MOO1 is a 5-star, hall of fame potential, satisfying strategy game.

It has many issues today due to aging, but let me tell you here some keyboard shortcuts that will help you tremendously on Dosbox.

CTRL+F12 - increases cycle - press this some 20 times every time you play and more every time the game seems to lag, this fixes it.
If you alt tab into something else and are stuck with a small screen when you come back, ALT+Enter solves it.

In 2024, with a library with some 30+ games, including AAA and game of the year ones, I end up reverting back to this one all the time.

This game just works, it is very straightforward, easy to master, and it is fun. I put some 100 hours on this over the last year and have to uninstall/hide it from library to push me to play something else.

It may be the first 4x game (or one of), but more importantly, it is a 4x game that respects your time. You won't spend 300 hours on a match because you need to micromanage specific build queue for your planets, and 1k other things, like modern 4x games do. Here you just manage 6 bars (production, population, defense, etc), research, shipbuilding and conquest and you can play a whole match on a small galaxy in 1hr or so. The different races can be quite different and make you want to keep playing to try different strategies with each.

If you don't like the looks of it there are mods that make it better.

Of course there are issues with it, the annoying news, the random intergalactic voting that sometimes happens two turns in a row, and there is no ability to toggle victory conditions, nor many other things that you would like, but the experience is still solid.

Just try it already if you haven't yet.