.com.unity Forums - IG3 (imperium Galactica III)

It would be a topic of a dissertation to explain all of the reasons that MOO 3 is bad.

* The UI is a nightmare...

1) Things are spread out on various screens that ought to be together and you have to keep clicking around on those stupid tabs to adjust your empire finances or do simple diplomacy.

2) The ship design screen is cruder than the original MOO, with no fixed places for the components and no reports on the properties of the 'specials' so you have to go back to the 'add special' screen to check on their properties. It's far worse than the MOO II ship design screen, which was decent for its time.

3) There is NO inventory screen for ground troops -- you build them and magically assemble ground forces from your mysterious reserves when you need to invade a planet -- but you cannot figure out how many you have! (But they still cost you maintenance... and you cannot scrap them! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif )

* Combat is very weirdly buggy.

1) "ECM" and "ECCM" (Combat Sensors in SE speak) are directly compensatory. After long testing most of the 'expert' player agree that your own ECM and ECCM cancel each other out, even when on different ships. A 'task force' is handled as one big statistically defined ship in the code and it's not done right.

2) Sometimes an enemy task force will sail up to attack you and disappear while sitting right next to you. Which means your forces cannot fire on it. Yet, the AI ships can see and fire on yours. Yeah, real fair.

3) Missiles go sailing around the map indefinitely until they find a target!!! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif And there is really no reason to ever use reloads. You should just load your ships with the largest number of single-shot launchers you can so as to have the biggest 'up front' punch.

* The 'espionage' system is a joke. You build ONE spy at a time, and they have a fixed 'life span' meaning you can't build up forces any faster regardless of how large your empire is or how many opponents you are fighting.

* The 'leaders' are completely featureless. Their effect in the game is more like random events. You just get a message that some leader or other has 'decided to join you' -- no option to hire like in MOO II though at least you can dismiss them. And no cost to keep them other than whatever 'disadvantage' they might have. And no assigning them to a given system or ship. They just sit in your 'leaders' screen and affect your empire statistically. Yech... why did they even put this in?

* The Diplomacy system is broken out of the box. The data files are actually misnamed (and full of typos) so you need a 'mod' from a third-party 'fan' to make it work remotely like it was designed. And it looks like QS is not even going to release a 'data patch' to fix this, let alone any more code patches for numerous other bugs.

* There are scads of other typos in the config files that make the AI even cruddier than it would otherwise be. These can also be fixed with 'mods' from players who have discovered the problems, but you have to go find them.

* The search for those 'Antaran X' abilities/technologies that are so crucial to wnning the game is completely out of your control! You just send off a bunch of ships and get back reports that a ship has been lost or a possible search (archeological dig) site has been found or a 'partial discovery' has been made. When enough 'partial discoveries' accumulate they group of ships starts back and you get this new 'super technology' that can tip the balance of the whole game. It has no relation to how you play the game, it's just a function of sending out hordes of ships.

There are a few nice features like population migration but over-all it looks like a prototype for a game, not a finished product.

[ January 08, 2004, 18:21: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]