User:Philcha/Sandbox/MOO 2 - 2

Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares
Developer(s)	Simtex
Publisher(s)	Microprose (PC), MacSoft (Mac)
Platform(s)	MS-DOS, Windows 95, Apple Macintosh
Release	NA: October 31, 1996 EU: December 16, 1996
Genre(s)	4X, Turn-based strategy
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer

Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares (MOO2) is a 4X turn-based strategy game set in space, designed by Steve Barcia and Ken Burd, and developed by Simtex, who also developed its predecessor, Master of Orion. The IBM PC compatible version of the game was published by Microprose in 1996, while the Apple Macintosh version was released a year later. by MacSoft in partnership with Microprose. The PC version was on sale as a download until late 2010, when Atari silently removed the game from their on-line store. Copies can be found from stores and online distributors. Despite its age the game still has an active fan-base and is still played online.

Master of Orion II won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1996, and was well received, although reviewers differed about which aspects they liked and disliked. The game is still used as a yardstick in reviews of more recent space-based 4X games.

Victory can be gained by military or diplomatic means. Major elements of the game's strategy include the design of custom races and the need to balance the requirements for food, production, cash and research. The user interface, which is mainly mouse-based but includes keyboard shortcuts, provides a central screen for most economic management, and other screens that control research, diplomacy, ship movement, combat and warship design.

Good old Games sells the game as a DRM free download, coupled with the 1993 version, and Cnet and GameAxis Unwired also give free downloads, of Master Of Orion 2: Battle At Antares only. The game is still played online, and one group of enthusiasts has developed a patch for the MS-DOS version, which fixes some bugs and adds set-up options.

Backstory

Long before the time in which the game starts, two extremely powerful races, known as the Orions and the Antarans, fought a war that devastated most of the galaxy. The Orions won and, rather than exterminate the Antarans, imprisoned them in a "pocket dimension". The Orions then departed from the galaxy, but left behind a very powerful robotic warship, the Guardian, to protect their homeworld. Whoever beats the Guardian gets military technologies which players cannot research for themselves, and the opportunity to colonize the Orions' homeworld, which is usually the best planet in the galaxy in all respects.

Some time after the start of a game, the Antarans, breaking out of the prison dimension to which the Orions banished them, begin sending increasingly powerful fleets against players' colonies, simply to destroy rather than to invade. The only way to stop the Antarans' campaign of terror is to carry the battle to their home universe through a Dimensional Portal.

Gameplay

Victory conditions

Despite the game's name, conquering the Orion star system does not automatically win the game. There are three routes to victory: conquer all opponents; be elected as the supreme leader of the galaxy; or make a successful assault against the Antaran homeworld. To be elected, a player needs two-thirds of the total votes, and each empire's votes are based on the population under its control.

Stars and planets

Star systems have at most five colonizable planets, and a few have none. Players can colonize all types of planets although gas giants and asteroids require the planet construction technology. Colonizable planets vary in several ways, making some more desirable than others:

• Population capacity, which on most planets can be improved by terraforming. "Toxic" planets cannot be terraformed.
• Ease of growing food, which is important for the reasons described below. At the start of the game most planets are incapable of supporting agriculture, but terraforming can remedy this,, except on "toxic" planets.
• Very rarely, "splinter colonies" automatically join the empire that discovers these, and acquire the racial advantages and disadvantages of the discovers.
• Sometimes other features that increase or decrease productivity in one or more of farming, industry, research and cashflow.

The most desirable systems are usually guarded by space monsters, much less powerful than Orion's Guardian but still a severe challenge in the early game, when fleets are small and low-tech.

How planets' economies work

Without food, a colony will starve to death. If an empire as a whole has a food surplus, it can prevent starvation by sending food in freighters, which are produced like any other ship. However, just one hostile warship of any size can blockade an entire system, preventing the delivery of food.

Each player can change each of its colony's output by moving colonists between farming, industry and research, except that natives can only farm. A player can use surplus money to accelerate industrial production at specified colonies, but not to increase agricultural or research output.

Maintaining buildings costs money, and so does running an excessively large fleet. Ships of different sizes require different numbers of "command points". These are provided by orbital bases, which are major construction projects for small colonies. This severely limits the size of empires' fleets in the early game, where one can have only one frigate (smallest type of ship) per starbase or one battleship (largest type of ship in the early game) per 4 starbases without having to "buy" command points, which is very expensive.

Research, usually followed by construction of appropriate buildings, can improve all types of productivity including cashflow and command points, and can also reduce or eliminate pollution, which otherwise is a serious constraint on industrial output in the early game.

The technology tree

Falling behind in technology is likely to be fatal. Distributive across 182&nspp;techlonogies, the games shows eight research areas, each divided into several levels, each of which contains one to four technologies. To research a higher-level technology, one must first have researched the previous level.

