The book that coined “4X”, and the one 1oom’s README credits for “documenting the game mechanics and AI
decision making in great detail” (1oom abbreviates it OSG). Local file, gitignored (*.txt):
MasterOfOrionStrategyGuide_opt_djvu.txt — archive.org’s DjVu OCR layer, 1,172,820 B, 94,686 lines, UTF-8.
Re-fetch: https://archive.org/download/MasterOfOrionStrategyGuide/MasterOfOrionStrategyGuide_opt_djvu.txtMasterOfOrionStrategyGuide_opt.pdf, ~142 MB) is not downloaded — use it for the
tables, where OCR is weak: Appendix G alone is ~48k of the 94k lines and is mostly table noise.OCR quality: readable prose with typical noise (“Empich” for Emrich, “Gtowth”, “}” for “?”). Numbers in prose should be spot-checked against the PDF before they become a formula.
| Content | Book page | ≈ line |
|---|---|---|
| Table of contents | — | 300–700 |
| Ch.3 Seeing Stars — galaxy generation, planet prospecting, movement | 41 | 4,475 |
| Ch.4 How to Win — Galactic Council | 61 | 7,500 |
| Ch.5 Facts Bucks — income, trade, taxes, reserve | 73 | 7,500–9,400 |
| Ch.6 Planetary Development — pop/industry growth, ecology | 85 | 9,400–11,400 |
| Ch.7–8 Starship & planetary combat | 105–154 | 11,400–16,400 |
| Ch.9 Ship design | 155 | 16,400–23,700 |
| Ch.10 Technology — discovery mechanics | 207 | 23,700–25,300 |
| Ch.11 Diplomacy — relations bar, diplomacy points, AI initiatives, personalities, objectives | 223 | 25,300–29,200 |
| Ch.12 Spies | 267 | 29,200–31,300 |
| Ch.13 Races | 285 | 31,300–32,900 |
| Ch.14 Random events (“Disastrous Details”, incl. how to disable) | 301 | ~33,000 |
| Ch.15 Odds & ends — difficulty, Orion, cheat keys, 32,000-ship limit, AI summary | 311 | 33,850–35,500 |
| App. A — The Next Turn Sequence of Play (turn-processing order) | 327 | ~35,560 |
| App. B–F — engines/hull, ship size, ECM, damage vs shields | 331 | 35,700–41,700 |
| App. G — Overall weapon effectiveness (tables → use PDF) | 347 | 41,700–89,700 |
| App. I — Technology information summary | 379 | ~92,100 |
| Index | 391 | ~92,900 |