The MOO2 Book / History / Versions

-1 food was changed to -0.5 food and its cost changed to -3.

A new special has been added. "Poor home world" costs -1 and makes your home world mineral poor.

Ship defense bonuses have been increased from +20 to +25 and from +40 to +50 at the same cost.

A new special has been added. "Poor home world" costs -1 and makes your home world mineral poor.

After you colonize a planet for the first time, you will be allowed to enter a new star name. The length of the new name will be limited by the amount of horizontal space available on the main galaxy map. Bear in mind that each letter takes up a different amount of space. (For example, a "W" is wider and takes up more space than an "I."). In any case, you will be limited to 15 characters.

When playing tactical combat vs. a computer-controlled empire, there is a super-fast resolution mode. Press the "Z" key to turn on the super-fast mode. Click anywhere to turn off the super-fast mode. Combat graphics displays are minimal in super-fast mode, greatly speeding play.

To reset the Hall of Fame high scores, press Alt-C. This will restore the default scores.

The game no longer crashes in space combat if the Antarans capture ships.

The game no longer crashes if you cycle through the opening menus.

The game no longer crashes if the name of the home system has too many letters.

The game no longer crashes if the player wins by being voted leader of the galaxy and the name of the player’s emperor has more than 10 characters in it.

The last customized race created will be saved. It can be loaded by clicking on the "Last Race" button instead of selecting a picture for your custom race to use.

Customized races can now be named by their creator. Just click on the race name in the top middle of the Race Customization screen to edit the name.

Individual ships can be renamed using the detailed ship display. This display is reached by right-clicking on a ship in the Fleet Movement pop-up list, the Fleet Operations screen or the Leaders screen. In the detailed ship display, left-click on the ship’s name to enter a new ship name.

* Cycling through the ship pictures in the Ship Design screen will no longer change the ship name, preserving custom names.

When refitting a ship, you will be prompted to select a current ship design if there are any of the same size class as the ship to be refitted. The refitted ship will have its design updated to the chosen design’s specifications. The design screen will still be available as an option as in earlier versions.

In tactical combat, pressing "T" will end the current player’s turn.

Left-click on the marines displayed at the bottom of the Colony screen to display your current ground combat statistics.

Tutor level should be a little easier.

The Custom Race option is available on all difficulty levels.

The Creative racial ability now costs 8 picks. As a result, the base Psilon race loses Artifact home world and gains Large home world.

The attacker will now always move first in tactical battles, except for the Antarans who will always move first regardless.

Players no longer get System Specials if there is a monster there after combat. (This used to happen with moster:space_eel[Space Eels] since they don’t attack you. It could also happen if two players showed up on the same turn: the monster attacks one and then the second player chooses not to attack the monster.)

If both sides die in a battle vs. the Guardian, the player will get Loknar’s special now. (Previously, you had to actually win the battle, not just tie.)

* Loknar now brings 1-2 extra randomly selected technologies. If already in your possession, no other technology is received instead.

In an obscure rule change, there are now always some pre-allocated ships for the humans in a single-player game. Before, the ship slots were allocated round-robin among all players. In games with very large number of ships, this meant that you might sometimes only be able to build a few ships in a turn.

Gyro-Destabilizers now take 75 space and cost 50 BC. Their damage has also been decreased to 1-4 per size class of target ship.

Ion Pulse Cannons now take 30 space, do 2-10 points of damage and cannot be modified to be Heavy Mount.

Plasma Cannons have been increased to 25 space.

Fighters have a 50% chance to avoid the effects of any ship self-destruct or warp core breach explosions.

Assault shuttles are now one-shot weapons. They land their marines, but do not return to the launching ship.

* The Wide Area Jammer fleet wide bonus is no longer cumulative with any missile evasion bonus given by jammers. Only the best bonus applies.

The Damper Field will block any marine casualties caused by Neutron Blasters and Death Rays.

Extra combat turns given by the Time Warp Facilitator will be given after the opponent has taken a turn.

1st player: normal turn
2nd player: normal turn
1st player: extra turn
2nd player: extra turn

* Missiles on the Missile Base get the ECCM mod immediately instead of at level 1 miniaturization and this mod no longer uses space.

* Missiles on combat satellites now get ECCM immediately and the ARM and FAST mods at L1. These mods do not use space.

* Combat Satellites have Warp Dissipator fitted once the technology is available. (An extra line has been added to the Star Base Specials table.)

* The Guardian now has 2 Spatial Compressors.

* Antaran ships now have missile jammers onboard.

* Antaran Raiders (frigates) now have a Neutronium Bomb onboard and Intruders (cruisers) have 2 Spatial Compressors instead of 1.

* AI now mounts Stellar Converters on Doom Star class ships.

Modem problems with head-to-head play have been addressed.

A network synchronization bug involving viewing battle results when one player’s computer was slower than the other has been fixed.

The Tiny planetary shield crash bug is fixed.

Graphical problems with planetary shields have been fixed.

The lockup when all the ships on one side are in stasis is corrected.

