MOO AGA53
Silicoids, Impossible, Medium, 5 Opponents
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This is the writeup for a Master of Orion game that I played at the tail end of 2026. We had earlier conducted the highly successful Season Nine of Civ4 AI Survivor that resulted in Ramesses being crowned the eventual champion. My habit has been to play a Single Player Civ4 game with the winner on Immortal difficulty, however unlike the prior seasons I kept running into problems when attempting this challenge as Ramesses. First I tried to execute the AI gameplay as Ramesses, attempting to found an early religion and use it to make friends and reap shrine income, only to find that this really didn't work for a human player on high difficulty. After failing that plan several times, I tried to play a more normal game with Ramesses... that resulted in Suryavarman running over my empire in the medieval period with a huge stack of units. Then I attempted a wacky variant called The Madness of King Ramesses where I randomly rolled all of my tech choices and city build choices. It was a fun and highly amusing game but that effort also ended in failure, out-teched by the Monarch AI civs and unable to break through the defenses of neighboring leader Bismarck.
This was a lot of failures in a row, a rare stretch where I tried a whole bunch of different ideas with none of them working out. My response was to try something entirely different: going back to Master of Orion with a completely unrestricted game, no variant at all, simply trying to win the darn thing. To stack the odds further in my favor, I would be playing as the mighty Psilons who I've always considered to be the strongest race in the game. The Psilons have three research-related abilities: first, they receive 50% more research points (RP) for all tech spending throughout the entire game. Second, they are also rated "Good" in all six research fields which discounts the base cost of each tech by 20%. Taken together, the Psilons essentially pay half price for every tech in the game: Improved Eco Restoration's 1000 BC cost for other races would effectively cost them 533 RP to research. Their third racial benefit is that all techs have 75% odds to appear as research options in their tech tree, in contrast to the 50% odds for techs to appear by all other races. Thus the Psilons not only research faster than everyone else, they also have fewer holes in their tech trees to work around, letting them pick the most efficient routes moving forward.
Furthermore, the Psilons have no racial enemies when it comes to diplomacy: they are "Neutral" with everyone except the Darloks who dislike everyone. This stands in contrast to the game's other powerhouse race, the Klackons, who have diplomatic penalties with four different races (Alkari, Mrrshans, Sakkra, and Silicoids plus the universally hated Darloks). While the Klackons get out to a faster start than the Psilons, they usually waste most of that advantage by getting into early conflicts that the brains can skate past. This absolutely does matter in a Single Player game and it's the main reason why I rate the Psilons as the better choice of the pair. I hadn't played a completely unrestricted Psilons game for 13 years and, well, you're about to see why. For the naming convention, I used an Austin Powers reference about "Finding Our Mojo", which was a very dated reference by 2026 - but Master of Orion was even older than that so I didn't feel too bad. Time to get started:
We named the homeworld "Thebes" as a reference to all of those failed Ramesses games and the Psilon leader for this game was amusingly "TheRammer". This starting planet was located in the south-central portion of the galaxy with a large gulf of empty space to the north. That portion of the map proved to be even more empty when my scouts discovered that the blue star to the north held no planet at all, leaving a gap of something like 8 parsecs up there before reaching any other stars and limiting early expansion solely to the east and west. The eastern blue star held a Minimal 50 world which I was content to grab and that was it without researching increased range tech. When the scout reports started arriving, they reported a dismally hostile local neighborhood: six of the eight planets were flashing red on the habitability scale! There were only two Desert planets that could potentially be colonized, and there were enough AI scouts buzzing around the planet to the northeast that I knew there was virtually no chance to colonize them.
But wait, things were even worse than they might have seemed at first glance. Those two Desert planets were both *SIX* parsecs away, out of reach from both of the tier 1 Propulsion techs. Ugh! I was likely to secure the Tundra and Dead planets to the east, but both of them were small with base sizes around 20-30 and I had no other prospects for expansion without having Range 6 or Controlled Toxic techs. This was an absolutely brutal start and most races probably would have lost the game right here.
The saving grace was that I was the Psilons in this game, those beautiful overpowered brainiacs. I've talked before about how the Meklars can be very strong on a small number of planets, using their extra factories to build their way out of a jam. The Psilons are even better at doing the same thing, researching their way out of trouble much faster than anyone else could achieve. I maxed out the homeworld on 100 pop / 200 factories and then started doing some serious researching, opening only the Planetology and Propulsion trees to focus my research. Planetology happily delivered both Terraforming +10 and Improved Eco Restoration, as I grabbed both and then had to take Controlled Tundra at the next rung since there was no Controlled Dead. For Propulsion, I researched the cheap Range 4 tech and then skipped forward to Range 6 which was thankfully present at the next tier. This game would likely have been over immediately without that tech being present, fortunately the Psilons have those boosted odds for each tech to appear. Being "Good" in Propulsion knocked the cost of Range 6 down to 2600 RP and Thebes was producing about 300 RP per turn once it was maxed out. Surprisingly, it wasn't that expensive to go for this tech early on - this would have been absolutely brutal for the Klackons with their "Poor" rating in engine tech.
