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Masters of Orion 3

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: September 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Someone managed to take a fun simple game and create a monster.
There are some screnes that pop up from one screne, but when you close them you are not back where you started from. This makes several things in the game rather tedious.
Also you can no longer create your own race without starting with one of the game races. There is no way to set up a unique race that lives in any atmosphere, because someone thought you shouldn't be able to.
The game has some good ideas, but poor execution makes it rather less fun to play than the previous versions.

B-O-R-I-N-G

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: June 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

What a complete waste of time and money. Even with the patch applied, this game is terrible. It's boring, the AI stinks, the graphics are terrible, and the fun parts of the game have been abstracted (particularly the space combat) while the boring parts of the game, including economic management, have been expanded on. It makes no sense. It's as though they were intentionally trying to make the game boring and dull. If I was on the design team for this game, I'd be ashamed.

One and a half stars. That speaks for itself. Do not buy this game.

A somewhat positive review!!!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Everything bad that you've heard about this game is true. But, after playing it for a while, it got rather addicting. When I first started playing it I couldn't stand it. But, out of shear boredom, I kept at it. After some time I couldn't pull myself away from it. Now, it's still not as good as MOO2. I still find MANY faults in the game, but for some reason I can't stop playing it.

There is a certain feeling of being disconnected from what is going on. With little input from you, the game will kind of play itself. Also I find it frustrating that you can't tell planets what to build, or more importantly, what not to build. In a large game, you can have hundreds of planets under your control, and it just isn't feasible to go through ever one of them telling them to make certain things. For example...I have tons of ground troops already, yet the game keeps building them even though I want my planets to build ships instead. There is no way to just tell all your planets to just build a certain thing. And, when you are under constant attack and ships are running low, it's enough to pull your hair out when your planets keep making ground troops that you have no need for.

It took me a long time to figure out just how combat occurred. You can only take 10 groups of ships into combat at a time. Each group can have 18 ships, making a total of 180 ships in each battle per turn. The instruction manual says you can have more, but I've found it to be a rather useless and inaccurate source of information. It took me forever to figure out that if I wanted to invade a planet with ground troops, that I had to send only 9 groups of combat ships, and one group of troop ships. If you send more your troop ships may sit on the sidelines as only 10 groups total can be involved per turn.

When I defeated the Orions, I got nothing special for my trouble. No super weapons or special ship class. You can find Anteran artifacts, but they aren't quite what they were in MOO2. I'm not really even sure why the Orions are even in the game as they make no contribution to it. They never go to war against me, I can't steal any of their technology because their boarders are too well protected. They seem to have no real function at all in the game.

I had a lot of false starts when I started playing the game. Start a new game, get frustrated and just start a new one. I think most of this was just from a lack of understanding of some of the basic concepts, or more so that the instruction manual doesn't explain them at all. Here is a couple examples of how inaccurate the manual is...

The largest group of ships you can have is called an Armada. In an armada, you can have a total of 18 ships. But, when you read the instruction manual, it says it has 33 to 64 ships.

They have types of ships in order
Instruction manual -- In the game
Lancer ------------- Lancer
Cutter ------------- Cutter
Corvette ----------- Corvette
Frigate ------------- Frigate
Destroyer ---------- Destroyer
Light Cruiser -------- Light Cruiser
Cruiser ------------- Cruiser
Battle Cruiser ------- Battle Cruiser
Dread Cruiser ------- Battleship
Dreadnought -------- Dreadnought
Battleship ---------- Super Dreadnought
Titan --------------- Titan
Behemoth ----------- Behemoth
Leviathan ----------- Leviathan

Just look at that discrepancy. The manual is full of them. Who wrote this thing?

Anyway, for all it's faults, I still find this game very addicting. I'm not saying I love it, but I can't seem to stop playing it.

Worst follow-up game ever.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Like most of the other reviewers, I'm a long-time MOO fan. I keep Win98 box around just so I can keep playing MOO2.

Do not buy MOO3. All the fun stuff from MOO2 is either missing or buried so deep in the UI that I can't find it. The gameplay is neither compelling nor addictive.

Playing MOO3 felt a lot like doing income tax - lots of nicky-picky details you can't ignore, hunting for the right forms to fill out, and sparse documentation telling you to do things that don't look right after you do them.

A huge disappointment - save yourself the heartache and do not purchase this product.

What is this ...?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: June 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have put up with many games long enough to beat them. I put up with Pikmin for god's sake. This game starts out great. You get to create your character from a choice of many sweet looking aliens. I thought to myself "wow, this should be a cool game." Was I wrong. AI is horrible. At times I wanted to fire a giant laser into my own team. Knock some sense into them by eliminating a few of their friends. But this didn't work. This game is so bad, I only played an hour, in which all I did was create characters. pPretty pathetic, yes? I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone.

