This section contains a listing of the three races that are in the bottom of the pack. Generally, though they may have significant advantages, they have some debilitating traits that are just too hard to overcome both for the players and the AI. Often they do get into strong competitive positions, but regardless of where they peak in a given game they almost never win.
The Bulrathi[edit]
The Bulrathi are meant to be strong in terms of ground pounding and they are very very good at that. They get +25 to ground rolls which means they can usually kill at least 4 or 5 enemies for every 1 population they lose on ground assaults, if the ratio is not even higher than that. If only a handful get through planetary defenses they still threaten to conquer full population planets.
Technologically, they are experts at nothing, but they are "good" in both Weapons and Construction. These are the two fields that are used for researching advanced technology for ground combat, and they get + 20% to research in both.
Those two categories also control adding thicker armor to ships and allowing more space on ships for weapons and reducing the space used by weapons to allow for even more weapons. This hopefully allows the Bulrathi to win the space combats that will allow them to send in the ground troops.
The Bulrathi will often try to send in ground troops without even trying to engage first in space combat. They just hope they can get enough through the planetary defenses to land enough troops to win. This "send and pray" strategy tends to fail more often than not, but it can result in both empires wearing themselves down so badly they are both taken over by a 3rd race on the sidelines.
The Bulrathi also have one of the largest disadvantages in the entire game. That being that they are the only race to be "poor" and receive a - 20% research penalty for Computer spending. The Silicoids are poor at every single other field and good in computers and they are still better off technologically than the Bulrathi who are average in 3 fields and good in two. This is because the Silicoids make good spies and they can steal missing techs from other races. The Bulrathi, on the other hand, can only look forward to never stealing any techs and to always having all of their techs stolen by the enemies.
If they try to cover up this weakness by spending more resources to spy the enemies and even more to guard against being spied on, they only reduce their research spending even more and cause themselves to get even further behind. The only way they can hope to compete well in the spy game and the technology game in general is to play to their strengths and do a lot of invading, stealing lots of advanced techs from the opponents. If the Bulrathi can successfully invade the Psilons or the Meklars on even one planet, it is possible they will land themselves a stolen tech that is very high in the computers research path and instantly negate all disadvantages they have in spying.
The Darloks[edit]
This race has the second worst relations in the game, only to the race that is the absolute worst race in the game. This race has a setting of "unease" in regards to every other race except the Humans. Everyone has "relaxed" with Humans and the Darloks are no exception.
Thankfully, this is one step above what is required, most of the time, for them to declare war on the Darloks for no reason at all. The fact that, most of the time, opponents will not declare war on the Darloks for no reason at all is the only thing that puts them above the Mrrshans which have at least a few decent relationships. Usually the Mrrshans will have at least one blood enemy on every map and that is 1 more than the Darloks.
All the other races know the Darlok's specialty, spying, and know not to trust them farther than they can throw them.
The Darlok are truly excellent spies. They are "good" at Computers, receiving a + 20% bonus to their Computers research and ensuring they have high level Computers technology and they get an additional + 30 benefit to their spying abilities in addition to that.
They are one of the only races that can even attempt to forego all spending on all other categories and attempt to just steal every single technology from every other category.
Their single biggest advantage is also their single biggest drawback. Because they are good at nothing else, the Darloks are encouraged to try to milk their sole advantage for all it is worth. The problem is that sooner or later they are going to fail, statistically speaking, and when they do the opponents are likely to declare war and the player will likely get dragged into a war they can only hope to win.
The Darloks will also not likely have any allies to back them up, because they are encouraged to stay out of direct combat and stay in the background plying their trade. At least if they were fighting they would probably be building "enemy of my enemy" relations with at least somebody, and they might be able to turn that into an ally. Due to their "operate in the shadows" mindset they never get these allies and when time comes to war over their espionage they will probably be entirely friendless in the galaxy.
Also, the "all spying" strategy has the quite serious flaw that the Psilons and the Meklars might still be ahead of the Darloks, even with all their advantage in spying, in the Computer field and those races will almost certainly be positioned well to pound the Darloks into the ground if the Darloks do fail in their spying efforts due to their huge technology lead or their huge production lead.
So even still there are some races too dangerous to spy on even if the Darloks go fully into the spying plan. The best targets to spy will be the Mrrshans and the Bulrathis who both tend to be very weak at Computers. The problem with that is that stealing their techs would still leave Darloks in the position of just being better than the other worst races, and not better than any actual good races.
