Customer Reviews

Master of Orion 3

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(53)

 

 

Being a MOO fan, I was stoked when Moo2 came out. I bought it, played it, and fell in love with it.

Then Moo 3 comes out. "AWSOME! I'M THERE!" was my thinking. Ohh would I ever be disappointed! The micromanagment that I so enjoyed from Moo2 is gone. The AI builds EVERYTHING now, and it's such a klunky interface (albeit a very pretty one) that it litterally took me TWO DAYS to figure out how to design and build custom ships.

Now add in that the stupid AI always builds things that are not going to help you advance. The game MIGHT have been playable if there was a way to disable the AI. But you cann't. You can override it, but that's it.

Now take into account the fact that the game makers decided to remove what was one of my favorite items, the combats between vast numbers of ships. Which would not have been so bad if they had done it to ALL. But the people who now inhabit the planet Orion (namely the "new orions") can have hundreds of tiny tiny ships (about the size of a single person fighter craft) in combat, while you are limited to 60 ships of any size, and you will soon find it virtually impossible to reach orion!

Then consider how long it now takes to build ships of any decent size. In moo2 it might very well take as many turns to build a powerfull ship on a poor planet. But it would only take like 10 turns on a ultra rich planet with all the upgrades (core waste dump, deep core mines, automated factories, etc...)

And it's hard to get the most out of your planets because now you need to control the type of industrial buildings that get built on the planet, and each planet has multiple regions of various types. Ok, that would work if sufficent information was given about the various types of regions. Sure a fertile area is best for an agricultural building, but what about "hard scrabble"? Only about one in three or four types are intuitive.

Now add in the horrible system with which your relations with other races are managed, and the fact that each parent race has 3-4 "child" races, which means that you could potentiall have multiple "Klackon" or multiple "Psilon" type races in the game.

And finally add a users manual that really doesn't help much. Don't get me wrong. I love a manual with a story. I absolutely ADORE the Homeworld 1 manual beause of the story of the people from Karak. But the manual for Homeworld is only 1/2 story and 1/2 manual. The MOO3 manual is about 90% story. Which again would not be TOO bad if it was Story up front and manual in back or the other way around. But it's not. Moo3's manual is Story + little but of manual + story + little bit of manual, etc... so if you are not absolutely ENTHRALED by the story (which I was not), you wind up not being able to read the manual!

Over all, I have to say that QuickSilver really did a HUGE Dis-service to the game's name sake. My honest recomendation to ANYONE who wants to look into getting this game: SAVE YOUR MONEY! This Game MIGHT be worth GIVING AWAY, but I would not pay $5.00US for it.

I reviewed this game when it first came out (I was even one of the fools to pre-order the stupid thing), but I wanted to give an update. I recently downloaded DOSbox and started playing MOOII again, and WOW! I forgot how fun this game was. I can still remember playing the first one on my Tandy back in 1994 and both those games just make me cry when I think about MOOIII and what it could have been. Don't waste your money, and do download DOSbox and start playing MOOII again.

Sad. Just sad.

I LOVED and still play MOO2 on a semi-regular basis - one more turn, one more turn . . .

I waited for over a year, participated in the discussion boards (Clasby - the tiny giant) and anxiously awaited the game until my pre-ordered copy showed up. Part of the big enhancement was supposed to be the reduction in micromanagement but it is actually worse!

Example: you want to deploy five armies worth of ground troops to conquer some planet. Go to ground force creation, *click*, decide how big a force (division, army, whatever) *click* type of force (marines, tanks, whatever), *click*, then decide which specific troops you want in the unit, (potentially hundreds more clicks based on race, experience level or whatever but luckily there in an auto-build), *click*. Yes you could, in theory, decide that on specific troops to account for the planets gravity and terrain but the combat itself is so abstracted that it's really hard to tell if it makes any difference anyway. And you can't really figure out what exactly the terain is like until you've already unloaded the troops. Besides, you have SO MANY ground troops by mid-game that your really better off just dumping whole (and multiple) armies anyway. Ok, so now you've got the army, *click* ok, then got to another screen where you put them on your troop transports *click* - yes they have their own task force and you can add escorts - but you don't want to. Everything gets dibanded when you unload troops. That is they disapear for a time, then go into reserves for next deployment. Ok, so that's at least six clicks per ground force. You wanted five - so that's thirty clicks - at least. So much for getting rid of the micromanagement.

Moving the ships around once their deployed is even more frustrating as it's hard to figure out where they are, where they're going and so on. Ship design is confusing and muddled, it's hard to compare weapon systems etc., etc., etc. and basically imposible to build up to date ships. I spent A LOT of time going to every planets build que and deleting the old crappy designs, and the THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of non-Combatant ground forces it wants to build to get something useful built. Even once that's done your 'viceroy' will change the funding levels every turn so you never really know when a unit will actually be finished.

