MOO III

[Tifi]

There was never really anything wrong with Moo3, but there was also never anything truly right with it either

Even right out of the box I found it to be somewhat enjoyable, if host to a few... erm *cough* quirks.
In fact the biggest dissapointment I had with it was that I could no longer board enemy ships, and that my planets would constantly do thier own thing - which usualy involved building troop transports. For ever.

That being said, being able to equip just about any weapon ever on your fighters was a very good (fun) idea, and I utterly adore the return to Moo1 style economy sliders and tech distribution.
Terraforming was fun though, watching your planets slowly change as they spin

To really appreiciate the game though you have to mess with the spreadsheets to 'fix' a few of the omissions that were made in the rush to get it out of the door.
Player mods are the answer!

[JosEPh]

For all of you who really never gave it a real go, you can send me your unused Game CDs.

Only Da_Brick actually played the game.

"I watched the space combat video it was laughable" Good golly siron that is soooo lame.

Are you looking for Eye candy? What about serious depth and replayability? Oh yeah I forgot you all "watched" but didn't really play the game.

We all eXpected a MoO2.5, we Got a Totally Different game. And many ppl, including almost all of you here, couldn't handle that. Your loss really.

Am I being a bit harsh? No not really, your own posts show how little effort you put into it.

And Tifi is correct that the Modding has made the game by leaps and bounds that much more enjoyable. But it still takes some patience to learn. Play Chess? Were you good at it your 1st 10 games? Same goes for MoO3.

JosEPh (Keeper of the Roll Call AtmoO forums and user of *pointy words*)

[RedChico]

(...)Am I being a bit harsh? No not really, your own posts show how little effort you put into it.(...)

Well Joseph, time proved "us" right and you don't see Moo3 and a game with the same top quality as Moo2 & 1.

And "we" are the majority.

Was i a bit harsh?



EDIT: but anyways, their mistakes and ideas (bad and good) will be analysed and added to my own project.

EDIT2: something went wrong in my 1st sentence.
Now i don't remember what was my line of thought.
But anyways Moo3 was really a major let down. All those great minds and so little improvement over 1 and 2.

[Aeonic]

I acquired the game for free courtesy of my brother giving it to me. I played it for something like one to three weeks, and I don't recall all the management stuff being all that bad. Actually what mostly caused me to stop playing was the 5-minute delay between turns that I had to wait, and that's no fun in single player. Guess I needed more RAM or something.

But what did bother me was the ship conflicts. First of all, when I played it while it was relatively new (unpatched as well, I believe), designing ships consisted of going to the ship design screen, clicking the optimize button, and pressing OK. What fun is being able to optimize your ship? The sad part was that the optimized ships actually were the best, too. If you tried to make anything else, they always turned out inferior. What fun is designing ships when you don't actually get to design anything? The game might as well just ask you which hull size and class (beam ship, missile ship) you wanted to build and automatically build the best one.

The second thing that bugged me was the ship formations and the way combat was handled in general. I remember once I put together some uber-huge armada with hundreds of ships, and when you enter combat, you see what looks like large donuts of ships crammed together in impossibly tight formats. I'd rather have seen what we saw in MOO2 with Auto Combat turned on - the ships start in formation and then they each go out and do their own thing. The fighters were cool, though.

Finally, there wasn't any real variety in equipment that I can remember. No stasis fields, no plasma webs, no teleporters, no black hole generators, transporters, pulsars, etc... It was all just beams, missiles and fighters. So combat always looked the same - ships fly at each other, launch fighters, missiles, get close enough and beam each other to death. Not too much fun.

Other than that, it seemed OK to me. Pretty much everyone who reviewed it acknowledged that it had a really steep learning curve though.

[Gusset]

I'd hesitate to ever refer to MOO2 players as anything approaching a "majority", unless you're limiting yourself to the population on this forum.

MOO2 is a great game, but my desire to play it, while still present, is on/off. This is probably due to having done it 10 years running. DC/VDC help a little, but not hugely. What keeps me coming back, despite the game's quirks and my overexposure to it, is the multiplayer angle. It's just well done.

I tried MOO3, and really wanted it to replace MOO2 for me. Unfortunately, after playing about 3-4 weeks, I gave it up due to one (to me) major and one minor reason.

The major reason was the combat engine. I really, really liked the concept, and still do (Space Empires 5 is somewhat similar in tactical mode, though I only play it in strategic mode). Unfortunately the MOO3 execution had at least one detail that ruined it. It's been a long time, so I could be remembering falsely, but I think it was that the only way your ships could fire at the enemy was if they were headed directly toward them. This made longer ranged weapons as a strategy against the enemy pointless, along with a host of other possible tactical options.

The minor reason was personality. Sometimes MOO3 had all the flavor of Excel. Not a really big deal, but it could have used some of the campy touches that MOO2 has. Examples: seeing a Sean Connery lookalike (if playing human) tell you about the latest tech advancement (I have literally said, "Thanks, Sean!" out loud on many occasions), watching the colony ships land on a planet, getting the silly "We're going to kill your people and enslave you" message on contact with another race, the colony view with all the buildings, the ground combat replay, etc. These sorts of things are rather silly, but I find them attractive.

I've since discovered Space Empires 5, and it's replaced MOO2 as the main computer game that I play...really great game that I think would satisfy any MOO2 player here if given a decent chance. The issue with SE5 is that it's simply too deep and detailed to make for one or two evening's entertainment per game like MOO2 can. That's what I wanted from MOO3.

[c'g~]

MOO2 is a great game, but my desire to play it, while still present, is on/off. This is probably due to having done it 10 years running. DC/VDC help a little, but not hugely.

Oh man, my Mod isn't in Gusset's list T_T

As for MoO3, I'm totally agree with Gusset: horrible battle mechanics implementation and lack of MoO2 flavor have killed MoO3 for me at least.

[Astax]

Moo3 is fuckin horrible. #1 problem they made was trying to make a game from scratch. They should have just copied moo2, added some minor things, and upgrade it to a 3d gfx engine that can support modern resolution and they have instant success story.

The game is a waste of time. All I remember is hitting next turn wondering wtf was happening as I was bombarded with worthless information every turn.

[Immelmann]

i just got the game for $5 on ebay, i am totally lost! the overabundance of information has my mind wheeling.

star lanes? ha ha ha i half expect to see orange barrels and detour signs!

gonna fiddle around with it some more, see what happens

[Astax]

Star lanes are actually a pretty good idea. They only limit your movement early on, later your engines are fast enough to skip them. It is pretty good gimmick.

Anyway i found use for moo3. I'm porting some of the graphics as placeholders for my own project lol. Of course nwo I can't distribute it to you else I get sued for copyright blah blah. So for now I'm just gonna work on my own, till I get my own gfx in there hehehe.