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Too Big a Departure From MOO-II

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 110 / 117
Date: April 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I'm a big fan of turn-based resource-management strategy games. I've loved the MOO (Masters of Orion) series up until MOO-III. My biggest complaint about MOO-III is the lack of control I have over the planets in my Empire and the forces I control (or really don't). This is primarily the result of a bad interface. However, the interface is so bad that I returned the game, because it was no fun to watch what horrible things the computer AI (Artificial Intelligence) would do for me since the interface prohibited me from controlling my own units.

In a nutshell, MOO-III is the successor to a popular series of turn-based resource-management strategy games. What made the MOO series more attractive than many of its' competitors was an easy-to-use interface, charming graphics (art), and a good storyline. For instance, in MOO-II, whenever galactic events occurred, a robotic news anchor would read the report (often with a little bit of humor) while background news music (the sounds of teleprompters) played. I loved it and it greatly added to the charm and feel of the game. Star ships were highly customizable and researching new technologies to get the latest gadgets was a lot of fun.

MOO-III lacks those fun news reports. Starship design is a droll affair conducted on a menu system that Apple Computers must have long ago rejected. Choices are limited and the auto-build function tends to do most of the work. Researching new technologies is now a bore since I don't do much more than allot money to each area of technology being researched and wait for the results. In addition, social unrest factors in my empire constantly delay new projects since the "people" are against orbital mines or some such. I tried out many different empires before realizing that this problem was game endemic rather than empire endemic.

The Galactic Council is one of the few game details that are improved from previous MOO games. There is a voting process similar to MOO-II and, of course, the powers-that-be (the New Orions) in this game have something like 1,134 votes to your 2 as a new player. Trying to get a diplomatic measure through the new council is near impossible as well (even after some 200 turns into the game). It seems as if only the New Orions can propose really cool new measures such as Galactic Space Port Tariffs. Unfortunately, the other empires tend all do have a chip on their shoulders (or alien parts I guess) so all that really happens is you get constantly condemned at the Galactic Council. It's sort of like a replay of the USA trying to get anything done at the UN. Never the less, this was one of the few aspects I liked on MOO-III.

The story line and game fluff are also outstanding. I enjoyed reading them very much. If only the game play was as well done as the story background.

Documentation was very weak. There is no graph that shows the strength and weaknesses of various government types. There is also no documentation for the various planetary specials (want to know what "ancient battle damage" means?) in the manual (By the way, "ancient battle damage" means that a planet is easier to terraform). Much of the games' necessary information is in an attached document that must be printed out using some 60+ pages of printer paper and ink. The Prima clue guide is a bygone necessity to even try to understand what's going on in the game and the Prima MOO-III clue guide didn't help much either.

What turned me off most to MOO-III is a poor game interface. The designers must have realized that they put an awful lot of detail in the game (can allot zones of development on a planet's surface) so rather than make it easy to control these aspects of the game they designed AIs to do it for you. You don't even get a choice of whether to turn these AIs off (as most people did in earlier titles in the MOO series). You can guide them slightly buy choosing policies that will direct the AIs, but they seem to do whatever they want to anyhow. I couldn't figure out how the AIs made the choices they did and neither could any of my friends. If I could understand how the AIs made decisions for my galactic empire then the game might have been playable. As it currently stands, in MOO-III, the player is more like a galactic CEO than a galactic leader. I make decisions, but I have no idea what's going to happen with them. Space combat is much the same with ships being very difficult to control and doing stupid things when under control (such as ships with long range weapons closing to short range).

I can't recommend MOO-III. Its' poor game interface and unwieldy AI makes the game more of a core to play than a pleasure. It's simply not too much fun. MOO-III minimizes its' fun parts with a poor interface. I only give it two stars for its' awesome story line (too bad I didn't get to see much of the story line since the game play was so bad!).

I recommend Space Empires IV Gold by Malfador Machinations instead of MOO-III.

