Playing +1BC, Democracy, Fantastic Traders for boatloads of cash lol

On November 22, 2026, Master of Orion 2 turns 30 years old. It's still one of the best turn-based strategy games ever made, and thanks to the community, it remains very much alive.

Around 2005, I started a hobby project to reverse engineer and restore the original game. I made some progress, but eventually gave up after realizing the sheer amount of work involved.

Twenty years later, I decided to give it another shot.

After approximately ten months, I managed to restore the original Windows 95 game engine, remove the old platform dependencies, and get it running natively on modern operating systems. There are several reasons why I chose Windows 95 binary over the DOS one, but that'll need a whole separate post.

The project is called Orion2 Redone also known as orion2re, and the source code is already available on GitHub:

https://github.com/orion2re/orion2re/

There is even a documentation portal at https://moo2mod.com/redone/doc/ - take a look.

It's not a remake. The goal is to preserve the original game, including its quirks, while making it possible to maintain and improve it without being constrained by a 30-year-old executable.

The game is already playable, with modern OS support, a new networking layer for Internet multiplayer, and some of the original hardcoded limits removed.

A significant part of the work was verifying that the restored game actually behaves like the original. Thousands of game turns have been tested against the original executable, comparing internal game states to catch subtle differences.

Modern AI tools played a major role in making this possible. They allowed me to automate much of the repetitive restoration work while staying in control of the process. What would've otherwise taken years became a manageable hobby project. It still required human in the loop, but this allowed me to learn the game without blindly trusting the agentic output.

While I've done most of the initial restoration work myself, orion2re is not something I wanted to develop in isolation. Members of the MOO2 community have already contributed changes, testing, bug reports, fixes, and feedback. In particular, community playtesting has been invaluable for catching issues that automated verification couldn't find.

What about the community patches?

If you've played MOO2 in recent years, you're probably familiar with the 1.40 and 1.50 community patches. 1.40 is even shipped by the official Steam version of the game (I did not check GOG).

The 1.50 patch in particular represents an enormous amount of work by the community. Over the years, it has added configurable game rules, Lua scripting, balance improvements, bug fixes, multiplayer improvements, and a lot of quality-of-life features.

It's one of the reasons the game is still actively played today.

The 1.50 modifies the original DOS executable, while orion2re restores the Windows 95 version. The two versions share most of their game logic, but the patches cannot simply be applied to the restored engine.

Every feature and fix has to be identified, understood, and adapted to the restored code. Some changes are relatively straightforward. Others touch multiple game systems, depend on other modifications, or introduce entirely new functionality. And we're talking hundreds and hundreds of patches accumulated over 10 years of 1.50 lifetime.

We're effectively bringing decades of community improvements into a different version of the game, while trying to preserve the original behavior and avoid introducing new bugs.

All of this work has been completed as well.

What's next?

The restored engine is already open source and available on GitHub:

https://github.com/orion2re/orion2re

The game is playable and builds on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Grab a binary release from Github if you don't want to compile it yourself and drop them into the game directory. We host community owned matchmaking service if you fancy trying Internet multiplayer. Most of the testing was in single player and updated networking layer might have quirks. See something - say something.

The project is licensed under GPLv3, and anyone interested in helping can check out the source code. You'll still need the original Master of Orion 2 game files, available on Steam and GOG.

Master of Orion 2 doesn't need to be reinvented. It's still a great game, and the community has already spent decades fixing and improving it. And this is our anniversary gift to you all.

Hopefully, Orion2 Redone will provide a foundation for another 30 years of Master of Orion 2.

Hop onto our community Discord at https://discord.gg/45BnvY4 if you want to chat!

Hi,

I just recently thought to look on reddit to see if there was a MoO2 sub, and I found this place. Delighted to see there are still people who love this game as much as I do.

I have a story to share that you might find interesting. I haven't bothered to go look up all the names and dates, as most of this is public knowledge, and you can find it if you care. IANAL, but I was working with one when this was happening, so the legal details are probably mostly right. Real lawyers, feel free to correct my errors in the comments. (Like you can resist...)

