Basically... Freeorion has some competition.
Heh, not *much* in the way of competition, i'll grant you. But i've had this in the works for quite a while now (i did some initial work on it waaaaaaay back, then stopped about 3 years ago when i heard about moo3, since it seemed to promise everything i'd ever wanted) and i started working on it again about 2 months ago (actually right after after the 1.2.5 code patch, when i realised that moo3 was never going to be finished to a standard that i would find playable).
FYI : My aim is to produce something more Moo1-like in style than Moo2. Its also very much a one-man show (i'm designing this game for *me* - if you dont like what i'm doing, go design your own damn game... oh... you already are
). Graphics are currently almost nonexistant, i am concentrating on getting the core engine behaviour working first with a placeholder UI (though i have what i think is a pretty good UI design in waiting).The webby is also very basic at the moment. I will upgrade it (add forums etc) once i have something which will run on anything other than a Solaris system. I'm not intending to use any code from Freeorion (even though its open source) but there may still be situations where we can help each other out.
Have a look and see what you think.
Making your own game is so much better than a group effort, because you make the desicions and the decision making goes faster.