I recall it running pretty well on my old XP machine too.
MOO2 did some things that I don’t think any other 4X game has done, or at least not as well. For instance, the combined colony screen. The ability to adjust population activities, transport from one planet to another, rush production, and even set production and manage the build queue all from one screen. At the time Civ II made you open every city whenever you wanted to change anything. Civ IV is somewhat better now in that you can do most of the basic management from the world screen, but there are definitely times I miss the simplicity of the MOO2 colony screen.
It’s really a shame there was no MOO3.
I went ahead and got the GoG version. It’s worked fine and been fun except for one oddity; it doesn’t let me switch between capital and lowercase letters normally. Shift doesn’t do anything nor does just pressing capslock. I have to double tap capslock to switch between caps and lowercase. Workable but weird.
Forgive me, but I recently picked this up on Steam, so I’m not as familiar with the game as y’all (hence the question!)
It seems that the game allows the other races to “cheat”.
Whereas I am limited to a certain distance from the nearest colony (based on tech level), and cannot build colony ships very quickly, the other races do not seem to have these limitations. They expand 15 parsecs away (early on), build 5 colonies when I’ve only been able to build one ship. What gives?
Is this a bug, a flaw, a design? If the latter, I wish they would have had everyone play by the same rules and raise the difficulty in other ways. It would be nice if it was more like playing other people (who have to follow the same rules as you), since you can then make more logical plans.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Oh the AI definitely ‘cheats’. Get Omniscient and watch them never have to use scout craft. Or when they take uncharismatic (I forgot the name), they can still make demands of other races. Or when they take the limited tech learning trait they can still discover another technology that you wouldn’t be able to.
Building 5 colony ships in a few turns, or being able to travel 15 parsecs (vs what they’re limited to) would certainly be major cheats. Much worse than not using scouts… Heck, I can counter that one, but I’m still limited by money and the propulsion tech level that I am on. I still can’t whip out a colony ship every turn or two plus leapfrog 2 or 3 star systems!
You’re objecting to the fact that a game from 1993 cheats against a human? I suggest you simply deal with it. If you want a more “intelligent” single player game go and find Galactic Civilizations II which was published in 2006.
Sorry - MOO2 came out in 1996, MOO was 1993.
GalCiv still cheats.
I know, but it cheats in less blatant ways - well aside from the conceit that all other races have been studying stars and know where to settle.
It’s very hard to build single player games that emulate playing against good human players. That excuse is getting thinner for modern games given the computational and programing resources available. But to give a game from '96 with system requirements like “8 MB of RAM and 75MB of HD space” grief over cheating is just ridiculous.
That;s fine if it’s how it’s programmed to be.
I was thinking it could be a bug and I needed a patch for it, or there was some way to stop that.
Silly programming, though
It’s not silly, though. If the AI races didn’t cheat, there’d be no challenge in the game at all. Making the AI smart enough to challenge you based on it allocating its resources as efficiently as you can is pretty much impossible still, and we’re talking about a 15-year-old game here. Making it smart enough to challenge you based on a suboptimal allocation of way more resources than you have is a solvable programming problem.
Ok, all you MoO2 re-discoverers, now for the real fun: drag out your copy of CivII and give THAT a whirl. 
Are you sure they didn’t just find a wormhole or two? I could definitely see the Sakkra (with their fast growth and cheap colony ships) or the Klackons (with their high productivity supported by high food output), when provided with a lucky starting position, make not-very-pronounced cheating seem downright egregious.
At the time MOO2 came out a 486 @ 100MHz was the default platform and the program required 8 MB of RAM and 0.75 GB of HD space. GalCiv II showed up on dual cores at 1500 MHz and required 256 MB of RAM and 2 GB of HD space (excludes Video RAM requirements which simply wasn’t a going concern back 15 years ago).
4Xs are very exploitable by humans that can strategically plan and adapt to exploits the system’s programming allows. Fewer computations and simpler models means you need to have the computer cheat to make a game challenging.
Oh and there were no patches back then, not really.
Sorry, I have to disagree.
The programmers could have easily done other things - such as given the AI more advantageous rolls, or enhanced the tech acquirement process - without allowing things that simply should not have been possible (expansion across mega-parsecs, a colony ship a turn in the beginning). The latter makes the game follow an illogical path, while the former makes up for the AI limitations yet still stays within the basic rules as the game is set up. IMHO that would have been greatly preferable.
Eh, I totally disagree–I’d rather the AI can bypass some tech/colony limitations than have it cheat where I can watch it cheating (with random rolls, in battle). It does cheat tech too, btw.
Look they did that too, but I do not remember that kind of cheating on anything under Impossible. This kind of stuff was what drove people to want multiplayer games. Hell the “deep” 4x multiplayer game in the late 90s was Stars! which was basically done through emailing a host once per day to update your turn.
Just post in the docs that the AI players get say 5% tech bonus per difficulty level.
That should be easy to program, as well as obvious to players since you know it up front (and can easily plan for it - not so easy to do if a Silicoid colony ship shows up over a ultra rich toxic planet 2 parsecs from your home world - and there’s no Silicoid planets within 20 parsecs from you.
I gotta admit, I can’t recall seeing enemy ships violate range requirements while within my sensor range. Then again, I tend to play Huge galaxies.