It's a tough genre though, not as directly appealing as modern games. There are a few other more recent '4x games' out there, with realtime combat, more detailed star systems, 3D star maps, colony buildings, 3D spaceship editors, etc. Atari now sits on the rights (edit: Atari bankrupt, Wargaming bought MoO and released a remake). MoO was developed by SimTek and published by Microprose in 1993.

Both games have their fans, but perhaps the MoO2 fanbase is larger. I heard MoO2 had more micro management, something I'm not too keen on. However, with my redesigns I have tried to incorporate some of MoO2's designs where possible. I haven't played MoO2, but the art for the aliens seems a bit stale compared to MoO1's cartoony look. It was something which I had always wanted to see in this type of game. Soon I discovered depth of the ship design feature, and I liked how you can fit more into the ships at later tech levels because of miniaturization. It's a bit cumbersome to control, and I'm not too keen on TBS games with lots of abstractions and simplifications. When I recently decided to try out an emulator called DOSBox I also stumbled upon Master of Orion 1.