Orion Globe

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Orion Globe FAQ version 1.0
Written by Andy Poon 
From: Saxman
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 05:23:37 -0700

Intro

This is a faq written because I posted a message in the MOO2 newsgroups saying that I know a configuration for ships that virtually makes them invincible. After what I did I received criticisions that say that I’m a fraud. So, I’m writing this faq to prove that I’m not a fraud, and that I actually have something to offer. 

What I’m about to show you is a ship that is virtually indestructable; the most advanced and powerful ship possible during the late stages of a game.

People might recognize parts of this ship, because the ideas can come to anyone, but not a lot of people have puzzled all the ideas together yet, so I’m going to attempt it right now.

Orion Globe

I called this ship I had the Orion Globe because in Master of Orion II, Orion is the symbol of power. What this ship can do in terms of destructive force well deserves its name. The record so far is 36 Doom Stars and 64 Titans destroyed, single-handedly. Since the maximum ships that can go into one single battle is 100, this record is hard to be borken. How did I managed to invoke the enemy to send me that many ships you ask? Well, first I gave the seat of the galactic council away, then I used a program I downloaded called Corion2, and gave the enemy 5 million credits, which they used to buy all the ships they could, and an all out attack was launched against me. The rest you can figure out on your own.

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Table of contents

  1. Rough description
  2. Special systems
    1. Misc
    2. movement systems
    3. defensive systems
    4. offensive systems
  3. Weapon configurations
    1. phasors
    2. disruptors
  4. Result

Rough Description

This ship can reach its maximum potential most easily with the ‚Creative‘ Special race ability, because being creative will get you the Megafluxers and the Hign Energy Focus, when not being creative will leave you with only the High Energy focus, and will also get you Microlite Construction when you might want something else instead, and….. you get the picture.

It also helps quite a lot if you have the ‚Warlord‘ ability that turns the ship into an Ultra-elite.

This ship has little defensive special systems, so there’s no displacement devices or Reinforced Hull or Heavy Armor, and I don’t have any shields or the Damper Field. 80% of what this ship contains are modifications to the weapons system, but the beam defense is very high, and point defense weapons can be equiped easily without taking up much space at all.

Below is a list of equipmenst that I have on borad the Orion Globe.


Special Systems

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Misc

Battle Pods

There’s nothing special about this, just that it gives you more room to work with. (Essential)

Time warp facilitators

Combined with other systems, this is one of the most essential equipments. It enables a ship to take two consecutive turns after the enemies have finished theirs. (Essential)

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Movement Systems

Inertial Nullifier

 – When you’re only one ship, the limited weapons range requires you to travel near the other ships, and start shooting at close range. If you go up or down on the screen, you’ll still need to turn around, and head back the other direction. If you lost movement points while turning, it’ll lose you some time before you can reach the enemies again, so this is a good equipment to have.

   – Not only that, after you destroy the ships infront of you, and try to turn around and get the ships behind you, they will fire at you because their weapons are still at full. At this time, the nullifier will evade their shots, and you’ll suffer much less damage because most of the shots will miss you. (optional)

Subspace teleporter

 This teleporter moves you closer, so that most of your weapons can be used. Believe me, with the amount of weapons this ship equips, some times, you’ll still have a lot of weapon shots left because you don’t have enough movement points to get you close enough. (optional)

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Defensive Systems

Damper field

This cuts your damage by 4/3 if you do get shot while turning around. Very useful in some cases, because the enemy WILL launch plasma webs, which always hits, and you’ll suffer quite a bit if you get cought uncloaked and without the Damper field. (optional)

Phasing cloak

Combined with the time warp facilitators, it allows the ship 10 cloaked turns to not be attacked at all. If you can’t be attacked, you can’t be destroyed. It’s so simple yet effective. (essential)

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Offensive Systems

Achilles targeting system

If you look at the descriptions for this system, you’ll know that the system allows you to completely ignores armors, and go for the hull. What does this do? obviously cuts down the weapon use to half the neccessary amount! Not only that, at times, it hits the systems of the enemy ship, causing warp core breaches that damage other enemy ships, and when this happens, your weapon use is even less. (essential)

High energy focus

This increases the damage each of your weapons can do by 50%, and decrease the weapon usage to destroy a ship. I think it’s worth (essential)

Hyper-X capacitors

If you want double the weapon amounts, you gotta have this. Combined with the time-warp facilitators and the phasing cloak, this thing will pump out twice your equipped weapons every time you decloak. Because the combination of the Time-warper and the Phase cloak requires you to not fire for one round to recloak again, it is the perfect time to recharge the hyper-x capacitor. What a combination, eh? 🙂 (essential)

Structural Analyzer

It Doubles the damage of each weapon that penetrates the shield, it is just like another Hyper-X, except it works in different ways. You’ve gotta have this to do more damage. You say that it’ll only work after the shield is down? I’ll tell you later how to get around that, if you don’t know already.


Weapon Configurations

The Stellar converter is, of course, the most powerful weapon to use against anything; ships, space stations, planets. But the problem with using it against ships is that it is too powerful, like killing a fly with a smart missile. Another flaw is the space that it takes up. Although you can still get it miniturized to 200 space per, it is still too much for one weapon, although they ARE cool to have on board.

People also think that maulers are the best weapons because it always hits. I can give you many reasons right now why NOT to use it.

  1. Double range dissipation
  2. No Autofire, point defense, and other mod’s.
  3. takes up still too much space for a weapon that can’t use autofire.

There’s so much that this weapon can’t do that others can, and the 100% hit is not exactly necessary, as long as you have near 99% hit.

