Master of Orion

TLDR: It's fun, it's a bit different but I find myself going back to MOO2 more often than MOO: CTS Master of Orion Conquer the Stars provides an adequate effort in attempting to succeed Master of Orion II, Battle at Antares (we don't talk about Master of Orion 3). MoO: CtS comes with a fresh coat of paint, some new design choices and an all star voice cast that bring the alien leaders and their adjuncts to life. There is a lot that is familiar to players of MOO2, the aliens, the technology, the random Antaran attacks, the kinds of planets you encounter and the space monsters sometimes lurking therein. Much like the barbarians from Civilization, there are space pirates and they are annoying. Where things diverge substantially and somewhat controversially is instead of researching fuel technologies and or building outposts to extend the range of your ships to access systems further away there are star lanes connecting each star system... unless it's a special kind of star lane and then you need a mid-game technology to be able to traverse it. Later on another technology allows you to put Jump Gates at a system's warp point allowing direct connections to other jump points which permit you to bypass many a system that would normally be a part of the route connecting the two. The star lane design slows things down substantially. The larger the galaxy the slower things go, much slower than a fully loaded MOO2 game. It can become tedious as turns take an increasingly longer time to resolve. Much of the game is spent waiting for things to happen before you give order to make more things happen (eventually). Combat can be abstracted entirely and it is a time saver to do so. Should you decide to fight a battle manually, the battle is carried out in real time like a janky crossbreed of Total War and Starcraft. That said, it is still less tedious than commanding 80 ships manually in MOO2. Colonies are very similar to MOO2 but there are tile limits that cap the amount of production or agriculture one can engage in (technology can expand the number of tiles and population cap). Instead of having an option to build housing, you simply grow more food to accelerate your colony's growth rate. One positive development in colony management is the Interplanetary Administration building which will redistribute food across the planets in a star system and allow the other planets to export their production to the planet with the building. This helps cut down the time it takes to construct larger vessels (or groups of smaller ones) considerably. The Antaran attacks scale with your total fleet strength so it is always difficult (but not impossible) to repel them. Still, it's a lot easier to evacuate your colonists and return to rebuild after your colony is razed than to fight the Antarans and risk having your fleet wiped out (time consuming to rebuild). You cannot capture ships (no boarding actions) so the challenge and reward of bringing in a high value Antaran vessel (or enemy empire vessel) for use or to scrap to try and exact technology is off the table. Espionage is far more elaborate with many more options for missions your spies can undertake. So is diplomacy. It just so happens that you'll end up fronting the aliens the fee for starting a Trade Agreement because the computer doesn't like to accumulate credits and is often broke. It's worth it, however. Mods like "5X - The Ultimate Balance Mod" are like an expansion to the game, offering more technology, buildings, ship designs and modifiers to the races. Once you've mastered the game in vanilla, the mod can breathe new life into the game. I don't think it's better than MOO2, especially given the pacing on large maps but it's still pretty good. If they had simply given MOO2 a fresh coat of paint, fixed the bugs, implemented the voice actors and maybe offered some more settings for galaxy creation that would have been enough for me. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"