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Avasculous
Aug 30, 2008

TheCosmicMuffet posted:

MOO2 had stuff like launching salvos of missiles, cloaking, then coming in at a ship from a facing where its shield was down, or using the time device to take a double turn. Teleporting away from fighters. Using tractor beams to hold the enemy in place and board them. Or giving up on trying to stay ahead in the ships race, and just get great ground tech so your assault shuttles would be insane and you could steal good ships from the other guys.

None of it amounted to a really awesome tactical combat game, but it made the design part of the game more interesting. If you were thinking about how these different systems and abilities would interact, that made designing ships more than just 'ok, I need this shield booster, and this beams booster, and then as many beams as I can have'.

Even if it still just ended up as deathstars full of plasma beams.

Very much this.

GalCiv2 has way better AI and probably much better balance (I was a kid when I played MOO2), but the sheer banality of spending 8 turns researching "Red Laser III" (which is 1 mass point smaller than Red Laser II!) so that you could fit one more Red Laser on your ships that already have 4 will never hold up to self-destructing your own ships to knock-out enemy shields on one side and using crew-killing ion blasters to soften resistance for your boarding shuttles.

It's amazing to me that every "successor" to MOO2 seems way more fixated on replicating the colony management worker shuffle and human-wearing-makeup aliens than what was far and away the most fun part of the game.

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