Technology: Lots and lots of tech. To bad you can never be sure what exactly it does or control how, when or where it gets implemented.

Diplomacy: just accept whatever they want as it dosn't matter anyway.

Spying: Ugh!

I could go on about the details but the basic problem is that I never feel much in control of the game - and what I can control are the most tedious aspects. I'm one of the few who dosn't seem to mind the combat, but getting to that point is pretty much not worth it.

Sad.

Master of Orion 3 is a huge 4X space empires game which despite numerous flaws and a harsh learning curve is an excellent game. Read on if you want to learn more about it.

After playing my first 100 turns of Master of Orion 3, I disliked it. After 200 turns, I was ready to toss it in the trash. After 300 turns, I started to understand and enjoy it. After 400 turns, I was hooked.

The game suffers from a poor interface, which makes for a steep learning curve. A few of the most useful screens are hidden behind other less useful screens (Fleets overview is hidden behind ship design, for example). In the space combat scheduler, you can't see details of your fleets, so you somehow have to remember in which of the 20 battles scheduled for this turn you have troops for planetary assaults. There is no way to see which of your planets have deployed ground troops other than to examine them all one by one. There is no way to see what is queued up for construction in the second and third priority boxes on your planets other than to examine them all one by one. Alien empires threaten you on the diplomacy screen, but you have no idea what the action was for which they are threatening you. There are many other examples where this game would have profited greatly from better interface design.

The game has a very non-intuitive game system, which makes the learning curve even steeper. When your planets build starships, they go into your Reserves after which they can be deployed instantly in any star system where you have built a Mobilization Center, even if that star system is on the other side of the galaxy. After a transport fleet drops its ground troops, it automatically disbands. There is no way to transfer ships between fleets or to transfer mobilized ground troops from a planet to a transport fleet. When fleets or armies are disbanded, they go back into your reserves after a delay of about 5-10 turns, during which time they are unavailable. Oddly enough, all of this works fairly well from a playability standpoint once you get used to it. The need to wait for disbanded troop transport ships to reappear in your reserves in particular has a limiting effect on any empire's ability to swiftly overwhelm another.

This is not a game for anyone who *must* be able to micro-manage planetary development and ship/army production. It's simply impractical once you have more than a handful of planets. Once you have hundreds of planets, you will be grateful to allow the AI to handle everything, while occasionally tweaking ship production. The AI generally does a fine job with planetary development, which is necessary since there are hundreds of items which can be built. It's somewhat brain-dead when it comes to ship production, however: the AI will happily build nothing but point-defense or troop transport ships and utterly neglect your attack ship capability if you allow it. So you have to learn how to manipulate the AI into building what you need through the control of your active ship designs, while you occasionally re-work the construction queues on a few of your most productive or strategic planets to build some ships that the AI hasn't gotten around to queueing up yet. When you have hundreds of planets you will be grateful to have the AI running your production despite often struggling to keep it on the right track.

Despite the criticisms, I love the game. If you play in a large galaxy, the scope is huge, you can end up controlling hundreds of planets and ships, and a single game can last practically forever if you set the victory conditions to sole survivor. There are two other victory conditions you can set which can make for a short or medium length game: become president of the Orion Senate or gain control of all 5 of the "Antaran X" technologies. Despite many flaws, the diplomacy with the computer controlled empires is better than most games that I have played. In addition to the many agreements which can be made bilaterally between empires, some or all empires will belong to the Orion Senate which can pass laws affecting all its members such as bans on the use of certain types of weapons, trade embargos against specific empires, declaration of galactic holidays, declarations of war, and inviting or expelling members. Initially a computer controlled empire called the New Orions has the presidency and enough votes to have complete control of the Orion Senate, but as the other member empires prosper they can eventually gain enough votes to take control away from the New Orions and even expel them from the senate. And none of my criticisms about the AI apply to how well it does for the computer empires, all of whom are worthy adversaries.

Like a number of other reviewers on here, I seem to have been there from the beginning. Played MOO when it came out, still play MOO2 all the time (it even runs beautifully on my new XP machine, of all things, and takes up about 78 mb. I have newer games with savefiles bigger than that). Those games were/are great. They enticed you, encouraged you to explore and expand your empire, to try new and daring things (and even had humor, like how your 'citizens' in MOO2 demand a stadium if you happen to play it on April 1st).

