Master of Orion 3, that is. Yeah, I know I’m about 3 years late, big deal 
It was on sale, £5 + shipping, so I figured, why not? Can’t play all the newfangled Guild Wars MMORPGs on this dinky 1.somthing GHz P4 laptop with a Radeon obsolete video card anyway.
Anyone else playing/played/whatever this game?
I did, or at least I tried to, and I wasn’t impressed at all. Lots of ideas, some nice, some just indifferent; lots of potential but a very boooring game. Maybe it’s good if you have plenty of time to dedicate to it - really a lot of time! I made the effort and spent quite some time on it, but it didn’t really capture my attention.
I have to say that people that liked it warned me to patch it with the latest patches available, as they apparently make the interface a tad more user-friendly.
I loved MoO II, but something went horribly, horribly wrong with number III. It seems like they put in every single idea they ever had for the game. I mean, sure, there probably are a lot of unfun aspects to ruling a galactic empire, but they probably could have left them out of a game, which by its very definition should be all fun.
The Evons were pretty cool, though.
I actually liked it, against all odds. I thought it was very addictive - but buggy. Not as good as MOO2, by a longshot, though.
Believe it or not, but they actually took alot of stuff out for the release.
Put me in the camp of thinking the game sucked. God forbid if you didn’t set the combat to auto-resolve. One battle could take upwards of 10 minutes. Galactic Civilizations was the game that MOO3 should have been.
I tried to play. I wanted to like it. Unfortunatly, after trying and trying, I accomplished niether and gave up.
So if you stumble upon the “secret fun mode” easter egg on the game, you’ll let us know, right?
Okay, well, after about 5 hours of continous play (wow, it’s 1am already?) I’m kinda getting the hang of it… it’s a bit addictive, and not really fun in the sense of “fun”, but more like fiddling with a spreadsheet to make it work.
I must say that I really like the idea of Devplans, though. Now, if only they’d WORK… 
I was a regular on their boards from a long long long time ago.
I went through all the development cycles and all that fun stuff.
It was a great community with a great love for the game and the hope for something better.
What we ended up with was a spreadsheet that had some interesting aliens.
The humor, cheekiness and fun of the game had left a serious, number cruncher.
The soul of MoO was gone.
sigh
I still have my MoO2 CD, I still have it installed, I still play it now and again.
THAT was a game! They tried to add eXperience to the 4X game. I always said
they added in eXcel.
I’m a builer player. I love building empires, cities, roller coaster parks, etc. I just
could not get into building around the computer, around the interface. It seemed
so unnatural to me.
Right… back to my lurker cave.
Ditto. So sad.
Another here who found MoO 3 less than enjoyable.
I spent a fair bit of time on the pre-release boards myself. I agree that basically all the game is now is an Excel spreadsheet with a GUI front-end bolted on.
These sorts of games always have a tough time balancing out the macromanagement from the micromanagement. Some people love micromanagement and some hate it. The problem is, any game I’ve tried to play that purports to solve the micromanagement problem by an intermediate AI (MOO3 and CivIII come to mind) never gets it right. The AI starts building stuff I don’t want and it can be tough to override it. MOO2 hit the balance pretty well.
The problem I have with auto-resolve was that I often saw combat resolved in a way that never would have happened had I just put the actual battle on auto and went to make a sandwich. This was with lots of games. In any case, long battles aren’t just a problem with MOO3. I’ve had games in MOO2 where I was way, way ahead technologically, basically having maxed out (and gotten) every technology. So I’d build these practically invincible Death Stars (yes, I know the actual class in-game is Doom Star) with only one weapon, the stellar converter. Auto-kill on hit, but I’d only have one or two in a system at any given time. (Combine the easy fleet destruction of a few of those things with telepathy and the star gate and you can easily conquer the galaxy without ever putting troops on the ground. You don’t even have to worry about the enemy reconquering territory behind your front, because the star gate is built automatically in every system you control and your sensors can see their fleet coming soon enough to be able to gate back enough of the fleet to defend the system.) Problem was, occasionally the computer would launch a huge fleet of like a hundred ships (several levels of tech behind) against my system, which would generally only be defended by the planetary defenses and a Death Star or two. I’d always win the battle but the thing could take an hour to run. The problem was, I’d actually lost a couple times when I let it do the statistical auto-resolve, which makes no sense when I can let the battle run and take out their entire fleet with basically one ship and sustain no damage.
MoO3 's space battles were it’s strongest feature for me, vs. MoO2. I loved the fleet angle, the 3D view, and the quicker, real-time resolution.
I mostly lurked, but I spent probably two years on the pre-release message board for MOO3. While it was in development, it sounded like it was going to be an amazing game. I mean, really, what’s not to like about Master of Orion with better graphics, more aliens, and a bigger tech tree? Really, every feature seemed cool, from jump nodes (I think chokepoints would’ve improved the strategic element of MOO2 combat) to multi-tiered development policies.
I can’t say for sure where things went wrong, but my guess is that it was all downhill after Alan Emerich, the head developer for the game, was fired and replaced by Rantz Hoseley, the project’s art director. Alarm bells should’ve been ringing at that point, but the beta testing started soon afterward and the testers all seemed to enjoy themselves and fueled our excitement with “after-action reports” of particularly climactic battles and games.
Then the game was released. I bought it on the release date and raced home to install it. Two years’ worth of anticipation were about to pay off!
As it turns out, spreadsheets with graphics from 1996 (The game was designed to run on a 233MHz PII) are not particularly entertaining. I tried to like it. I really did. I traded it in for a new copy of MOO2 within a week.
Hmph.
I guess I just get hours of enjoyment from playing a spreadsheet, then.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go check out this nifty new Excel game I keep hearing about.
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Can anyone tell me the origin of the term ‘Easter Egg’ to mean a secret code, item, or move for a computer game? I’ve heard and used the term for ages, now, but I have no idea why that caught on over the old fasioned ‘secrets’ that were what I recall from Atari 2600 days.
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