Range 6 tech arrived somewhere around 2345 on the calendar and it remained eerily quiet on the diplomatic front. I still wasn't in contact with anyone else and my scout blockades continued to hold. There had been no GNN messages about anyone colonizing six planets which I could only interpret to mean that this was an unusually hostile galaxy in terms of its planets; thankfully the Silicoids were absent from this map. It appeared that there was no one in the southwest corner of the map, which was great news! However, that was offset by finding even more hostile planets down there, two Barrens and a Toxic and a Radiated world. Sheesh! Believe it or not, 10 of the first 13 planets that I scouted after the initial pair were Hostile. Here's what the map looked like as I started grabbing the few planets that I had the tech to colonize:
What I couldn't have given to be playing as the rocks in this galaxy, heh. The good news was that Controlled Tundra finished researching at about the same time as Range 6 which was enough to start securing some of these worlds. I left the Desert planet in the northeast alone, knowing that I would never be able to control it with multiple AI homeworlds so close by, and indeed that spot would be heavily fought over in the following decades. Instead I reached out to colonize the Tundra planet in the southeast along with the Desert planet six parsecs away to the northwest, with the latter crucial spot opening up more opportunities for expansion to the north and west. There were also multiple Barren planets nearby, not particularly high quality planets with low base sizes around 20 to 30, but it was still better to grab them. Better me than one of the AIs and all that. I didn't have a single planet above base size 50 in this vicinity so terraforming would have to do some real work here. At least there were multiple Rich planets in the area if I could research enough tech to colonize them.
I had met two races thus far, the Darloks and the Meklars. The shapeshifters effectively blocked any further expansion to the east while the Meklars were running some One Planet Empire action to the north. I was worried that they might come my way, however they fortunately lacked the hostile techs needed to push south. I also knew that the Alkari homeworld was located at the circled white star to the north, though they also seemed to be struggling at researching Planetology tech as there were some Tundra and Dead planets in their neighborhood which they weren't colonizing. Overall this was good news: none of the AI civs seemed to be running away with the game, or even doing particularly well. When GNN announced that someone had reached six planets, it was my Psilons who were the first to land the milestone achievement. Then a random GNN comparison of empire production contained two critical bits of information: I was second in Production (!) this early on Impossible difficulty, wow. And the Humans were ranked EVEN LOWER than the Meklars, who I knew had only a single planet to their name. Holy cow, what was going on in this galaxy?! 
When I did make formal contact with the Alkari, it turned out that they still only controlled four planets despite starting right in the heart of the galaxy. I had left a Tundra planet in a nebula alone, knowing that I could never defend it, but when the birds kept ignoring the spot, I grabbed it as well and was left unchallenged by the AI. I secured two more planets along the extreme left edge of the map, one of them a Minimal 70 planet that was actually not Hostile, and then I had the good news to see the Meklars expanding out to a few more planets to the north. Yes, that was good news: it was much better for the borgs to have a handful of planets where they could shuffle ships around than have just their homeworld where they would be almost forced to attack me. I signed everyone up to trade agreements and relations built over time to the point where I could sign some Non Aggression Pacts as well. The only race that refused to trade with me was the Darloks, so therefore I tossed Improve Eco Restoration to the Alkari to start a spectator war between the birds and the shapeshifters. I've written a bunch of times about how the AI shouldn't agree to those sort of deals and it was a dastardly move to be sure, however this was a totally unrestricted game and I was keeping all of the dirty tricks available for this one. The fighting between the Alkari and the Darloks clearly slowed them both down and allowed me to keep building up in undisturbed fashion.
In terms of research, I opted to continue skipping more terraforming tech in favor of pushing for Controlled Toxic. That was a very expensive tech at this stage of the game and it really hurt to remain stuck on Terraforming +10 while having so many small worlds. Nevertheless, this map was absolutely packed with Dead and Toxic worlds so I had to make the effort to chase towards that goal before the AI races. I was able to get most of the techs that I wanted in each field, such as Scatter Pack V missiles in case anyone tried to attack, but even the Psilons still had to contend with some holes in their tech tree. The two big missing techs were Improved Robotics III which kept the economy in low gear along with passing up more terraforming techs, and then there was no Planetary Shield V to keep my worlds vulnerable. I built a single missile base over most planets and then relied on diplomacy to keep me safe; the lack of terraforming tech may have actually been a blessing here as it kept my population from swelling to the point where it tanked my relations with the other races.
