MOO3 finished!

[Puke]

from the avault review:

Once you know what you should be doing, MOO3 is somewhat curious to pin down in terms of gameplay; at first, I wasn't sure if it was anything more than a spreadsheet with a graphical interface. It's obvious that Quicksilver gave a great deal of thought and effort to the economic and scientific aspects - even including a Planetary AI to deal with mundane tasks. What is equally obvious is that combat is often quick, dull and very dumbed down. The combat engine is not basic in its underlying design; Quicksilver took into account sensor ranges, weapons ranges and other factors as never done before in the MOO series. However, once in combat, there is little strategic gameplay present. You simply point your Task Forces in a direction until you spot the enemy, hit the attack button, and let the AI do the rest - making combat little more than a light show. Even intercepting enemy fleets is no longer that important, as every ship you build automatically goes into your empire's Reserves upon completion. From there you can create a Task Force at any system capable of building the same ships in only one turn - even if your vessels were created many turns travel away on a distant world. With the ability to instantly generate battle fleets just about anywhere in your empire, the Last tactical area of combat has been eliminated.

Unfortunately, I found that the AI only loosely follows the guidelines that you set. For instance, even though I set Mining as the highest DEA priority for Mineral Rich worlds, I often caught the AI building mainly Farming zones instead (despite the fact that Farming wasn't even in my Development Plan). In addition, I found that if I set the AI not to colonize worlds on its own, it would do so anyway - even if the planet was toxic to my race.

In terms of difficulty, Master of Orion 3 falls totally flat, especially compared to its predecessors. I was hard pressed to tell the difference between the Easy and Hard levels of difficulty, as both played nearly the same. In fact, it's not uncommon to see AI players actually bring a fleet to one of your systems, then do nothing. The enemy will simply sit in orbit of a system until you send in an opposing fleet and destroy them; they won't even press an advantage. The only real challenge posed by MOO3 is with the Antarans and the various Guardian battleships, each of which takes aggressive action.

maybe i wont buy it, afterall. Theres always Galciv. maybe X2 will come out in a couple months.. maybe i'll finish the GritTech mod, and play more PBW.

[Fyron]

Maybe it will be better after many patches a year from now.

[Wardad]

Originally posted by Puke:
...maybe i wont buy it, afterall. Theres always Galciv. maybe X2 will come out in a couple months.. maybe i'll finish the GritTech mod, and play more PBW.

hmmm... play more PBW.

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
You know what I find impressive is that there are no copies floating around on the P2P networks yet. I browse both the Kazaa/Gnutella network and the WinMX network on a semi-regular basis. Normally you can find a game Online well before you can find it in the stores because someone at the CD plant will leak it. There's usually a lead time of two weeks or more. They must have resorted to some extra-ordinary security to prevent it from leaking.

Either that or it sucks so bad nobody WANTS to pirate it

(And I was looking forward to MOO3 too... )

[klausD]

Nobody mentions that the combat system of MOO3 is only real time. Is this real time crap so much accepted in this forum, that no one is complaining about this important issue?

[Fyron]

KlausD, MOO3 combat is designed so that you do not control the units directly. You give orders to task Groups and such before the battle, and watch them fight in real time. The pace of the battles is supposed to be such that the real time does not matter, and you have enough time to give whatever sparse orders you will need to give during combat. SE4 strategic combat is very similar, in that it is designed such that you give orders before combat, and then watch the results as the combat unfolds. This is not really a bad thing. In fact, real time combat for 4X games is far better than turn based, because it eliminates all of the unrealistic problems that come with turn based combat. In fact, I hope SE5 has well-implemented real time combat (and I am fairly certain that it is going to anyways ).

[ February 25, 2003, 19:36: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[raynor]

Even if Moo3 was unplayable, typically there would be enough people looking for it that at least someone would pirate it. I'm brand new to P2P networks such as Kazaa. But I think they use some sort of ranking so that people who have UP-loaded lots of stuff can get faster downloads somehow. I think...