Master of Orion II: every race

Master of Orion II is an old game and I'm still playing it. It can thank it's longevity to the deep race customization and the research system that makes a player choose one path over the other. At first I was mainly playing it with "creative" race (gets all two or three technologies when advancing a field instead of only one) variations and occasionally with non-creative race (but not "uncreative") to try out some more powerful but risky combinations. Few years back I've played around various gimmicks, diplomacy, espionage, ground combat, missiles only, small ships only, etc.

Reading about stock races in both MoO I and II (mostly comments how they suck in multiplayer and how some races are plain weak) I've realized I haven't played most of them. I've played stock Psilons, Silicoids and maybe Humans on one of my first few runs. Psilons are only stock race with "creative" perk which makes them a great race for learning the game and OK choice for higher difficulty levels. After learning the game mechanics I, like most people, had tendency to play with custom races that were "creative" but had other perks different from Psilons. Problem is "creative" gives false sense of power, yes you have all the toys at disposal but wisdom in choosing technologies and little espionage can make you equally versatile and some other perk instead of "creative" can make your race expand and develop faster. There are many interesting combinations without "creative" perk. Stock Silicoids are one of them, they don't eat and don't care about environment, meaning they have roughly twice more research and industry points at the beginning then other races and can immediately exploit hostile large and/or rich planets. With a little customization say replacing slow population growth with some other negative perk could make even more powerful race.

Finding a right trait combination is practically mandatory on the highest difficulty single player and doubly so in multiplayer. Stock races are simply outclassed there. So I figured if I want to play a normal stock race I could set other settings to "normal". Not every game has to be 8 player huge map on impossible difficulty. In fact higher difficulty levels break empire interaction. Wars happen more often, if you play custom race with "repulsive" perk (no diplomacy beyond declare war but can pick more positive perks) you'll be declaring wars on sight. And there is flawed AI power estimation making it to either attack you thinking you are weak for favoring ship quality over quantity or to declare war on you because you've expanded more then they did. On average difficulty AI is much better at role playing and my first game in this series was really interesting. Below will be links to posts about the game with each race:

• Alkari
• Bulrati
• Darloks 
• Elerians 
• Gnolams 
• Humans (coming up next)