Can it be run without the CD?
{credit: Joel Dickerson }
Copy all the bloody LBXs to the HD directory (~330Mb).
Maybe you'll have to change the orion2.ini file to point to the hard
drive, but I haven't found the need. If you need to just replace the
appropriate drive letter with a text editor.
[V. Cheating]
A) Cheat codes. From the main screen type the following.
{usenet: Christopher Holko.}
ALT-moola 1000BCs
ALT-einstein Give all non-advanced techs.
alt-menla Instantaneously research current tech.
alt-crunch " complete production.
alt-canbonlyl All races declare war with you.
alt-iseeall Give you omniscience, but it "does change your racial
attributes." <- Will confirm what exactly it means.
B) Hex edit cash.
I forget the offset, but here's how to find it. Search for the
second instance of your race name (Klakon, for example) and
go down.. hum.. I think it was 9 bytes. I'll doublecheck later.
It could be fun to start a game then give EVERY race an inmense
amount of cash.
[VI. Random Events]
A) Space Eels: The only monster to breed and multiply. They blockade
systems (which basically prevents colony ships and freighters from
functioning in that system) but they won't harm fleets.
B) Space Dragon: Oh, I like this guy! He popped up looking for a new
treasure hoard, and parked himself in my system demanding a payoff
of 500BCs. I pretty much refused and toasted him. I should have paid
him to see which other system he'd terrorize.
C) Population Boom: Lots of instant population, or perhaps extra growth
ala-MOM (BTW MOO2 resembles MOM much more than it does MOO1.) I can't
check since it's never actually happened to me.
D) Hyperspace Flux: Halt in interstellar traffic. This means no fleets can
start intersystem movement. Exceptions include freighter traffic,
already-moving fleets, and ships belonging to transdimentional races. I've
run into a little 'feature' because of a flux. See Run Away! in strategy
section.
E) Spacetime Anomaly.
F) Mysterious fleet explosion.
[VIII. Diplomacy]
A) Treaties.
Maybe this section belongs with the previous section. *cough*
All right, treaties are a pain for some used to MOO1 when it was
very clear cut. In MOO2, acceptance depends on the personality of the
race (and possibly the very race itself). I have found research treaties
to be the most acceptable to CPs. Then it probably is nonagression pacts,
followed by trade treaties.
In any given meeting there's a specific amount of 'bad bloopers' you
are allowed before the meeting is over. Demands are among the highest
in terms of 'bloopers' cost, followed by failed treaty talks, and
then the neutrals: exchanging tech, and succesful treaty talks.
I don't know if one can have an unlimited number of tech exchanges
(besides the obvious limit) as in MOO1. Regardless, giving gifts
basically gives you 'good bloopers.' As a final note, giving techs
in MOO2 is nowhere as effective as in MOO1.
If you've exhausted an emperors patience, you must wait a certain
amount of turns before you can talk to his/her royal pain-in-the-neck.
The minimum I've found is three, as in MOO1. Good relations can reduce
this amount.
It's also pretty darn hard to get a war stopped, by giving them gifts
or the such as the CPs tend to do to me. It's because your gifts to them
have no strings attached.
I wonder how the concept of reputation works in this game. Is it ala-MOM,
where it affects only one race, or ala-CIV, where everyone else knows
about it? I suspect the former.
B) Trading techs: You've got what!? Can I have it? Pleaseprettypleasewithsugarontop?
Some people get upset at trading high-cost techs to the CPs. After all, they are
giving away something they worked hard for for a bargain price. Hum. The way I
look at it, I'll take any production-tech for a production tech (well except maybe
some ludicrous trade like deep core mines for automatic factories. I doubt that
will ever happen), keep all my spy techs (unless I'm not really researching anything
of my own), and miscellaneous techs I can trade freely. They gain something, I gain
something, BUT, I'll know how to use it, and they won't. :)
On the subject of fair tech trades, the only way to have fair trade is to have equal players.
That is, if one partner is so much obviously more advanced, they don't have to trade anyway.
When you get into parity-level trades, you both benefit fairly equally, and well, if you're
the underdog, beg, plead, or just steal. It's only fair.
[IX. Fleets]
A) Tech improvements.
Just because you've got pulson missiles doesn't mean you should stock your
next ship with them. Hey, wait, I've got _MIRV_ merculites. So I can have
twice as many MIRV, fast, EECM, Heavily-armored merculites. Hum.
The same applies to beam weapons. All the improvements are quite useful. My
favorite has to be autofire.
B) Size matters.
1. Defense vs. Offense.
Large ships have the advantage of more armor for the cost
(which translates to construction time), while smaller ships can carry
more weapons for an equivalent cost. Smaller ships, in addition, have a
higher combat speed (which translates into beam defense, and well, movement rate).
It is no longer as clear-cut which size is best, unlike MOO1 (where it was basically
the smallest that will carry the weapon you want.
2. Large ships can also take advantage of the nice enhancements. The larger the ship,
the more cost-effective it is to drop the enhancements in, specially if the wide-area
jammer (which affects the entire fleet).
3. Initiative.
In MOO2, the human always gets initiative. What this advantage means to ship size I'm
not quite sure. While the smaller ships lose some of the advantage from going first (since
they go first _anyway_), I think it proves to be a net-gain for small ships, because a
larger number of weapons can have 'first strike' with no fear of retaliation until it's
all over.
