Recently, I discovered that there was a later patch posted for an improved version of Masters of Orion 2. My version was 1.4x from GoG which is decent. However, I got to the point where the game felt stagnant mostly due to the AI not pushing harder on the most difficult game settings. After reading about the patch and learning that you can run it on a GoG Mac/DosBox installation, I figured to give it a shot.
Probably, the biggest game changer to me that got me interested in the first place was being able to convert a Toxic world into a Barren one. The default mechanism in 1.50i is through building a Recyclotron, similar to use a Barrier Shield to convert a Radiated world into a Barren one. This is a massive plus because Toxic worlds tend to feel like a waste (pun not intended). In the worst case scenario, you have a LG Tiny Toxic World that is of ultra poor status and alone in a system. In short, you would be wasting resources to develop such a world. In a slightly better scenario, you might have an opponent build on a Toxic world of medium or smaller size within a system of other planets. Then if you have a Stellar Converter, you can blow the planet to form an Asteroid field which would eventually allow you to use Planetary Building to convert it into a large Barren planet and make the scenario more salvageable.
So with Toxic worlds now which might have decent minerals and possibly gold, gems or artifacts, you can utilize the planet and upgrade it. Also, from what I read, you can configure the game to change the type of building built for this conversion process. I think thematically the Recyclotron fits quite well so there’s no real need to alter the default here.
Another major (or minor) change is some of the racial picks. One that got me was the number of points penalty in selecting a currency disadvantage. I pretty much exclusively use Custom races and the old -4 currency disadvantage would allow me to pull in Ground Combat disadvantage for another -2 points. In turn, that would allow me to do Lithovore for 10 points (along with Subterranean for 6 points) and grab Rich home world to start. That would provide 4 remaining points along with the bonus 2 you can get from research and start with Telepath. The -5 point penalty prevents me from my normal configuration, in turn forcing me to take the negative Growth Population pick instead. While that isn’t a horrible pick (because you can offset it partly via a Cloning Centre or Androids), it feels odd to say the least. I still can do the main custom race that I want but I can feel some of the adjustments.
Also, I noticed that currency generation is a lot harder. I felt like I took a lot of penalties this time around despite using a similar build. Heck even without the BC penalty, I was making less. I haven’t done a deep dive into what’s causing this but at least for Research, I did see that my government type might heavily influence the massive number of points that I’m missing in Research. Again, I can’t say for certain without doing a side-by-side examination but it does feel like I’m struggling a little more here.
Where I’m not struggling is with my ships. This is one area where I feel I’ve gained a lot of power due to the amount of space and the cost for gear. I easily was able to add on far more weapons to my normal ship to the point where I felt thrown off. I had so many points left over, I just started dumping extra stuff that I normally wouldn’t bother with. So those formulas seem altered pretty drastically.
Now, the other major change I really wanted to experience was to the AI. My biggest complaint about the default game from GoG is that the AI sucks. Maybe it’s the way I play my game but at least the AI seems far more demure when it comes to expanding their system. Most times, the GoG version only grabs one additional star system really late into the game. Part of that might be due to their proximity to where I’m building my colonies but even non-aggression pacts do little. It’s like the AI just gets jammed and are protecting themselves. However, at some point in the late game, the AI will change into a different phase where it begins attacking other opponents to conquer systems and expand their strength. Yet I’ve seen situations where the AI might colonize a neighboring system that have multiple rich+ type of planets and only plant themselves on a single planet and ignore the rest. As a result, I wanted to see if the new patch changes any of this.
Right now, I can’t really tell because many of the AI opponents would expand only later in the game. Certain races like the Sakkra will try to expand fast and even do more than a single system. Others like the Elarians and Alkari would expand very slow. In those cases, my theory is that their worlds were built far too close to mine and they ended up getting trapped until very late. The Alkari though impressed me the most because they did send out a colony ship far from their home world later in the game. So at least for 1.50i colony expansion in the late game does not seem to be exclusively related to the star date.
The patch did mention that the AI would take better advantage of colonies and ship design. It’s very hard to see on my end about the ship design process for the AI. As for the colonies, I do not know concretely what that means. My main hope was to see the usage of Planetary Construction and possibly Androids. At this time, I have yet to see the AI make use of Planetary Construction. They will do Terraforming, Gaia conversions and make use of Barrier Shields and Recyclotrons to upgrade planets.
On the other hand, Diplomacy seems odd. At least, for the GoG 1.4 version, I noticed most of the time, the initial encounter with an AI race would typically start with a non-aggression pact. I can’t tell if that’s simply a default when I start massively expanding (meaning 10-15+ systems). However, some races might immediately approach me with a Research Pact. Maybe it’s me but it feels odd to start diplomacy with Research.
Another thing I noticed is that combat does not immediately end after defeating the enemy. This feels like how the game may have been set up long ago. I really hate this because if you have a huge fleet, you have to go through each ship and not only hit “Done” but wait until all of the turns expire. This can take extraneously long so I need to determine how to alter this part if possible.
Now, the biggest irritation to me came through the rearrangement of the default build list. The list on the left side are now reordered by implicit category rather than alphabetical. As someone who has played this game since the mid 90s, this change completely through me off my game and I accidentally would miss a building on occasion because they no longer were in the same spot. I have to admit that I’d make a mistake or two before with the standard alphabetical list but it’s a real mind fuck seeing something you’re used to just flipped around. If anything, it makes it harder to find things because you’re bouncing around all the time based on the order that the patchers recommend.
That said, supposedly this list is configurable and that’s where the modding portion really comes in. While I have discovered the file location of the USER.CFG file and have edited both, I do not see the changes reflected. So I’m uncertain if these changes occur when a new game is loaded. The patch notes suggest some sort of editor but I do not see it as a direct option (meaning, an in-app type of editor). Either way, the default list is something I want to revert for my own sanity’s sake.
Now, the mod part is very interesting and where I want to eventually do a deep dive. I haven’t really sat down to figure out what I can do just yet nor how I can alter the game. I did use the improved map mod which seemed to cause a few system to overlap and make discerning each one difficult. But I did notice that there’s switches you can use to change the default behavior of the maps. One that looks really interesting is the default home system minimum planet number. This patch sets the number to three, which is great especially for AI races that might get blocked if they don’t expand out quick enough and eventually not have enough resources to grow.
Beyond that, a lot of the patch may have altered ship combat. Based on my tests, outside of the lame end turn aspect, I don’t see a lot of differences. The main thing I saw which was unsettling initially was the space around the fleet. I believe that area denotes where a ship can see/move during the turn. The other thing I noticed was that wider mounted weapons felt more limited in area. I couldn’t tell if this already was in place but I think my GoG fleets did better in this regard. Maybe the issue was the updated way turns were handled. At least with the GoG version, it seemed you did things in order of appearance.
Moving forward, I want to see how the flags to building the maps can change. I can’t tell you just how many things are configurable but the main point is to try and change enough of the base game where I can get more life out of it.
Final Thoughts
I think the biggest thing is to figure out how to make my own modifications and how the USER.CFG operates. There’s some good things buried in there but it’s not entirely obvious how to make this work. I am looking through the launcher’s TCL code right now and am trying to figure out how to pass in parameters to the game or how the USER.CFG gets loaded. Either way, there’s some good stuff to explore.
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