Hrm. . . No posts for two weeks. . . Maybe someone will read it anyways:
I have been playing MOO, off and on, since it came out. In fact, if it was not for MOO, I would have waited longer before getting a CD-ROM drive. I have memories of being able to go for coffee between turns on my 386. I just finished a couple of games.
Typically I play as either the Klackons or the Darloks, in a huge, hard galaxy, with five opponents. At average difficulty, I play whatever suits my whim. I have only managed to win an impossible game as the Darloks. My experience with impossible games is that as soon as I am one of the candidates for president of the republic, the republic forms against me. If I do not have the tech to drive away attacking fleets, I am rapidly exterminated. Sometimes, a race takes a dislike to me, and decides to wipe me out before the republic forms.
The Republic is apallingly bad at prosecuting wars (in my experience), so do not give up; until, they are annihilating your star systems.
About small ships: A stack of fifty-three starships with energy pulsars will destroy all stacks of small ships adjacent to them, even the unlikely scenario of small ships with class XV shields, and neutronium armor. The higher tech pulsarwill do it with a stack of twenty-seven ships. Okay, I tend to put beams on my small ships, because I am biased against missiles on my starships. At the higher tech levels, huge ships rock. If you can build the toughest ships in the game (Neutronium II armor and advanced damage control), it takes just over a thousand points of damage to even weaken it. A stack of those will easily handle The Guardian.
About The Guardian; it is very terrifying at the lower difficulty levels (when you are tempted to tackle it with inadequite weapons), but a bit of a wuss at the hardest levels (but usually because I can never get to it before I can attack it with megabolt cannon, plasma cannon, or -- in one extreme case-- maulers. I have stopped using the the Death Beam on my starships, and I only smack the Guardian to shrink all of my other weapons.
Given the problems of stack sweeping attacks, I have a fondness for medium ships. They are fast enough to build, can incorporate both beams and bombs, and still have room for state of the art targetting computers and a shield.
The wierdest game that I played was one where noone developed a better ground attack weapon than the fusion bomb. Interstellar wars were futile affairs; until, I discovered the mauler.
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