Things remained quiet as I largely just built factories and moved population around for a while. I had been able to research Warp 3 technology at the third tier of Propulsion which was a huge help in shuttling population transports around at warp 2 instead of warp 1 speed. There were lots of Hostile planets joining the Psilon empire and those things take forever to get started unless the player can seed them with some initial population. I also had the dumb luck to land the Mining event which struck the homeworld of Thebes and turned it into a Rich planet, followed by getting the Merchant event for a donation of 1000 BC into the planetary reserve. It's so rare to get an actual good event that I really did feel as though I was starting to find my mojo.
When Controlled Toxic tech finished, I started grabbing all of the Dead, Inferno, and Toxic locations that the AI empires continued to lack the tech to colonize. I picked up the Dead and Toxic planets to lock down the eastern border with the Darloks, with the Toxic planet over there actually having a base size of 80 which is exceedingly rare for a Hostile world. To the west, I added a Rich Inferno planet, a Rich Toxic planet, and an Ultra Rich Toxic planet. All of them were flooded with population and quickly knocked out all of their factories, only being held back by having small sizes for the moment. There was a green star along the western edge of the map that had a juicy Ocean 70 planet which I now finally had the range to reach; the Meklars got there first with an armed colony ship, only to be packing a pair of 2-shot missiles which both missed, followed by the colony ship retreating - ha! I secured that spot as well and then began sending even more colony ships towards a trio of Dead planets in Alkari space. Once again, I could never defend those spots but it was worth the effort to try and planet my flag there.
The result was a staggeringly successfuly landgrab:
My Psilons had control of *SEVENTEEN* planets at the time of this screenshot! And the process wasn't even over yet, as I had several more colony ships en route and Controlled Radiated research under way to unlock further worlds at the highest tier of hostility. My AI rivals seemed to have been completely stymied by all of the hostile planets on this map, with the Alkari and Darloks tying for the lead at five planets each. The Meklars had a mere four planets and the Humans still just had their homeworld; I would later discover that the two unexplored stars to their east were both Radiated. The Klackons would later turn out to be stuck on three or four planets as well, leaving this galaxy utterly helpless to stop the impending supremacy of the Psilons. Diplomatically the situation looked like this, everyone aside from the party-pooper Darloks at Relaxed or better and Non Aggression Pacts going up with most of the races. I had been able to vote for the Alkari in the first Council election (which happened very late, a bit after 2400 on the calendar) and I already had a veto block with 10 out of 26 votes. The GNN robot was warning that my Psilons controlled 18 systems and "If their expansion is not contained they will soon control the galaxy."
It was about this point that I realized: *I* was the Runaway Psilons! And it felt pretty darn good. 
If there was one fly in the ointment, it took place at a pair of Dead worlds in the far north. I had colonized these spots since they had been left uncontested, then sent population transports on long movement orders from the homeworld to help them get started on development. However, the Alkari eventually did research Controlled Toxic tech and made a play for these locations themselves. They destroyed one colony and refounded it for themselves, then invaded and captured the other one. Unfortunately this now meant that my population transports were considered to be invasions, something that I very much did not intend. I wish that Master of Orion would let the player cancel the transports in these cases since I was quite content to let the birds have these spots. The good news was that the Alkari managed to defend the planets against my "attacks", something that I wanted as outright capturing these places would surely result in a war. Relations plunged with the Alkari all the way down to the bottom of the diplomatic meter, though they oddly did not declare war. We were actually still trading at the modest 100 BC amount which may have helped out; I never saw a serious attack from the birds during this period. I also stirred up more trouble by getting the Meklars to declare war on the Alkari, with the cyborgs not even asking for anything in exchange. This bought me more time to keep developing my planets in peace and pushing further down the tech tree.
