Master Of Orion II Strategy Guide Contents: Establish friendly relations Research :  Bite the bulletResearch beam weaponsAutobuild Large planet, no people Leaders are a good thing Combat : TacticalDesigning your own shipsDealing with space constraintsManaging command points Invading other planets Fire drill Orion The Antarans Click here to go back to the top. Establish friendly relations At the beginning of your game, you will want to make a good start with your neighbor species. After the first or second turn, contact each one that you can have contact with and request a research treaty. You should also try for a trade treaty, but success for a second request like that in the same session depends on the diplomatic expertise of your species and the difficulty level of the game. Regardless, you should try, the consequences for failure are not that great. At the beginning, the trade and research treaties will drain some money from your coffers. After approximately 4 to 6 turns though any negative effects should be gone and more research points or money should be coming in. As time goes on and your relations are stabilized, you should try later for a non-aggression pact. The next step is an alliance, but I don't really reccomend an alliance as just a general tip, an alliance is something you have to decide on an individual basis if it is in the best interests in your country to do. If you do agree to an alliance, they will aid you in war, but keep in mind you will have to aid them too. Keep that in mind so you don't agree to an alliance to some nation that is at war with three other major powers at once. Later when you are more powerful, you can then decide what is the right time to break the treaties (if you wish) and attempt to conquer your former allies. Click here to go back to the top. Research At the beginning, and almost throughout the whole game for that matter, you should dedicate most of your colonies to research. You ask, how do I build things? How do I feed my people? Well, there are some ways around these problems. Click here to go back to the top. Bite the bullet You will have to bite the bullet and dedicate one fairly large colony to agriculture, and one fairly large colony to production. If your empire is really big, 2 for agirculture and 2 for production might be required. All others should go to research. The agriculture colony can help sustain the whole empire with a good freighter fleet by delivering food to all the different planets. However, all of your planets should have a hypdronic farm, soil enrichment, and food replicators as they become available through your research. Each of these technologies make some food without any colonists, reducing the burden on your one agriculture colony. The one production colony should be your shipyards, ships can take a long time to build and you really need a whole lot of workers working on them. To build the buildings you might need on your other colonies, you should set everyone to build trade goods. This makes every colony produce some money that adds to your coffers. With that money, instead of building what you need you can buy it instead. It is hard to buy everything, so the first thing you should do when you buy buildings is buy ones that can produce other buildings. That means the first buy on each colony should be an automated factory and robo miners. These don't produce as much as a whole colony of workers, but they do relieve the burden from having to buy everything. Why go through all of this just for research? Well, staying ahead in the technology game is the way to win. If your opponent gets a sizable advantage in technology, you could be in some serious trouble. You should focus your research on force fields and physics, these categories of research is where you get the better shields and energy weapons.  Research beam weapons You really have to invest in beam weapons in order to have superiority. You do get missles in the game and they can do good damage, but as the game progresses I usually find I leave missle technology behind and focus more on phasors and the like. The most powerful weapons in the game are beam weapons, hence the stellar converter, so focusing on missles first might not be the best course. Missles are good for defense if you have missle base on a planet, lost of the are fired at once at ships. Another drawback to missles is that they can be destroyed with beam weapons and anti missle rockets as they approach. Beam weapons can also of course be thwarted with good shields and some special add ons, but you really can't make that argument with a stellar converter or death ray. When you have the ability to research a beam weapon upgrade, you usually have the ability to research a hand weapon counterpart to it. For example, I could have the choice of either researching a phasor for a ship, or a phasor rifle for my troops. The key to this choice is that if you aren't in any immediate danger from another species, you should research the rifle.  Click here to go back to the top. Autobuild This is an option you can click on each of your colonies. When clicked, each new building that becomes available through your reseach will be automatically built by whatever colonists or machines you dedicated to labor. I don't really reccomend it unless you have your colonies pretty much the way you need them to be, because autobuild doesn't build the building in any real specific order. So, if you are in a war and you need battlestations on some of your colonies, it could build a hyprodnic farm first, wasting valuable time. If you want to be really efficient, turn autobuild off and put things into the building list manually. However, turning autobuild on might be necessary since it might take so long to check each list if you have lots of colonies. Click here to go back to the top. Large planet, no people A problem that you might come up to is that you just colonized a large planet but there is not enough people in the colony to take advantage of it. Letting people spawn on there own can take forever, so there are some things you can do. First, dedicate everyone to labor. Then, have them produce houses. This helps drive up the population a lot. You should also try researching cloning centers, when one of these is built that will help also. Occasionally freak accidents occur that are reported on GNN (the galactic news network) that a sudden population boom occured on one of your planets, but don't bet on it. Click here to go back to the top. Leaders are a good thing Whenever the screen comes up that a leader is willing to work for you for a certain amount of money, strongly consider taking the opportunity. Leaders can help you produce money, increase moral among the people, reduce pollution thus increasing productivity, and numerous other benefits. Those are leaders of colonies, but you can have leaders of ships too. Those can help in many combat areas such as energy weapons and ordinance, and just recently I was happy to see that one of my ship leaders gave a bonus to my invading troops (look below).  