Like others have said, great game..poor A.I that cheats.
A new player to the series will see this game as a tragic lump of rubbish, but deep inside really is a rough gem that just needed more polish, Microprose tried with Moo3 and unfortunately failed and that ended the franchise and indeed the company.
Sure the graphics are simply but what can you expect from such as old game, however the micro-management aspects are all there, which are important for strategy lovers, the only real problem with the game and already mentioned it, is the A.I because simply put, its cheats ~ and the developers have openly mentioned that it was programmed with 'advantages' over the player, unfortunately most of the time these 'so called' advantages can prove very frustrating especially on higher difficulty settings, it can prove almost impossible..heck there is a difficulty setting called 'impossible'
Its the same old formula for the A.I though like with most older strategy games, if you can't see what the A.I is doing, you can bet top dollar whatever its doing, its doing 5x faster than you, 5x more efficiently than you and building 5x faster than you...and that's at the easier difficulty settings, basically it all boils down to a bit of luck sometimes in the fact that you can get an empire together without any others noticing you and then being able to properly defend yourself without another empire taking over half the map before you can.
The only game that honestly beats MOO2, is Imperium Galactica 2 but good luck finding it these days.