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Spare yourself some wasted time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: September 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is hardly worth writing a review for. The only reason I am writing is to tell you to stay away from it.

In a word, the game is: boring.

The game was delayed over a year (it was a "top 10 vaporware") game of 2002. When I got the game I realized why. Half the stuff just doesn't work right in the game.

1. The developers promised a book on the game in March, 2003 (the one that came with it was WAYYY out of date). It is now September of 2003 and the developers won't even answer the question about when we will see the manual on the Atari boards.

2. The game was patched twice (one data patch, one code patch). They say they will patch it again, but it might be December 2004 before they get around to it (that is their words, not mine).

The game is trash and the support is trash. Don't buy it.

kick but game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 20
Date: March 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

this game is the best game that anyone can make because it has awsome space battles new liforms to conqure or destroy and better graphics the ev overide 3 if you like war and you like startreck this game is for you. You start out as high tech as we are today then you build up to a star treck like advanced nation then conquar the galaxy in this game you can mass your ships with you allias to attack i cant wait till i get this game on my mac if i were you i would rush to get this game sweet!!.

Don't buy this.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: June 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The most aggravating thing about Master of Orion III is that I can see the truly great game it could -- and should -- have been. Individual features are worth bragging about, but the assembled product leaves something to be desired. Like fun.

The gameplay suffers from cumbersome controls that bog down, rather than enhance, the play. For example, micromanagers like me will find tons of options for controlling every aspect of each of their interstellar colonies. This is great, but I find myself fighting the menus more often than I do the other races. To do one simple and oft-repeated task, it is necessary to move down through four or five submenus. The onion-layer approach is a decent idea, but in my opinion, there should be a shortcut menu for common functions. Many of the existing menus and functions are misleadingly labeled. For example, there is nothing labelled "Production": to see what a planet is building, you must find two separate menus under "Economy." You cannot even see a colony's garrison and ships all at once. This, to me, runs counter to common sense. Similar obstacles exist in the game's myriad other menus.

The colony-manager AI is halfway decent, in that it takes care of mundane things for you. On the down side, unless it is heavily customized, it tends to do a slipshod job, and to build huge numbers of often-substandard military items you don't want or need. If it is left unchecked, you may find yourself with 50 or so troop transport ships, but not a single division of soldiers to put on them.

The foreign-relations aspect of MOO3 is frustrating. The other races' attitudes towards you are totally unpredictable: they change on the spur of the moment, and there is nothing you can do to influence them. As an example, I have seen another species coldly refuse my offer for a pact on one turn. The next turn, THEY came to ME, all smiles, looking for the same pact, which I accepted. The next turn, they nullified the pact and declared war on me. That wouldn't be so bad if it was a fluke, but that kind of thing happens ALL THE TIME. A degree of random action is expected and acceptable in diplomacy, but this is ridiculous. If the developers had just not bothered putting diplomacy into the game it would have been less of a headache for everyone.

The graphics, especially in the battle scenes, are (ahem) less than spectacular. Games looked like this four or five years ago. While revolutionary visuals are not to be expected in a strategy game, they could have done much better (Imperium Galactica II's cool looks come to mind.)

I'm a sucker for science fiction, so I find the tech chart interesting and useful. The research process doesn't make much sense to me, though. Maybe I missed something.

The sound is good enough. Again, one hardly expects stunning effects while playing a strategy game.

This game reminds me of Rubik's Cube: I enjoyed it for about twenty minutes, but then I realized it wasn't much fun if you spent hours on it and still couldn't figure out which way to twist it. Some may find MOO3 suits them, but like Rubik's Cube, most people will quickly put this game on a shelf and leave it to gather dust. Final analysis: There are better ways to spend your time and money.

MOO2 is better

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: September 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

MOO3 offers little that is better than MOO2. The only major improvement is in the quality of the graphics. The planets are gorgeous. Everything else is horrible. Menu navigation, ship battles, exploration, espionage, ship design and colony management were all much better in MOO2. This game has become more tedious, not less as promised by the game designers. The manual tells an interesting story but is otherwise worthless. This game should have used MOO2 as a starting point. Don't be fooled - this game is nothing like the excellent games that came before it.

Best Half-Finished Game -- Great for Single Player Gaming

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Masters of Orion III is the best half-finished game ever produced. Some will tell you that MOO II was better, but that is only true for multiplayer gaming. As a single-player game, MOO II was a complete bore. MOO III, on the other hand, is a hugely interesting single player game.

Unfortunately, the project was too ambitious for its budget and MOO III was rushed into production only half finished. The result is a great gaming concept, hugely complex and endlessly mod-able, tied to a buggy and now unsupported implementation.

The gamer willing to mine the internet for fan-created fixes, mods and guides (the documentation is also lousy) will be rewarded with a turn-based 4x gaming experience still unsurpassed in 2008. MOO III was the first great "macro-management" game, and the world is still waiting for the second.

Warning: don't buy the Mac version. The Mac port is less buggy than the Windows release, but far too many of the player-created fixes are Windows-only.

I loved this game and played it for hundreds of hours. If a finished version were ever released, I'd buy it in a minute.

Too much simulation, too little interaction

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The so-called 4X games may not be my forté, but I can't see how MOO3 really fits into the category of "game". You need a great deal of patience and a desire to drop interactivity in exchange for thoroughness of simulation.

Oh, you can do everything in this game. You can terraform. You can conduct diplomacy, invade other planets, build ships and raise armies, conduct research, bomb another people into molecular components. But somehow, none of that is fun here. The graphical interface - what makes a game a game - is so minimal it just takes away the fun. There are too many options to set (tax rate, spending on various sectors, intent of AI governors) and too many discrete possibilities within them.

Consider Dark Reign 2, which is an RTS and not quite as grand as most 4X games. You can discretely set your units to scout, seek and destroy, or hold their ground. In MOO3, you have a continuum of 1 to 100. This invites ridiculous levels of fine tuning.

Combat is... about as exciting as playing my Atari 800.

To be fair, it's more expansive than Gal Civ I in terms of what one can do, but just not as enjoyable to play. Okay, I really didn't enjoy either that much, but Gal Civ at least makes you feel like you're not some bored intergalactic bureaucrat.

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