I received a copy of this game I believe either in my 2nd or 3rd year in college. Easily, I must have spent countless hours, even way passed its published date, playing this game. I never played the original nor did I try the follow up one, despite the fact that one of my TAs and roommates in college worked on it. Either way, it’s a huge stand out game for me which is why I decided to review it.
Around ’94-95, a large number of war/strategy games began to hit the market with Dune 2, Command and Conquer and, of course, Warcraft being some of the most notable. Also, plenty of resource management games took off. Most were real time in some fashion. But Master of Orion II took a slightly different route in approaching the genre in a turn based fashion. Because of that approach, I think I got pretty hooked right away in that I didn’t feel as stressed out trying to manage troops from constant barrages of attacks while being on another side of the map getting blindsided.
The game is all about resource, population and diplomatic management. You start off choosing one of a dozen or so races or pick a custom one with a few choice attributes. You can select your difficulty, technological advancement and galaxy type. Also, there’s a few scenarios to increase the challenge such as the Antares attacking and random encounters. This makes each game unique and adds a reasonable amount of replayability.
To win the game, you can either eliminate your opponents, kill off the Antares or some other goal. Generally, the Antares or elimination of your opponent, for me at least, felt more like a long haul type of game. Until that point, your main goal is building up your resources, advancing your technologies, colonizing more planets and systems and gradually building up your forces.
If you play against the computer, you can have several opponents that you can ally with or fight against. Your race partly influences how you parlay with the other AI opponents as well as your strength. Some forces will be aggressive no matter what but the game generally will not assault you if you can over power them. Of course, the contrary is true as well and the moment they detect a weakness, you’ll see a fleet ready to take over your worlds.
The game is really polarized when it comes to difficulty though. If you’re helpless, you’ll be squashed without question. However, if you manage the conquer most of the universe, the AI goes into what I call a “dumb mode” where it kinda gives up. Occasionally, when I reach a point in the game where I control the vast majority of the systems, the AI stops producing or might just try and build warships to assault me. If it halts production completely, I might send him some mercy by giving him a system just to keep the game going.
The primary weakness in the game though is the monotony of micromanagement. When you start off with only a few planets, dealing with each planets’ upgrading process isn’t so bad. However, down the line if you manage to have dozens of planets, switching between every single system can drive you crazy. You’ll simply lose the ability to track every little thing. Sometimes, you might simply forget that you completed upgrading a planet but never had the chance to return because you were missing resources. In turn, there might be more work you’d want to do but end up neglecting it.
The real strength of the game is the grind of upgrading everything. I found that the most enjoyment I received from this game involved starting from scratch and slowly building up an empire. Seeing your evolution is very rewarding, especially once you start becoming positive in terms of your capital.
The other positive is the customization of your fleet. When you acquire enough technology, you can design your own ships with all types of weaponry for different purposes. And that leads into the discussion of space battles. The space battles are turn based, although I heard you could go real time. But you really won’t want to in this game because again there’s just too many moving parts with all the ships you have to manage. But with an ample fleet of Doom Stars (the game’s version of the Death Star), you practically are invincible.
On the other hand, the game can become formulaic over time. Your build strategy probably will be the same on each planet where you focus on capital then move towards military. Also, you’ll probably focus a lot on colonization as more planets means more resources. Even your fleet becomes pretty cut and dry where certain defenses or capabilities will generally make their way into your Doom Stars no matter what.
I tend to think of this game as a good day game. It can take a good, solid day of resource grinding to really min-max yourself. The micromanagement aspect will drive you crazy and your hand will slowly stiffen as you click on the same routine from planet to planet. But it’s one of these games that I’ll bust out on an annual basis as a distraction just to do something different.