The threat of mutually assured destruction has failed and you are ordered to fight a war that no one can win. I have played many games over the years, have bloodily butchered my way through countless hordes of enemies... but DEFCON has them all beat in cold brutality. If you "win" you can congratulate yourself on a well-executed genocide. Awesome. =)
Simtex did the impossible. They took the *entire* high fantasy genre and rolled it into one playable game. Literally good / evil magics and play styles, chaos magic that is both unreliable but nonetheless highly destructve on a global scale, possibly turning the whole world into an apocalyptic nightmare. Nature magic to heal the wounds of the earth - and the body - and strike down offenders with lightning... for looting and polluting is not the way! Breathtaking. The wizard creation tool provides near endless replay value because there is always one more combination of spell book picks and wizard traits you haven't tried yet. And races. Races that *matter*. That play differently. They have access to different buildings, different units, different tactics, different abilities. Then you have heroes to lead your armies, providing leadership or other benefits, or being spell casters themselves. And you can buy / conquer powerful magical items for their use or even cast massively powerful spells to *create* such artifacts. Again, this is heavily influenced by your wizard's magical orientation so a fire wizard won't create the red Cape of Flight. That the AI is weak should surprise noone. There is an impossible amount of options and tactics available. But what's wrong with winning a game as long as you can do so in new and interesting ways again and again...? If you can stand turn based strategy games at all, you will buy this game. You have no choice. TIP: The graphics are dated, no doubt, but can be massively improved by forcing DosBox to use a smaller area of the monitor. Provided your monitor still supports a resolution of 800x600 (or equivalent), the options fullscreen=true fullresolution=800x600 (in the DosBox *.conf file) force the game to use a smaller area in the center, reducing the pixelisation that you would normally get in true fullscreen mode. What looks so bad is not the game graphics - it's the huge pixels you get when "just" running it full screen.
It's what happens when developers not just listen. Players wanted more stuff, more features, more details... and they got what they wanted. Literally. Bad mistake. The amount of useless detail is the most prominent feature of MOO3 and it buried an amazing franchise. Why GOG keeps devalueing promo deals by adding this game is beyond me.
