Master of Orion 3

I liked it. I've played it quite a lot in the past. I am one of the few here, but I liked how you can do things with different zones in each planet, I liked the ship design, and the star lanes. And the music! I also enjoyed MOO2 very much.

Oh man .. I preordered this game in the days. Everything anounced sounded so promising. And then this game came out. It was totaly bugridden. You could call yourself lucky, playing more then half an hour without crash. Ok, classical bananaware, was my idea. Let it rest for half a year, so they figured out those anoying bugs and braindead AI. Next try half a year later, the game didn't crashed every half an hour or so. But the govenours, those assistants who should be helping you govern your race, were still a bunch of drunken, braindead monkeys. There are fan mods around which fixed this problem to some extend. How far I can't tell you. There were other games around like galactic civilisations, which needed my attention more. ;-) Try it out: If you does not like it first, try the fan mods. I'am told they make it a good game.

This game fails at being a 4X game. A lot of things are automated because there is just to much to do, it would take ages to micro manage. Now the automation wouldn't be a problem, if it wasn't done so badly. In MOO2 you could simply see what your planets were capable of and easily build fleets. In MOO3 everything is obfuscated. It's hard to figure out what is going wrong. The AI will constantly build useless ships. You finally did manage to get some decent ships? Okay now make a fleet, but be sure it fits the constraints of what is allowed in a certain fleet. You got a fleet? nice, now watch as your 18 ships are suddenly ambushed by 72 ships, each with enough fire power to take on a 100 of your ships. That was just the easy setting. To sum it all up. Boring mechanics, Too much clicking through all the menus, Difficulty all over the place, AI not helpful at all, Graphics are worse than MOO2. Avoid this game like the plague.

It's 2018 and I just played several games of MOO1 and MOO2, which I enjoyed very much. I also gave MOO3 a try again, mainly because I had forgotten why I despised the game when it came out. Now I do remember. Some did point out that it is quite decent once you install several community mods. But, the version you get for your money isn't. So I can't give it a better rating than 1.

Word to all the other reviews so far. Moo 1 & 2 are in my top five greatest games. Moo3 was just plan poop. What a let down, all the bad memories are flooding back! Make it stop!