While out of town, I used some spare time to play one of the few games I have installed on my work laptop: Master of Orion 2. This is a classic game. On the surface it hasn't aged too badly. Still, the more I play the more glaring its faults become.

The research system is horribly flawed; a non-creative race absolutely must tech trade or else has no access to necessary technologies. If there end up being no races to tech trade with -- either because the rest were eliminated or their tech level can't keep up or maybe even there exists a perpetual state of war -- the non-creative race ends up with maybe half of available techs. And in this game, tech is life.

In later stages, micromanagement becomes nearly unbearable. Without the ability to record a default build queue, you end up repeating the same steps over and over and over again. The build queue's limited size also adds to the tedium.

Only five ship design slots? There's six ship hull sizes alone! I usually end up sacrificing destroyers entirely not far into the game.

And then there's the AI. Don't get me wrong, I realize how hard it is to create a good AI (one that doesn't cheat, that is). But the AI players never refit their old ships with new tech. When you have limited command points and every ship matters, this is a big deal. The big scary alien fleets turn out to have quite the glass jaw when you realize most of those battleships have Class I shields that crumple like paper in the face of your death rays and particle beams.

It's a shame that Masters of Orion III was such a dismal flop. I'd really love a modern successor to the game that was so excellent for its time. While I've heard good things about Galactic Civilizations II, it lacks the tactical portion of the genre I love so much.