Review by: Maximillian Ben Hanan

Ultimately disappointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 26 / 30
Date: November 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you are like me (interested in the next MoO title, skeptical that people who hated this game are either stupid or too impatient), you'll likely buy it anyway. When you do, you should know the following:

1) The manual is useless. Worse than useless, it's often wrong. The only way to learn how to play the game is to hit the discussion forums at the quicksilver website and read the newbie questions. It will take a couple of days.

2) The game as published is buggy and almost crippled in some aspects. There are two patches available from MacSoft... download and install them immediately.

3) It's a terribly slow game. I don't mean, slow like RTS games are "slow" because there's a long startup period. I mean, slow like by the time you get well into a game, the turn processing takes >5 minutes in a large galaxy, and it starts to get boring to play it.

4) There's an open-source version of this game being developed, called Free Orion. Check it out; offer your help if you can; these people have the right idea.

I wish there were a "perfect" or "definitive" game of galactic conquest out there that was optimized for the modern OS's, but there's not. This one isn't even close.

What a Letdown

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 33 / 42
Date: June 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Nothing like MOO2. This game is clunky, takes forever, and is, to be blunt, terribly boring. There are some good ideas, but they got too complicated with everything, and it's not fun to play. The only way I'd recommend trying this game is if you can get it extremely cheap (try eBay). My guess? You'll play it once or twice, and give up. UGH.

Very pretty, but wholy unfair game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: August 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Being a MOO fan, I was stoked when Moo2 came out. I bought it, played it, and fell in love with it.

Then Moo 3 comes out. "AWSOME! I'M THERE!" was my thinking. Ohh would I ever be disappointed! The micromanagment that I so enjoyed from Moo2 is gone. The AI builds EVERYTHING now, and it's such a klunky interface (albeit a very pretty one) that it litterally took me TWO DAYS to figure out how to design and build custom ships.

Now add in that the stupid AI always builds things that are not going to help you advance. The game MIGHT have been playable if there was a way to disable the AI. But you cann't. You can override it, but that's it.

Now take into account the fact that the game makers decided to remove what was one of my favorite items, the combats between vast numbers of ships. Which would not have been so bad if they had done it to ALL. But the people who now inhabit the planet Orion (namely the "new orions") can have hundreds of tiny tiny ships (about the size of a single person fighter craft) in combat, while you are limited to 60 ships of any size, and you will soon find it virtually impossible to reach orion!

Then consider how long it now takes to build ships of any decent size. In moo2 it might very well take as many turns to build a powerfull ship on a poor planet. But it would only take like 10 turns on a ultra rich planet with all the upgrades (core waste dump, deep core mines, automated factories, etc...)

And it's hard to get the most out of your planets because now you need to control the type of industrial buildings that get built on the planet, and each planet has multiple regions of various types. Ok, that would work if sufficent information was given about the various types of regions. Sure a fertile area is best for an agricultural building, but what about "hard scrabble"? Only about one in three or four types are intuitive.

Now add in the horrible system with which your relations with other races are managed, and the fact that each parent race has 3-4 "child" races, which means that you could potentiall have multiple "Klackon" or multiple "Psilon" type races in the game.

And finally add a users manual that really doesn't help much. Don't get me wrong. I love a manual with a story. I absolutely ADORE the Homeworld 1 manual beause of the story of the people from Karak. But the manual for Homeworld is only 1/2 story and 1/2 manual. The MOO3 manual is about 90% story. Which again would not be TOO bad if it was Story up front and manual in back or the other way around. But it's not. Moo3's manual is Story + little but of manual + story + little bit of manual, etc... so if you are not absolutely ENTHRALED by the story (which I was not), you wind up not being able to read the manual!

Over all, I have to say that QuickSilver really did a HUGE Dis-service to the game's name sake. My honest recomendation to ANYONE who wants to look into getting this game: SAVE YOUR MONEY! This Game MIGHT be worth GIVING AWAY, but I would not pay $5.00US for it.

