After playing the Diablo 4 Season 7 PTR for a few days, I already got bored and watched the new Path of Exile 2 launch. While I am intrigued in terms of being a casual viewer, I don’t feel that game is for me. So as I loaded up Gog.com on my Mac side of things, I found that Masters of Orion 2 can also be played there. The one question I had though was: how would it translate?
Like the “PC” version from Gog.com, you use the Dosbox emulator on the Mac. Now, that can get a little confusing at first because of one issue: cheats. The native Mac version has a completely separate cheat list that you would think would be the same as the one from Gog.com (or Steam for that matter). Instead, because you’re running an emulation layer, you’re actually running the “PC” version.
So how to activate the cheats? As per the usual instructions, you use the “PC” version of the cheats except you use your “option” key. As a quick example, if you need money, you just hold down option + moola as you almost would with a PC rig. Everything else is pretty much the same. The only thing you have to be a little careful of with the Dosbox version is that the window can easily be shrunk if you accidentally hit option + return (or alt on a PC keyboard). If you’re like me and trying to spam type the money cheat, it’s easy to do this quite often and can be rather annoying.
The thing I really like about this game on the Mac more than I do on my PC is that it’s actually better to play on my laptop. I was having a lot of physical problems with the mouse setup and excessive clicking on my gaming rig/table. On my MacBook Pro, the graphics aren’t intense and the game is turn based which makes the trackpad more ideal than a mouse. It can be a little tedious at times when you’re faced with a long menu and small font to accurately be able to click on a list item at times but I still find that effort less daunting than the repetitive issues with a mouse on my gaming machine.
Also, because you don’t really require any special setup with a fancy gaming mouse or keyboard, playing on a laptop is nice. I can just sit on my couch and enjoy the game. Outside of knowing the abilities or cheats themselves, there’s no real need for a reference sheet (unless you really want to go hardcore and see the whole research tree for instance).
On this run, I did another Impossible, Pre-Warp, 8 Race, Mineral Rich, all events, Huge Galaxy run with a Custom human race. I only wanted human for the appearance but I used my typical Subterranean + Lithovore + Rich Homeworld + Telepathic and the eventual Omniscient (from iseeall) along with the negative picks (can’t remember the names but the government one and -0.5 to BC and -2 to Ground Attack). In the end, the last race around was the Alkari which was my best ally until I decided to fuck the guy over. That said, I was immensely disappointed that the Alkari did very little to expand and build. I practically had to give him tech and money for him to do anything. Of course, once he started stealing stuff that I deemed too dangerous, I figured it was time to teach these fuckers a bit of a lesson.
Anyway, it was fun but I might try another custom game tonight. I need to figure out an aggressive race that I can 1v1 at the end which grows rapidly. I find it disturbing when a race does not try to colonize all the planets in their system, ignore terraforming and/or refuses to colonize even shit planets. I figure none of them will use the planetary construction ability even if they’re given it. I don’t recall ever seeing any of the races do that in any of my play throughs.
I’m debating on my next play through whether to include the Antarans. On the latest play through, these guys didn’t appear for a while and I couldn’t tell if it was due to some setting. But now that I’ve got a rhythm going with this game and a better setup, I might just keep them around. The only thing which makes them a wildcard is that there’s always a possibility that another race may construct the portal to their world and beat me while I’m not looking. Unless that race has Doom Stars though, I doubt they’d be able to.
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