Let me tell you a story. Sit around in an orderly circle and listen, but beware: this story is tragic, and all too real. I tell you this so that you do not suffer the same fate.
You played Master of Orion 2. You loved it. You were excited to see what came next. Then, on a sad, rainy day in 2003 - almost as if the gods were taunting you - you stroll to your local EB Games and pick up a copy of Master of Orion 3 - a brand new game! MoO2 was a master class of the genre, so its long-awaited followup must be a master class of its own! An improvement on a master class, if you will.
So, you launch the game, for the very first time! Excitement! And...nothing, for about 30 seconds. That's how long the game takes to launch. But, as they say, greatness takes time, right? The horrendously ugly looking UI you're now looking at, that's just surface level! The beauty is in the details. You start up the game, with any of the interchangeable races that don't change the experience at all.
But you don't know that yet. Ignorance is bliss!
You begin the game. You're immediately faced with a veritable flood of tutorial text, which probably adds up to more text than the combined bibles of every religion ever created. Despite this frankly horrendous amount of words, you still somehow feel woefully unprepared for the never-before-seen levels of tedious micromanagement you've just been introduced to.
Then you realize...nothing interesting is happening! At all! You don't really have any idea how long you've been sitting there - 5 minutes, 5 hours, hell, maybe even 5 days. Constantly hitting end turn. End turn. End turn. End turn. Reading a useless bulletin board of horrible, boring information between every click. End turn. End turn.
Eventually, you might meet an AI civilization. Your hopes might go up a little bit at this point - is this where things finally start to get interesting? Do I get to partake in some cool diplomacy? Maybe some genuine, heart-pounding war! And hey, the diplomacy system is pretty advanced - you can take quite a few actions, and there are even specific inflections you can use to try to convey them. This would be the difference between, say, demanding tribute from someone, asking them for something as a friendly gift or begging them to have mercy on your god forsaken soul.
Is this a positive? No. No it isn't. It would be a positive in a game with actual AI, which this game does not have. The diplomacy is entirely binary. The CPU players, as far as I've witnessed, have no intelligent AI whatsoever. From the turn you meet them, they either hate you or like you (based on race). If they like you, they... won't really do anything. If they hate you, they'll sanction you and maybe even declare war on you. This is hardly a concern, since the AI can't seem to muster a proper offensive to save their lives.
A good combat engine wouldn't have really saved this dumpster fire at this point, but it could have at least been SOMETHING to gravitate to. When I say "good combat engine", I don't mean "voxels having a pissing contest".
With that last hope gone, you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, increasingly in vain, for something interesting to happen. You start to fall into the doldrums, and, eventually, you come to the horrible realization that there is nothing interesting to wait for. This is it. This is all the game has to offer. Tedious micromanagement that doesn't even change anything to enough of a degree to warrant it.
And at the end of this thought process, you realize you haven't actually bought a video game: you've bought a fictional, pencil-pushing office job that you don't even get paid for.
Disillusioned and jaded with this new reality you've found yourself in, you leave the office, give your regards to your coworkers, and proceed to drive off a bridge.