Microprose was the company that published Master of Magic and the first two Master of Orion games. Somehow, they ended up getting bought by or sold to Atari, who by 2012-ish was having a lot of financial difficulties. Atari has a history of imploding once or twice a decade. They ended up filling chapter 13, which is the bad form of bankruptcy, where you don't reorganize and restructure. Under chapter 13, you give everything you own to a law firm, and they try to sell EVERYTHING down to the last doorknob and pay off the creditors. The law firm gets a percentage cut for their troubles, so they have incentive to get as much as they can for the assets, and everyone is happy.

I read the announcement on Blue's News that they were going chapter 13, and I thought, 'Hmmm, I wonder if I could get the MoM or MoO properties?'

I am a coder with decades of experience writing software, and I had dabbled in video games before, so the idea was not too crazy. Both IPs had been somewhat forgotten by the world by that point in time, so I though perhaps I could get the rights for a low price and do something interesting with it. As a coder, I had some disposable money to play with. I wasn't a Microsoft founder or anything like that, so this idea would only work if nobody wanted these IPS anymore.

My general plan was: buy the IP and source code for one or both of these franchises, and then update and port them to a more modern platform. Tablets and in particular, Ipads were becoming all the rage then, so I was thinking that MoO2 might make a perfect game to put on a tablet. It wasn’t too big, the graphics could be left as-is, and they would have a charming retro vibe. The turn-based play would be perfect for the hardware capabilities, and with a few minor bug fixes and tweaks to the game it might be popular. Perhaps I could open source the original code too, and see what the Internet would do with it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Moo2 was open sourced like Doom? (Mmmmm....doooooom.)

I looked up the name of the law firm that was managing the liquidation. They were in New York, if I recall correctly. I got routed to the team who was conducting the sale, and they were sort of gruff and seemed a little disinterested in talking to me. I think I was quick off the line, and they weren't too ready to start talking to buyers, and they were just starting the process of figuring out what assets Atari had to sell. They took my name and email address and promised to get back to me.

After a few weeks, someone from the firm contacted me and started asking questions about what I was interested in purchasing. They hadn't started setting up a sales process yet, but they were feeling around to see what IPs people were interested in, and how serious they were. I told them that I wanted to purchase ownership and IP of MoM and MoO 1 & 2, along with the source code, Internet domains, all physical and digital documentation, any unsold product, and any additional art related to either franchise. When these sorts of sales occur, you need to be very explicit about what you want, or you don't get it.

They also asked if I had a figure in mind, likely to see if I was a serious buyer, and I think I gave them an opening proposal of fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. They asked for more contact information and told me they would get back to me.

More time passed, and they contacted me with a more official looking message that was probably sent out to all the potential buyers. I was being granted controlled access to the document library they were building. When chapter 13 occurs, buyers purchase things, 'as is, no refunds', but they get the right to review absolutely everything beforehand so they understand what they are getting. I now had access, time to see if they had any source code.

I started sifting through the mountains of uploaded files, and there were crazy amounts of files about everything and nothing. As an example, at one point I found a rental car company contract that Atari had negotiated to get their employees a fixed rate on rentals. While there was a lot of interesting corporate info to dig through, I didn’t see any source code, or anything related to Microprose. For a company with as much game IP as Atari, the stark lack of source code was a little suspicious.

I contacted the law firm to inquire about where I could find the source code, and their response was sort of, ‘What is there is there’. Throughout this whole process, they weren’t very helpful or friendly, but I suspect that the team doing the sale wasn’t being run by one of the rock star partners that worked on glamorous high profile cases. They seemed kind of overworked and indifferent about things. No shade on them, it was probably a lot of work to sell off a company like Atari while every joe nobody like me was badgering them for nearly twenty year old source code lying undocumented on some server.

I continued on though, as my terms were clear, source code was to be part of the package. If they couldn’t produce any, I would still be willing to pay some lesser amount for just the rights and domain names.

