The version from 2016 is generally not considered worth playing by people who have followed the series, unfortunately. It's not quite as bad a dud as MOO 3 was, but it's not as good as it could have been either.

I can understand people's desire for sounds, but I have to explain that the particular version we're able to play was never really meant for people to use. The project of which it is a part was a recreation of the original game from the 90s, and it included the text version as a proof of concept more or less. We're very lucky it happens to work well for us by pure coincidence. The recreation itself does have the original sounds, but it is also inaccessible because it uses SDL graphics technology, which no screen reader I'm aware of supports.

So that's why things are the way they are with this particular program.

The main issues I remember were that a lot of the core gameplay systems like travel between stars didn't feel like the previous entries in the series. From an external perspective it looked like they took the races and lore of the MOO games and put them into a generic 4X space title. I honestly never tried to play it, mostly because of the poor reception, so I'm not qualified to say whether that's true or not.

Milos,

COmbat îs an area I want to fix up, but it is kind of confusing. Basically the commands you want to use are "l," to see places on the battle grid you can move or shoot at, and the positions on the grid such as "A3," or "b5," to move your ships and shoot your weapons. the text-based combat display is probably the part of the game that's hardest to use at the moment.

Basically, you always start out on the left edge of the screen, unless you're defending a planet, in which case I think your opponent does. Your ships are divided into groups based on the type of ship, and the game prints out a grid which is something like 8x10 squares. The tricky part for us is that the grid isn't always easy to understand, and that it gets redrawn frequently. The combat code draws the grid whenever the situation changes, a missile is fired, ships move, weapons hit, etc. The grid has specific symbols for damage, for enemy missiles, and for asteroids, among other things. THere's no text indication of what happens aside from the symbols i mentioned.

I did have a work in progress which showed a bit more info, like damage numbers and the current-selected ship group in the prompt, but I don't know where that code got to and will probably just have to recreate it.

Hi,

Okay, part of the confusion I think is that "m," is a toggle, it isn't a launch missile command. If you have missiles equipped and the toggle is on, which I believe it is by default, you will launch your missiles at the square you type. Keep in mind that your ships only have a limited number of missiles per combat.

Also note that your ships can only move a certain number of squares based on their engines. In the early game it's a very small range, something like one or two in any direction. The "l," key is a "look," command, which redraws the grid with periods in the squares you can move to. I don't remember if there's a separate symbol for squares you shoot at.

I hope this clarifies a bit. The grid is basically redrawn after every turn, and if nothing happens it means you probably typed something the game didn't understand, or were trying to do something your ship couldn't do.

Milos,

Spies are a bit unusual. Basically, it takes a certain amount of time and money to put a spy network in an enemy empire. You would type something like "spy sacra 50," to spend 50% of your spy budget on putting a new spy network in. It takes a few years to put one together, and you can see the number you have and how much time it will take to add another with the "races," command.

Once you have one or more spies inside, you can tell them to sabotage. Type something like "spy sacra sabotage." This will order your spies to start sabotage missions. The chance for them to succeed is dependent on the tech level of the enemy empire, as well as counterintelligence spending on their part. You will get a prompt if they succeed inviting you to choose what to sabotage.

Finally, if you have at least  one spy network in an empire, you can use the "report," command to give you info on their tech level. This is the only way to keep abreast of what research they're doing. The report is updated as long as you have at least one spy network in an empire, no matter what it's doing.

All this is explained in some detail in the manual, which is included in the game archive, as well as the official strategy guide i've linked to earlier in this thread.