Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
This is probably not what you want, but "Remnants of the Precursors" is a MoO1 adaptation with a number of flavor-retaining enhancements. I think the largest galaxy I ever played for a while was something like 50,000 stars and 500 empires, but it's possible to go up to over 500,000 stars. The game interface can be made to work crudely at that scale (but it's open source and allows mods), and at some point your machine may grind to a halt between turns, once there are enough large empires. But it was a fascinating experience.
It felt like I was an orchestra conductor, shifting the pressure and direction of expansion. And it was very much in keeping with the grabby aliens theory: my empire was surrounded by an ever-expanding wave of scouts, followed by a wave of colony ships and guard fleets, and here and there actual battle fleets, all pulsing out from factory worlds on the rim of the developed core, with dozens of turns before they get close enough to the front to even be pointed at an enemy. (The deep core of my empire being too far away, and thus devoted to research and taxation.) I no longer cared about individual ships, it was more about how best to allocate the ones that had arrived at the frontline waypoints this year. When a new serious threat emerged, I had to do some long term balancing, figuring out what technologies and resource base they had, whether my fleets could defeat it in sufficient numbers or if I'd need a new design, which of my existing ship designs could afford to be scrapped, whether all my other ongoing conflicts could stand the loss of a class of ship, and so forth.
Eventually, as I expanded along the spiral arm of a galaxy and into the body and reached the dense core, I found that I was too late. Instead of being 1-2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the empires I'd been encountering, a Meklar empire had taken over the core and had expanded so much that, although I still had a slight tech lead (Psilon pride), my size graphs were indistinguishable from 0. Alas, then the game started taking too long between turns on my 10-year-old laptop. But it's been a number of years, and the game engine has improved substantially since then.
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