Alright, NOW I've had my fill of MOO2 for another couple years, I feel like.  Did another game, this time with the added quality of life features, and also custom modded it to have a really small map, so only like 11 star systems (for 8 players), which I think helps.  Less is more, I think, when it comes to these things.

I guess one boring thing that tends to happen when it comes to me playing against the AI is that I reason out that I get an advantage the longer I wait to come into conflict with the other races, because the further along we are in the game / tech tree, the more of a benefit I'll have accumulated with my decisions and everything.  Which isn't like necessarily true, population is really important and if you can just conquer a star system or two and take them for yourself, the extra populace and planets can really boost your empire, but especially in the early game, I'm just sitting there frantically trying to get my economy and tech going without building up any defenses until I really have to.  There is definitely a tradeoff there, I mean you DO want to just get all that stuff researched ASAP and it's a waste to start building a fleet if you don't need one, right?  And then you also run into the issue where early game beam ships are really useless compared to ships that use fighters or missiles.  Of course, a creative race gets fighters (usually non-creatives end up having to choose reinforced hull) so they've got a leg up there, but I've been trying to play non-creative recently as it's a little more interesting.

The other problem with attacking early is that colonizing new planets after wiping out the other race is slow, but conquering the other race via ground combat is also a drain on your economy as you need to produce and then upkeep the troop transport ships.

Well, at least all the building queue management was a lot easier with the key shortcuts, and for lategame battles I just fastforwarded everything.  I conquered most of the galaxy, tried to exchange tech with the Psilons for stuff I was missing, and then when I was ready and they finally got fed up with me, I went into the final war with them.  By that time I was just dilly-dallying in the end-game anyways so they already had stellar converters and all, which meant that I couldn't just trounce them like they were nothing.  But with enough ships to survive the initial turn, even their huge fleet fell.  Nice.

Anyways, that's quite enough of that.  Again, another few hours wasted, but I mean, when else but the holidays am I going to feel like that's an okay thing?  Getting in touch with good old video games isn't a bad thing during this time, right?

 

All that aside, today was an okay day.  I started it out feeling pretty ungrounded, but some white tea (and a bunch of other teas) helped with that, and then we had a nice dinner out.  I decided for Rhythm Quest to hold out and not release the song select menu yet; just going to do the difficulties update, though I did do some more work on song select anyways.  I'll try and get that released tomorrow...