Orion globe

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In Master of Orion II, the Orion Globe is a ship configuration, generally using the doom star hull size, designed to be nearly invincible, and, in some cases, capable of destroying enormous fleets of enemy ships alone. The entire design is based on the combined effect of two ship systems:

• The time-warp facilitator: This ship system moves the equipped ship in and out of our dimension, disrupting the normal time flow for the ship and allowing it to take two battle turns for every one turn a ship without it can take.
• The phasing cloak: More powerful than the standard cloaking device, this ship system makes the equipped ship completely invisible to all detection. However, because of the enormous energies required to keep the phasing cloak in place, it has a harmful effect on the ship's crew and will automatically shut down after 10 battle turns, after which it will only have the effect of a normal cloaking device (which can be detected). The equipped ship must also come out of cloaking completely in order to attack, but if it is left for one battle turn without doing anything it will recloak.

If these two systems are used together, the ship equipped with them will be able to come out of cloaking, attack the enemy ships, and then, on its next turn (provided by the time-warp facilitator), recloak, denying the enemy ships the chance to attack it back. This means that, when used properly, it is impossible to kill before 5 standard battle turns have passed (because of the time-warp facilitator, the 10 turns required for the phasing cloak to shut down will pass in only 5 standard battle turns). This combination of only two ship systems is the basis for the Orion Globe, but to maximize its power, several more devices should be added, including:

• The hyper-x capacitors: This system stores up energy and allows it all to be transferred to the ship's beam weapons over a short period of time without overheating the other ship systems. This allows the equipped ship to fire its beam weapons twice in one turn, but it must then wait one turn without firing its beam weapons to recharge before it can fire again. Beam weapons can also be fired normally if desired. Hyper-x capacitors are the beam weapon equivalent of fast missile racks, which do the same thing for missile weapons.

This system fits in perfectly with the other two. Because the ship already spends one of the two turns it gets every round doing nothing in order to recloak, the hyper-x capacitors effectively double its damage. But that's not all. There are some other useful systems which are also standard on the Orion Globe:

• Shield-piercing autofire phasors (weapon): Shield-piercing greatly increases a ship's damage by allowing the beams to bypass enemy shields entirely, and autofire effectively triples its damage again.
• The high energy focus: This ship system improves the power and cooling efficiency of the equipped ship, increasing the damage done by all its beam weapons by 50%.
• The structural analyzer: The structural analyzer doubles all the beam weapon damage that gets through enemy shields.
• The achilles targeting unit: This advanced computer system allows all weapons used by the equipped ship to bypass enemy armor. Since the enemy's armor is typically the same as their structure, this also greatly increases the equipped ship's damage.

Together, all these systems make the Orion Globe so powerful that one of them can destroy dozens of CPU-built doom stars. A whole fleet is correspondingly even stronger, and at about 20 or 30 ships would become capable of destroying all the ships the enemy could build at all (the maximum total in a game at one time is 1023) without taking a single loss- at least in singleplayer. In multiplayer, against human opponents, the Orion Globe is quite easy to destroy. To do so, a human player should use a ship configuration known as the Orion Globe Neutralizer.

[edit] The Orion Globe Neutralizer

The Orion Globe Neutralizer also has several essential systems:

• The phasing cloak: See above.
• The warp dissipater: This ship system can negate warp fields around enemy ships. If any ship in a fleet in battle is equipped with a functioning warp dissipater, no ship on the other side can retreat from battle.
• The stellar converter (weapon): The stellar converter is the single most powerful weapon in Master of Orion II. It has no range penalty, always hits and does 400 damage to each side of the target (for 1600 damage total). Plus, it can destroy planets.

It also has one system which must not be installed, the time-warp facilitator (see above).

This configuration means that the Orion Globe that the Neutralizer is meant to destroy is not only unable to retreat from battle, but will also come out of its phasing cloak in 5 normal battle turns, while the Neutralizer will take 10. Once the Orion Globe is out of its phasing cloak, the Neutralizer can guarantee a no-range-penalty hit on the Orion Globe with its stellar converters. Provided the Neutralizer is a doom star class ship and is equipped with at least two or three stellar converters, the Orion Globe is usually doomed.

[edit] External links

If you have a question about the Orion Globe that is not answered here, see the original Orion Globe guide