The Orion Nebula

Perhaps the orientation of a defending ship would determine probabilities. Assuming that the engine is always on the behind, a hit there would be more likely to wreck havoc. Much more likely, actually, since I suppose attackers would use all the sensors they have to target a weak point. It sound unbalancing, but I think that the only time a ship would have it's behind to the enemy is either by retreating or for hits and runs. In the case of the latter, a fast ship would be hard to hit anyways, so it would be fair.

About random autofac outputs, why not make them individuals? An automatic factory adds one point of production, that's it. Getting new technology wouldn't be as easy as buying it on every colony, but would take time to 'modernize' your economy.

How about more contrast between buying production and just producing it? The way I see it, the democratic race would 'buy' contracts and simply be a customer of its economy, while the other regimes would just order their population to do it, with the penalties of meddling in the economy. Of course, the one regime not to have these penalties would be unification, though it shouldn't have its prod bonuses.

Democracies would be very productive, but could only command a share of production proportional to taxes, while unification would harmoniously unite its agenda with that of the population.

Yea much is possilbe ... I just wanna have a balanced game ... with some lil radom techs no race would be superior in any case. In regular moo we have uni as a super goverment while the others r not so good (in most cases).

I think in 1-2 years there´s no project which could be better than moo2, so atm I like the DCb6 mod. Its still in progress, but it has much more balance than regular moo.

Upgradeding moo2 is the best solution atm ihmo, but with the source code it would be much easier.

Ship defense and offense ought to be calculated from the difference between the defending ship's last amount used of movement points and the attacker's computer quality. Probably been thought of before.

Anyways, I love Moo2 but hate to play it because of all the micromanaging. The advantage of shifting colonists around to max. growth and storing production should be taken out. We could always find new cheap ways to win anyways. And isn't that the point anyways?

This would mainly cause boring "wait contests".