Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares is a 4X turn-based strategy game set in space, designed by Steve Barcia and Ken Burd, and developed by Simtex, who developed its predecessor Master of Orion. The PC version was published by MicroProse in 1996, and the Apple Macintosh version a year later by MacSoft, in partnership with MicroProse. The game has retained a large fan base, and is still played online.
Master of Orion II won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1996, and was well received by critics, although reviewers differed about which aspects they liked and disliked. It is used as a yardstick in reviews of more recent space-based 4X games.
Plot
Long before the time in which the game is set, two extremely powerful races, the Orions and the Antarans, fought a war that devastated most of the galaxy. The victorious Orions, rather than exterminate the Antarans, imprisoned them in a pocket dimension before departing the galaxy, leaving behind a very powerful robotic warship, the Guardian, to protect their homeworld.:iv
Some time after the game starts, the Antarans, having broken out of their prison dimension, begin to send increasingly powerful fleets against the players' colonies, to destroy them rather than to invade. The only way they can be stopped is to carry the battle to their home universe through a Dimensional Portal.:14:3
Gameplay
Master of Orion II is more complex than the original game, providing more gameplay options for the player. Three new alien races have been added, and the option for players to design their own race. Instead of the one planet per star system found in the original there are now multiplanet star systems that can be shared with opponents. Spaceships can now engage in combat, marines can board enemy ships, and planets can be blown up. Multiplayer mode includes one-on-one matches and games with up to eight players.
Victory can be gained by military or diplomatic means. Major elements of the game's strategy include the design of custom races and the need to balance the requirements for food, production, cash and research. The user interface provides a central screen for most economic management and other screens that control research, diplomacy, ship movement, combat and warship design.
Conquering the Orion star system does not automatically win the game; it merely provides the powerful Avenger starship and some non-researchable Antaran technologies. There are three routes to victory: conquer all opponents; be elected as the supreme leader of the galaxy; or make a successful assault against the Antaran homeworld. To be elected, a player needs two-thirds of the total votes, and each empire's votes are based on the population under its control.:14:2
Star systems have at most five colonizable planets, and a few have none. Players can colonize all solid planet types, while gas giants and asteroids can be made habitable with the planet construction technology. Colonizable planets vary in several ways, making some more desirable than others::47–52
The most desirable systems are usually guarded by space monsters, much less powerful than Orion's Guardian but still a challenge in the early game, when fleets are small and low-technology.
Without food, a colony will starve to death. If an empire has an overall food surplus, it can prevent localized starvation by sending food in freighters,:57 which are produced in groups of five and require a small amount of upkeep when in use.:75 However, a single hostile warship of any size can blockade an entire system, preventing the delivery of food.:139–140
Each player can change each of its colonies' outputs by moving colonists between farming, industry and research,:57–58 except that natives can only farm. All normal colonists pay a standard tax to the imperial treasury, and an additional imperial tax may be set causing a corresponding reduction of industrial output on all colonies.:137 Players can use surplus money to accelerate industrial production at specified colonies, but not to increase agricultural or research output.:35–38 The maintenance of buildings costs money, as does maintaining an excessively large fleet.:34 Ships of different sizes require different numbers of "command points". These are provided by orbital bases, which are major construction projects for small colonies, and communications technology. This severely limits the size of empires' fleets in the early game, where one can have only one frigate (smallest type of ship) per starbase or one battleship (largest type of ship in the early game) per four starbases without having to "buy" command points, which is very expensive.:137
Research, usually followed by construction of appropriate buildings, can improve all types of productivity, including cashflow and command points, and can reduce or eliminate pollution,:65–9:65–99 Falling behind in technology is likely to be fatal. There are eight research areas:64–65 divided into several levels, each of which contains one to four technologies. To research a higher-level technology, players must first have researched the previous level.:64–65 Players can also acquire technologies by exchange or diplomatic threats, spying,:142 hiring colonial leaders or ship commanders with knowledge of certain technologies, planetary conquest, capturing and dismantling enemy ships, random events, or by stumbling upon it in a derelict craft orbiting a newly discovered planet.:112–116 All weapons and most other combat-related components benefit from miniaturization, in which further advances in the technology area that provides them will reduce the size and production cost of those components.:100–102 Technological advancements also make available modifications for most weapons, which usually entail a significant increase in their cost and size but can greatly improve their effectiveness in the right situations.:100
Screenshots from the game Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares
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