Ideosyncracies

[Tifi]

When playing a a nice fun game of Moo2, do you have a particular thing you seem to always either set out to do, or do without even thinking about it?

I've noticed in many of the games I've played I've ended up going on massive capture sprees wether I intended to or not, amassing a huge hodgepodge fleet of random AI and/or player ships

I really really like the cybernetic race pick, even though its borderline suicide most of the time, and I have a great deal of like for combining it with telepathic to allow self-repairing-captured-zombie-horde-ships.

And finally, I seem to have something of an unusual preference for small ships.
My fleets are mostly frigates & destroyers, with a handful of cruisers and maybe a couple of battleships, and ONE titan OR doomstar.
Completely wasteful allocation of command points I know, but somehow it just feels 'right'.

[TheDS]

I don't give my ships fanciful names, like the default names. I name them by their type and then increment them as they advance. So far, I haven't needed a number bigger than 9.

Frex, when I build early missile boats, I call them DDG or CG (depending on if they're DD or CC size). CC-sized carriers are CVL, BB-sized are CV, and doomstar sized (which are just for fun, really) are CVX. My BB-sized battleships are simply B (which is analogous to pre-Dreadnoughts). Later, when I get Titans, I call them BB. And when I have a ship devoted to capturing other ships, I use LHD if it has practically no other capability, and LHA if it does, but there's not a firm dividing line here.

Another quirk I have is I try to get at least one of each race, and put at least one of each race on my homeworld AND Orion.

Also, I tend to name my homeworld "Home" and then name my colonies for women I admire, with Orion reserved for my favorite actress, Lacey Chabert. This is almost always the last world I'm able to name. And I almost always build the portal to Antares at Lacey, because I know she kicks evil-alien butt whenever she's in a position to do so. (The only time I don't is when I get Orion late enough in the game that I've already got a huge fleet waiting to go and it would take too long to build the dang thing.)

I used to always build 4 doomstars loaded to the gills and each designed differently, and send them to Antares, but lately my games haven't seen the Antareans building enough to need that kind of firepower, so instead I just send every ship I have (usually about 20-40 of all sizes are left) and see what I can do. If I lose, it's okay, I just build some high-tech ships, which won't have half the problems those low-tech ones had, and the remnant empires aren't strong enough to breech my defensive installations.

I never build food replicators, and destroy them as soon as I discover I've captured them. I'm going to try a game one time where I don't do that and see how it goes, now that I've seen the light about androids.

I guess those are the major ones.

[Time]

When playing a a nice fun game of Moo2, do you have a particular thing you seem to always either set out to do, or do without even thinking about it?

Expand everywhere and build up my planets as fast as I can.
RLabs, AFacts, PlanSuper, Soils, Robos are my important techs.

It's interesting to hear how others name their ships.
I don't use fanciful names either. I consider that a distraction.
I used that CVL type naming early on.
Now, I just name them based on the weapons they carry such as:
C Merc.3mvPul.2 which would indicate that this was a Cruiser carring 3 Merc mirved missiles (2 shot, because, it is after the decimal, 5 shot if before or no decimal) and 2 Pulson missiles 2 shots.
I do the same for Beams Ships too.
For Example: B Phas5.4.3 would mean 5 Heavy Phasors, 4 Regular Phasors, 3 point defense phasors.

I always convert or build my scouts upto the BattleScanner model, I mentioned somewhere. (Empty with Extd Range, Battle Scanner, Aug Eng, Stealth Field depending on whan and if all of these techs are available)

Oh, and I always name my Home World as Ahome.
This way it appears closer to the top of the list, when listing colonies in alphabetical mode.
I do try to pick names for other planets based on some reference I can easily remember, based on the main planet I intend to colonize in that system, such as Hoth if is a Tundra planet, Dune if it is a Desert planet, Bajor if it is a wormhole planet, or Titan if it has a Huge pop max. Oceania if is an Ocean world, which I usually try not to terraform, because, it just looks so cool.
I even use UR for Ultra Rich planets, or Gemma for Gem worlds. This helps for sending leaders to certain worlds that would benefit more, such as the financial leader to a gem world, or Res leader to an artifacts world (Arti in my games)
These are, of course, names for single player games. I wouldn't want my opponent to take my URArtiGemma planet before I could defend it well.