I'm not saying my suggested custom race is a powerhouse. But Feudal isn't as bad as people say and can have its own advantages if played right. Once you are over the hump of getting your first research buildings and can maintain decent expansion, you should be good to go.

No doubt, feudal is best govenment for some settings, if you mind speed game, its actually the best for advanced and even average (but on average huge it mean what you should get exactly all you need in artifact planet, so i never get a patience to played it this way, with feudal you could win in a mid-50 there). But as far i got you're not talking about speedrun, as you plan to research labs, do expancion etc. In fact optimal strategy VS AI is no research exept most basic and no expancion at all (assuming you have a right race), or outright expand and sheer overpowering, it take more time tho, and you cant do it with feudal. Well, ofc AI is SO weak so you can win even with feudal researching cloning centers etc, but its just sign of weaknees of AI. With right race you can get all the possible techs pre T200. And right way of playing feudal is skip all possible research and do war. Btw this game can be won from Average (not mention advanced) tech even on huge without spending ANY RP during a whole game and without diplomacy or using captured techs (exept achievements ofc), so thats the basic strategy leaning of feudal here. Otherwise you play feudal only to make your life harder.

Or to have fun. Nuff' said ;)

Sorry, im wrongly assumed what you was interested in some actual problem from a game, say how to beat antarans.

MOO2 Impossible, I have recorded wins with the stock Psilons and Klackons. I had a game going with the Meklars, and was in the steamrolling phase, but ran out of mental energy to finish it.

The Psilon game featured a surprise attack on the Darloks starting Turn 119. The exploit was a couple of Destroyers with MIRV'd nukes against a Star Base with no Heavy Armor.

The Klackon game was won by out colonizing and out populating the opponents and obtaining key technologies, taking a couple of monster guarded planents (Turn 114 Huge/Rich) and Orion, then going after the Antarans.

No, because I'm not insane. I could barely handle normal and need a lot more time to work myself up to even thinking about impossible,

One trick I have used on impossible is to take the "Charismatic" racial pick. For 3 pick points you get most of the diplomatic relations to neutral and that can allow you to set up trade/research treaties that will eventually turn into Non-Aggression Pacts. When your relations are very high from the treaties, then you can demand things (techs, stop spying, systems) and actually get them rather than war.

The only 2 things you can't do is use bio weapons and never accept alliances. In the first case, everyone will hate you, and in the second everyone but the allied race will hate you, and it will drag you into wars you may not want to fight at that time.

Thank you,
Typhon Grey

I had a really hard time with impossible for quite a while. I've got to where I can usually beat it now, but I only choose impossible if I'm really in the mood and have lot's of time to play.

I typically play on hard with pre-warp huge galaxy. It's a little too easy, but impossible is so intense for me I really have to be in the mood for it.

On impossible,I've recently tried going with warlord, telepathic, large-rich and +1 food ( fuedal repulsive for negatives). And its quite easy, but its not played like your typical game. You have to be building your missle cruiser from the beginning and keep building them, put on extended tanks and 9 x2 nukes. Don't even research, just build. The only times i needed to research is around turn 80 or so, to break the psilons and their emc + shield technology, but usually the game is over around the 100 turn mark.

This works well on Small and Medium on Impossible, but on large and above, the tech deficiency might cause big problems.

Actually you describe exactly typical moo2 game against AI. You dont need to colonize against AI, you dont need factories or labs not even talking about more advanced useless crap. Because AI cant develop or defend even on impossible. The only important techs if you are using right race (uni, tele trans, large rich) are additional fuel tanks, fighter bays and deuterium. Using it you should win huge 7 opponents no later than 100 turns from prewarp, actual speed depends on the map generation (my best is 63 turs for example). When you play average tech and smaller maps - you could skip all the teching entirely and win with basic nukes (18 turns for small for me, but its with fighters found in arti, without it, using fair nukes it would be around 21-22 turns at best). In general your race is sure kill against AI, but sure kill start with race "Unification with full 10 non-lethal negatives and without any other positives", as AI is very weak. Main problem of your race is wasting pick on useless Warlord and skipping most powerful game pick of Transdimentional, otherwise its a viable strategy for small average tech, its really good what you keep proving my point what this game could be fully learned in week or two, as if i got you right you started to play it just recently, and already moved very far in understanding it. When youll feel bored with AI (i guess pretty soon), try to join multiplayer games, there could be other story, as impossible AI playing much worse than any newbie human player.

it's not impossible but having creative is required, I can't even begin to imagen what it would be like without that.

Actually imho trying to play on impossible difficulty WITH creative makes things a LOT tougher.

The main reason is that it takes 8 picks and really a lot of the tech is not that needed. These picks are much better spent in other areas. Of course this all depends on galaxy size.

One good combo with Creative might be Democracy for the research bonus, it also lets you get the Morale Bonus's as well unlike Unification. Sadly that's 15 picks right there.

Creative is required only on advanced tech games, where you dont need to research at all, but cant let game miss key cheap technologies for you. But its only about humanVShuman games, or some other cases where you need a top reliable performance, its very easy to win all AIs without it still.

I've heard that impossible is easier with Master of Orion 2 than Master of Orion, to the point that good players will usually win even in the worst situation. Myself, I'm just becoming familiar with MoO2 so I couldn't say.

I love impossible difficulty in Master of Orion though. Sure there's a couple cheap tricks you can use, but unless you're one of the top few races its truly a crapshoot. You may be put in a decent position where winning is very doable, or you might get your butt kicked unless you really try some off the wall strategies.

You can make a deliberately weak race in moo2, and enjoy problems with AI on impossible this way. But yes, generally speaking moo1 is no doubt harder than moo2. In moo2, if you play decent race, its not the "good players will usually win even in the worst situation", its "impossible to lose in any case, if you playing right". In moo1 AI could find a very good sector for theyr additional initial CS'es (thing they dont have in moo2) plus a good arti planet with some planetology tech - and would spread really fast. No such things could happen in moo2, as good race in hand of human will always outperform any AI.

My brother and I used to play on impossible all the time, that was quite a while ago though.

I usually went with cybernetic, telepathic, unification, and low-G. He usually went with repulsive, telepathic, lithovore.

We thought creative was useless because you can steal tech from the other races easily. It didn't seem to make the AI that mad when you stole their techs if your fleet is large enough.

I worked up to beating impossible games by kind of cheating. I would start a hotseat game and create my race, and a secondary race of "slaves". I would give them +2 food and make them subterranean. Then when I met this race I would just surrender them and transport a few guys to all of my planets, that make the game beatable and I could hone my strategy against the impossible AI. I would usually loose a lot of stars in the process but the advantage in the end would balance out.