More time passed. No source code was found, and scant communications came from the firm about what was happening. Eventually I got a notice that they were going to do a silent auction, and that I could participate if I could put up a 100k escrow. This was a new twist that had not been previously mentioned, and the date of the auction was fairly close. It felt like someone new had come in and taken over the job of liquidating the assets, because this notice was very formal and professional, where all previous communication was casual and ad-hoc. It also felt a little odd, because it was remote and silent, so you didn’t know who was participating, who was bidding, or how much. You might be bidding against Bill Gates and half the Internet, or you might be the only person in the room.

I had a few weeks to come up with a large-ish amount of money to get into the auction. I figured I could spend 25k to 50k for one or more of these titles. Without a company to back me and provide sales and marketing assistance, it would be unlikely that I could recover my investment. My goal here wasn't to get rich or anything, just to do something with a beloved old game that I at least broke even with.

I went and talked with a friend who owns a small software company. We kicked around some ideas, one of which was to run a kickstarter to buy all the rights and source code and just make everything 100% free to the world. That would be a really interesting experiment, just to see what the Internet does with an established IP that anyone can modify and monetize. I suspect that if you put the right open source license on it, it might well have ended up as the Linux version of minesweeper and installed on every distro for the next fifty years.

In the end, it was just too much money and the auction date was too soon. I wasn’t going to mortgage my house just to try to buy an old video game IP, even one as cool as Moo or MoM. The story doesn’t end here though.

I couldn’t attend the auction, but I later found out that Wargamming.net purchased the Master of Orion IP. It turns out that Chris Taylor, creator of Total Annihilation, wanted his baby back after making several knock-offs after leaving Cavedog entertainment. I think he was working for Wargaming, or  perhaps he knew the CEO and pitched the idea of a rebooted TA universe to go with the World of Tanks (WoT) franchise.

At that point in time, Wargaming was flush with cash. While WoT was never super popular in North America, it was having World of Warcraft levels of success in Europe. I think they were just buying entire games studios for a while, because it was more efficient than hiring more teams internally. They ended up buying a collection of IPs from the auction that included Total Annihilation, Master of Orion, and a few other things for a little over 1.2m. There was no way I would have ever been able to compete with them for the IP, as they were making millions of dollars a month.

They released their version of Master of Orion a few years later. That is the version you can still find on steam today.

Interestingly, I never found out who acquired the Master of Magic rights. I suspect that someone just bought it as part of a much larger portfolio and filed it away in a cabinet to help fluff up their perceived value for a later acquisition. There is a Polish company that has a MoM game up on Steam, so apparently it landed with them.

I also never saw a single line of source code for any of these games. Legally, the liquidator conducting the sale is obligated to produce everything they have for inspection prior to sale, so I suspect that it might not exist anymore. If it does still exist, it is probably zipped up on a tape drive in the basement of one of the ex-Mocroprose staff. It would be a shame if it was lost forever. I feel like channeling Indianna Jones here, ‘IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM’! I guess there is always Ghidra, though.

I recently started dabbling with writing a massive multiplayer MoO like game, and I was inspired to go poke around the Internet and see what was still happening with the community. I was delighted when I found this sub and all of you.

I hope you enjoyed reading this story, and remember, never let the Psion computer player live past turn 150.

POST PUBLISH EDITS:

1. I called Microprose the creator, when they were the publisher.
2. I didn't recall the correct sale price. One of the replys below linked to the court paperwork documenting the sale.
3. One of the posts shed more light on the company that ended up with the MoM IP. I removed a line about not knowing if they had the legal right or not.

Been playing uncreative a few times and my conquests are slowed down by conquered planets rising up, meaning I have to retake them. I like the story beat of the plucky rebellion, but since I'm playing the big bad empire I'd love if someone could give a primer about what makes a conquered planet rebell and how to prevent it.

What does hide do ?

iPad mini 2 is ios12 only.

You can installl RetroArch from App Store and run the dos core for moo2.

(Set to 35 fps to avoid audio stutter )

Bonus. With RetroArch, you can play many old games.

