Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares/Hiring Leaders

From time to time you'll get opportunities to hire leaders who will enhance the performance of your economy or your military, or occasionally both. These characters are mercenaries - they work for anyone who will pay their fees, which come in 2 parts: a one-time hiring fee, usually quite large (rather like a transfer fee in football); and a salary per turn.

Choosing the right leaders can be major advantage, while getting the wrong ones can simpy drain your finances.

There are 2 main types of leader:
 * Ship leaders, who improve the performance of their ships and even of whole fleets - but opnly if they aboard a ship. A ship can have at most 1 leader.
 * Colony leaders, who can't be on ships. There are 2 types of colony leader: those who are only effective if assigned to a system, and those who are effective even of they are sitting around your Officer Pool (think of it as a lounge in your head office).

It's more useful to list the various advantages that various types of leader can bring, rather than try to list all the leaders. Since some leaders have more than 1 type of advantage, we'll also say what combinations are most common and which are most useful in various types of situation.

To complicate matters, some Colony Leaders also provide combat advantages and some Ship Leaders also provide non-combat advantages. These are known as "general" abilities.

Managing leaders
An empire can have at most 4 Colony Leaders and 4 Ship Leaders. If you don't hire a Leader when he / she first appears, he / she waits in your Officer Pool for about 30 turns. That has an important consequence - if you have 3 leaders of a type (Colony or Ship) and a 4th appears that you don't want, dismiss him / her immediately, because no more Leaders of that type will appear while there are no free slots in your Pool.

For governments other than Unification, the Officer Pool is a lounge in the Capitol, which is initially on your homeworld. If a non-Unification empire loses its Capitol, either by sabotage or because the homeworld is invaded or destroyed, no new leaders will appear until you build a new Capitol; you should in any case do this as fast as possible because your whole empire will suffer a morale penalty for as long as there's no Capitol. A Unification empire has no Capitol, and the Officer Pool is initially somewhere on the homeworld. Unfortunately the manual does not say what happens to leaders in the Officer Pool if the Capitol is destroyed or a Unification empire's homeworld is destroyed or captured, nor does it say where the new Officer Pool is if a Unification empire's homeworld is destroyed or captured.

Colony Leaders that need to be assigned to a system are ineffective until they arrive at that system. Leader assigned to the system containing your Officer Pool "arrive" instantly; Colony Leaders assigned to other systems take 5 turns to arrive. A system can have 1 Colony Leader, so if you assign a new Colony Leader to a system that already has a Leader, the incumbent has to return to the Officer Pool; and does so immediately, so the system is without a Leader for 5 turns.

Similar rules apply to Ship Leaders: if the ship is in the system containing your Officer Pool, he arrives instantly; otherwise he takes 5 turns. There's one other rule for Ship Leaders: in order to refit a ship that has a Leader, the Leader must first return to the Officer Pool.

Usually the best leaders appear later in the game and are really expensive.

Loknar, the last Orion
If you beat Orion's Guardian, you get a powerful battleship commanded by Loknar, who has Galactic Lore and insanely high skill levels in the following abilities: Helmsman (benefits the whole fleet of which his ship is part); Ordnance; Weaponry; Fighter Pilot (benefits the whole fleet of which his ship is part, provided they carry fighters; Loknar's ship does not). Loknar's main weakness is that he is not a Navigator.