Armor-Piercing Attack: In MoO 2, some weapons can be made in armor-piercing variants (and some in shield-piercing, for that matter) so that damage that passes through armor/shields is applied to the target ship's structure/internals immediately.However, all weapons in the Master Of Orion series do have a maximum range that's not a direct function of ship's hit probability. Arbitrary Maximum Range: In MoO 2, lasers and almost all other energy weapons have range-based damage penalties due to bloom, but mass drivers, gauss guns, Disruptors, and the Stellar Converter do not.This prevents players from having a fleet entirely made up of Doom Stars. Played straight with Doom Stars in Conquer the Stars, where any player is limited to one at a time. Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Generally averted, since the game allows you to have more ships than your command points allow, although it comes at a hefty economic penalty.

All There in the Manual: While all of the game manuals contain backstory that has little to no effect on the game itself beyond establishing things like Orion (and later the Antarans), the manual for MoO 3 includes an expansive and intricate history of the galaxy, complete with a complicated system for establishing the galactic date, leading up to the events of the game.The Alliance: Confederation governments, an advanced form of the Feudal Future.Acceptable Breaks from Reality: MoO 3 demonstrated very well just why many aspects of running an empire are simplified or abstracted in 4X games, and almost as well why the rest aren't.There's some use of the third dimension in the third game, but nothing that absolutely requires it. 2-D Space: In the first two games, the galaxy maps and space combat all take place on a 2D plane.

Master of orion 2 races