Well, I was there. I followed all the process since the beginning, since Alan Emrich, the original designer, made his first post about what MoO3 was going to be. The excitement was real. Then, the cuts began. A planned feature was cut, then another, then another, then another... And then, the game was pushed back a full year. Emrich was also cut, and the art director (I still remember the name: some Rantz Hoseley, famous for his "anti-cheese campaign", who later created one of the most cheesy races in gaming history) was put in charge of design. An art director with an ego the size of the Fujiyama (the Human race portrait, in fact, is his own). Someone who didn't know sheet about game design, and whose ego didn't allow a single drop of criticism. Still, hoping for post-release support and expansions, I made the mistake and bought it. The result was a buggy mess which basically played itself (legend has it that 1.0 could be won just and exclusively by pressing the "Turn" button). This game did not just killed a saga, it killed a whole genre. Until GalCiv came to resurrect it, the 4X genre was dead after MoO3. Many years later, I heard about all the "community patches" and had to give it another try. Bugs may be squashed, but the game remained the same. There's still very little to do save some devplanning which you cannot really tell what it affects. If you move it to the macro direction, as they claimed, you have to ensure that macro is playable and fun to play, not just a plain "Autocolonize On/Off" feature or some obscure and limited devplans. You still don't have the feeling of... simply doing something of significance. Many years later, many patches later, was still boring. And in a time when there's a Distant Worlds, a Stellaris and, most of all, the gem that is Endless Space 2, there's not point in wasting your time and money searching for a game where it isn't one.
