You can turn off tactical combat in Moo2 and it not only gets rid of the micromanagement it speeds up the game quite a bit. You do lose the joy of turning your ships to face remaining shields at inbound missiles and clever stuff like that so most of us prefer tactical on. Without tactical you also cannot refit and customize your ships.

Moo2 improves on pretty much every aspect of Moo1. Clearly Moo3 was a failure and should be disregarded. Moo2 is still played multiplayer at my house and connected to other friends homes using Hamachi – it is played on windows machines using DosBox and IPX primarily. It can even be played on Vista machines if you get that IPX addon.

The only problem with Moo2 is that it was so well done that it is nearly impossible to improve upon. Most people have difficulty responding to perfection. They range from disbelief to denial to rejection of the fact. Moo2 was the perfect space combat simulation. The fact that every last bug was never exterminated to bronze the game properly in the PC game hall of legendary fame is a true travesty.

Now if I could just locate a full technology tree listing somewhere it would remove some of the adventure which keeps me from playing this classic excellent turn based space combat simulation as best I can..

Michael A. (comment 1) pointed out that in Moo (original) you can design ships that are extremely effective in tactical combat. MOO 2 takes this to a level that no other space-based 4X game has matched, and it’s very satisfying when your 1 battleship destroys 4 enemy battleships that are apparently at the same or higher tech level (my personal best is 1 beating 6).

The downside of MOO 2, as “Tea Leaves” says, is micromanagement. But at least it provides a very effective management tool in the Colony List screen. And MOO 1 has micromanagement issues too: you have to tell colonies to stop building missile bases, to stop putting resources into population growth when they’re full, to stop building ships. MOO 1′s Colony List is of very little use in handling these situations, because a colony’s activity is a set of 6 percentages rather than 1 build queue item, an it’s hard to squeeze those 6 numbers into an entry in a table. So I find MOO 2 easier to manage.

“Well, lieutenant, it’s February, we’ve been firing constantly at them for nine months, and vice-versa, when do you anticipate either ship actually being harmed?”

“Harmed? Well, I’m pretty sure they’re out of toilet paper by now…they’ll be grumpy for sure.”

But I think you’re right, when a game is part of a beloved franchise, is built up in the gaming press and is highly antcipated and then turns out to be outright bad it’s worse than if it was a bad unknown.

MOO3 is the worst in kind of way Black and White is the “worst”. Only moreso with much more catastrophic results.

1) Highly anticipated
2) Promising design choices
3) Promoted and co-developed by Alan Emrich, who coined the term 4x
4) Initial reviews were glowing.

Then it came out and it took a few weeks for the suck to sink in. It really is a terrible game, not merely average like B&W, and it is the last game in what was THE 4x space franchise.

I played more of MOO2 than the original, and therefore like it more. No real objective reasons – just I got used to the sequel before I touched the original. For a long time it was one of my favorite games.

I wrote a retrospective on SimTex for CGM last year, so I had to play Master of Magic for the first time in forever. It really doesn’t hold up well. The MOO games, on the other hand…

But unlike him, I urge you to check it out, try playing it for a while. Why? Because it’s exceptional. You can’t possibly know how bad a game can be until you play MOO3. But’s it’s not the WORST 4x game ever.

That title belongs to 1997′s “Into The Void”. Check it out, if you dare.

Right now I’m playing settlers 2 and having a blast.