The first impression of Master of Orion 3 is not good. The layout is lifeless and flat. At the time it was a huge step back in presentation for a turn based strategy game, and the years have not changed this. There are many spreadsheets of info with basic icons. Occasionally there's something more, but largely it's like something you could create with a lot of work in Excel. All of this is unfortunately because it hides the gameplay underneath...if the UI wasn't so bad it might take less time to realize how bad the gameplay is. The game is the worst of what I think of as "programmer mechanics", where the programmer of the game can see all of the action going on but the player isn't involved. Even if you understand the meaning of all the seemingly nonsense info, the game actively fights you trying to play. You could try to manage your planets, but the game doesn't agree with you and it will fix your mistakes. You could try to do combat, but the game can do it all for you as well as you can. Might as well just press the end turn button again and move forward. I've seen some bad sequels, but I don't think I've ever seen one as spectacularly deflating. I can still remember nearly two decades later the feeling I had after buying this game.
