Master of Orion 3

You know when you were little and you got a toy and it had all these gadgets and readouts that would've been really cool if they actually worked and meant something? MOO3 is the gaming equivalent of that. Consider yourself edumacated...

I loved the series, this game I had high expectation of coming years after the master of orion 2 was released. Alas this was a disappointment. In all honesty, I don't even thing it should be on good old games, it's not old enough or good enough and with the amount of frustration the intrusive AI and lack of control caused it could bearly be classed as a game.

Getting past the point that I did not enjoy the game. I tried, several times, I understood it, I had no problem with the spreadsheet like number crunching, it wasnt that complicated, just wasn't the best layed out. If all the sliders and resourcing etc was too complicated, stay away from Gal Civ2. Anyway, aside from a halfbaked attempt to be a continuance of the original (story wise). If you read all the backstory prior to launch this was WAY in the future from MOO2 and had already had a Dark Ages in Space, for lack of a better description. But aside from the fact that they are both space Strategy games and a few of the names remained, this is not MOO. MOO2: fine tune and control EVERYTHING. MOO3 tune little, control less MOO2: Build what you want, when you want (provided tech is there) MOO3: It tried to automate everythign for you, and did it in unimpressive fashion MOO2: Outfit and organize you fleet how you see fit. MOO3: NOT ANYMORE! If you want a fleet of between X-Y ships it requires, 3 pint defense, 2 carriers, 5 Dreadnaughts, 4 destroyers, 7 Token Ring ships. Basically 2/3 were there to be bullet sponges MOO2: Planet admin guys offered static buffs and debuffs, perhaps some interesting other perks. MOO3: Admins took over, and argued and generally fought against me. (perhaps more real to the politics side of it, but thats NOT what I played a game like this for). MOO2: All forms of weapons were very viable. MOO3: Build lots of missiles for combat ships. You Win, easy as that. MOO2: Everyone is on the council, period. MOO3: At least at release time, you had to chose it as a customization option, or pick one of the canned "upper" for lack of a better term races. MOO3: Graphics were a selling point. MOO2: Was good enough you didn't care what the graphics were like. Basically so many things that defined the type of game MOO1 (played a little) and MOO2 (played crap loads) the games they were was gone for MOO3. They wanted to design a new game, thats fine, have at it. But don't call it a sequal to a classic just to ride on its coat tails to game sales. It may be fine for its type of game, but I don't dig that type of game. Its like getting a Sex Pistols CD, opening it, seeing Sex Pistols on the CD itself, and putting it in and hearing Greenday. THAT'S NOT WHAT I PAYED FOR! Basically, they took advantage of a name, at the fans expense.

Like many others I cherished the series before playing MoO3. Back when MoO2 came out it was among the first to allow the player to design his faction. That sure was awesome! Without any competition there wasn't much of a quarrel about balancing that customization however. Looking back later it was a milestone, very innovative, immense fun and all, but... woefully unbalanced. After a while nobody would fail to notice the overpowered perks to pick, so the "custom" factions turned out rather similar more often than not. What the fans wanted to be was MoO2 with an upgrade. Perhaps better balancing, perhaps some interesting new perks and technology, but definitely the same game at heart. MoO3 was not that. Thus it was not too well received, many of MoO's fans blaming it for all the change it brought. What seemingly went unrecognized was the fact that it was MoO's very own "tradition" that repelled them: To be innovative! Perhaps a more polished version of MoO2 would have been wiser. Even so the way MoO3's developpers went about it earned my deepest respect. What has been a plague not only for MoO, but for the whole genre of turn based stratetgy was endless turns once your empire got big. Every little planet needed to be managed in rather repetitive fashion and instead of an emperor we became more of a multi-mayor, stuck in the routines of dozens of outposts to individually oversee. At that point MoO3 introduced features to customize automatic, empire-wide routines and policies. Ingenious! Later on we saw a similar development in other games. Yet again MoO was on top of the genre, thinking further than others dared to. There's very little I'd respect more than actual innovation, so you'll excuse me if I hate a little on my fellow MoO fanboys, never giving MoO3 a chance. MoO3 also balanced the custom races by allowing you to customize existing races to an extend instead of building one from scratch. You could build pretty much anything - only that you'd need to think about the "template" you used for your customization, your starting race to customize that is. The best production will always be the Meklar's. A custom version of a different race may outproduce non-custom Meklar of course, but custom Meklar would be better still. Then again they'd only thrive on the smallest planets and couldn't compete for biggest planets with gas-giant dwelling races - no customizing that. Also they were pretty unpopular with the other races. It was A LOT better than MoO2 in terms of customizing your faction. With all that said I have to admit that not all of their innovations bore fruit. Parts of their custom planet-automization simply weren't effective. At the end of the day that promising idea could well be used, but it wouldn't be as effective as controlling every planet yourself still. Nonetheless it did at least allow to manage vast empires a lot quicker at an efficiency loss, if so desired. The empire wide policies still shone bright and the "faulty" parts are entirely optional. Unfortunately it didn't get the support it should have, given the poor feedback. Thus you'd do yourself a favor checking out a mod or two. Among others there's a mod to teach the AI (and your own auto build option) to design obviously better ships, since the AI overlooked a few things. Get your own UGC patch and enjoy the best MoO there was!

I honestly cant say that i enjoyed any aspect of this game, and unfortunately, yes that also means the ship combat. How on earth do you take out one of the best aspects of the MoO series?! I was not born around the time Master of Orion 1 came out, and i was really young when number 2 came out. When my uncle introduced me to the Master of Orion series, i was hooked. I had never played a series of strategy game that kept me coming back for more, whether i won or loss. I was so interested, that I decided to see what other games my uncle had. As i was digging through his collection, i came pass the god forsaken Master of Orion 3. I was so Naive at the time that i wanted to try it out. My uncle had to have warned me at least 9 times that it was not even worth installing. I read the manual with all the races, and the graphics, i just thought that it couldn't be all bad. I have lost count of how many times i have installed and uninstalled this game, believing that perhaps i just missed something, or maybe I'll get better, but to no avail. This game is just pure bad. It was like the developers got our love with Master of Orion 1. They made Master of Orion 2, and we thought it was a gift from god. Then they played a cruel joke by giving us a game that they created while they were drunk and on drugs on a Monday. This game is really not worth it