Went back to playing MOOII

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 15
Date: April 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I reviewed this game when it first came out (I was even one of the fools to pre-order the stupid thing), but I wanted to give an update. I recently downloaded DOSbox and started playing MOOII again, and WOW! I forgot how fun this game was. I can still remember playing the first one on my Tandy back in 1994 and both those games just make me cry when I think about MOOIII and what it could have been. Don't waste your money, and do download DOSbox and start playing MOOII again.

I'm still waiting for this to be fun.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 18 / 23
Date: June 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off, when I heard MOO3 was coming out, I was excited. More excited because the rumor was that if MOO3 was successful a Master of Magic 2 might be developed.

I read all the horrible reviews that everyone wrote, and thought to myself, "Hey, I loved MOO, MOO2, MOM, Civ2" and just about every other turn based strategy game out there. I'll have to like this. I figured all the negative reviews were just by people who get frustrated by complexity.

The game is complex. VERY complex. I consider myself a pretty intelligent guy. I'm college educated. I've been playing strategy games for a long time. I have no clue the the [F-Bomb] is going with the economics and research aspects of the game. I'm sure a lot of time and effort went into developing this side of the game, but personally, I find US Income Taxes much easier to understand than this.

I've put in about 6 hours of game playing and I'm pretty much giving up. I kept thinking that I'm missing something and the game will get fun after just 10 or 20 more turns. The game just isn't fun. I don't mind playing for an hour to get into the game to get the challenge going (Getting setup in CIV and developing Cities takes time for the later battle). But the game is just missing the fun aspect.

...e

And the most depressing part, I sincerely hope they do make a MOM2...just don't let Quicksilver Developers touch it.

So disappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: July 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was really looking forward to this when it came out - I'm still a huge fan of MoO2. The third MoO game, however, was a huge letdown. In trying to save the player from having to micromanage, the developers created a horrible AI that never doew what you want. Very frustrating, not worth buying or playing.

Good, but should have been great

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 16
Date: November 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you have the time to put into learning it, it's not bad. Overall, I like it, but as a follow-up to MOO2, it disappoints. On the plus side, I've played it on everything from an 8500/250 (pre-G3 chip) to a dual 1.42ghz G4, and the turns process well on all of them, even the 8500/250. This is better than MOO2 Mac, which didn't start processing at reasonable speeds until the G3's came out. Sadly, the graphics in the game are on the low end of the spectrum, even for when development started. The aliens are drawn well, but the diplomacy screens disappoint. Ships are just colored arrows on the screen until you get into close, and even then they are low quality (by modern standards) images. MOO2 combat graphics are better.

I was disappointed by the Orion Senate screen. I was excited by the prospect of proposing laws and resolutions, but the implementation left me cold. You are allowed to propose laws and resolutions, but only within a very limited selection. And most of those don't interest me at all.

When you first start this game, if you haven't read anything at all, you will be quickly lost. If you've read the manual, you'll be better off, but you'll soon realize just how many necessary things are left out - but do read the manual for the storyline, it's the best part. The best way to learn gameplay and strategy is to go to the web and find the newbie forums. After reading through them, play awhile, then go back to the advanced forums to learn the tricks you haven't figured out on your own.

I haven't tried multi-player yet, so I can't say anything about that. I hope that it will be better than the single player game.

MOO3 is good enough that I continue to play, but not so good that it will replace MOO2 in my list of favorite games.

click...click...click...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 16
Date: April 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

MOO-III is the latest (and with any justice in the universe, the last) of a space-based series of resource-management strategy games. I was a big fan of the last version, which was a marvel of slick, intuitive controls, engrossing combat/empire management, and cheesy (but fun!) graphics.

Sadly, I returned my copy of MOO-III one week after I bought it. It's the first game I ever played that felt more like *work*. It's slow, boring, and comes with a poorly written manual. It's also the best example of why you never let engineering geeks run amok designing any interface without some play-tester feedback.

