Master of Orion 3

I know there's a big hate against this game. It's glitchy, You need to apply patches after you buy this game to make it less crash prone. But, after a couple of tryouts and restarts, I found myself playing until dawn. The best thing about this game is, you can automate most of the micromanagement. You can "program" how you planets are going to evolve and how you expand. You can really set your vision, and manage your empire like a supreme ruler, instead of the janitor who has to fix every light bulb by himself. Diplomacy can be really fun. Every race has a specific way to communicate with, and you can steer your diplomacy based on the characters of the races you're dealing with. So give this game a chance. Read the guides on www.moo3.at to get to know the game,

MoO1 was superb and addictive. MoO2 was a gold-standard game... the kind of game so rivetingly awesome it changed lives, started religions, and spawned a legion of imitators. Here's the MoO3 playing experience: Imagine someone telling you that your cherished pet was just run over and killed, now here, sit and micro-manage this spreadsheet for a few hours. I have never lived in anticipation of a game like I did this one. I spend over a year of my life reading every dev blog, e-stalking dudes whose names rhymed with "Antz" to try and glean any piece of information possible... man oh man, I wanted this game. That just made the soul-crushingly awful experience all the much worse. This game was not even close to finished when it was released. Half the dev team quit/was fired halfway through and their work wasn't completed. Two guys had to patch together a finished product and get it out the door. It's a buggy, boring, impenetrable "game" with no strategy. Your choices make no impact. Equip your ships with missles, auto-combat, and never lose again. Expand without trying. Win without caring. There are worse games out there, but none with a higher suck/expectations ratio in the history of gaming. Avoid this like the plague.

Lets get one thing straight right away: I can absolutely understand the grief that Moo1/2 fans have with this game. It´s not a worthy sequel of the previous 2 games. Does it make this game a bad game? Hell no! I really like this game, as I´m not a fan of MoO 1/2. You are looking for funny conquest space game, where you quickly build an empire and wage epic battles in space? Go on and leave, this probably isnt your choice... You are looking for a more "simulation" type of game? Maybe you are right here. Lets have a look on the gameplay. Turnbased, Yup! There are multiple layers of building your empire, and they can consume a decent amount of time. You should consider around 40hours+ for one game easily. First of all you build your colony ships and colonize the universe. Therefor you select a solar system, then select a planet, then select the construction queue. Reminds you of Endless Space? Yes its similar here. In the same production queue you can build major buildings on the planet, like shipyards, stock exchanges etc. But to make a planet produce something you have to go even deeper. Into the area layer of the planet, here you can assign areas to production types like minerals, industry, farming etc. You only got to assign them once BUT with 250 stars on a map each having 4 planets.... You also control research by two things. First you assign some sliders to research percentage, then trough your planets. More planets focused on research = faster research. Beside that research is quite passive as they progress in "tiers". When a tier is done you might get some new parts, buildings, shiptypes and so on. But not every tier grants something at all. Ship design: you design ships with a classic mass/part system. A corvette can have a certain amount of weight added to it and every part has some weight. The variety is huge as most parts even have upgrades. Combat is poor... you "command" fleets RTS style... move them from A to B thats it... Missiles appear to be OP

Only giving it 3 stars instead of two because of the races and only giving it two instead of one because at least it's not Master of Orion (aka MoO4 the newest one, which somehow manages to be even worse than this). In all honesty it's about a 2.5/5 game. A lot of people would argue with that but I found these some of the best done races in any 4x game ever and I'd literally have to wait until the Endless Space games to ever find it again. And no, having space furries is not "just what you do" in 4x games, we only tolerated it in MoO2 because we literally had to because back in my day we literally just had MoO2 to play. The races of MoO2 was hands down the worst thing about that game that unfortunately got cargo culted by clueless halfwits in nearly every other space 4x which was the one horrible thing about it. The original races sucked except for Silicons, Darloks, Trilarians, it really was just ants in space, robots in space, cats in space, bears in space, it was completely godawful in Master of Orion and Master of Orion 2. Here the races are actually quite imaginative and very well designed with the inexplicable exception of making Trilarians worse (they got turned to fish in space when it was the one actual alien race in MoO2 like just WHY), including gas giant races for once, and at least making the insectoid races somewhat palatable as alien seeming. I actually had a lot of fun with it. That being stated I really wasted my life playing this game as much as I did. Micromanagement is broken and made 1000x worse than MoO2, no custom ship design, ship combat is broken, you're forced to sit 10 min a battle, space combat is just terrible in certain circumstances.

do not use 1 and 2 as your decision on purchasing 3. This was the first time I almost cried over a video game. I would move right to Galactic civilizations after playing MOO1&2