Dudes. You can capture the Antaran ships? To quote one sage, “whoa!”
Heck yes, how do you think you get all those badass unresearchable techs?
Well, that and scuttling that one Orion ship for research points, IIRC.
Oh, yes. They’re all equipped with quantum detonators, so many of them will just explode, but some of them won’t. Scrap one of them and you can get one or more antaran techs. Their marines have the best possible combat stats, but their damper fields don’t block transporters; you can often capture the small ships using transporters. The big ships generally require assault shuttles.
The strange thing is that antaran tech isn’t universally desirable. Death rays and particle beams (the former is always one of the techs you get for defeating the Guardian) can’t be miniaturized. By the time you reach hyper-advanced physics IV or so, disruptors pack a significantly greater punch per unit of space than death rays, but your ground batteries and star fortresses will still use death rays because they’re “better”. I’ve been known to use a savegame editor to remove death ray and mauler device from my list of techs so that I can have better ground batteries.
…Yeah, I’m gonna end up playing this game again soon.
I found my old copy and tried it. With some fiddling* I’ve gotten it to run but the screen is filled with colored garbage. I may just buy the GoG version and hope it works better instead of continuing to look for fixes.
*Creating a copy of a file named dplayx.dll and renaming the copy dplay.dll, which apparently is what older programs look for.
The GoG edition is pre-configured for DosBox, which is where the .exe points.
Welp thanks to this thread I bought it on GoG and killed last night. I thought I played MOO2 before but it was actually MOO that I played way back when, so MOO2 is fresh and new for me. Score!
Meh. The graphics are so 90’s…
I don’t know about Win7, but I’ve got it running native in XP with no issues. I may have had to download a patch, but at this point I don’t remember. I installed the DOS/Win95 version and may have had to patch it up to match what shipped on the Win95/Win98 disc. (I have both those discs and they made some changes in the points for custom races in the upgrade.)
I bought the GOG version, and it may or may not have caused me some computer trouble. I played it for a while, and then a bit later Firefox totally spazzed out on me and went unresponsive. I have no idea if MOO II is at fault, or if it was CORION2 (a savegame editor; useful if you want to unlearn food replicators or do sillier stuff), or if it was Firefox itself. After a second reboot, CHKDSK does its thing, and apparently fixes a couple of things. Things seem fine so far now, but I’m still a bit worried that I may have more headaches on the horizon.
MOO II is as fun as ever, though.
I gave in and took Miller’s advice this morning before work. Far as I can tell it works like a champ on my Win7 machine. I’m kinda psyched to give it a more serious spin when I get home tonight :).
Now I’ll have to go check if they have a workable version of one of the early X-COMs - as I was looking at the Moo2 graphics during my test, I started flashing back to X-COM 2.
They don’t. But Steam does.
I should also have mentioned that the auto-build feature in this game is actually half-decent. Once you reach a certain point in the game, you can spam colony ships and send them to unclaimed systems, “fire-and-forget” style. Rush build a defensive or production building on each colony’s first turn, switch on auto-build, and then ignore it for a few hundred turns. For the amount of attention you have to pay to the colony, you get a good return on your investment.
I’ve been playing this game for almost a decade…what the hell’s autobuild???
It allows a planet to continuously turn out the same type of ship.
Max probably means “Governor” based on his description. The setting that automatically picks what building to put up next.
You’re the first person I’ve seen claim the MoO2 autobuild is decent. It prioritizes wrong, builds useless stuff, and does not always build things you want. It does get the job done, but not very well.
The only reason I could think to call it decent is because it’s decent compared to the prospect of micromanaging a dozen new colonies all at the same time (which gets real old, real fast).
And FWIW I’ve heard the steam version of Xcom does not work very well on modern PCs - it runs way too fast making it almost unplayable. I don’t have it on steam so I don’t know for sure, though. Shame because if you can look past the graphics and some of the more abusive tactics it’s still an excellent game.
That’s repeat build.
First of all, I said it’s half-decent. Second, it will get get everything built without your input; it’s not annoying if you aren’t paying attention to the planet (and you shouldn’t bother). A small barren poor low G planet will get built up and gaiafied quicker than you’d think, and then can make a noticeable contribution to your food supplies or research. Yes, you could get somewhat better results my manually queuing up buildings seven at a time, but it’s unlikely that it will make much of a difference if you’re already in the position to send out a wave of fifty colony ships.
I don’t know where you heard that; it runs perfectly fine on my quad-core Vista machine.
How do I do this autobuild thing?
There’s a button one the screen where you set a planet’s build queue. If it’s on, then the AI will pick new buildings to build automatically whenever you finish a project. If there are no buildings left to build, it’ll choose trade goods; when you discover the tech for a new building, it’ll switch from trade goods to the new building on the next turn, which is handy.