To call MOO3 a "game" or to say that you "played" it, wouldn't be accurate at all. I love MOO2 and I still play it. I micromanage all of my planets every turn, and I love managing every aspect of my empire. I got REALLY excited when MOO3 came out. When it was installed, and I saw how complicated it was, I got EVEN MORE excited! But then I started interfacing with it (I refuse to say "play" about this product). I thought, "wow, this is really complicated, when I figure it out, it's going to be awesome." Many, many hours later, my main thought was, "When do I get to make decisions?" There is nothing to do in this "game" except click "end turn." There are no decisions for the "player" to make. The AI makes all decisions, and any guidance you try to give it is ignored. I tried to have a noticeable impact upon what the product was doing for many days, with no perceptible effect. A year or two later, I decided that maybe I hadn't given it a fair chance and I reinstalled it, because I REALLY wanted to like it. I spent many more hours trying to have fun, to no avail. The third try, some years later, was no better. Look at the screenshots. That's what the game looks like. Three-quarters of the main screen is a list of all of the different spreadsheets and menus of spreadsheets that you can open. Once you open one of those, it's usually another list of spreadsheets. This honestly intrigued me, at first, because there are sliders and check boxes and pull-down menus all over all of the spreadsheets. Objective testing, however, proved that any boxes I unchecked or sliders I moved, either a) had no noticeable effect, or b) were immediately changed back to their previous states as soon as I wasn't looking. I've put 30-50 hours into this game, over the years, trying to like it. I came to the conclusion that I was not receiving any fulfillment from the product, because there was no way for me to influence what was happening. When I'm building an empire, I want to control it as a totalitarian dictator. If you're looking for something for your computer to be doing when you're not around, and you don't want to help crunch numbers for SETI, this is as good of a choice as any. This product, with the removal of all UI, would make an interesting screensaver. Maybe there are mods that turn this product into a game, but they would have to change some fundamental aspects of it.
