Master of Orion/Preparing yourself for war

Doing well in war is what everything else in the game is designed to support.

If you master every other area of the game, and fail in this one, you will almost never win games of Master of Orion. Case in point, if you never upgrade the warships available to you at the start of the game, you won't ever win pretty much any games except on the easiest difficulty settings and the tiniest possible maps.

There is an art to building warships that can't be completely explained here, because of all of the variables involved, but in here some pointers will be listed that will help guide your decision-making.

The first thing to understand is that, by nature, Master of Orion is a highly defensive game at almost all stages. Only at the end of the game does offense completely outclass defense.

The most important reason that defense completely outclasses offense for a large portion of the game is the strength of planetary shields. These things are absolutely unbalancing and completely upset the otherwise gradual progression of offense and defense.

Case in point, the Class V Planetary Shield is the next shielding available after Class III Deflector Shields. The next one after that is Class IV Deflector Shields.

Class II Deflector Shields are a "must research" there is no other option. Class III shields are going to be available a lot of the time, but not always. Class V Planetary Shields are available about 50% of the time or so for most races.

If you get class 2 and then neither class 3 nor planetary 5, you are going to be sitting with level 2 shields on your missile bases until you get class 4 Deflector Shields.

If you get class 2 and planetary 5, but not class 3, you jump right up to 7 points of shielding.

If you get class 3 and planetary 5, you have 8.

The latter 2 cases, in combination with the fact that most weapons do half damage to planetary targets, pretty much rules out all damage that the opponents can even do at this stage of the game. A common weapon for this stage of the game might be the Ion Cannon which could barely even hurt the bases with only a class 3 shield, but which could still hurt them enough to win if there were enough attacking ships. The heavy mount Ion Cannon does a maximum of 15, which would half down to 7 and a lot of the time would do damage against the class 3 shields.

Even the heavy mounted Ion Cannon, though, falls completely to planetary shield 5. It probably won't ever do any damage even if the opponent is without class 3 shields, having only been given 2 and 5.

The difference between not having class 5 planetary and having it is like multiplying your number of missile bases by 10 in terms of protection equivalent, and planetary shields AFAIK don't have any maintenance cost. If they do, it is negligible.

There are many combats where 1 missile base and a class 5 planetary shield will be a better defensive setup than 10 missile bases and no class 5 planetary shield.

Missiles, by the way, kill things - a lot - in this game. They are one of the most powerful weapons in the game early on and retain a lot of effectiveness as the game goes on. They are so good, in fact, that it is not the worst strategy in the world to put nothing other than missiles on your ships early in the game.

It is quite possible to do "hit and run" style attacks against the enemies where you get a shot off and do damage and then retreat before they are able to hit you. This allows you to kill their forces and lose none of your own. At the beginning of the game, this can only be done with missiles.

Missiles, by the way, are exceptionally good at killing missile bases that are not protected by planetary shields or protected by only very weak planetary shields.

If you are going to try to do this sort of plan, load up your ships with the highest damage 2 shot racks you can find and nothing else other than engines and targeting computers, because the idea is that you act fast enough that you can get a shot off and retreat before you take damage. Using this sort of strategy you want to be able to kill their ships and lose none of your own.

Generally, the best way to prepare yourself for war, then, is to research the highest level shields possible and start building missile bases. Sometimes building the shields are enough, because you can sometimes just build the bases once you know where the enemy is going and their ETA. If you want to maintain the best possible chances to keep up with the other races, your best bet is to toe the line as closely as possible. Spending too much on missile bases is a loss in production that could have gone to further research, both for the cost to build the base and the cost for every turn the rest of the game to maintain it. If you lose the world, it goes without saying that you lose ALL its production. Err on the side of too many if you are going to err at all.

Before you go to war, or as soon as possible after you go to war, you want to get a spy inserted so you can see the technology they are going to be using before they actually smack you in the face with it.

Here, Sirian, a famous MOO1 player advocates building counter ships for the ships you expect the enemy to be bringing. Basically if you have class 4 and 5 shields and you know their weapons will only do a max of 4 damage, then go with the class 4 shields and use the space for something else.

A different take, though, would be to just design the best possible warship and ignore what they are bringing completely then just throw out the best design you can and see who wins.

In the short term, Sirian's strategy might result in ships being made that are obsoleted much more quickly than in the other strategy. When ships end up worthless, you only get 25% of the cost back, keep that in mind. If you make the ships that are slightly worse in the short term and better in the long term you might be able to keep them longer and not have to scrap so many and rebuild them.

Another thing very important to note, the absolute best scenario is if you can get away with devoting only about 25% of your production to the war effort, and leave the rest to build their production and to keep producing research points. If you do go to war and you throw all your production into ship building, you may win the battle but it is much more likely you will lose the war. When the short term fight is over you might just find yourself in a massive technology hole against your opponents, one that is extremely difficult to come back from.

Regardless what you do, it is likely that the opponents are going to be increasing their research even while the battle rages on and don't think they won't start designing and building new ships in the heat of battle either. They can and will whip out hundreds of new designs out of nowhere in the middle of combat.

This is also why it might not be good to lock yourself into metagame ships just designed to counter certain enemy ships. Chances are decent they will scrap that ship and come out with a new design that beats your counter ship which is still configured to fight ship designs that no longer exist. Their agility in doing this tends to be quite large at times.

If you build the best possible ship you can build, theoretically it will still be the best possible ship you can build if they come out with some new threat too.

It is definitely a good idea to start building generically good warships once you get the High Energy Focus technology because ships with that technology tend to last a lot longer than ships without it on the battle field. You could end up using the same design for 50 game turns easily, if not more.

That being said, a lot of people consider the game to really be over by this point, so they would say it doesn't really matter what you do at this stage of the game.

Many enemies will give quite a fight once this stage is reached, but generally the advantage is decisively in the player's hands once High Energy Focus is researched.

Many players will even play defensively until they get High Energy Focus, and only then go on the offense, patiently biding their time until they get the key tech and then unleashing everything into the galaxy in one big flood.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this style of play, and it may even be a really good one. One thing it has going for it is that it is easier to balance good defense and researching than it is to balance things when good offense is added to the mix.

Defense bases are so good at what they do and so cheap for their effectiveness that the game is programmed in such a way that missile base management is absolutely vital to the playing of a successful game on most all difficulties.

The AI takes a very simple approach to the subject. Regardless what difficulty you play on, the AI has a formula it will use that tells it exactly how many bases to construct for each planet. This is based entirely on planet size. On the "normal" difficulty this is around 1 base for every 8 population. On Impossible level it is more like 1 for every 3.

Having or not having just 1 base can be make or break, and even moreso when the computer doubles the number they have (1/8 --> 1/3). This doesn't just double the difficulty of conquering the planet, it increases it more like times 10. This generally just means you have to build up very very large fleets before you can hope to win against a planet, either that or you have to technologically outstrip the enemy so bad that they can't even hit you with their best type of missile.

Generally speaking, once you have a fleet that is capable of taking out a planet, your probably want to let it build up for 2 or 3 more turns. The reason for that is so that you can have most of your original fleet intact once the world is conquered rather than having your fleet worn down to nothing during the conquer attempt.

The dynamics of the combat system usually play out that 25% - 50% more ships more than doubles the success in combat. You will have a larger amount of ships that survive to get close to their planet and you will be able to kill their missile bases at a faster rate and this slows down the rate at which you lose your ships at the same time speeding up how fast they lose their bases.