It feels like it takes seven clicks to do *anything*. (I suspect that had this title's programmers designed a car's stereo system, you'd have to twist a dial three times, honk the horn, and stick your head out the window in order to turn the damn thing on.)

A couple small kudos are in order: the graphics are a vast improvement, the aliens truly look *alien*, and the Galactic Council is awesome.

However, these are all ephemera; the talent to create an even moderately enjoyable and entertaining game was sadly lacking in this design team. What a sad waste of programming ability.

Excellent game despite many flaws

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: November 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Master of Orion 3 is a huge 4X space empires game which despite numerous flaws and a harsh learning curve is an excellent game. Read on if you want to learn more about it.

After playing my first 100 turns of Master of Orion 3, I disliked it. After 200 turns, I was ready to toss it in the trash. After 300 turns, I started to understand and enjoy it. After 400 turns, I was hooked.

The game suffers from a poor interface, which makes for a steep learning curve. A few of the most useful screens are hidden behind other less useful screens (Fleets overview is hidden behind ship design, for example). In the space combat scheduler, you can't see details of your fleets, so you somehow have to remember in which of the 20 battles scheduled for this turn you have troops for planetary assaults. There is no way to see which of your planets have deployed ground troops other than to examine them all one by one. There is no way to see what is queued up for construction in the second and third priority boxes on your planets other than to examine them all one by one. Alien empires threaten you on the diplomacy screen, but you have no idea what the action was for which they are threatening you. There are many other examples where this game would have profited greatly from better interface design.

The game has a very non-intuitive game system, which makes the learning curve even steeper. When your planets build starships, they go into your Reserves after which they can be deployed instantly in any star system where you have built a Mobilization Center, even if that star system is on the other side of the galaxy. After a transport fleet drops its ground troops, it automatically disbands. There is no way to transfer ships between fleets or to transfer mobilized ground troops from a planet to a transport fleet. When fleets or armies are disbanded, they go back into your reserves after a delay of about 5-10 turns, during which time they are unavailable. Oddly enough, all of this works fairly well from a playability standpoint once you get used to it. The need to wait for disbanded troop transport ships to reappear in your reserves in particular has a limiting effect on any empire's ability to swiftly overwhelm another.

This is not a game for anyone who *must* be able to micro-manage planetary development and ship/army production. It's simply impractical once you have more than a handful of planets. Once you have hundreds of planets, you will be grateful to allow the AI to handle everything, while occasionally tweaking ship production. The AI generally does a fine job with planetary development, which is necessary since there are hundreds of items which can be built. It's somewhat brain-dead when it comes to ship production, however: the AI will happily build nothing but point-defense or troop transport ships and utterly neglect your attack ship capability if you allow it. So you have to learn how to manipulate the AI into building what you need through the control of your active ship designs, while you occasionally re-work the construction queues on a few of your most productive or strategic planets to build some ships that the AI hasn't gotten around to queueing up yet. When you have hundreds of planets you will be grateful to have the AI running your production despite often struggling to keep it on the right track.

Despite the criticisms, I love the game. If you play in a large galaxy, the scope is huge, you can end up controlling hundreds of planets and ships, and a single game can last practically forever if you set the victory conditions to sole survivor. There are two other victory conditions you can set which can make for a short or medium length game: become president of the Orion Senate or gain control of all 5 of the "Antaran X" technologies. Despite many flaws, the diplomacy with the computer controlled empires is better than most games that I have played. In addition to the many agreements which can be made bilaterally between empires, some or all empires will belong to the Orion Senate which can pass laws affecting all its members such as bans on the use of certain types of weapons, trade embargos against specific empires, declaration of galactic holidays, declarations of war, and inviting or expelling members. Initially a computer controlled empire called the New Orions has the presidency and enough votes to have complete control of the Orion Senate, but as the other member empires prosper they can eventually gain enough votes to take control away from the New Orions and even expel them from the senate. And none of my criticisms about the AI apply to how well it does for the computer empires, all of whom are worthy adversaries.

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