I was working the diplomatic phone lines to see if I could get anything useful in tech trades, an effort which eventually bore fruit. I had either missed out on or skipped any of the Improved Industrial techs after the initial II9; when Improved Industrial 6 was missing from me tech tree, I made a real effort and managed to get Improved Industrial 7 from the Meklars. This was immediately useful as I was able to trade for Improved Robotics III with the hopelessly backwards Humans and then stacked up an additional 50% more factories on every planet. I was trying to get some more terraforming tech from someone, only to find that everyone was missing these techs from their respective trees! The cyborgs had Terraforming +30 and they weren't trading it, everyone else had zilch. Sooner or later I would simply reach something extravagent in my own Planetology tree, though for the moment I was stuck on +10 while still powering forward. There was no Atmospheric Terraforming in the Psilon tech tree, a real blow given all these Hostile worlds, which I hoped to get from another race if they could turn it up. I did finish researching Controlled Radiated though, which no one else possessed, and that led to a further four planets getting colonized:
Two Radiated planets were located in the backlines in the southwest, two more were east of Darlok space on the edge of the map, then there was another Toxic planet in the extreme north that everyone else seemed to ignore. This brought the Psilons up to a grand total of 23 planets and I actually received the "Leaders are already preparing to merge with the mighty empire" GNN message that indicates one empire controls half the map. What made this all the more shocking was the fact that I had never fought anyone thus far, nothing except that unintentional invasion in Alkari space and unarmed scouts running into one another. For that matter, I hadn't even built a ship with WEAPONS on it yet! 
How could I possibly colonize this much of the galaxy in completely unopposed fashion?! It was a bizarre game to be sure, with everything possible breaking in my favor after that initial galactic map had looked so rough.
I did finally break my pacifist streak by putting Scatter Pack V missiles on a Medium hull and using it to chase off an Alkari colony ship in the far east. For the most part though, I was stalling: waiting until I could reach Planetary Shield X at the next tier of Force Field tech and then unlock some further terraforming to grow my planets larger. Improved Robotics IV was present in the Computers tree and powered up my planets with more factories once it arrived, plus I had Zortrium Armor and some ECM tech for missile base defense along with the Improved Scanner to spot any AI attacks incoming. Those attacks still failed to appear though and, well, time is very much on the side of the Psilons so I felt little need to take action. There was a very real chance that I could simply outtech and outgrow the rest of the field without ever taking an aggressive action from start to finish.
Fortunately Planetary Shield X was present at the next tier of Force Field technology and I began pushing there with a major research emphasis, roughly 40% of total RP allocation on the spending sliders. This tech would triple my planetary shielding from 5 points to 15 points and largely make my planets invulnerable to AI aggression. The Alkaris had Omega-V bombs discovered which was a big reason why I was treating them so carefully, however the rest of the field didn't have anything particularly scary yet; several of them were using Graviton Beams (1-15 damage, halved against planetary shields) which would be irrelevant as soon as that shielding tech was deployed. My biggest problem was another swing and a miss in the Planetology tech tree: Soil Enrichment and Advanced Soil Enrichment were both missing! I had therefore missed both Soil Enrichment techs along with Atmospheric Terraforming, something that should be virtually impossible for the Psilons and their 75% odds for each tech to appear. I kept checking the whole game to see if another AI race would discover these techs, but nope, no one ever came up with any of them. These huge holes in my tech tree kept my economy in lower gear than it should have possessed, though at least I was able to trade Cloning to the Meklars in exchange for +30 Terraforming to help plug part of the gap.
My pacifist nature kept relations afloat with the other AI empires in the galaxy for a long time, though eventually the diplomatic picture inevitably deteriorated. My Psilons had so much more population than everyone else that relations slowly continued to drain away. This is one of the best mechanics in the MOO gameplay, not least because huge AI empires also develop the same diplomatic penalties, and it's one thing that creates real danger even for runaway powerhouses. Eventually those Non Aggression Pacts started to be canceled and relations deteriorated down to Neutral, then below that. I was racing towards the planetary shielding tech as quickly as possible but the first attacks started arriving before it could be deployed. The Darloks came poking around some of the newest Radiated colonies along the eastern side of the map and I chased them off with the combination of a few missile bases and some Large gunships sporting Mass Drivers. They also tried attacking some of my developed core worlds which went even worse for them; the Darloks had poor shielding and I'd had time to build a lot of Scatter Pack V missile bases. Then the Klackons came calling with their whole fleet:
Dead Certain was the one planet that I'd been able to hold in the middle of Alkari territory; Home Run and Long Con further to the north were the two spots that the birds had earlier taken away from me. This world had done nothing but build factories and missile bases for the whole game thus far and this exact situation showed why I had focused so heavily on defenses. The AI empires were obssessed with attacking this spot and Dead Certain served as a perfect aggression magnet to let other planets deeper in my core remain nice and safe. Anyway, roughly 40 Large ships were a sizable attack force and I was particularly worried because the Klackons had Class IV Deflector Shield tech which would greatly reduce the damage from my Scatter Pack V missiles (blocking 4 out of 6 damage per shot). Not to worry though: I was able to trade Cloning to the Alkari for Stinger missiles and their 15 damage per shot negated that whole issue. The bugs were also hideously backwards on technology thanks to be stuck on three planets for the whole game, and those Large ships turned out to have nothing but Heavy Ion Cannons and Scatter Pack V missiles. I beat back this attack at the loss of about a dozen bases (they had an awful lot of those missiles) while wiping out the whole Klackon fleet; the Planetary X shields would be researched and constructed before any further enemy incursions arrived.
