Actually, I have made the leap to MOO 3 with the release of the patch. I've been playing constantly for about a week now. The
game is actually pretty good. What sucks rocks is the UI, which is ironic because they made so much hype about the 'cutting edge' UI during the development phase. There are jillions of things missing that we SE IV Users take for granted -- like statistics on how many of each ship class are in service, designs of enemy ships encountered in combat, ability to select particular types of 'events' reports out of your huge pile of notices at the start of each turn, and more. There is no way to
turn off the in-game music fer cryin out loud! You have to just turn the volume down to where you can't hear it, but your CD keeps on spinning and using up your MTBF. Now that's an unfinished program!
If you can find your way around all the jumping and swooping menu doodads to get at the game, it can be interesting. MOO 3 has it's own Version of 'neutrals' for example, called Magnate Races. Just like in SE IV, you can use other races to inhabit worlds your own race can't live on very comfortably. And when you build colony ships the colony will be of the same race as the dominant population on that world, so you can spread a particular race to particular worlds. Too bad there's no indication of
what race dominates a planet on the main planet screen, so you have to go out of your way to a swooping dialog box and check before you queue up a colony ship.
Worlds are divided into 'regions' with differing characteristics instead of being one single homogenous zone. You can set what type of 'DEA' (economic zone) your regions have but everything else has to be done by the 'viceroy' AI. This gives planets a sort of 'SimCity Lite' feel. This is good, though.
Unfortunately the little box that lists your regions on a planet is a tiny fraction of the screen space and hard to use. And why does everything have to be double-spaced to make the tiny window show even
less information?
The ship design window is a nightmare. I literally do not believe that they released a commercial game with a UI that primitive. It's literally worse than MOO 1. All the ship components are jumbled together in a single list with no set place for any of them. And they jump around as you add/remove things. The MOO 1 screen was better and the MOO 2 screen was vastly superior. Why didn't they look at it?
In spite of the god-awful UI you still get a sense of the vastness of the universe being simulated in the 'black box' workings of the game. I'm still struggling to finish
one game, but I guess the main reason for that is my refusal to accept the (broken) judgement of the AI for ship building. It does stupid things like assign battleships to tiny worlds that will take 20 turns to build them, while assigning ground units, ONE AT A TIME, to your main industrial centers that could build the battleships in 4 or 5 turns... SO I have to check all the build queues every turn to prevent stupid attacks.
Well, as you can see in every single paragraph here, it's a real love-hate situation. I sure hope the next patch is a massive UI revision as well as bug fixes...
[ June 20, 2003, 18:01: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]