last I heard (a long time ago) this is going nowhere. The license wasn't available and Galciv 3 is more likely to fill the gap that Moo2 left. (read elemental development journals for some comments on this).

Same as Master of Magic. Elemental may not be the official sequel, but it'll be as close as you are ever likely to get.

Anyone played FreeOrion?

http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Main_Page

MOO2 is the game I keep hoping to find in the new crop of 4X games.  Some come close but nothing matches the original MOO and MOO2.  I just DL SOTS today but I am having issues with it.  Hopefully will be able to get it worked out and give it a try.

That's what Brad was thinking off. But we'll need patience. First elemental. The a few expansions for that. and THEN... maybe... galciv 3.

MoO2 was one of the greatest 4X games of all time. I think the addictive qualities of "just one more turn" are astounding. My two cents

I think MoO3's biggest problems were making it too complicated to perform the turn by turn tasks, but more importantly making an individual planet or ship meaningless. You feel no attachment to your creations; this was always the appeal, making a fleet that was so different and then seeing it in action, controlling all of the details.

With that said a large tech tree, with distinct differences in the different paths, can add variety. The graphics are also very important, you want to be able to see the massive fleet you've carefully constructed engaging in cool battles. It's about pride in creation.

- Jonathan

Umm, Moo3 was the reason I bought GC2 and it's expansions. I'd been following Moo3 development having loved Moo2. Then it comes out and it's frankley rubbish, broken and unplayable.

The biggest sin of Moo3 was it wasn't any fun to play, it was like playing with dozens spreadsheets, the game could also play itsef without any player involvements. Space battles where rubbish, ugly and unrewarding. The tradgedy is they had some good ideas, the way races and species worked was fun the diplomatic animations where good but he game was awful.

So looking for a new 4x space stratergy game I found GC2. Frankly I think GC2 with ToA is much better than Moo2 was, although there are still things I liked about that game.

That said I would love to see Moo4 made by a good company like Stardoc, but I want and lookforward to GC3 more. I'm going to check out free origion though.

I've thought about trying my own hand at a 4x space stratergy game recently written in Java, who knows maybe I'll have a go.

MOO3 as released was terrible. It was terrible in a tragic way because you could see so much work done, so much in it that could have led to one of the best space empire games of all time. But it failed to mesh together, and they broke the 2 things which had made Moo2 fun. First, the techonology in moo3 was so bland, so boring and generic, with no discovery alone having much effect, that you were never excited to get the new discoveries. Tech development should be one of the most exciting things in a space empire game. In MOO2 every tachnology pretty much had a big effect. New ship components that you wanted to immediately put on your ships, ground facilities that made a big difference to how your planets worked. MOO3 didnt have that, yoi barely noticed if youd researched anything.

Second, MOO3 made the ship design much less fun. Partly because the fleets were so large, that individual design of ships was less fun, as you didnt build ships in small numbers. You also had far less control over the combat so you couldnt really fire that nice new weapon yourself from your new ship.

With the player patches and mods, moo3 does become playable. they dont really address the issues above but what they do is give you a game thats playable accoding to its original design. Its a true empire game. You could see MOO2 as being small star kingdoms fighting with a dozen star systems in each. MOO3 gave your empire dozens and dozens of star systems. Each empire had hundreds of them in fact by mid game. It was fun after you got used to it. But it did take work to get there and you really had to forget it was anything to do with MOO2 to enjoy it.

This old gamer still plays MOO2 from time to time; love it! MOO2 and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri are my two favorite games.

I'd love to see an up-to-date remake of MOO2.

Hello all! I see lots of you like Moo... I loved moo 2 aswel. Tried moo3 demo, bought galciv but hated it. Sins of solar empire is awesome but I find it unsatisfying due to no story line and lack of feeling as if you are actually there. Homeworld had much potential until HW2 ruined it. And eve online... well ill just leave it at that...

Oops, sorry, getting ahead of my self. I been looking for a satisfying game for ages now. Ive gone through many, picking one up with joy only to leave it behind hours or days later. I been thinking how come old simple games vere so much funner than todays newer ones? So far, my conclusion is that today games are just too messy and lacking the ambience their predecessors had. Half life and team fortress 1 were SO MUCH better than what we got today. The negative simply outweights the poor graphics of yesterday... (I hope starcraft 2 is not as badly butchered)

Erm again, sorry, I meant to post a fun game I discovered recently... Its called "Starships Unlimited". You can find a demo somewhere on the web. It reminded me of moo2 somewhat...

Currently Im hoping to get my hands on "nexus the jupiter incindent" Hope thats good...

MOO3 was far from ok it was the biggest failure in gaming history, the developer seemed to have no idea what makes a game fun, and that is ignoring all the major bugs they never fixed.

It's a pity because they had some good ideas, they just failed to bring them together into a fun game with no critical bugs.

Moo2 was a great game though I agree, that's why Moo3 was such a let down.

I am one who agrees with the above post (#21). I also enjoyed MoO way more than MoO2.

The strongest feature in MoO was that large empires were still manageable. It sacrificed a bit of detail. But all information was easily obtained by a click and a quick glance at the sliders and some numbers. Often fully developed planets could be ignored, drastically reducing the number of planets to look at, instead turning the players attention towards warfare, expansion, espionage, research, shipdesign and diplomacy. The sum became greater than its parts. I have some feelings of nostalgia related to it, but I started to play it about 10 years after its release, and even though it looks a bit old the gameplay made up for it easily.

With MoO2 the needless managemental details overshadowed the rest, at least in my opinion. Having to plan each individual building made it take a lot longer, especially when handling many planets. The game included a governor that could use some buildorders, but I felt the governors were doing a poor job for the tasks that I had in mind for my planets. The technology tree didn't feel as slick as in MoO either, what I remember the most was how uneven the weapons development was, with the discovery of plasma weapons (think it was plasma) everything else became obsolete junk.

I have tried Stardocks Galactic Civilizations but was never hooked by it, although I have heard many were/are. The bad parts was that it felt clumsy and each turn was too timeconsuming, it was clearly not desgined to handle the control over large empires. The free movement in 2D space felt a little awkward too and removed chokepoint tactics completely (unless the AI was stubborn enough to always use the same route of attack). The open map did present some interesting things though, like the importance of having scoutships out and keeping intercept fleets near vulnerable places. The good parts were especially the carefully paced researchtree, the three types of different weaponry with specific defenses for that extra strategical edge, the beutiful and intuitive shipdesign, and last but not least the great diplomacy and interaction with the other races. Had the gameplay been 2-4 times faster, and less emphasis been placed on micromanagement, I would have prefered GC over the classic MoO.

The thing that was missing from MOO3 was Steve Barcia ...