MOO3 Patcher, i notice there are some good mods out for moo3 and there is a porg moo3patcher - can someone tell me at all how i use the patcher?

Download it via this link, place into your MoO3 folder and run. The main window describes every mini-patch it contains, you just click PATCH or UNPATCH buttons.

http://www.lcs-hamburg.de/Bhruic/bhruic.dyndns.org/patcher/index.php.htm

Or even better, you could read this thread:

https://www.gog.com/forum/master_of_orion_series/tutorial_master_of_orion_3_tropical_mod_patched_confirmed_windows_7_x64

Exactly. One thing to note: BEFORE copying Strawberry content into GOG MoM3 folder, you should save GOG MoO3.exe file somewhere, preventing it from overwriting with Strawberry MoO3.exe. If you don't do it, game will give you "Insert MoO3 disk" error.
So, if you want to play patched GOG MoO3 version, you should patch GOG MoO3.exe, and not Strawberry's. After copying Strawberry into GOG folder, just replace Stawberry EXE with GOG EXE and patch it manually, with Bhruic's patcher and Gerra patches.

okay thanks - i was following what you said, until the last part - replace with the gog.exe again - got it, but then patch it manually with Bhruics patcher and Gerra patches - okay, what are these, where are they and what am i patching manually and how ?

If you have downloaded Strawberry mod pack, inside you should have folders with names like MoO3Patcher, Gerraspatches or something like that (don't remember correctly now, sorry, and now I'm on my work, and has no access to my home PC, where MoO3 patches are stored). Just find EXE files inside these folders and run them (Gerra's patches require you specify the location of your MoO3 EXE, while Bhruic's finds it automatically IIRC). They patch GOG EXE file. Gerra's patches are not presented in Bhruic's, so they are good addition too. Bhruic's patcher describes every fix it does in its GUI window, so you can decide what fixes you need and apply as many as you like. Gerra's patches all are separate ones, each one of them says what it does when you run them (and IIRC they automatically make a reserve copy of MoO3 EXE each time, just to prevent errors).
And Bhruic's patcher in some fixes uses MoO3.dll file (it's included inside the Bhruic Patcher folder), you'll have to APPLY it to have those specific fixes, there's a button in Bhruic GUI to apply this DLL, so it's easy to do.

okay now i understand
thankyou