M003 takes all those wonderful elements and converts them into something akin to getting partially stuck in a revolving door in 100 degree weather. The interface works..sort of, if you don't mind 15 subwindows at a time warring with one another. You finally figure out how to tell a mineral rich planet to build more industry, only to return later to find your Viceroy working on political buildings. Odd looking creatures occasionally show up on your video display to declare war or peace or engage in cryptic insulting matches like 'We peacefully demand you withdraw from our space with anger,' as if all the programmers were not just hooked on phonics, but smoking it like crack. You squint at glowing trade lanes, a new and hideous addition to the MOO pantheon, which converts your galaxy from idyllic space to a odd web of ships bumping back and forth like Los Angeles freeways writ large. You hope that on one of the about 8 CDs that make up the game you will find what you're looking for: Master of Orion III god damn it, bigger, better, and more glorious than ever. Another Viceroy proudly announces that your 40-transport ship task force is finally ready. Your WHAT? You begin drinking heavily.

In the end, you're left with something like Highlander II or Godfather III or The Phantom Menace..people keep telling you, with a mixture of pity and cruelty, that it's related to the great predecessors you know and love and that if you just give it a another chance, download a few more patches, maybe play it with 'Ode to Joy' ringing in your ears and 3 shots of tequila burning in your gut, it will all come together for you. Well, it doesn't. Somebody wake me if Master of Orion IV ever shows up.

Nothing like MOO2. This game is clunky, takes forever, and is, to be blunt, terribly boring. There are some good ideas, but they got too complicated with everything, and it's not fun to play. The only way I'd recommend trying this game is if you can get it extremely cheap (try eBay). My guess? You'll play it once or twice, and give up. UGH.

MOO-III is the latest (and with any justice in the universe, the last) of a space-based series of resource-management strategy games. I was a big fan of the last version, which was a marvel of slick, intuitive controls, engrossing combat/empire management, and cheesy (but fun!) graphics.

Sadly, I returned my copy of MOO-III one week after I bought it. It's the first game I ever played that felt more like *work*. It's slow, boring, and comes with a poorly written manual. It's also the best example of why you never let art directors with no experience designing user interfaces run amok without some play-tester feedback.

It feels like it takes seven clicks to do *anything*. (I suspect that had this title's designers sketched out a car's stereo system, you'd have to twist a dial three times, honk the horn, and stick your head out the window in order to turn the damn thing on.)

A couple small kudos are in order: the graphics are a vast improvement, the aliens truly look *alien*, and the Galactic Council is awesome.

However, these are all ephemera; the talent to create an even moderately enjoyable and entertaining game was sadly lacking in this version.

An excellent game idea. I played the first and fell in love with it way back when. This newest version though is a big disappointment. It doesn't have hardly any of the original style that made the first so fun and the interface on this one is *HORRIBLE*. There is no real hand-held manual for such a complicated game, only in-game and that is vague at best. Learning how to do something as eventually vital as build a fleet in order to defend or invade is hilariously ridiculous. At the time this series began, it was close to the only one like it and easily worth it, but it's clear they've lost the magic and the point with this one. Pass it by.

First off, when I heard MOO3 was coming out, I was excited. More excited because the rumor was that if MOO3 was successful a Master of Magic 2 might be developed.

I read all the horrible reviews that everyone wrote, and thought to myself, "Hey, I loved MOO, MOO2, MOM, Civ2" and just about every other turn based strategy game out there. I'll have to like this. I figured all the negative reviews were just by people who get frustrated by complexity.

The game is complex. VERY complex. I consider myself a pretty intelligent guy. I'm college educated. I've been playing strategy games for a long time. I have no clue the the [F-Bomb] is going with the economics and research aspects of the game. I'm sure a lot of time and effort went into developing this side of the game, but personally, I find US Income Taxes much easier to understand than this.

I've put in about 6 hours of game playing and I'm pretty much giving up. I kept thinking that I'm missing something and the game will get fun after just 10 or 20 more turns. The game just isn't fun. I don't mind playing for an hour to get into the game to get the challenge going (Getting setup in CIV and developing Cities takes time for the later battle). But the game is just missing the fun aspect.

...e

And the most depressing part, I sincerely hope they do make a MOM2...just don't let Quicksilver Developers touch it.

This game is so terrible that it's amazing it was ever released. Many of this game's positive reviewers have speculated that perhaps those who don't like the game simply haven't taken the time to thoroughly understand it. Let me assure you, this isn't the case. The more time you spend with this game, the more you come to realize how egregiously flawed it is. There are far, far too many flaws for me to offer a complete list, so I'll just mention the one that I find the most hilarious. The game claims to have an advanced diplomacy model, but the diplomacy appears to have absolutely no connection to the rest of the game. I can carpet bomb an enemy's planet, killing millions of his citizens, and the next turn his ambassador shows up to...offer me a trade treaty? What the heck? Equally bizarre is the way that races will declare war, then peace, then war, peace, etc. every few turns for no apparent reason. It's kind of funny at first, but eventually you just start ignoring the other ambassadors.

Save your money. They should have to pay people to play this one.