Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares is a 4X turn-based strategy game set in space, designed by Steve Barcia and Ken Burd, and developed by Simtex, who developed its predecessor Master of Orion and Master of Magic. The PC version was published by MicroProse in 1996, and the Macintosh version a year later by MacSoft, in partnership with MicroProse. The game has retained a large fan base, and is still played online. Master of Orion II won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1996, and was well received by critics, although reviewers differed about which aspects they liked and disliked. It is used as a yardstick in reviews of more recent space-based 4X games.
Plot Long before the time in which the game is set, two extremely powerful races, the Orions and the Antarans, fought a war that devastated most of the galaxy. The victorious Orions, rather than exterminate the Antarans, imprisoned them in a pocket dimension before departing the galaxy, leaving behind a very powerful robotic warship, the Guardian, to protect their homeworld. Some time after the game starts, the Antarans, having broken out of their prison dimension, begin to send increasingly powerful fleets against the players' colonies, to destroy them along with any defending ships, before they disappear back to their mysterious realm.
Gameplay
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.



