dirt-bag’s keys to happiness and success in online moo2 for newbies
,1.
game speed: keeping pace with the rest of the players is essential for everyone to have an enjoyable moo. If in a 4 player game 3 players are waiting 3 minutes every turn they will soon lose interest and be very unlikely to invite the slow player to play again. Certainly there is occasion to have a long turn from time to time but some players seem to feel redesigning all the ships is in order every round despite having no intention of building or refitting that turn. In the top left corner of the galaxy screen is an indicator designating which players have completed their turns. Each player is represented by a dot the colour of their flag, if they are flashing it means everyone is waiting for you to finish your turn. We all went through the learning curve when we arrived online, and you too will be crushed like a bug the first few times, it is not a reflection of your intellect just your experience level. So please do try to be crushed in a timely fashion while starting out.
How to play faster
-use the colonies button (bottom left of galaxy screen) to manage all the planets as opposed to clicking on the stars and planets individually to see what they are up to, this will take some getting used to but really speeds things up.
-experiment while offline, the ai don’t care how long your turns take but now you are up against living, breathing, sentient (with some exceptions) opponents who don’t possess the unlimited patience of your CPU.
-design ships only when they are being built or during turns when an the opponents seem occupied, designing ships before the tech you want on them has be researched is a waste of everyone’s time.
2.
make saves: make a save every 10 turns or so then after the game is over, load the game in hotseat and see what the other players were up to and check out ship designs. Some of it will make no sense, which leads us to…3
ask questions: we are all know-it-all’s (legends in our own minds) and more than happy to let you in on some of our knowledge. We have seasoned players fluent in a variety of languages who would be happy to have more competitive players around.