[raynor]

I am a big fan of the Civilization series of games. (I will include Alpha Centauri) in that mix. In the original Civ played under DOS, I don't remember there being any sort of queue. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In that game, you could eventually end up with dozens and dozens of cities, and you would have to tell them what to buld each and every time they finished building something. To me, that is micromanagement hell. Don't get me wrong. I loved that game. But it *was* quite tedious after a while.

Was it Civ II that first introduced build queues? I think build queues are awesome. Now, you can plan out the next 'x' number of things you are going to build. This way, you still have all the control you desire but don't have to, in my mind, micro manage the "heck" out of the game.

Wasn't it Civ II that also introduced the ability to set your city on different tracks? That also was a neat feature. I must admit that I never used it because I preferred to specify what each city was building. Now, if I could have had the ability to specify what buildings in what order were build by each "minister", I would have loved that. Well... they added that in a later patch. You could edit a text file and determine what to build and when. I never used that but I applaud them for adding in.

Now, let's fast forward to MOO3. There are MANY, MANY buildings that you absolutely cannot build yourself. Speaking in SEIV terminology, each planet has a specific number of facility slots. In MOO3, there are a number of facility-enhancing buildings that can be stacked on top of those facility slots. In MOO3, you have no control over when and how those are built--even through the use of the empire-wide, macro-management development plans. To me, this is WAY too little control.

Through the use of Development plans implemented at the empire level, you *can* specify what "facilities" to build on a planet. That is a neat sort of feature that *might* be nice for a game such as SEV.

Another example of over "macro"-izing the game is how it allocates resources to new planets. In SEIV, when you start a new planet, population doesn't affect the initial production rate like it always has in the Master of Orion series of games. In MOO1 and MOO2, you could move population from your "average" worlds to your best, high mineral production worlds. But in MOO3, there just doesn't seem to be any way to do that.

Because MOO3 requires "money" to build anything, a new colony cannot do any building without a substantial amount