[Tampa_Gamer]

Well, at the specific request of some people who know me on this forum, of what my opinion on MOO3 is, here is my post over on the "Gone Gold" forum pasted in its entirety:

The following is a summary if my first impressions of MOO3. I have pretty much bought & own every 4x game that I can think of for the Last 15+ years as well as put probably a couple of hundred hours into MOO games as well as modding and playing SE4 lately. On MOO3 I have put 8-10 hours in playing and a similar amount in reading the entire manual and readme.txt 2x and review numerous Posts on the Apolyton & Infogames MOO3 websites. This is only my opinion and if I criticize something b/c I missed the concept in the manual or readme, I apologize but I think I spent more time preparing and reading in order to play than the average casual gamer. Overall, my attitude is that I will keep plugging away at this game until I understand it.

GAMEPLAY

Having only put 8-10 hours in so far, I cannot comment too much on this. To me, it does feel like a space empire strategy game of the MOO series. After a couple of hours (30 turns), I feel like I have a working knowledge of the economics of my planets (6) now (but there are a lot of subtleties that I still have yet to learn). In order to determine how good the viceroy AI is, I left 1/2 my planets on AI control and I controlled the other 1/2. With the exception of the military build queue, the AI did a pretty good job of building up the necessary items needed to get the planet's economy going and did follow my pre-planned regional zoning. One fundamental concept that took my awhile to understand is that unlike almost all space 4x games now, there are 2 levels of finances to balance - (1) empire, and (2) planetary. It is possible for planetary banks to have an abundance of AUs, but the empire is dirt poor b/c they aggregated like MOO3 - I think this concept works out well and I like it so far (but I have an accounting background, so others may not like the detail).

DOCUMENTATION IN RELATION TO ACTUAL PLAY

Bad - Everybody has harped on this point and I am not the exception. I understand that the manual was printed far in advance of the final gold Version, but with the ease with which text in tooltips and encyclopedias can be modified (see under "modding" below) there was no excuse not to offer more in-game help to Users. I consider myself a veteran 4x strategy player and I dabble in programming myself, so at the user-interface should not have been a problem for me - but it was. Many times I found myself trying to right-click on something or bring up a tooltip to understand something and either (1) there was no tooltip, (2) the text was useless b/c it repeated the name of the variable, or (3) it was downright wrong. The encyclopedia was next to useless b/c at the very least I expected it to have the same information that is in the manual, but it did not. As an example, when I was zoning my regions there was a little colored leaf with a description of the biodiversity of the zone next to it (i.e. arrable, alluvial, etc.) no where does it explain the effect of these different descriptions - optimally it would be in a tooltip on the screen in which you have to make a decision about what to zone the region, but at the very list it should be listed in the encyclopedia.

USER INTERFACE

Good - I like the ability to move the various menus around and they open/close quickly.
Bad - It desperately needs a tooltip overhaul (as discussed above) and some right-click menus. The font was fuzzy to me, but I am probably blind from staring at computer monitors since I was 12, so who knows - I will be modding in a different font. Overall, it seems very unpolished (there were several points where I was trying to modify a slider or button and the menu underneath was reacting instead of the actual one and several icons pop-up as you adjust the economic sliders, but no where does it explain what those icons mean). To me, a good interface design provides the information you need to make a decision on the same screen you need to implement that decision - in this aspect it fails b/c the information (if available at all) is several clicks away. Again, this may be an area where modding will help (see "modding" below).

SOUND & GRAPHICS

Indifferent - Not really necessary to be great in my view as long as gameplay is there (I am an SE4 fan - remember), but I would like at least 1024 resolution (wishful thinking). Menu sounds get a little old after awhile (I will probably mod those as well). Music can be toned down, but it created a good atmosphere. Graphics - what can I say...thank goodness they can be modded as well. Three years and this is the best that they could come up with...

AI & COMBAT

Indifferent - I cannot with comment yet with so little time in, but I can say this - they need to add a "pause" command so that in single-player we can pause to see what the heck is going on or get up to take a pee. I don't know why it was not included. If the concern is multi-player, make it optional.

SHIP DESIGN/TASK FORCES

Good - it does make moving multiple ships easier.
Bad - a lot of people have compared MOO3 to Kohan with respect to task force creation. I would agree to a limited extent. However, Kohan lets you see the stats for each component with a single right-click. If I want to know what weaponry/specials my Hawk avenger class has, I have to travel all the way back to the shipyard design screen and bring up that design - not very user-friendly. There is also no ship/task force experience that I could see. I understand the move from ships to task forces - but why not at least have experience at the task force level until they are broken up and form another task force. The MOO2 ship design screen had a better lay-out as well. In MOO3 you add weapons from a sub-menu which does give you that particular weapon stats, but does not compare it to others (like MOO2).

RESEARCH

Good - I like the matrix effect and fog-of-war type approach. The fact that it will change a bit in my next game is good.
Bad - They should put my current/expected tech level in each field on the slider screen where I make the expense decision, not on the matrix screen.

MODDING

Good - this may be the saving grace of MOO3 and from what I can tell has not been discussed all that much in the reviews (of course, I am heavily into modding SE4 - so I am biased towards this aspect). All of the MOO3 files are contained in .mob files which are essentially archived files and can be unzipped/zipped with any shareware archive program. Once unzipped, you can see that practically all of the text is editable in .txt files with any word processing programs; the sounds files are all .aif files; the cursors are .cur files; the video files are bink video; and the graphics are all .png files. Which means, folks, that we have a LOT of modding potential. They have also set-up the directory structure to accommodate several different data sets (good for using multiple mods with different games). A quick review of some of the files confirmed that we have access to all of the various stats, technology trees, menu graphics (yes - we should be able to make different skins for different races with different sounds - like BOTF). I think I found the ship graphics - but I am not sure. I think even the tooltip descriptions are in .txt format and we should be able to put better descriptions in there as well - especially if a particular mod changes the default meaning of the variable - there are a LOT of possibilities here and so far I am impressed.

Bad - they need to have a launcher so that you can choose which data set you are going to use for a particular game. Hopefully, this will be in a patch.

SUMMARY

I think I was a bit negative overall, but when you pluck down $50 and wait three years, expectations seem to rise (the subtitle name of the game in the box is "the ultimate space strategy game" or something like that). So far it is not. HOWEVER, I think with a couple of patches with some minor features added at the request of fans, some good user-made FAQs and an active mod community, this game could rise to the level of hard-drive staying power that MOO2 did - but I would wait until it comes down in price to the $30s and a patch is released that will address some bugs that are popping up on the main forum.