User Rating: 3.6 | Master of Orion III PC
Master of Orion was a great game. MOO2 was an incremental improvement. MOO3 tries to be an incremental improvement over MOO2, but is ultimately too buggy to deliver, and you're better off sticking with MOO2 or finding a different franchise to go with. Now, I'd read the bad reviews on GameSpot, but there were a few that were pretty good -- in particular, saying that the 1.25 patch of the game is a world apart from the version on the CD. You probably can't see the components of my rating, but basically everything is about a 5, except for the Tilt, which is a 1. Why so low? Because after installing the patch, the game wouldn't run on my CD player. Or my backup drive. So that means they took the opportunity when releasing the patch to fix their game bugs, to also try and increase their copy protection security -- and didn't test that any more than the rest of the product! (I was able to find a NoCD patch online, eventually.) The Master's Notes hint windows have to be dismissed twice before they go away, the Technology School sliders don't "stick" after you've modified them (which means that it's impossible to specialize in any kind of research), the UI makes it difficult to do the colony-by-colony micromanagement of MOO2 ... instead, you just sort of watch as the AI plays for you, occassionally making minor tweaks. Okay, enough ranting. MOO3 does have better multiplayer support than MOO2. 1) You can set a time limit for the turns, to make sure the game keeps flowing. 2)The combat is real-time, instead of turn-based. 3) MOO2's between-turn calculations were very slow, MOO3's are pretty quick. If all the bugs were patched, though, MOO3 would still have a lousy UI. Actually, though, I think the premise for the game is flawed. Their idea was that you would have so many planets to manage, that you NEED the AI to take a lot of control for you. Okay, so that's reasonable ... so why am I still responsible for manually updating ship designs as new technologies are released? And why is it even an option for me to control every fleet in every battle? No, micromanagement was much of the point of MOO 1 & 2. If a B+ player can only reasonably control 25 colonies, then make so it's unusual to have more colonies than that -- don't spend a lot of time *trying* to make a sophisticated AI, because even if you succeed, where's the fun in that? Bad game design, bad UI, and way too many bugs means that this is a game you should stay away from despite the brand name, even if you find it in the bargain bin.