Ships in stasis will not take damage from ship explosions.

Ships will now be able to reach Elite crew status.

If your income is negative and you are giving tribute to another player, you give them zero BCs instead of a negative amount of BCs.

* Colony base maintenance cost is now 0 instead of 5 BC, preventing displayed nett income to be 5 BC too low on turn of a colony base completion.

* Left-clicking on the Freighters window when all freighters are in use for population transport will no longer crash the game.

The overflow bug if you research more than 32,767 research points per turn has been fixed. The number now truncates to 32,767. The same fix was made for the player’s gross income.

When you acquired the application you were currently researching by nonresearch means (diplomacy, spying, etc.) and you were Creative or it was a gray box field, the game used to erroneously give you the whole field, resetting chosen research to none and amount of invested research points to zero. The game will now correctly assign you to research another application in the field (unless there are none, in which case you get the field).

* Researching a high tier ship shield technology no longer gives all lower tier ship shields for free.

Human players may now give Antaran technology to each other.

* Leaders starting experience is now equal to the xp threshold of their intended starting level (60/150/300 instead of 50/100/250). As a result, leaders now start at the correct skill level.

You are now able to hire "special" leaders.

Leaders give their special technology when hired, even if hired on a later turn.

Assassin leaders now correctly kill an enemy spy when you’re told they do.

The player will now benefit from Loknar’s Galactic Lore skill.

It used to be possible to circumvent the 5-turn ETA by sending the leader to the pool and then back to the same star system. This has been fixed.

Captured ships with officers can no longer be refitted on the refit pop-up menu.

Scrapping (captured) ships now gives you the opportunity to learn improved fuel cell technology.

The Colony Building Queue screen is changed to list the planet name.

If you press the "<" and ">" keys on the Colony screen and the Colony Building Queue screen, you will automaticaly skip the outposts in the lists.

On the Fleets screen, the relocation hot-key has been changed to F5. The hot-key for cancelling all relocations has been changed to Alt-F5.

* "Zog, the Gnolam Capilatist" is now called "Grogg, the Gnolam Capitalist".

Asteroids were added to the Colony system display. TODO missing from Rocco’s version, check;

Tactical combat ship initiative is now an option on the Game/Settings screen. When this option is enabled, ships in combat will move in the order of their initiative rating. The initiative rating is equal to the ship’s total beam offense bonus divided by 10 plus the ship’s current combat speed [Offense/(10+speed)]. Thus, smaller ships should move before bigger, slower ones.

The occurrence of "You are too powerful" messages from the computer AIs has been reduced. Various other changes to decrease the erratic behavior of computer AIs in diplomacy (such as races declaring war on you for economic expansion) have also been made.

All ships in a fleet are removed from a system if that race accepts your demand to so, instead of just the ships with weapons.

If two races own planets in the same system, the colors of the labels now reflect that in the Windows 95 version.

* In the Colony system display, toxic planets are now colored gold instead of red and radiated planets are red instead of gold. (Except for tiny toxic, radiated and barren planets that are red, silver and gold resp.) Note that the updated file 'colsysdi.lbx' that contains this change is not present in the German version of the patch.

Using the Alt-CRUNCH cheat now triggers the cheat warning in multiplayer games.

The Hall of Fame now records players' high scores.

Spanish or Italian language can be set on the Game Settings window. The Accept button immediately puts the new language into effect and closes the menu.

In combat with ship initiative enabled, ships trapped in a Black Hole Generator will now be destroyed after two turns instead of remaining immobilized.

In the System window, the correct number of colony ships is now displayed when there are more than one present.

Some logic has been added for better wording for cases where printf templates were lacking. *

One of five languages can be set in the Game Settings window. The Accept button immediately puts the new language into effect and closes the menu.

Added GameRanger support.

Added AppleEvent support.

Limited advisor animation speed on technology screen.

Insured that players receive notification of cheating in multi-player games.

Completely replaced drawing engine, fixing a number of memory overwrites.

Fixed missing month text in certain situations in the load/save dialog.

Fixed graphic clipping bugs in tactical combat.

Fixed lack of screen centering in tactical combat when ship initiative is turned off.

Fixed bugs concerning production and BC crediting to players.

Implemented true gamma fading for displays.

Fixed bad buffer when loading saved network games.

Fixed buffer overwrite when selecting unexplored stars on main screen.

Fixed bug in the colony summary screen which usually manifested itself as a crash in hotseat games.

Optimized tactical combat, diplomacy, etc. code.

Fixed bug in popup info window when right-clicking on planet in system window.

Fixed tactical combat so ships are immobilized and released correctly.

Fixed logic bug causing AI to destroy their own fighters when returning to mother ship.

Fixed text drawing bug on colony screen which was randomly overwriting memory.

Fixed potential sound channel initialization problem.

Fixed boarding so the damper field is 50% effective as per its description (not 66% as found in code.)

Added support for monitor selection on a multiple monitor system.

Fixed memory overwrite when cursor moved below bottom of screen.

Fixed assimilation handling so feudal governments assimilate immediately as per the manual.