As far as I can see, the two best weapons to use are phasors and disruptors. Surprised? Yes! Phasors and Disruptors are the best weapons by far!! 

But, there are two configurations for the phasors that are needed for maximum efficiency:

1. Shield piercing

     This IGNORES the shields completely!

At this point I’d like to make a concept clear. A ship has 4 levels of defense: Shield, Armor, Structure, and System. But when the structure is destroyed, then the ship is destroyed. So all we want to target isthe just the structure! 

 Lvl1: Shield Eliminated by shield piercing ability
 Lvl2:   Armor Eliminated by Achilles system
 Lvl3: Structure Nothing left to protect it

 Understand now? Shield piercing allows your weapons to completely bypass the shield, unless they got hard shield, then there’s nothing we can do about it. Combined with the Achilles system, all that’s left of the enemy that’s worth a darn is the structure.

So the lesson for today is that with the modifications that you’ve see so far, all you are shooting at, is the structure!!

2. Auto fire

 This enable you to shoot the single weapon three times! tripling the damage each weapon can do! how loud do I need to make myself heard!!?? If you’re worried about accuracy, I’ll tell you later how to max the accuracy.

Let’s see now: 

Normal weapon: x1
Achilles system: x2
High energy focus: x1.5
Structural analyzer: x2
Autofire: x3
Hyper-X Capacitors: x2
  x36

The systems here enhance one single weapon by 3600%, meaning that with 1 of the modified weapons, you can do the damage that’s needed by 36 of the non-modified weapons! Don’t tell me You’re not impressed. 

When the ship you’ve just made becomes a veteran, each of the modified phasors will do 180 damage to the enemy ship structure. That’s a lot for a phasor considering the max damage the descriptions gave was only 20 points. Wait ‚til it becomes an ultra-elite, then they’ll REALLY hurt.

* Disruptors

This gun certainly is more powerful than the phasors, but it also takes up more space, and unlike the phasor, cannot have the shield piercing ability. But if you’re going to fighting on a planet in a nebula, it is definitely the optimal weapon to have. 

* Particle beams 

Obviously, the particle beam has more force than the phasors, and itself is always shield piercing. If only there’s a method to miniturize the particle beams, then this would be the better weapon.

You can try and fit as many weapons as you can onto this ship after you equip the necessary special systems. I can tell you right now, you can have more than 198 AF, SP phasors on one Doom Star and still have room left for a few PD Phasors. It’s also a good idea to have 49 HM, AF, SP, phasors, because if you have 198 regular phasors, you’re definitely not going to be able to use them all because all other ships will be out of range of your weapons, so just put some heavy mounted phasors on for a farther reach.


Loknar

There’s one thing I’d like to add here now. I mentioned before that people might be concerned with the side-effects of Auto-fire, because it _does_ decrease the accuracy rate, and so people want to put the Rangemaster on, or have the Continuous modification to the weapons to compensate.

Loknar is one of the reasons why I called the Orion Globe the Orion Globe. With Loknar on your ship, his extraordinary abilities enhance every feature of the ship, including his super Weaponry ability virtually eliminates missed shots. I’ve always had loknar on Orion Globe, but if you have a haro that also has a high Weaponry skill, that hero can be used as well.

* If you’re worried about the accuracy of the heavy mounted weapons when you fire a long range shot, don’t worry, the accuracy is just as good if you have loknar on board.


Result 

The result is a ship that is so deadly, one of its kind can take on the entire universe. Here is a rough description of what it contains:

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(**) phasors hm,sp,af No shields
(**) phasors sp,af Moleculartronic Computer
(**) phasors sp,af Xentronium Armor
(**) phasors pd,af

** – as many as you want

—–

  • Achilles Targeting Unit
  • Battle pod
  • High Enegy Focus
  • Hyper-X Capacitor
  • Inertial Nullifier or Subspace teleporter or Damper field
  • Phasing Cloak
  • Structural Analyzer
  • Time Warp Facilitator

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Against a Doom Star with Energy absorber (taking away 1/4 of the damage) and Adamantium armor, 5 phasors will do more than 800 damage. If the enemy has good systems, sometimes it may take up to 11 phasors. Against a titan with similar equipment, 3~4 phasors will do, and sometimes even cause warp-core breaches, but that won’t help too much, because the warp-core breaches damage the shield and the armor, which we’re not gonna touch anyways.

The time warp facilitator (version 1.31) works like this:

In each round,

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You start enemy start
Turn 1: you Turn 1: enemy
Turn 2: enemy Turn 2: you
Turn 3: you Turn 3: you
—-
go back to turn 1 go back to turn 1

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After both sides have taken a turn, the final turn (3rd turn) goes to the ships that have a time warp facilitator on. Know your turns so that you can shut off all your un-used weapons and allow the ship to recloak.

If you do it right, you can sustain up to 10 rounds not being discovered, 10 turns to do whatever you want, unless the enemy runs before you finish mowing them down, but through my experiences, I doubt that they’ll run before you finish mowing them down. Besides, you’ll only have like 20~30 ships to worry about if they launch an attack anyways. There’s PLEANTY of firepower for that.

Well, here it is. Use the ship wisely. If you’re not careful, and it’s exposed to the enemy range, they CAN shoot you down. But otherwise, this ship cannot be beaten.

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Like any FAQ, many thanks to Microprose for making such wonderful game.

There, I said it.

If there’s any questions, or anything that I might have left out, please feel free to e-mail me at the address on the top of this FAQ.

I don’t need any money from any of you (like I can get any), but a little thank you note in my e-mailbox would be much appreciated