MOO3

[Repo Man]

Well, maybe I was being a little harsh with MOO II. MOO I was a great game, the kind that keeps you up to 4:00 a.m..

MOO II was missing something. It was kind of like chinese food. It had all the right ingrediants, but still left you hungry after two hours.

The ship design was great in concept, except that ships never aged out. They were far too easy to upgrade.

Tactical combat was good, especially in mid game. Towards the end those planet zappers got kind of silly.

I would really have to think about why I wasn't happy with MOO II, the best I can say right now is that the total was less than the sum of its parts.

[Talenn]

thecyclemania:

Ok, I'll bite on the 'what didnt you like about MOO2'.

Lets see. MOO2 was great game for while, dont get me wrong. But it had some serious shortcomings.

1) The pacing was GLACIAL. 24 Turns to get a COLONY SHIP!...Made for some really loooonnggg games. Not always bad, but the early game was repeated 'Next Turn' hitting. That also really dragged in MP games.

2) Ship components and design had far too many 'no brainers'. Missiles and Fighters were nearly useless compared to the best direct fire weapons. You rarely got up to bat unless you had the DF weapons. The starting ranges were too short and the missiles and fighters were too slow.

3) The absolutely SILLY way you had to research! Only being able to pick one item out of field was just plain stupid IMO. Many items were NEVER seen because certain items in the same 'field' were NECESSART...hmmmm, gee, Battle Pods or Survivial Pods? Gee, I wonder! Same for things like 'Mech-bots for ground combat or Titan Hulls?'...umm..really big decision there...I think not.

4) Loss of the 'flavor' of the AI players from MOO1. The races mostly seemed the same in MOO2. The art work and music for the leaders and the diplomacy were MILES behind that of MOO1. Graphically better perhaps (resolution-wise), but failed to convey the same moods and atmosphere.

5) Tedious Colony micromanagement. It was fine in the early game when you only had a few colonies to manage, but quickly became repetitive and annoying the mid-late game. Sure, you could 'auto build' the colony, but the decisions it made were often silly. I also dont think that 'feeding the empire' is something which should be major issue in spacefaring era game. That was fine for Civ, but it should have been dropped (or muted) for 'Civ in Space' IMO.

6) The tactical combat was often brainless. This is mostly a factor of the above weapons imbalance. Basically all you did was move forward and fire your best DF weapons at the enemy until one side died. Very little maneuver or tactics IMO.

Looking at this list, you'd think that I hated the game. Well, I did enjoy the game, but I feel that these shortcomings prevented it from becoming the 'time suck' that MOO1 was for me.

What I DO enjoy about SE3/4 is that many of the things we ARE dissatisfied with will be changed and corrected. MOO2 had a few patches and they DID help, but I'm quite confident that the level of support for SE4 will FAR exceed that for MOO2.

Talenn

[ashbery]

Yes moo3 looks great im looking foward to that more than civ3,but i think moo2s a bit overated it was good in its day and i enjoyed it for a time,but i think se4 has surpassed it it every area,which it should considering how old moo2 is,and can only get better in time with improvements.

[Jubala]

I've never played any of the moo games. Don't know why, I just didn't. But judging from what I've read about moo3 I'll probably play that. Still playing Stars!

[AJC]

I think that for its time Moo2 was a pretty good game. In fact I remember when it came out - I was thrilled - I thought finally a game that came close to the old star fire system, and on a computer no less! Oh the late nights I burned ... trying to beat the cheating AI...
I think my problem with the MOO series was that it came across as civilzation in space. Alot of the same paradyms were in the game that you found in all the civilization games- such as having to feed the population, the inability to research more than one tech at a time, to name a few frustrations. I particularly hated the fact that I could not build on a planet and build ships at the same time, and that I couldnt expand my construction capabilites around a single star system like I can in SE3/4.
Once I found the SE series - well moo2 got shelved. Moo1 and 2 were just too limited.

I am not too hopeful for Moo3 - It doesnt look that great to me, I hope I am wrong. The Last time I read about it - I read that they had removed tactical combat. For me, the ability to do tactical combat is half the fun of a space warfare game. I prefer the ability to move the ships and fight the battles myself instead of waiting for a computer to decide the outcome for me.

[mafia]

cyclemania - I checked out your MOO3 site. The second link down, read about the tech tree they are planning on writing. It's a complete copy of SE4's tech tree!

-m

[James Sterrett]

Talenn:

I disagree with you that the "choose one of the techs" in MoO2 was dumd. IMO, it's brilliant in theory, because in theory it presents the player with tough choices and forces the player to engage in some combination of conquest, espionage, and/or diplomacy to gain the other options. It's a mechanism that creates more gameplay.

In practice, I agree many of the choices were not that tough to an experienced player. But there were a few tough ones. I always agonized over Missile Bases vs Auto Factories, both critical technologies. If more of the sections of the tree had forced decisions like that, it would have been a stronger tech tree design.

On the other hand, I missed MoO1's random deletion of techs from the tree. That ensured that every game played at least a little bit differently - and, sometimes, a LOT differently. I played a game once in which nobody developed anything that could harm planetary missile bases until very, very late in the game. The only way to take systems was to try to bLast out the missile bases with spies! Eventually, the really powerful late-game weapons changed that and the conquests unrolled again.