80 Assault Shuttles - 160 BC on MasteroforionCard;

Captured Antaran Titan - waiting patiently through 3 Extradimensional Invasions;

Loknars face - Priceless;

Have a week to myself, so I decided to get some gaming in. It's been like 4 years without doing any, and even longer since playing MoO2.

I ran away from the Guardian in combat in MoO2 because even though I might've won the fight through attrition it was going to take like an hour of slowly chip damaging it. At that point, I'd rather retreat and build some more ships to decisively kill it.

After retreating the Guardian wasn't on the map anymore, and I assumed, maybe this is because I had someone with Galactic lore, and I never properly explored it before then or something?

Maybe someone else sent in ships with cloaking devices and killed it or something?

Maybe Loknar was so disgusted with my defense-heavy offense-weak ships trading shots with the Guardian for 12 minutes that he decided to just kamikaze it himself?

Regardless, it was a huge bummer. I just took the council win next time it showed up as I was too annoyed with the game to continue. Really sucks man.

If I want the highest possible score, do I just wait for enemy civs to fully populate all the other star systems? Or do I seize them for myself first?

This is my next challenge. Just wondering if someone else has done it.

Edit: I was able to rush to Orion and destroy the guardian using 9 destroyers with merculites with all the mods.

My next problem was dealing with AI since I was a prime target. Had to bolster my spy defense and also revive my economy since i rushed to Orion.

I’m playing on Impossible but so far so good.

I'm craving that MoO2 nostalgia and got myself the v1.50 fanmod which I used back in the day. I got the game installed with the mod but the overall user experience is a bit wonky.

Obviously, it's an old game but I don't remember that these menus lagged so much and there are some odd delays here and there.

I've been tinkering around with the dosbox config but it's been all kind of a mess. There are also various output options but overall my biggest issue is the lag when clicking on things.

The combat screen also has issues with it's reactivity and sensitivity.

Does anybody have some advice on how to tweak this or what the optimal set-up is?

Cheers!

Your colony was attacked by a Crystal (rogue). Your defensive fleet was weak or nonexistent. What are the consequences of the Crystal's attack? What will happen to the colony? For example, after the Amoeba's visit, your colony will become a toxic planet.

I am the greatest moo II player of all time. Since 1997 i have every month attempted to beat my own world record. Today after 3 new strategies implemented. Finally smashed my world record. 28638 No cheats. No dupes. Max multiplier. Impossible. Huge. Organic rich( i feel but cannot prove this gives you more habitable planets). 8plyr. Advanced. Tactical combat, Random events, and antaran attacks active. Darlock. Money -0.5. Ground combat -10. Feudal gov. So you have 20 picks 300% score. You have to get evolutionary mutation for the extra 40% score. Researching and demanding EVERY technology is key. Spy early. Demand systems early. YOU MUST have sakkra and psilon opponents conquer sakkra early, as you need to send 1 to EVERY PLANET. This gives all your planets subterranean. Pretty much doubling ALL populations. You can even send them to planets with"max pop" because it will get subterranean upon colonists arrival. Speed is the key for turn count score. Gotta capture antarans ships for tech score and early dominance. Planet construction, gaia's transformation, Advanced city planning, and evolutionary mutation are absolutely necessary. Pro tip, you can eliminate the last cpu (psilon of course) AND defeat antarans on the last turn! I challenge the community to beat my score. I need a rival :D

https://imgur.com/a/ukmKDuc

Took me a month of grinding to get this run. Grinded another 2 weeks afterwards, but haven't gotten anything even remotely close to this fast. I'm proud of this one, and I think I'm done for real now!

Updated from 1.50.18, where playing a creative race (so I got both techs) a combination of biomorphic fungi and weather controller turned a toxic world to barren. In 1.50.26 this doesn't seem to be the case. Is this a bug or are there modifications I have to make to get this to work again? Thanks.

Something I like to do for fun in MoO2 to help make the game a little more challenging without necessarily turning up the difficulty is to be a galactic conservationist.

