[Devnullicus]

can you post some of wha you think are good points to the game?

Well, it's a struggle to enjoy MOO3, honestly. There's a couple reasons why I do:

1) I was a huge MOO2 fan. So there's some definite brand loyalty in there
2) I enjoy playing with numbers and modding. MOO3 is very moddable (much like SE4, in fact, but more obtuse about it)

Other than that, I mainly just am disappointed in it. The new patch that came out recently fixes a lot of my major gripes about UI, etc. and makes it at least playable.

If you really start digging into the data and read a lot of the Boards and FAQ's about how things work in the game, it can get interesting. The space combat faq made the game interesting again for me.

My biggest complaint about MOO3 is how much they hid behind the scenes. They give Users VERY little info on what's really going on and how to affect your empire. There's an incredibly complex engine hidden in that game, and in order to play it well, you need to understand what's going on inside the algorithms. Modding really helps me to do that (as it did in SE4 back when I made devnullmod originally =) ).

As for strategies, well, it all comes down to micromanagement, as it always does. People complain that all they do is hit "next turn". If you do, the game will run and your empire will do about as well as the AIs.

The key is keep a close eye on your planetary production queues and make intelligent ship designs. Be aggressive about attacking the AI or other players because it's hard to defend a system, even though orb bases and sysdef ships are much tougher than normal starships. They can be easily overwhelmed with moderate fleets.

Trade tech with AIs. It's actually possible with the new patch (they would always say no before). The AI in the new patch will actually attack once in a while now and is much more dangerous (yayyy! it was pitiful before). Make sure you keep a large amount of spies in reserve to protect against enemy spies (the economic spies are cheapest and protect as well as any other spy).

Specialize your planets. i.e. build minerals on very rich planets. Make farm planets where you can, bioharvesting planets are semi-rare. Make some industrial only planets that will become production powerhouses. Always build some recreation/gov/mil centers on your planets as morale is a serious problem later as overpopulation and enemy spies hit. Even then, you'll still have to occasionally move your oppressometer down and pump large amounts (sometimes ALL) of your cash into unrest control.

I'm not the best MOO3 player by far, but I'm getting better, especially now that I understand how ship designs work and how to make effective ones. The bulletin Boards help a lot with strategy, etc.

Anyway, not sure how glowing a review this was for MOO3. =) I enjoy it for my own quirky reasons, but I can understand why many, many people do not and are hugely, angrily disappointed with this game. *shrug*