To may it clear to the strategically-impaired (actually, my lousy prose is to blame),
say you have a ship with 300 armor and a weapon sufficiently-powerful to blow the targets
up. It doesn't matter whether you have 100 structure or 1000, in this case. It becomes a
bit less clear-cut if the same ship can only take out half the targets, in which case they
will quickly retaliate and fry you. Hum. The formulas are going to be impossible..
Maybe the kind soul who did the weapons charts for MOO1 can tackle this one - I'm failing
calculus myself.
C) Favorite ship designs (ala MOO1).
1. The Peashooter: the smallest-possible ship that can carry the nice x2 missiles. They
can fire from afar and send their deadly payload. While their small size will mean they
may get blown up, it's actually nice if the CP targets them, because you've already
fired your payload _anyway_, and besides, you've got a nice big distance between the two
of you to minimize the damage.
2. The Juggernaut: Big, and it will absorb all the damage they can dish out. These ships
are front-line. While their offenses may suffer, it is very nice to have a damage-soaker
around. They keep going and going and.. Actually, I can think of two versions of this ship.
The first would be a missile-launcher (no longer a x2, perhaps x5 or even a torpedo). This
ship would move slightly ahead of the peashooters to draw fire away from them, while remaining
far away from the main battle, if the enemy should prove to be too powerful. Adding some
antimissile defenses is very nice, since they can take out all those missiles the CP sent
towards your peashooters. The second version would be beam weapons, and this one goes to
the front to bash down the opponents through brute force.
3. The Marines: This is a nice new feature adding complexity to the formula. I've been
experimenting without much success. Obviously, ground combat bonuses help a lot. Anything
that takes down marines is very nice (neutron blasters, for example.) Other techs make
it more complicated with assault shuttles, troop pods, transporters, ect. I haven't quite
figured out how to handle them.
4. The Spawner: This carrier spawns out little fighters to blow up their fleets. I like targetting
big ships, because I don't like having my fighters target a little scout that soon gets blown
up and takes out the fighters with it. This ship obviously belongs in the rear of the battle
(unless you need its marines or add some funky specials), and bigger ships are nice for it. Well,
technically we _can_ treat them as peashooters and make them sufficiently-small, but it's a nice
esthetic to have a big ship there. I mean, carriers ought to be _big._
Cloaking sounds so nice for the carrier.
Take a look at what makes up the individual fighter's stats - Weapons are your best PD/bomb,
engines, shields, armor, are as your best. Obviously higher techs in these help very much.
I'm going to start a game where all I do is make spawners, and some other little gnats to
guard the Mother Ship.
"Fly, my children, fly!"
Whoshhhhzzz... zap zap zap zap.. boooooom.
5. Valiant Gnats: Weak defense, heavy into offense. They launch right into the front lines, and
their beams take out the enemy. The benefit from speed-bonuses and the such. I only add offensive
and speed specials to them (why add a missile jammer when the missiles would blow me up _anyway_.)
6. Trick ships:
These frequently involve some clever combinations of specials/weapons. They have to be executed
precisely to be effective.
The earliest I've been able to build is the Spinner. They've basically take advantage of the
gyrothingy.. 5 of them will take down a starbase in one shot, easily. You'll reach range in
two turns, so you'll have to survive that long. Antimissiles can be useful.
Remember that some specials, like the tractor beam, should not be stacked. I stacked
12 of them in one slot, so what happens is all twelve target one ship. Distributed among the
slots makes for finer control (this is true with any other situations, such as crippling a
ship to capture it, instead of blowing it up).
D) Scrapping.
The BCs yielded are pretty pathetic, but sometimes you've found you've got _just_ too many
transports, and they are draining your treasury.
One interesting tidbit (from usenet) is that scrapping a ship containing an unknown tech(s)
yields one to you. _Now_ you can build damper fields.
Since I learned this I've been designing special ships to capture antareans, but not
destroy them. Okay, so I like my new toy... :)
The colony screen is amazingly useful. Left click on left side to jump
to that colony, and on the right to change the production queue. The
little round thing on the right can be clicked to quickly purchase
production to complete said item.
This is also the easiest place to move colonists from one place to the
other. Say, click on 10 scientists and plop them on a farmer slot in
another colony (or the same) and they'll be rearranged. Much nicer than
doing so from the hum planet screen.
2. Heroes: Okay purple shaggy farmer, I _really_ don't need more food!
{correction from Jim Vieira
On the leader's screen, any heroes you don't hire (assuming you have a free
slot) are shown with their cost in a little red number. You have a bit of
time to change your mind. I've found that if all four slots are occupied
like that, another hero won't come along till the bugger leaves. So you
can just click on the dismiss button, so they don't hog the spot.
Also, to get to the fleet captains, bloody click on the tab on top.
3. Production
Click on the icons in the colony's screen (not the spreadsheet)
to see the exact calculations.
B) Increasing maximum planet size.
Terraforming _still_ increases maximum size, something I just noticed.
Gaia tech also does this. With subterranean (as in Sakkras) the maximum
sizes can be amazing! Orion terraforms to a 42, Gaia, Ultra-rich planet.
Yum.
C) Game options screen.
Some fairly useful thingies, like shutting off animations, and the
bloody music, to save your sanity.
