Nice article, though my favorite one is the one you made on MOO II. You are right. MOO II is not yet surpassed. Not even by GalCiv II in my opinion (or Sins for that matter).

My top list of games:

1. CIV IV

2. Shared second: MOO II and Total Annihilation  (ouch my age is showing here)

I found the economy in SotS to be pretty good, esepcially as it matches the game's intent, to place you in the shoes of the overlord of an entire species who has no time to deal with building factories on planets, not when there are fleets to build and rival species to subjugate.

Customization and uniqueness (particularly having differences when it comes to trade) without the need to micro-manage.

Several games have made economy management okay. I don't know that any of them have yet made it fun.

I still am waiting for an 4x game that can rival MOO2. Imo it`s economic system was even better than Civs one (at least lategame). I yesterday bought Gal Civ 2 to give a try again because I still remember not liking the system that much after I tried it a few years ago. After reading the article I maybe should have bought SotS instead (both were low prize) but than I would have missed on the diplomacy features...

IMHO the way you have to manage your planets in MOO2 is just superior to any other 4x space game I know. I really like the face that you just have to build buildings once to get bonuses as this reduces pesky micromanagement enormously (until lategame, when you started to have to update every single planet every now and then). You can have building queues for 100 and more turns and the important decicions regarding production/reseearch/food/income can be dealt with using 1 interface screen. Together with the transport system this allows for some deep strategies without even having to go into the single planet interface once.

I did like Ascendancy (tile management) for example but updating the different tiles as soon as you wanted to change a planets strategy or got a new improvement just became a chore. Civ4 does have a similar problem. Although you´re building a citys improvements only once, managing the surrounding tiles and units lategame just becomes too much micro. I loves this game but almost never finish a huge world as round just take too long at a specific point (1850 til 1900 when you are the dominating power but would need 100 years to conquer the plant; going completely war production would speed up the process but result in even more micro).

MOO2 endgame is more like starting to build ships everywhere (huge queues), setting up some automatic rally points and then just having to move huge armadas with 1 click. It basically had depth, the possibility to micromanage but without too much need of it.

Sadly MOO3 although probably having the most sophisticated economic system on paper (!) just did not do it right. They tried to implement everything and it almost sounded as a simulation instead of a strategy game. And then you could not figure why things happened because everything was calculated behind the scenes.

I still hope that some day there will be a 4x game that can rival MOO2s complexity and accessibility. But IMHO it is still the best of its genre even after 10+ years...

I completelly agree. This was one of MOO2 shortcomings in my opinion. The game was extremelly fun to play in all phases except in the eXtermination phase (late game). I remember that at some point in the game we knew that victory was certain and that it was just a question of "sweeping" the galaxy with stacks of ships. Something that also occurs in Civ4 by the way. This is one thing that in my opinion 4x games did not still got it, that is to balance phases so that all of them have something exciting to offer. For instance I see myself having more fun re-starting Civ4 games than actually have the patiente to finish them. But that is another discussion ..