In MoO II their traits got more diverse but still centered around ground combat: "+20 ship offense", "+10 ground combat", "high gravity" and dictatorship government. Ship offense bonus is simply extra beam accuracy, not a big deal but makes beam ships efficient slightly sooner. Ground combat is also flat bonus but with more significance than ship offense. In technologically even match +10 bonus makes 20% more chance to win a roll giving the 3:2 advantage (60% vs 40%). Interestingly +10 is not the biggest racial bonus for ground combat. Maybe developers felt Bulrathi needed an edge in space combat more then all the ground combat bonuses. High gravity trait is real kicker and it makes quite a number of changes. Homeworld becomes high gravity planet and the race receives immunity to 50% penalty on to high gravity worlds. This in a weird way translates to industry bonus, thing is rich and ultra rich planets tend to have high gravity. Large and huge planets too. When ordinary races come across large rich planet, they usually have to wait until midgame for planetary gravity generator building in order to eliminate gravity penalty. High G races on the other hand can fully exploit such planets from the start. Since high G races don't really need planetary gravity generator technology they are free to choose another tech from the field, either a gravity beam (strong midgame weapon) or a tractor beam (a special weapon that reduces target's combat speed, potentially immobilizing it). Cool thing in MoO II is ground combat in space, under certain conditions ships can be boarded and either raided or captured. Raiding damages or destroys random equipment such as weapons, shields, engines, computer or special equipment. If engines get destroyed, ship's warp core "breaches" and the whole ship explodes. Capturing ships is more lucrative business, captured ships can be used against their owner or scrapped for cash and new technologies if the ship has equipment unknown to captors. In order to board a ship one has to either get close to immobile target, teleport marines or land assault shuttles on it. Not the easiest task but some techs like the aforementioned tractor beam make it more reliable. And there is one more thing with "high G" trait, it gives an extra hit point to marines so in a way it directly improves ground combat odds.
In this game I had much more luck with starting location, two systems with artifacts, one with space monster and one unguarded. Ecu, the unguarded system had three decent planets, small ultra poor terrain with artifacts, large swamp and medium desert. Doesn't sound like much but unlike random barren or radiated planets usually found in vicinity of the homeworld, those are self-sustaining climates. Early on that that helps a lot, you don't need as many freighters and you don't need to dedicate your homeworld to farming and supporting colonies. Joseki, the system guarded by space hydra had only one planet but it was almost as good as Orion, large ultra rich gaia with artifacts. Hydra has strong attack, 3 beam attacks that always hit (like mauler device) and can do up to 60 damage but unlike space eel it lacks missile defense so swarm with 10+ missile frigates can kill it, especially if it chooses to attack missiles instead of ships.
By the turn 90 I've colonized Tyrius in the middle of galaxy, made contact with all other players, Sakkra, Humans and Trilarians and got some more lucky rolls: colony leader with megawealth and random event that turned my homeworld ultra rich. At that point luck made the game too easy. Only thing stopping me from attacking space hydra and colonizing sweet Joseki world was space flux, a random event that prohibits space travel (freighters can somehow still move food around). When space flux passed I've included Joseki to my economy and along with Sakkra became a candidate for Galactic Council. For some reason Humans were upset with me voting for myself and declared war on me. I really couldn't figure out why, I wasn't spying them, we were at good terms, they were not in the alliance with Sakkra, haven't had erratic personality and I had bigger fleet. They had bad planets though, were they trying to expand over me, why not invade Trilarians? I had no problem with war, destroyers with beams (3 AF AP ND lasers, tritanium armor, class I shield, battle scanner, heavy armor) started to replace not so old missile frigates and Human's Ussika system fell quickly. After 10 turns and some espionage they gave up, gave me gyro destabilizer and asked for peace. I agreed, I wanted Humans to use their research potential to get technologies I would either trade or steal, not to fight me. Sakkra on the other hand was one I wanted to test my fleet against so I tried to provoke the war by demanding terraforming. They knew what I was armed to the teeth and gave me the technology. Reluctantly I left them alone and went back to building up my economy.
Then Humans made a wrong move, demanded tribute and declared the war when I refused. I don't know what went wrong with them, they had no economy, focused on espionage technologies and were underestimating me despite all numbers showing they had no chance to win. Oh well, my ground troops set foot on one more system, Muru and as I was about to attack Aldebaran they asked for peace. Few turns later Trilarians asked me for alliance and I accepted, curious in which trouble would it lead me to. And then the game fell apart, on turn 231 Humans surrendered to Sakkra. I was facing a boring game of either eradicating Sakkra from all planets or being elected as the leader of Galactic Council once again.
After some thought I've decided to end the game by punching Antarans in the face, I mean, with ground combat/space marines and started to work my way up the tech tree. War between Sakkra and me finally broke out, I demanded Zortium and they violently refused. I attacked and conquered Aldebaran and they launched surprise attacked on Ursa with 4 battle ships and 6 smaller ships. Nebula around Aldebaran prevented me from pulling back my attack fleet so I had to defend with spare a little fleet around my shipyards, 2 destroyers and one cruiser. It was enough to win and also to capture one of their ships by losing only the cruiser and the star base. Scrapping captured ship gave me zortium armor and I've started to rebuild even stronger defense. Few turns and one Antaran attack on Aldebaran later Sakkra ceased fire and gave me Sol system. On top of that I demanded peace with Trilarians which they refused. For the rest of the game I've tried to keep Trilarians alive but they were hopeless. I've parked my ships in Trilarian systems hoping to destroy incoming fleets but Sakkra's turn was processed before mine and attacked and bombard to oblivion my ally before I had chance to drive them off. I tried giving Trilarians technologies and money but no amount was enough to keep them safe from invasion so in ended up giving them Sol system where I've built every defense building. By the turn 300 I've stole adamantium armor from Sakkra and attacked Orion. Rewards I've got were xentorium armor, death ray, particle beam and reflection field. I hoped for damper field but no luck this time.
50 turns later with few hyper advanced upgrades I was confident enough to attack Antares. I've made some bad choices along the way, picked stealth suit over personal shield and energy absorber over megafluxers so my ships and marines were not as strong as they could have been. For a good measure I've compensated quality with quantity. Antaran ships fell quickly after being immobilized by tractor beams and raided. Only one of their cruisers survived the first turn. On the second turn whole battle was over, I lost only 3 out of 17 battle ships.
The design I ended up with was a battle ship with phasing cloack, subspace teleporter and two tractor beams and mauler devices. I haven't had space for more weapons and had to wait for 3rd hyper advanced physics to even get this much. That's why I regret not having megafluxers especially since I didn't even use energy absorbers. I could have gone with less defense, when star fortress got first opportunity to fire it has completely destroyed two of my ships so automated repair was useless and shields could have been omitted without losing too much survivability. Image above shows my ship design and Antaran's star fortress before being destroyed. Look at how much damage raiders made. Luckily security stations was destroyed early on so odds were not too bad, 90 vs 110 other equipment followed shortly but weapons where hard to dispose of. When damper field got destroyed it was an easy task to destroy the station with mauler devices. All in all I've got my taste of Bulrathi both in ground combat and space combat, I had opportunity to play with tractor beams but the game didn't last long enough for transporters to come into play. Shame the game got derailed in the middle and AI players managed to research so few technologies. I was looking forward to powered armor technology which adds one more hit point to ground troops and space marines but is in the same field as robo-miner plant - a must have midgame industrial building. Maybe it would have happened if I was willing to trade strategic technologies like planetary supercomputer and aforementioned robo-miner plant.