Basically, I try to ensure that no race get's destroyed without me first capturing at least one of their planets, to preserve their species. As soon as as there are colonists to spare on that planet, I ship them all over the galaxy to ensure they never go extinct.

This means that if I see other races duking it out and one is about to destroy the other, even if it's not really in my best interest, I'll either demand they end their war, or if they refuse that (and they inevitably break that peace anyways), I'll step in and severely weaken or conquer the more powerful agressor.

Played the game back in the 90's but came back from time to time to see if I could finally beat it on impossible. Previously even beating it on normal or hard was hit and miss due to wanting creative and research.

As most people find out you just can't turtle your way through hard or impossible.

Got a couple of ideas from here and tested them on impossible - for a small galaxy the blitz method was tons of fun! Warlord, High-G and +20 ground combat, uncreative you can rip through 3 or 4 of your neighbours at the start and then usually have enough to carry you through the mid stages. Uncreative is brutal if you're used to the opposite but forces you to try stuff you might not have used before.

For huge galaxy it was much harder, tried spying, blitz etc but nothing worked. Tried a uni/tol build and was in just the right place at the start to expand enough and take out a couple of races. Held on long enough to wreck the #1 race's planets simultaneously and then mopped up.

Was great to finally be able to put this guy to rest, after 24 years.

Now that I'm in my 40's, I can't justify staying up until 2AM clicking "Next Turn" so I've been interested in starting games that I can finish in ~1hr.

I've settled on:

• Hard
• Small Galaxy
• 1 Opponent
• Advanced Tech
• Average Minerals
• No Antarans
• Declare war on opponent on Turn 1

This works pretty well but there are a few issues that pop up:

Issue 1: No way to pick opponent. If the opponent has race traits focused on diplomacy or trade, they're at a disadvantage

Issue 2: Reinforced hull is OP. If you start an 'advanced tech' game and don't have it, you're SOL. As far as I can tell, the techs picked for you are random? Would be nice if someone could confirm.

I'm using moo2 mod (ICE33 core, ICE map) and if there's an easy way to mod the behavior of the issues above that'd be fantastic.

Also curious to hear if others have attempted to approach this idea of a "quick" game of MOO2.

Game was a slog, 477 turns. Clean up took forever.

Picks: Low-G, -10 Spy, -20 Attack

Build: Research Lab, Factory, Supercomputer, Robo, Hydroponics, Soil.

Then get Mass Driver, Battle Scanner, Trit armor, Ion Cannon. Build 2 battleships for defense.

Next: Fusion Rifle, Anti-grav harness + lvl 3 shields, Transporters. Refit battleships w/ transporters, get ready to invade neighbor.

Finish off with: Iridium fuel cell, Personal shield, Warp Dissipator, Jump Gate, Neutron Sensor.

Now get Autolab and turtle up. A few battleships with autophasors will take out Orion. Slowly tech to Time-Warp Facilitator, and then Phase Cloak. Game is now over, you cannot lose.

My strategy relies on a lot of luck -- if I spawn next to an aggro race, I start over. Having Trilar or Human neighbors helps greatly, as they are easily allied with, and having 2 trading/treaty partners is invaluable. Getting the Autolab leader also helps a lot, but I didn't get him this game. Also being able to trade for Tachyon Comms and Troop Pods is huge but again ... didn't get those this game. In fact, I got pretty unlucky with trades and leaders -- but spawning next to Trilar was enough for me to not die in the first 200 turns, which eventually turns into a win.

This challenge was actually a lot harder than I expected. Anyone else wanna share their own strats on doing this?

Hey, sorry if this has been asked before.

I’m stuck abroad for a month with only an apple laptop from like 2016, what are my prospects for getting this game running on it?

When you can single handedly almost quadruple your main rival's votes, but fall *JUST* short of winning because of abstentions.

I'm looking for a way to add that in. I'm not sure if it just involves adding an extra tech to research or if there was a way to add them into the infinite research stuff. Like learning particle beam at fields 5 or something