[MoO] Asymmetric Research: The Cool Thing about MOO2 Everyone Forgets About

[BvBPL]

What makes MOO2 the bee's knees? Obviously there are a lot of things about MOO that are awesome, but one thing that is often overlooked is the research system.

In MOO2, research is comprised of many tiers. At each tier, you could generally choose between two or three separate advancements. Choose one and you can't research the others. This made for some interesting choices; do you want power armor, battlestations, or advanced communications? Of course you could trade for specific advances with other races, but you generally couldn't collect all the techs.

This system has never been repeated in other 4Xs. Sure, there specializations in GC, but those are generally incremental advances to existing things rather than choices between phasor and plasma weapons and the like. Endless Space lets races choose a number of different advancements, but there are too few specific choices and player can always go back to pick up one he skipped.

Was the tech system in MOO 2 a compelling part of it for you?

 

[Ray F]

What makes MOO2 the bee's knees? Obviously there are a lot of things about MOO that are awesome, but one thing that is often overlooked is the research system.

In MOO1, you started with a limited tech tree (50% removed) to begin with. Basically, there would always be certain technologies that you could NEVER get unless you found a way to acquire them from another race. Being creative (i.e. the Psilons) helped (25% removed), but didn't guarantee that you would have access to every tech you wanted.

This meant that you could not enter the game with a predetermined notion of which techs you would choose to research.

 

[vmxa]

Stardrive 2 has the same tech system. They copied many parts of Moo2. Same names for most of the tech.

 

[Rocco.40]

As much as I like the tech tree system of MOO2, due to weak a.i. that cannot make proper choices (like a low-G race that does not choose the gravity generator) it also gives the human player quite an advantage.