Players can also acquire technologies by exchange or diplomatic threats, spying, hiring colonial or ships leaders commanders who know certain techs,, or can help to attack or defend colonies..

All weapons and some other combat-related components benefit from miniaturization, in which further advances in the technology area that provides them will reduce the size and production cost of these components.

Diplomacy

Master of Orion II provides a wide range of diplomatic negotiations: gifts of money or technology or even all the colonies in a star system; opportunities to demand such concessions from other players; technology trades; trade, non-aggression and alliance treaties. The diplomacy menu also enables the player to allocate spies between defensive duties and spying or sabotage against other empires, and to check opponents' technological progress and diplomatic relationships.

Spaceship design

The designs of colony ships, outpost ships and troop transports are fixed. These three ship types will be destroyed instantly if they travel without an escort and are attacked by anything, even the weakest combat ship.

Colony ships, outpost ships, troop transports and warships benefit from technology advances which increase the travel range and speed of all of an empire's ships, an upgrade with no charge.

Players can design warships, provided they choose the "tactical combat" option in game set-up. A pllayer can also refit ships to take advantage of technology improvements which do not provide free upgrades. !!

Combat and invasion

Ships can travel to any star system within their range, unlike games such as Space Empires or Master of Orion III where interstellar travel is possible only or mainly via "wormholes" and it is possible to set up easily-defended choke points.

In Master of Orion II, space combat occurs only within star systems, either over a planet one side is attacking or on the outskirts of a system, if one side is driving away the other's blockaders or trying to prevent an enemy buildup. If the defending side has warships and several colonies in a system, they automatically scramble to defend whichever colony is attacked. Limitations on the size of empires' fleets mean that most battles involve only a handful of ships on each side. Ships do not form stacks as in the original Master of Orion (1993), but move and fire individually.

At the start of a game the gamer chooses whether all space combat should be "tactical" (controlled by the player) or "strategic" (controlled by the software), but choosing strategic combat prevents the gamer from designing his/her own ships.

Enemy colonies can be taken over only after all orbital and planet-based defenses have been destroyed and all defending ships have been destroyed or forced to retreat. Instead of invading, a victorious attacker may destroy an enemy colony by various means.

Leaders

From time to time players get opportunities to hire leaders, for an annual salary and usually a hiring fee. Colony leaders improve the farming and/or industrial and/or research and/or financial productivity of all colonies in the system to which they are assigned, and some improve the efficiency of defensive or offensive spies. Ship leaders improve the combat effectiveness of their ships and some improve their travel speed. A few leaders of both types also improve the performance of warships and/or ground troops under their command, or contribute directly to a player's finances, or attract other leaders, usually for a reduced hiring fee.

Random events

From time to time there are lucky breaks, disasters or emergencies which are not caused by any player's actions. These can be disabled in the game start-up menu.

Playable races

Master of Orion II provides 13 pre-defined playable races, three of which are additions to those available in Master of Orion. The game also allows players to create custom races, and a group of enthusiasts regard race design as a crucial element of strategy. The game gives each player a budget within which to select advantageous traits and balance these with disadvantages. Most of the options are major or minor advantages and minor disadvantages in farming, industry, research, population growth, money, space combat, espionage and ground combat.

The race design system also offers "special abilities" that affect various aspects of their effectiveness. Each government can be upgraded once by research, but the upgrades generally increase the advantages of each government without decreasing its disadvantages.

User interface

The main screen consists mainly of a map of the galaxy, which can be zoomed but not scrolled. Stars have names which are color-coded to show which empires have colonies round them, and dotted lines show friendly and enemy ship movements. Clicking on a star that the player has already visited produces a pop-up window which shows the planets round that star. A fleet allows the player to give orders and displays a pop-up which shows each ship in the fleet. The buttons along the bottom give access to various menus, and the icons on the right provide information about the status of the empire and access to additional menus.

Players can manage their economies almost entirely from the Colony List, which can be sorted by any of one of: Name, Population, Food production, Industrial production, Research production, the item currently being built, or Cash (BC) generated. The Colony List allows the player to access any colony's Build Menu, and to change a colony's output by moving colonists between Farmers, Workers and Scientists.

The Build Menu allows the player to queue up to 7 items (buildings, ships or spies) for construction at a colony, to refit ships in that colony's system and to design ships which may then be built at any colony.

At the end of each turn Master of Orion II shows a report in which items link to the appropriate display, usually to a colony's Build menu when a construction project has been completed.

The Information menu gives access to: a History Graph which shows how the player's empire compares with rival empires; the racial characteristics of all empires with which the player is in contact; the technologies the player has researched; and descriptions of all technologies, including the exotic ones which the player cannot research but may gain by beating Orion's Guardian or by capturing an Antaran ship and scrapping it afterwards.

