I gotta stop playing Master of Orion II, haha.  Despite having ostensibly experienced pretty much most things the game has to offer (??), more than once, something keeps me coming back.  The power fantasy of just building out an empire and seeing your ships decimate the AI fleets I guess is just tantalizing, researching the cool weapons and seeing them in action.  Beam weapons of course are the "coolest" and late-game they become absolutely awesome, but in this playthrough I went with a hybrid approach of small missile-launching ships and larger fighter bay-stocked carriers in the early game.  Fighter bays really are quite, quite strong in the early game, the problem is that you give up the Reinforced Hull upgrade in order to get them.  I didn't think much of it, but later on I definitely felt the fragility of my ships...

Anyways, it gave me something to enjoy about my day, despite it taking a long-ass time and being wrought with some of the tedium inherent in a 4X-style game.  Silly me didn't think to look until =after= I finished, and I only just now found that the 1.50 fanpatch mods add a number of quality-of-life features that would have made things really a whole lot better -- build queues that you can automatically apply (even to all planets), and also, increasing the speed of all combat animations so you can just fast-forward through them.  I was gonna say, I'll probably try not to revisit MOOII for a good while again, but mayyyybeeeee with these extra features it wouldn't actually be so bad.

Still, I have to wonder whether I'd have more fun playing some more Caesar III...

Well, I got some more Rhythm Quest work done at least, and some presents wrapped as well, so it's not like I did =nothing= the entire day besides play MOOII.  Tomorrow there's an event at Teance which should be nice, and then hopefully I can continue the Rhythm Quest work.  I'm pushing to release the new all-song-select menu, but even if I decide not to (and I might), the multiple difficulties update should be ready to go without too much further work.