Added message when human player colonies are taken by AI using mind control.

Fix Y2K issue in load/save dialog.

Fixed Tactical Combat bug relating to hanging at the end of the combat round when capturing ships.

Removed Draw Sprocket and Display Manger dependancies.

No longer switches monitor resolution on launch.

Added support for forcing movies to run in 256 colors by holding down the Option key on launch.

Fixed bad port when playing Quicktime movies which could cause crashes in some situations.

Added option to disable the "Antaran Attack" movie.

Fixed drawing of background in Information screens.

Fixed (added) scrollbars in Fleet Officer screen.

Fixed intermittent hanging when pausing game.

Fixed hidden cursor while game paused.

Fixed bug introduced in V1.4 which caused race pictures to not be drawn when eliminated.

Fixed Officers screen drawing bugs introduced by V1.4 speed improvements.

Improved mouse response on detailed ship information popup (Fleet and Officers screens, and Tactical Combat - Scan).

Fixed update flash on banner selection screen.

Improved mouse response on Game Menu and all associated sub menus.

Fixed screen updating problems in build list with Colony Bases.

Fixed all references to Left & Right clicking and Alt keys (data file change).

Fixed highlighting stuff for designing ships broken in V1.4.

Fixed "What Ship ?" and "What ?" cursors so hotpoint is in center.

Essentially re-wrote the "Repeat Build" UI support from scratch.

Fixed networking support for TCP/IP Games over the internet.

Fixed a number of buffer overwrites which where causing damaged heaps and miscellaneous crashes.

Introduced processor specific optimized builds.

Added support for disabling movies by holding down the Control key on launch.

Changed startup test to work with monitors that don’t support 640X480 mode.

Fixed stack overflow crash on 68k machines at the Construction Orders screen.

Improved mouse movement on most screens.

Improved drawing speed of many screens.

Original release.

Post Warp technology age — All players get all techs 250RPs and below except for fighter bays (even creative races will not receive fighter bays).

Cluster galaxy — This new map has more stars in the same area as a large galaxy. Single player only.

Improved home systems — There will now be at least one colonizable planet in your home system (plus your homeworld).

New command line switches:

Last Race button — The last race button has been removed from the multiplayer Select Race screen to prevent numerous bugs (duplicate race pictures / various crash bugs).

Modem Comm Info and TEN buttons — The modem Comm Info button has been disabled (and greyed out) in order to make room for the patch code. If you need to configure the modem settings, you can use the 1.31 version of the game to do so. The TEN button has been disabled (but not greyed out) for the same reason.

Missing VESA bug — You should no longer receive the erroneous "load VESA.COM" message when you have a proper VESA VBE enabled video card.

Display Redraw Routing bug (1) — Fixed a problem in a display redraw routing that sometimes resulted in memory outside the VESA display memory window to be overwritten. This bug could cause random crashes and lockups.

Display Redraw Routing bug (2) — Fixed another problem with a display redraw routing that sometimes resulted in memory outside of the video frame buffers to be overwritten. This could cause parts of the save game to become corrupted, random crashes, and other strange behavior.

ESC from Custom Race screen bug — Pressing ESC on the Custom Race screen could wrongly display the 'Last Race' instead of the 'Custom' button in the Select Race screen. This occured after creating a new custom race (not when chosing Last Race). Now the correct 'Custom' button will always be displayed.

Ship leader crash — The game will no longer crash when you view ship leaders and you have no ships.

Credit cheat fix — You will no longer produce Trade Goods and a buildable item on a colony in a single turn if you have no next item in your build queue. Previously the excess production was counted twice, giving the extra BCs while still storing the production. One side effect is tech breakthrough happenning before combat now.

Repeat Build bug — It is no longer possible to cancel the production of a Repeat Build item after it has been bought. Cancellation allowed money to be converted to stored production. This could be exploited to purchase expensive items by canceling multiple cheaper repeat built items over the course of several turns.

Arti planet bug — The planets artifacts research bonus will no longer vanish in LAN games when an opponent ends his turn first.

Cloned cships and opships — Colony ships and outpost ships should now always be used up when the ship lands. It should no longer be possible to build the colony and keep the ship.

Stealth Field bug — Ships equipped Stealth Field technology will no longer be visible to long range scans on the Galaxy Map.

Cloak techs bug — Ships equipped with the Cloaking Device or Phasing Cloak will no longer be visible to long range scans on the Galaxy Map.

Phasing Cloak bug — All Phasing Cloaked ships should now always revert to regular cloaking after 10 rounds during combat instead of only ships from player #0.

Tractor Beam crash — Tractor Beams should no longer crash the game when a player is moving a ship wile Tractor Beams are engaged. (This was most notable if one of the ships involved was off-screen.)

BHG with INI bug — When ship initiative is enabled, a Black Hole Generator should now destroy a ship instead of only immobilizing it.

The patch introduced changes to end of turn calculations, affecting many aspects of the game. In regard to economics it contributed to the Free Cash Bug. In regard to tech it made Tech happen before the combat.