Now you may or not remember dear 'ole TiG. Well he and I have been LANNING a number of strategy games recently. Here's some notes:
MOO:
Don't buy it. TiG returned his copy after less than a week. It looks great and plays well enough to start with. However the game is riddled with bugs. Visit the main MOO forums. I'm told there is a 100+ point rebuttle of bugs that make the game un-playable. Included is an item that means if you message the main race in game they won't answer you, until something like the 451st turn that is, when they reply to ALL your previous messages. And supposedly the AI will surround planets but not actually land ground troops to take the planet back!
We went back to PzGen2
Hearts Of Iron:
We like. Difficult to master the balance between economy, research and your war machine. Even when you have it sussed it can throuw the odd curve-ball. MUST have patch 1.04 to play LAN though or it will randomly crash out. Single player is otherwise fine although 1.04 adds to that too. See the HOI forums for more details I guess.
Hearts of Iron
Hope that helps! About MOO, it has HUGE potential, once the bugs are fixed. (We've also tried Haegemonia but my machine wasn't up to it so we need to go back to it at some point. Looks gorgeous)