The danger in their profession and their horrendous set of relationships pretty much guarantees this race a solid spot as the number two worst race in the game.
The Mrrshans[edit]
The Mrrshans are without a doubt the absolute worst race in the game. It is hard to even argue they are "only" the number 2 worst race in the game. They face such an uphill battle that their best hope is that there are very few players in the game and that they are the lucky civilization that is positioned in such a way that they get to expand and cover half of the galaxy.
Short of this, they almost never have any hope of actually winning any game. They are without a doubt the hardest race to win with as a player and as the AI as well.
Played by the AI, they are often in the position of being the "king maker". They can choose a civilization and ensure that civilization, and the Mrrshans themselves, both lose. That, however, is a long way from actually winning.
There are two primary reasons for their massive difficulties. One that only applies as an AI controlled race, and the other that applies regardless of who plays it.
Firstly, they default to the Ruthless temperament. This means they will attack without any regard to what they might lose if they think they have any hope whatsoever of winning. They will sacrifice their entire fleet to try and take one planet. Most of the time they can take it, and most of the time they will lose 2 of their planets or more to a different race when the dust has settled, making them worse off.
They will also willingly sacrifice tremendous numbers of ships to enemy missile bases with only a slight hope of winning. In combats where the more pragmatic temperaments would run and save their ships the Mrrshans will often stay and lose everything.
Thankfully, as a player controlled race, this does not have to be their fate.
Believe it or not, their other drawback is even worse than that.
They have, without a doubt, the absolute worst set of galactic relationships in the entire game. They are blood enemies of enough races that they will almost always get into a "you or me" battle early on when both sides should be reaching for new technology. It doesn't matter who wins this battle, the war is lost for both because when the dust settles both will be so exhausted and so far behind in tech that neither will come back and win the game.
The Mrrshans will rarely ever find any allies and will tend to be the enemies of every civilization in the galaxy at all times. Even worse, their relationships are so bad, by default, that even players will find most of the races declaring war on them only a few turns after meeting.
Worse still, one of the blood enemies of the Mrrshans is the Alkaris, who will probably be honorable, and who - because of that - will probably have tons of allies in the game.
The Mrrshans are the galactic experts in Weapons research, but that tends not to be a very large benefit. Computers technology ensures that weapons hit more often and do more damage and Mrrshans have no particular benefits in that technology. They do act as if they have + 4 targeting computers as a racial advantage, and that does cover up for some of their disadvantage, but they will tend to spend so much on ships that they end up more than 4 levels behind in battle computers anyway, negating their whole advantage.
Their racial advantage in targeting also does not carry over to giving them Improved Robotics Control technology, and giving them a huge production base. Usually they are going to be using most of their small production base on fighting and then there will come a point when they have no relevant ships, no relevant technology, and no relevant production base.
Of all the AI races, they are the absolute most likely to have absolutely zero technological advantages on any race. Even on Impossible difficulty, when they get a large bonus to research spending, they will often be behind the players in every way that matters even though the players have no bonuses whatsoever.
Thankfully, if you decide to play them yourself, they have redeeming features, and you don't have to go into the pitfall of going all-out on ship production and falling behind on tech like the AI does. MOO is a game that you win by turtling and teching up, not by going all-out aggression - and the Mrrshans are actually deceptively good at the turtle game. Their two bonuses (+4 to targeting computers and Expert in Weapons) actually both benefit your missile bases, the first ensuring that essentially 100% of your missiles always hit for a huge damage boost, and the second ensuring that they are always equipped with high level missiles. Because of your terrible relations you will be attacked, but you have potentially the best missile bases in the game (at least second to the Psilons), so you can defend your planets. Turtling also requires high tech production, but you have a solution for that as well : Orion. The Mrrshans are actually the best race in the game for beating the Orion guardian early : their +4 in targeting allows them to make an Orion fleet of small ships much earlier than any other race since fitting a Mk.III computer on a small ship is much less demanding in tech than fitting a Mk.VII computer! With the tech boost from an early Orion, and early teching into a high level missile for your bases to keep your planets safe (e.g Scatter pack VII), reliably winning with the Mrrshans on Impossible is actually not that hard. Early game expansion is key, and unless you are boxed in for planets by the AI (which is a problem for every race), you don't have to sacrifice your tech to fight an early war at all!