MOO1 quirks

Playing v1.3 here.

A few funny things I have encountered to this day ...

1. Multiple alliance. For example, I was playing the Psilon. I established alliance with the Silicoids and the Klackons. Quite a while later, the Silics and the Klacks are at war. The Silic wanted me to break the alliance with the Klacks. I refused. Now then, at the race screen, the Silic hates me, but I am still allied with him and our trade agreement still stands! ROFLMAO!!! This sort of bug has happened in other games that I have played which involved multiple alliance. CPs seem to be unable to break alliance for whatever reasons. (CPs have no such problem, if the alliance in question is only bilateral.)

2. Planetary defense. Until CPs reach absurdly high tech, they seem to not like entangling missile bases, even though their attacking fleet actually has a decent shot at overcoming planetary defense. For example, most of my planets have best planetary shield I can get plus 10 - 20 missile bases. A fleet of 10000+ enemy ships attack. But after I fired off a salvo of scatter-packs, they get the hell out of my planet. There have been several games in which I was able to hold off on building a large fleet until towards the endgame, because I could pretty much keep the enemy fleet away with a handful of missile bases.

Other quirks that everyone else have experienced consistently and allows you to exploit them to your advantage?

2) What was your Planetary Shield + Force Field level on your bases? And what were the 10K enemy ships armed with?

Beam weapons only do half damage to planetary targets, so if you had, say, PS5 + FF5 = 10 levels of shielding, the AI would need beam weapons that did over 20 damage to have a chance of damaging your bases. It's not that uncommon for missile bases to be immune from enemy beam weapons for a large portion of the game. If the AI fleet had been packing bombs or missiles, they would have a better chance to damage your bases, since missile and bomb damage is not cut in half against planets.

Exactly, the AI surely had weapons that it knew could not damage the planet. You see this if you attack a planet and use auto for the battle.

The moment all the bombs are gone the fleet jumps back away from the planet as it cannot damage the shields.

neutrino said:

1. Multiple alliance. For example, I was playing the Psilon. I established alliance with the Silicoids and the Klackons. Quite a while later, the Silics and the Klacks are at war. The Silic wanted me to break the alliance with the Klacks. I refused. Now then, at the race screen, the Silic hates me, but I am still allied with him and our trade agreement still stands! ROFLMAO!!!

Click to expand...

It's not a bug. Master of Orion is one of the few games where it's possible to engage enemy races in combat without declaring war. This usually consists of early-game brush skirmishes, but the AI will sometimes even conduct major invasions without declaring war. You can be sitting there, trading with one of the AIs while maintaining good relations, at the same time that they're ruthlessly exterminating one of your worlds. You have the choice of then "overlooking" their aggression or doing something about it in response.

This all might seem silly, but it speaks to the wealth of strategic choices in this game despite the extremely old AI programming.