Where I simply thought Master of Orion 1 was an interesting and decent enough game with some polish and guidance to actually on-board new players, I still felt like it wasn't quite where I wanted it to be. It was still dense, confusing, and really really slow. Hearing that this game is better, I switched off immediately and just got right into the thick of it and was delighted to see that even with less tutorial guidance, it's a lot more intuitive to pick up and understand than the first game. Not only that, it absolutely delivers on all of the extra content and options, streamlining much of the experience of the game while leaving options for highly technical play. It has an amazingly high skill ceiling. I, stumbling around on the skill floor like a child can see this, but I can finally say I've been properly introduced to 4X games and it was not Civ V, not Stellaris, but Master of Orion 2 which gave me all of the tools to actually enjoy playing and learning.

So, I want to get out of the way that I did play extremely easy mode on a small galaxy, with the use of some cheating just to make the experience less stressful at first because I was really just trying to learn. Let the record show, I am not pretending I'm anywhere near good at this game, I am just competent enough to understand what everything does now. I'm going to keep playing this without the training wheels and maybe with a custom race, since the game gives you a lot of options to run your civilization however you want. Though, for my first I picked one of the premades and with a lot of the settings configured to make things just run as smooth as possible and not be so granular.

I picked the Elerians, a race of omniscience psionic women who live in a matriarchal, feudal society, in which I was their empress. I felt really happy being able to guide so much of the development of this civilization and shape it into my own. Because of the lessons I learned from MOO1, I decided to spend a lot of my early time building up research on defense tech, and of course building wide instead of tall. It's a lot harder this time around to cap the populations and reach the 'max' so to speak of a planets development, so I don't know how necessary it actually was. But it allowed me to expand and fast track so much, that the threat of conflict became trivial. So I was in a constant state of planning for a horrific war while getting a leg up on every other empire with tech.

As things started to relax, I would focus more inward in trying to make my people better. More eco-tech in order to terraform, clean up the waste of my planets, make all of my people way more intelligent and with supreme psionic benefits. All kinds of automated and green industrialization, expanding further and further, taking more and more land. Turning scraps and barren planets into paradises. Eventually, I had the chance to make a "pleasure dome" on every planet. So my empress gave some serious thought, is it simply not enough to live in lush ecologically sustainable abundance? To have a vastly expanded women only military with considerably lax rules on relationships? Well. Fine. If it's for the people, they can have their hi-tech goon rigs. I don't care, I'd say, as I would move a fleet of destroyers with antimatter beams dangerously close to an empire I had a non-aggression pact with, just to make sure the non-aggression was still non.

The game pushes you to eventually go to war and strong arm your way into the position of being the Master of Orion, but because I was a filthy casual baby about the game, I managed to get a pretty bloodless ending. The worst battles I truly had were with the ancient guardian ship guarding Orion, an ancient civilization holding many secret technologies. This won me a lot of cred with the other nations, as did installing a bunch of spies into each other civilizations so I could stay far above them. My expansion, my ability to make dead planets more hospitable, and the fact I didn't wage war with anyone led to a pretty happy ending for me. I know next time I'll have to be even more violent, aggressive, paranoid, for my empire. For Grub Supremacy. But the evolution of society and navigating all of the random events, fantastic experience.

One problem with the game that's still there is it's quite long. You have to pass a lot of turns upgrading and upgrading and balancing between trade goods and building housing, worrying about the upkeep which is broadly more simplified. Nothing was so hard to follow, and I'm really thankful for that. But it still is an experience that requires patience, and some forethought about what's going to matter 50 turns from now. I could see everything going completely wrong just by you investing into the wrong things. No characters or advisors were really there to tell you to do something else. You are the sole decision maker, a true empress in this game. And like a proper empress, it's highly likely you'll be crushed under the weight of your ambitions or poor decisions. There are a lot of invisible soft rules that players of these games have developed after decades of playing them, and to a new player you very likely will end up helpless

The only other problems I really have with the game is that it's missing an elegant system to do planned economies and construction jobs across whole star systems or multiple at the same time. Other simple little automation and quality of life things are just not there, but I can hardly blame the game for this since it came out in 1996. And for 1996, they cracked the code. This game is better than Stellaris, full stop. It gives you a vast expanded and rich game with interesting events and mechanics, for one single payment. No permanent stream of DLC racking up hundreds of dollars. FUCK you Stellaris. MOO2 is my new 4X space darling.

The last thing I can say about this game is the art and music. Everything is so visually cohesive, interesting and full of personality. Funny dated pre-rendered graphics and particle effects, solid pixel art of the various units, and a perfectly navigable UI/UX. It's got this fantastic synth music going the whole time, and I never really get sick of it. Every race you can play as is really strong in its visual identity, and the thought put into their culture is really fun. If you're considering a huge ass strategy game and have a love retro games, please don't sleep on this one. For something so acclaimed as a classic, not a lot of people on BL (or here on Grouvee) seem to have played it. I'd like to help fix that. This is one of the most interesting DOS games out there, and I'm saying this as someone who is genuinely terrible at 4X games and never clicked with them.

Reviewed on Jan 26, 2026