I am new to the series, perhaps in part because I am in my late twenties by now and more appreciative of the genre than my teenaged self. I have decided to jump head first into MoO2 because it seemed best suited for me but I noticed an apparent 50/50 split with veteran players (with some favouring them equally) and so I invite a battle of words and superior opinionating! Which of the first and second games is better and which one do you recommend as an entry point for a fairly invested fan of grand strategy?

Well, since you likely have the two pack, why not try both and tell us? Beyond that, it's different strokes for different folks.

Personally, there's a lot of a little details and ambiance I like with Moo2. Custom races, leaders (heroes), boarding actions during battle, the music, more starting condition variables, space monsters, and much more. I've had a lot of good times with the game. Then again, I always found the colony improvement system to be tedious in larger galaxies, especially when playing a "creative" race. Drilling down to all those colony build queues to add yet more additions gets tiresome for me. Again with larger galaxies and higher difficulties, the big scale battles can get a bit tedious too. When I load up Moo2, I tend to stick with small and medium galaxies these days.

As for Moo1, I really appreciate the purity of the game. Some of the colony management tedium is eliminated by the "simple" slider bars, letting you focus on grand strategy and battles. Which, in my opinion, is the real meat and potatoes of the game. I also like the more randomized tech trees in Moo1. With Moo2's tech tree design I'd usually find myself slipping into the same set research path most times I'd play. With regard to combat, due to the way ships are grouped, battle tends to be more straightforward. Large battles are less tedious, but also less tactical.

Not to sound like a diplomat, but I think the best choice is simply playing both depending on whims and mood at the moment.

How's your first campaign going, by the way?

I have dabbled with both but mostly with MoO2. The presentation helped me get into it very quickly, though I much prefer the sliders and research methods in MoO1 over the bizarre city building screen and fairly open research of the second game. The main reason I choose MoO2 over MoO1 however is performance related. MoO1 runs sluggishly on both computers I've tested it on, some screen transitions taking up to 10 seconds while most other things have a ½ second delay relative to my input which makes playing the game feel like a chore. Might have something to do with the DosBox settings but I'm not interested enough to try and fix it right now.

First impression is that MoO2 is the better game, except for a few missteps with the game design where the first game seems to be more in spirit of being the head of a government. I have not played either game long enough to appreciate the bigger picture like game balance and victory conditions.

With regard to the performance issue in Moo1,

Here's one thing you can try:

Look for the .conf file in the game's main directory/folder. Then make a back up copy of that file. Next, open it up with notepad or similar and find "cycles=". Change the setting there to cycles=39000. Save the file, run the game, and see if that improves it.

I'm a die-hard MOO2 myself. Never could get into MOO1. Probably because MOO2 is a game from my youth, while MOO1 is a recent discovery.

But I have also a strong reason to prefer MOO2 : For those kind of games, I like m starships to be starships, that get into battle as ships, and not numbers next to a class name. If I have 3 cruisers in a fleet, engaged in a battle, I want to see and give orders to the Vanguard, the Vindicative and the Hammer, and not to a 3-ship-stack.
Totally subjective, I know. But it involves me more into the game (while I'm totally ok with a more abstract hands-off approach for other fields such as colonisation and science). It's the reason I also prefer "Eador genesis" over "heroes of might and magic 3" :)

Setting the cycles to 10000 seems to speed up game responsiveness and load times without causing sound and music slowdowns. Thanks for the suggestion!

Still, I can't get into MoO1. It may seem petty but the race designs are totally offputting and distracting me from the game as a whole. I like many of the game design aspects but the visual design kills the immersion for me. I'm not talking about "bad graphics" or limited 1993 technology, I'm talking about the design. The Alkari made me laugh out loud. The choice of race is also rather boring and in many cases insignificant., whereas MoO2 offers some decent visual designs as well as a general set of racial traits with customisability. That helps me get into the game universe.

I wish MoO2 had blind research ("We could use this new technology to conquer the galaxy" rather than "Make me a machine that can travel further into space, the emperor demands it!") and I wish they didn't think randomly borrowing Civ-style city building gameplay and putting it where it didn't belong was a good idea, but overall it's a more engaging game to me.

I don't mind abstraction, and in fact I seek it in strategic games. Presidents, kings and emperors should not be directing tactical combat, but historically they have been known to oversee military designs and applications. I like HoMM3 and so having armies (or fleets) represented with numbers is perfectly fine with me. I also love tactical games, so winning wars and winning battles are both good challanges in games to me.

I understand. In the end, I've probably logged far more hours with Moo2 than I have or perhaps ever will with Moo1. Moo2 is a highly enjoyable game for me. I'm glad the cycles setting got the performance working correctly for you. Very handy little thing for tweaking any number of dosbox games.

Race choice actually has more of an impact than is immediately obvious from the short description in-game, but which is covered a bit in the manual: all of the races have modifiers to the various tech categories, which affects both research speed and the number of techs that will appear in that category. Playing to those strengths (or around those weaknesses) is an important part of using the race well.

I like both, but if ultimately forced to choose, I think I'd side with MoO1. Sure, it lacked a lot of the "cool" stuff that MoO2 added in, but the tradeoff is that the underlying gameplay is more tightly made. MoO2 has all sorts of exploits and loopholes that you can toy with (maybe this is a plus depending on what you want out of the game) whereas I can only think of a couple in the original. I also prefer the research/colony management system in the first (which, ironically, seems to be something they tried to bring back in MoO3, but they did it wrong.)

Though as an aside, there do exist a few MoO2 mods that are supposed to balance things out better; I haven't experimented with them enough to form an opinion but they might be something to take into consideration.

You are correct, Garran. I just checked and there are more than just a single racial trait for each race in the first game. I just did about a 100 turns as Sakkra and bombarded a couple of Bulrathi colonies for fun. I found the game surprisingly easy to get into this time around, except the ship designing stuff was a bit over my head.

I'm thinking that so long as the game does not crawl to a halt performance wise eventually, I think MoO1 just might be the game for me.

I have been playing both of the first 2 games since they first came out in I guess the 90s. I find different things about each that I enjoy and some I consider tedious. All in all, I find MOO 2 to be the most challenging. I find the whole concept of capturing planets to be tedious in 1 and only use it as a break from the others.


I have a question. What other games do the players of MOO find as challenging and enjoyable?

I've had some very good experiences with Sword of the Stars 1 (Ultimate/Complete Collection).

Thanks.

While I still play Orion 2 religiously, every now and then, I take a few months off and play something else. Is sword a strategy game, or hand eye coordination?

Other strategy games?

Master of Magic - also made by Microprose - is an obvious answer there. There are some easter egg references between them that you'll only get after playing both.

Alpha Centauri, which someone was asking about in another thread a few days ago, also has its charms, although it isn't related to MoO beyond being part of the space-fi genre.

And while it transitions more into city building/sim, Tropico 3 is hilarious.

Thanks

I just need a break every now and then. I just finished a really frustrating MoO 2 game where I couldn't build because 3 of the other races waged a war against me the entire game. It tied up all of my resources and ships constantly defending the entire length of my empire. I wasn't losing ships, but could never amass enough ships to attack Orion, or expand my borders. I decided to start over hand hope for a more enjoyable scenario.