I have the game, and I love it! And I never read the manual, but the game is pretty intuitive, IMO.
Just take the Psilons for the first few games, so that you can explore the whole tech tree and get familiarized with the game.
MOO2 is a
must for strategy gamers. It's customizable races gives the game a huge life span, and, more important, a huge fun!
I still play it multi-player, and several people still do! And the game was released in 1996, making it one of the oldest games played over the Internet! It's got to be an excelence game, right? I mean, there are also good games out there, but MOO2 is just MOO2!
I hope we will play some MOO2 together one day, tomdy2k!