Master of Orion 3

I remember when this game came out. I had it pre-ordered. Ive been an avid MOO player for years. The combat system is clunky and awful. Star Control style combat with terrible audio. They completely deviated from MOO2 and tried something different. It failed miserably. When i returned it, I was one of at least 70 people who returned it the same day it arrived.

This "game"... I bought it new on release because i just loved MoO2. Such a disapointment. Better to forget this "game and play something else. It's a next turn click "game" and it runs itself. If you try to do something it just ignores you next turn and does whatever it was planning to do. Spreadsheet the "game"!!

I feel the pedantic need to point out that (contrary to one post) you can take control of your empire and disable the AI. There's a little check box to do so for each planet you control. The fact that someone was confused about this, however, illustrates MOO3's biggest problem. It's not, as one poster surmised, a matter of people calling this a "spreadsheet" because it was too hard, it's a very convoluted interface that weighs on your very soul at times. Yes, you can take complete control and not delegate planetary operations to your "viceroy", but do you really want to? It's not the worst game ever, and $10 may not be the worst price to find out if you happen to be MOO3 material. I give it an average score - this game can easily go either way.

This game is just plain terrible. It abandoned the great gameplay of Master of Orion 1 and 2 and replaced it with non nonsensical macro management system that requires almost no input from the player. As a result you don't need to participate in the game at all. You can pretty much win pressing the next button.

The game as delivered is terrible. It's very difficult to know what's going on half the time. Fortunately a community of friendly geeks didn't want to give up on it. They have produced a large library of user-generated mods which fix most of the things that suck about it and make it at least playable. Mods are available for free at http://www.moo3.at/mods/ Some are better than others, the best one I've tried so far is the Strawberry mod pack. If you've downloaded this game and have found it incomprehensible and un-playable, I highly recommend you pay them a visit before trashing it. MoO I&II are still more fun. This one's more about running the empire and less about an entertaining combat interlude. It takes a long time to play a turn once your empire gets to a certain size, and you're forced to micromanage each planet's economy because the AI makes VERY POOR decisions. It will terraform you into bankruptcy if you let it.. One other unfortunate trait of this game is that the save point is after the combat phase. If you save & quit at any other time, everything you did after the combat phase is lost.