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!
