Master of Orion II is an old, old game. It was released in 1996 but people still play it and await for worthy successor. One reason why fans still play MoO II is a deep and meaningful customization. Like in AAA "RPGs" (quotes because role play games get confused with "whatever has experience bars and level ups"), before the game starts player can spend an hour picking traits for his/hers race and empire. Many traits add or remove game mechanics such as lithovore: race doesn't need food or telepathic: empire can mind control colonies. When the game starts every few turns, depending on empire's research output, player has to choose one of the two or three mutually exclusive technologies (or take all is the empire has certain trait). This choices heavily influences which tools will player have at his/her disposal, much like deck building in CCGs. And finally, player can design combat units. I can't even start to explain how much game defining it is and considering the topic I presume you, dear reader, have played the game and are familiar with most of it's feature. If you haven't played it, please do, you can get it from GoG.com for 5$.
Every now and then I find new "build" I haven't tried so far. It sounds unbelievable considering that I play the game for many years (I'm not disclosing how many :)) but I was noob back then and only used one strategy, playing turtle until I got all technologies and then unleash invincible fleet on everyone. Last few years I was trying new stuff, diplomatic race, spy race, uncreative race, empire with heavy money generation bonuses, limiting my self to only the smallest ships and so on... Recently I've tried limiting my self on using weapons other then beams. It was surprising, I had no idea interceptors are so strong in early and mid game. So in the last game I excluded special weapons too, only missiles and bombs were allowed. It was fun and tense at first but AIs were not developing well so it became too easy. They managed to keep pace with armor upgrades but by turn 350 nobody managed to get anything beyond class I shields. Still, I managed to experience new stuff. Having no beam weapons leaves ships free from beam enhancing equipment and frees up nice amount of research points. I've used those points to speed up research of chemistry (better missiles, armor and ship range) and construction, to get automated repair sooner. You see where I was going, high quality armor and self repair equals invincible ship. Unless enemy has ion cannon and it so happened that AI was good enough to get it and bad enough get any better beam weapon for a long time. I was invincible in ship to ship combat but assaulting planet required some fancy footwork in order to have shielded part of the ship facing star base when it was about to fire ion cannon.
After reaching the end of chemistry techs, I've switched to power in order to try out torpedoes. Torpedoes are interesting weapons but in my opinion too high in tech "tree". Antimatter torpedo is OK, easily accessible for mid to late game. By the time proton torpedo becomes usable the game is almost over. Same holds for plasma torpedo that is very last technology in power field. As I said I was facing underdeveloped AIs so it was not fun upgrading torpedoes when antimatter was more then enough for the job. One the bright side, researching torpedoes gives player opportunity to get energy absorber which is great addition to ships designed around taking hits instead avoiding them. Combine it with hard shields and damage reduction will be so high that all but late game weapons would become ineffective.
I've finished the game by attacking Antares and I did it twice, separately with torpedoes and with missiles. Those two roads were very different. Torpedoes were reliable on doing the job given enough time, in fact I had to attack Antares twice with torpedo ships because I reached turn limit first time. I did some bad moves and star fortress managed to shoot down 5 out of 6 ships and the last one didn't have enough fire power to destroy it within 50 combat turns. I could have brought more ships but I wanted to give some chance to Antarans :). Anyway, going with missiles was a gamble, missiles can be destroyed before doing damage and the ammunition is limited so it was possible end up in situation where ships have to retreat because they can't attack any more. I brought extra ships, just in case. With missiles it's either overkill or stalemate and aside from EMG they aren't that interesting. Unlike torpedoes, missile have no twist, they just do damage and higher missile technologies are simply damage upgrades. That is somewhat spiced by EMG, a missile modification that applies damage directly to target's engines if it's shields are down. Unlike armor, engines have very few hit points and if they are destroyed the ship self-destructs. To balance that EMG greatly increases missile size. But AI was not challenging enough to give me opportunity to try it out...
All in all there is material for another playthrough. Maybe this time with smaller ships and no creative trait. Yep, Master of Orion II is still play worthy.
