Et cetera.
Victory conditions come out pretty much the same: conquer everyone or win the galactic vote in the Orion Senate, but a new challenger has appeared…
The big new twist in this story is the Antarans. They fought with the Orions (you remember those guys?) back in The Day and were banished to a pocket dimension the size of a single solar system. Now, they peek out from time to time with a vastly superior fleet and crush everything in their path (thankfully, they don’t make multiple stops). With the construction of a Dimensional Portal and a sizable fleet with the best tech, you can win with a simple final space battle, regardless as to how you’re doing topside (although you probably wouldn’t have that fleet if you were doing poorly, so there’s that.)
The game even features an 8-player multiplayer mode, but since the turns only end when all players are finished, the game’s pace hinges on the slowest player in each turn. I recall our longest games with five people on a LAN only netted us a few colonies and never anything close to a finished game. The fact that the game crashed at a certain date meant we had hard stopping points.
Ship design is actually streamlined a little, so you’re no longer pondering whether to put shields or faster engines on your craft. In fact, you no longer need to research and equip colony pods, standalone colony ships handle all the work. Downside? All of the ship designs are extremely ugly.
For some reason, they decided that de-emphasizing the cool GNN news anchor and showing off the set instead (with a tunnel in the back that goes to… the delicatessen, perhaps?) was a creative win.
This leopard print-looking planet is easily one of the most unique designs in this entire game.
In Conclusion
The problem with Master of Orion 2 is simple: they came up with every single idea they possibly could, jotted it on paper, and then programmed around that. Unfortunately, all the charm and much of the fun is lost in translation, leaving you with a game that has a lot of the same name, but little of the same game. High on the pre-release hype, I loved this game a lot more fourteen years ago, but now long-since divorced of those times, it was difficult to even put in the time in this game to compile this article. The nostalgia has been wiped clean entirely. The game isn’t much of a game at all, it’s an exercise in patience. I mentioned it in my Master of Orion article that those who prefer this game over the original played this game first, which is feasible, but I’m really not sure how well that point can stand after some solid time away from both.
Remind me when I’m rested up and I’ll try that messy experiment that Infogrames called Master of Orion 3.
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