Leaders to anything can help out a lot, but they cost a little bit each turn (usually no more than 4 BC a turn) and can cost a lot at the beginning (an initial cost of usually a few hundred BC). If you can't afford him or her at the beginning, they will wait around for about 30 turns to see if you can raise the money. Click here to go back to the top. Combat  Ship combat and invading planets is almost another issue entirely in Master of Orion II. Both parts, empire building and fighting, are probably equal in importance to your survival. Click here to go back to the top. Tactical combat I highly reccomend clicking the tactical combat box when starting a game. It's the most fun because you control the ships when you fight, otherwise the computer will just figure out who is the logical winner if there is a confrontation and will then report who is the winner and with what losses. Not very fun at all. Click here to go back to the top. Design your own shipsA key to success in combat is designing your own ships. When you research new technologies such as phasors and plasma cannons, they aren't automatically added to your ships. You have to design the ship and add it yourself. It's actually pretty fun, because you can make your own perfect doomsday ship even with a custom name and your favorite ship captain in command of it. Click here to go back to the top. Dealing with space constraints You really can't live without is battlepods. Battlepods are in the special add on category in the design screen, it gives you an additional 50% space, extremely valuable so you can pack in more dirupter cannons or a sheild capacitator. There are many other special add ons, such as high energy focus, battle scanners (+50% to your beam weapons), security stations (a marine defense bonus to your ship if it is boarded), etc. It isn't a bad idea at all to pack up on these, but you have to compromise it with how many weapons you take. Since you constantly have to deal with how much space each item that goes on board takes, researching titan construction is a very good idea. Titans are huge ships can even fit on stellar converters when they have battlepods, steller converters are huge beam weapons that can even destroy planets from orbital bombardment. Stellar converters are usually fit on even larger ships, doom stars, which are death star like ships from star wars. To build a Doom Star takes a lot of time, and you have to research it also, but they really pack a punch. Click here to go back to the top. Managing command points What the heck are those you ask? Well, every ship in your fleet takes up a certain number of command points. The bigger the ship, the more taken. If you use up so many of your command points that you no longer have any, you go into negative command points, money is taken out of your treasury to maintain your fleet. That can be a dangerous game, because if your run out of money your ships will start being scrapped.  Click here to go back to the top. Invasions These have been talked about breifly before, but this is a more in depth look. Invading other colonies is a great way to get a colony without waiting for it to be built. The problem is the people you conquered aren't too happy, and you have to worry about conterattacks when you already destroyed the planets defenses. If you aren't careful insurgents can retake the colony back to its original owner, so you must take the proper precautions. Those precautions are building a Alien control center, a marine barracks, and a armor barracks (in that order). When that is built, you stand a much better chance, and eventually the conquered people will assimilate into your empire and be happy about it. However, if you capture a large planet, it might be a good idea to unload troops on the planet from one of your transports so additional troops will be standing guard while those facilities are being built. Something else interesting about invasions is that when your troops win, sometimes they will find a piece of technology that you might not have, which can be a great benefit. Click here to go back to the top. The "Fire drill" Why is it called the fire drill? Your guess is as good as mine. This used to be the name for a crazy maneuver that one of my friends invented in a WWII combat flight similulator. He would climb the plane as high as he could in a last desperate move, then dive at his opponent while shooting everything he had. Well, in the sense that these are both last desperate moves, the name fits in this case also. If you are at the point that you simply cannot compete with your opponent and things look bleak, build small ships. Lots of small ships. We are talking in the twenty five to fifty ship range, and it only really works if you still have a lot of remaining colonies so each colony can build one ship each turn. On each ship, equip with battlepods, and if you have it, equip them with sub space teleporters also (they allow a ship to move twice as far in one move). Then, load it up with bombs, the most powerful you have. What you now have is many little bombers. You may loose quite a bit of them, but they do destroy colonies. When you send them off to attack, just send them to the planet. When at the planet, release all the bombs you have. Keep doing this until the colony is destroyed (when the population reads at zero when you move the cursor over the planet). You might also want to send troops to board any Battlestation or Star Fortress that might be near while you are bombing to take out the threat of it destroying any more small ships. If your lucky, you will cut into his or her labor, food , and research, eventually turning the war to you. If a large attacking fleet really should be your first priority, do the same with small ships but give them your most powerful beam weapons or most powerful missle. You will probably send several fleets to theird death, but eventually you will grind away their superiority and take em' out. Click here to go back to the top. Becoming the Master of Orion Conquering Orion doesn't win you the game, but it helps. On top of getting a huge planet that is resource rich, you get a special ship. The special ship is Loknar's ship, Loknar was the last Orion that was an Antaran hunter. It comes loaded with goodies, the most important technology it comes with is the death ray. The death ray is a beam weapon in between a disrupter cannon and a stellar converter and can be fitted on to almost any of your ships. I would reccomend refitting all of your ships with it as its primary weapon, it's a real good piece of equipment. Click here to go back to the top. The Antarans There are three ways to win the game: The Antarans are a super race that were banished to another dimension a long time ago. They occasionally send a couple ships through a portal and attack some of your colonies, which can wreak havoc on you at the beginning. When you have researched quite a bit, you can get a Dimensional portal and send your own fleet to attack the Antaran home world. This isn't for the timid, you must send a strong fleet or they will be destroyed. On top of their own fleet guarding the planet, they have a strong Battlestation that looks almost borg like (if you have ever seen Star Trek). I have tried taking over their ships, but it has never worked, their marines are just too powerful. It isn't uncommon to loose your whole raiding party when you have plasma rifles and many other advantages. If you attack the Antarans, it can be done, but be prepared! Click here to go back to the top. |
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