Reception

Summary

Aggregator	Score
GameRankings	8.7
Metacritic	84%
From 1990s	Score
Meinfelder	3/5
Ward	8.7
Retrospectives	Score
Chick	"looming large"
Current (in 2011)	Score
Ocamp	6.0 From 1990s
"trancejeremy"	7/10

Allover reception

Chick's retrospective review (2001) described Master of Orion II and its predecessor Master of Orion as "looming large" in any discussion of space-based strategy games. Master of Orion II has been used as the standard for comparison in reviews of more recent space-based 4X games such as Space Empires IV (2000), Galactic Civilizations II (2006–2009) and Lost Empire: Immortals (2008).

Lombardi (2006), writing for Armchair General, compared favorability Master of Orion against Galactic Civilizations II:, as: a player of Galactic Civilizations II must balance micromanagement against the ability to let the details manage themselves; while Masters of Orion II includes a tactical battle option, Galactic Civilizations II automatically resolve combat, which emphasise the need to redesign for new opponent; Galactic Civilizations II′ tech tree is so long that one could spend months researching the tree in detail. However, Chick founded it easy to readjust every few turns in Masters of Orion II.

"trancejeremy" (2007) wrote that Master of Orion II was long regarded as the greatest of space-based 4x games. In his opinion, Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar′ first expansion pack now borrowed features from Master of Orion II, and adds a few but significant additions enhancements which change gameplay greatly.

Ocampo (2008) condisered the upgraded Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords to have out done Master of Orion II, as the new claimant very latest version of the sequel looks like the very late version of the sequel, Galactic Civilizations II looks like now Master of Orion II has the heir that everyone has been waiting for.

For many turn-based space strategy gamers, at the top of the genre Master of Orion II is still occupies the top point, which Yahoo finds depressing, as the game was first released in 1996. However, that could change soon, because it looks like someone is finally coming out with a faithful successor to Master of Orion II. Stardock announced this week that it has finished work on Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, the follow-up to 2003's strategy gem Galactic Civilizations. The first Galactic Civilizations was a great strategy game with excellent artificial intelligence and deep gameplay, but it wasn't quite full-featured enough to be a proper heir to the Master of Orion throne. Stardock took note and went back to the drawing board, and as Yahoo concluded while playing with a very late version of the sequel, Galactic Civilizations II looks like the Master of Orion heir that everyone has been waiting for.

Graghic quality

There were complaints that the loading of copious artwork from the CD made the game run slowly, and both a reviewer and enthusiasts now advise players to avoid this by loading all of the files on to their hard disks. A review specifically for the Mac version complained that the user interface was "clunky", as this PC port lacked features common in programs originally developed for the Mac.

CNET Archive considers that Master of Orion′s graphics come alive, while those of Space Empires: IV are "plain and unpolished".

Other aspect

VanOrd (2011) considered Master of Orion II the progenitor of space-based 4X games, and regarded Sword of the Stars as worthy extension of the tradition of space-based conquer.

Development

The game was designed by Steve Barcia and Ken Burd,, and developed by Barcia's company Simtex, which had previously developed Master of Orion, published in 1993 by Microprose. For Master of Orion II Simtex provided: additional pre-defined races and the option to create custom races; and multiplayer options. The first "Orion" game's graphics had also been heavily criticized, and the second included higher-quality artwork displayed at a higher resolution.

In June 1995 Microprose agreed to buy Simtex, and turned it into an internal development division. The acquisition continued to be known as "Simtex Software", and the Simtex logo appears briefly before Microprose's while MOO II is loading. Microprose released Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares for IBM-compatible PCs in 1996, and an Apple Macintosh version was published a year later by Microprose in partnership with MacSoft. The production team included:

• Design: Steve Barcia (Lead Designer), Ken Burd
• Programming: Ken Burd (Lead programmer) and 5 others
• Art: Dave Lawell (Lead Artists) and 8 others
• Music: Laura Barret
• Sound: John Henke

As of November 2011, GameAxis Unwirder supplies Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares.

Post-publication

Atari no longer sells the PC version of the game as a download even though they had done so until mid-2010. However, Good old Games sells the game as a DRM free download coupled with the first game, and Cnet also gives a free download, of Master Of Orion 2: Battle At Antares only. The game is still played online, and one group of enthusiasts has developed a patch for the MS-DOS version, which fixes some bugs and adds more game set-up options, and a few mods which adjust the game balance. Difficulties have been reported in running the game directly under Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X, and the same enthusiasts recommend running the MS-DOS version under the control of the emulator DOSBox, which they say also offers some advantages for online multi-player games and works equally well for Linux and Mac OS users.

So far there has been one sequel, Master of Orion 3. Comments by reviewers and players have mostly been unfavorable. Despite the similar names, there are large differences in gameplay between Master of Orion II and Master of Orion 3.