Before going off on the finer details of races, ship building, and other more micro-management oriented duties, you should look at a few of the basics that will help you immediately in making things easier. There are plenty of variables to adjust the game's difficulty.

Setting Yourself Up for Success

When setting up the game, don't be afraid to change it to make things a little easier on you, especially if you're still getting your feet wet. Sure, it might be nice to brag to all your fellow gaming geeks that you play MOO2 on Impossible, but it's not much of an accomplishment if the number of successful turns you play is less than your shoe size. Easy is only slightly tougher than Tutorial, but they're both a great place to master some of the fundamentals.

Bigger really is better, especially when it comes to the size of your galaxy. Smaller galaxies breed fierce competition as each race is vying for the limited resources available, whereas in a Huge galaxy you might never encounter another race.

Obviously the more players you get involved in the galaxy, the less opportunities there are for expansion. If you set the number of other races down to about three you may play for several hundred turns before you come across anybody, giving you ample time to research technologies and get some productive colonies going.

Though starting out with advanced technology sounds like an easy way to save you some time, you've got to realize that every other race you're playing against is going to start at the same level. Before you know it, everyone and his genetic offshoot is paying you an unfriendly visit. It's best to start out at Pre-Warp level and begin researching Faster Than Light travel right away. The computer opponents won't devote their energies here, so you'll be able to get a jump on them in your galactic expansion.

And unless you're some kind of masochist or are playing with a Lucky race, you'll probably want to start out with Random Events and Antarans Attack turned off. You'll save yourself an unbelievable number of headaches from such party-poopers as monsters, pirates, and hyperspace fluxes.

The First Hundred Turns

There are a lot of do's and don'ts in a game like this, and you should keep them all in mind as you begin your quest into this wacky world of attrition.

Growth

There's a fine line between growing too fast and going too slow. If you begin setting up colony after colony without having enough freighters and food supply to keep up with demand, you're just asking for trouble. You need to make sure that the colonies you have are doing well before you burden yourself with more. On the other hand, you don't want to under-do it either. If you keep all your resources, people, and fleets in one system, a well-executed attack from another race can essentially blow you into extinction.

Ships

Just as you wouldn't want to send a Colony ship to a completely unexplored area of the universe, you wouldn't want to send two Colony ships to the same system. Unless you're an Omniscient race who knows that there is gold in them thar hills, be sure to thoroughly explore an area before plopping any colonists there, and sending two ships is just overkill.

Don't be afraid to design your own ships - nobody knows your needs better than you do. Design them for maximum efficiency in their class. Also keep in mind that early on, you have about as much chance against the Antarans as the Jets against the Cowboys, so you might as well do like Monty Python and "run away, run away" at the first sign of Antaran trouble. No sense in losing your entire fleet.

Design ships for maximum efficiency in their class

More Flies with Sugar...

The name of the game is conquest, but that doesn't mean you have to pick a fight with every Tom, Dick, and Alkari who comes knocking on your little corner of the universe. As in real life, you should try to win each race's confidence, exploit them, and only then should you pulverize them into subjugation.