ya,
I remember it was the only game I new I would like before I bought it, so I preordered at $49.99 and the Handbook $10 more.
Boy, was that a waste of money!
Most of you have covered most of the bad stuff.
1. Star Lanes Suck!!!!!!
I enjoy the whole freedom of movement thing. Their my engines, let me go where I want to!
2. Diplomacy? I could get a trade treaty and not know how I benefited from it. Not to mention terms like casis belias? (or something like that) why introduce strange terms like that? Games are still played be young people too.
3. Too little info. on how anything is done.
4. Too little control.
5. The grant system sucked! I want to spend money to protect my colonies, not just watch forces come in and do little to respond.
6. I can't stand screen flipping! Minimize this.
7. Strange names on the tech list, instead of familiar names, made it less easy to adapt too.
If you stole antiagathics, just what did you get? How about a T.R.A.P.S. Logistic System? Frame of Reference Simulator? Public Service Ethos? Z Storage and Basing Facilities?
Just keep it simple. Keep the learning curve simple enough to get enough players to like your game, and you'll keep your fan base.
8. Races seemed too similar. They seemed too much like +1 here -1 there, lame.
9. They hid Subteranean in a readme file saying Klackon had it, but, not the actual effect, or if could be stolen, traded, replicated, researched, or purchased.
10. Complicated ground combat system. When I actually got some ground combat, I just used nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare'd every time. I didn't know any better, it just seemed like it would get this pain over faster, lol.
11. Senate. I could look down the guide, say wow, I'd like to suggest that and be unable to.
Any pluses?
few.
1. I tried to like the combat system. When you think about it. MOO1 stacks spacecraft, MOO2 forms lines like battlefield warfare from 200 years ago. and MOO3 did improve this. Fleets had rings of smaller ships around it to protect it. (of course, perhaps not every race may have thought of this at the same time, lol, and it was the only configuration available)
2. More ship sizes, MOO1 had 4, MOO2 had 6. 8-10 might have been a max I could live with. Of course, they couldn't stop there, there went to 14 different hull types (overkill).
3. When I heard that there were moons and zones to planets, I thought wow, now allies could inhabit moons of each other, and zones where appropiate. Such as Plains, Mountains, Ocean, Atmosphere, thinking an Aquatic could live in the Ocean while a scilicoid could live in the mountians, etc. Boy, that blew up in my face.
4. You could have more than one Orbital Platform around your planet
(nice). Of course, I couldn't figure out how to upgrade the weapons, they remained old and easily beatable later on. Nor could you build many missile base like MOO1. Geez, between the US and USSR during the cold war, we had a combined ICBM total of over 3000 missiles. (someone could look up the actual total) That would trash any alien attacking this planet, if we upgraded them correctly over time. But, MOO2 and 3 gave us 1.
5. I liked the seperation of races by type, Humanoid, Aquatic, Cybernetic, Geodic, etc. I would have simplified this to terrain types and created sub-classes of breed types (Harvester, Humanoid, Cybernetic would all inhabit normal terran worlds; Insecoid and Geodic, Subtanerrean worlds; Aquatic, Saurian water based worlds; Ethereans, (glad they added them, but, they sucked) Gas Giants worlds.
6. Different race modifiers for race in ground combat(Initiative, Number of attacks, hits, etc.) Nice, though I wished i could see a comprehensive total somewhere, so I could tell what was better.
probably more.
This is just getting too long for me now, lol.
Bottom line. MOO4, if created, has to be better than MOO3, they better listen to customer feedback, or they will be doomed to bomb again.