And that was basically it as far as any AI threats were concerned. I faced attacks from every AI race except the One Planet Empire Humans at various points in time, none of them having any success whatsoever at breaking through my prepared defenses. The Meklars had been a great ally the whole game, only for me to draw the Assassination event against them which forced them into a war as well, not that they managed to accomplish anything beyond blowing up a lot of their own ships. I was able to tech Scatter Pack VII missiles and then Hercular missiles after that which absolutely shredded anything that my enemies could field. They were all struggling badly on tech due to a lack of planets and so many hostile worlds; I was starting to get way out in front of everyone else despite having conducted no invasions or tech thefts. It was purely Psilon research dominance, backed by an absurdly successful colonization phase.
I could have attacked any of the AI empires along my borders and started running over their worlds with ease had I wanted to do so. The Alkari and Darloks both lacked any planetary shield techs while I had discovered Omega-V bombs a bit earlier, plus I had no fewer than *SIX* Rich planets and an Ultra Rich planet within my territory. Constructing an unbeatable fleet and then running over their worlds would have been child's play. Instead, I pushed forward with a purely peaceful gameplan, trying to see if I could win a Council victory without ever taking an aggressive action towards any of the other races. I was forced to research the useless Doom Virus after missing both Terraforming +50 and Advanced Soil Enrichment (seriously what was going on with the Planetology tech tree in this game?!) and then made a big step forward with Terraforming +60 at the next tier. Once that was researched and all of my planets terraformed with 30 additional population, I pushed onwards to Terraforming +80 for another 20 pop everywhere. With every planet spending their income on research, my RP/turn rate first hit 10,000 and then 15,000 and eventually soared above 20,000 each turn. I could have won the 2475 Council vote with 23/33 votes (17 votes of my own and 6 from other allies) but pushed on to see if I could vote myself the winner in 2500. I managed to discover Terraforming +80 and do all of the terraforming before the next vote, with Terraforming +100 in the percentages and almost ready to go as well. The bar graphs looked like this:
It can be hard to read them when someone is this far ahead; I didn't know if I had quite enough population but I figured it would be close. Obviously my Psilons were extremely far ahead in every category, with Technology and Total Power showing staggering leads for a purely peaceful game. It's virtually impossible to get this far ahead in Master of Orion without invading the AI empires and stealing some of their techs for your own use; what a crazy game. The Alkari were the only AI race that managed to field something like a competent empire, everyone else was stunted for the entire competition. Anyway, I knew that I would be up against the birds in the vote and tossed something to the Meklars for a peace treaty just in case I needed their support in the election. This proved to be a good move as it saved me the tedium of playing another 25 turns:
I had 29/48 votes for a total of 60% of galactic population: close but not enough to get over the top without additional support. Taking back the two planets that the Alkari had conquered earlier in the game would have been enough for a solo victory, by taking away two votes from them and adding them to my side, but of course that would have meant invalidating my pacifist variant. The real issue was missing out on the Atmospheric Terraforming and Soil Enrichment techs, any combination of those techs would have been enough to win the Council vote all alone. The combination of Atmospheric + Advanced Soil Enrichment would have easily been worth another 10 votes on this hostile map if not more. Anyway, I could have played on further and likely voted myself the winner by capturing Orion and reaching Complete Terraforming (+120 pop on each planet) but there really was no point. The Livestream had been running for three hours already and my Psilons had nothing further to prove: they were unquestionably the rightful heirs of Orion.
Overall then, it was a highly unusual and memorable game. The starting position had looked so terrible at the outset only for everything to flip around in the opposite direction when it turned out that the AI races were all stumbling even worse than I was with the heavily hostile planet distribution. There were a bunch of comments from the Livestream audience about how this game would have played totally differently if the Silicoids had been present and that was absolutely the case. The rocks would have loved it here and undoubtedly would have been the runaway AI empire had they been around. As for the game that actually took place, I can't recall claiming fully half of the map uncontested very often on Impossible difficulty, and never before with the mighty Psilons. They are hands-down the best race in the game if they get left alone to deploy their teching abilities and this game was certainly the proof of that.
Thanks for reading along - I definitely feel as though we found our mojo in this one!
