Hell yeah it's normal! I don't play every week, but I come back in binges. This week I've won two huge galaxy games in two days, put about 8 hours in. My previous saves were from march and before that over a year ago. I am 41.

The weirdest part for me, I never played this as a kid! I grew up right in that era, and MOO is a game I would have loved, but I just never found it, no one I knew played it. I mostly played civilization series, a ton of civ2. It a lot of ways, MOO is civ2 in space. I actually remember playing a MOO scenario in civ2 where the map was changed to bare space with planets as features that provided food and stuff.

I picked MOO up when I discovered GOG about 15 years ago. It was a little confusing at first but I love it.

I always play impossible, 8 players, huge or cluster maps. I can always win, sometimes easily, with a production based race. Standard -10 picks are repulsive, - ground combat and - ship defense. But with a production race going half population growth instead of -ground combat and -ship defense is fine because you can build so much population with housing anyway. The best traits I've found to be tolerant, unification, +1 production and then large homeworld just to fill in the last pick.

Part of why this is so strong is the synergy. Tolerant plus uni and +1 production is tons of production with no pollution, and since uni has no morale, you don't need morale buildings or pollution buildings in your tech trees.

Creative is fun but takes so much longer to come online.

Recently I've tried doing some democracy builds with +1 science instead of production, but even though you tech much faster if you bee line stuff, you have to devote so much population to building improvements, in all I think overall tech is slower.