Avasculous posted:

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.