Bastard of Orion

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game was awful. After years of waiting it was a monumental disappointment. MO2 was perhaps the greatest space strategy game out there and probably second only to Civ 2 as greatest strategy game of all time. This third installment removed everything that was great about the first game and instead replaced it with everything that was boring. The biggest complaint about the second was the amount of micro-management and the lack of a decent AI. The third has even more micro-management and a dumber AI! Not to mention how impersonal the game is. You can waste hours navigating through confusing, layered screens to get to common functions like production. Andt you can't name colonies. How are you supposed manage a bunch of worlds with names like Scyd and Rel. Its tough to care about a homeworld named Kled 3 when you're Human. Also the level of discord on the planets meant colonies seceding 5 turns into the game! If they had simply beefed up the graphics of the original game and expanded the universe a bit, Master of Orion 3 would have been Ok. Instead they squandered the potential greatness and probably doomed the series. McBoxski

All the fun of chartered accountancy!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game takes all the sharp controls of MOO2 and splatters them in shades of grey. Have a path to the future in mind or a strategy? Forget it. All you can do now is massage the probabilities somewhat. Sure there are lots more probabilities to play with but percentages cease to mean anything as soon as the die is cast. The instruction book is merged with a story that makes little sense and has less purpose other than to make the actual content more dilute. The combat segment takes out all the controls that made it effective. If you had a strategy for developing certain weapons or capabilities they get washed out by the generic "attack" button. They added "realism" by adding all the probabilities and uncertainties. So much so that, give an order, have it go through a couple of layers of bureaucracy and something you intended might happen. That'l be good when the new game "Government Bureaucrat" is leaping off the shelves. I'll hold my breath.

Not a sequal to Orion II

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: October 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I think the biggest mistake by the producers was to market this game as a sequal to MOII. It simply isn't and doesn't feel like one. Rather this feel like the first in a second series of more sophisticated space empire games.
The main problem with the game itself is that it seems very much to be a working model released as a final product. I think they have the basic framework for a good game here, but most aspects seem poorly developed. The game leaves you with the impression is was hijacked by a bunch of supernerds halfway through production.
The menus/control panels are poorly designed especially at planetary level. Here you're left with the feeling of having little connection with what is actually happening (you can't see what is going on) and the graphics are what you would expect from a game developed 15 years ago on a commador 64. Manipulating planetary production using the simplistic icons feels more like programming a computer.
As people have already said the game is clumsy and navigating through it is difficult and confusing.
Most importantly the game feels very flat, there is no arcade quality about it, no gameplay as such. For most this will mean there are no fun bits.
I could recommend this game only to real hard core number crunching obsessives, for who it will be worth the money. For the rest-it feels like a budget game and I would wait untill it is

Possibly the worst game ever?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 13
Date: February 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

That is, if you could even call it a game. Micromanagement hell is more like it. Mediocre graphics at best, hours upon hours need to be spent to learn how to navigate the controls, an AI that is mindbogglingly poor and all this on top of the long delays and poor support. I'm amazed it made it out the door. I'm amazed that the people who brought you MOO2 packaged this and sold it with a straight face. I really wanted to like this game, but it simply is no fun at all. You can either let the game play itself by hitting the end of turn button when you get bored of staring at the screen, or you can delve into a what quickly becomes a hell of micro-management. I've read most of the other negative reviews on here, and they all seem spot on. Read on for more details. I can only hope that someone else will save the genre.

Genius is sometimes misunderstood

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: December 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game well after it was made available despite being a MOO & MOO2 addict. Why? The reviews for this game were horrendous. I bought it only because I saw it on sale for $10.
It turned out to be the best game I ever played. I started thinking to myself why did I love it so much, and think it was going to be as great as it should've been when hardly anyone else did?
1) The aliens aren't the same as they are in MOO or MOO2. While they have the same names, appearances and abilities are only vaguely similar.
2) The interface is very different than MOO & MOO2 though it does have some elements of each.
3) I had already been told this game was bad, and it was hard to learn so I was prepared the reality that this wasn't just going to be MOO2 with better graphics and sound.
4) Everything, I mean everything you could've wanted to control can be controlled which also has frustrated many. It takes quite a long time to learn how to play this game the way it was meant to be played. I spent at least 2 whole days behind the computer to figure it out, and I'm still learning. I bet a year from now, even after dedicated playing will I still learn some things. The first day wasn't fun at all. By the 2nd day I started to figure it out. By the 3rd day I was playing to the point where it was 6am and I still hadn't gone to sleep yet.
I think the immensity of the game is the biggest reason why people have been frustrated. A rough analogy is comparing this game to a fine wine. While the previous games were like soda. Wine requires dedication and years of drinking to fully appreciate. Everyone will love soda, which tastes good immediately. Few will like a fine dry wine. That's not to say the MOO3 haters are wrong. This game is not for the shoot em' uppers or those wanting immediate gratification.
Further, the game while having many similarities in "mathetmatics" (research points, credits, food, etc), the interface is very very different than that of MOO2. I think this turned off devouted MOO2 fans because they had to learn to "walk" again.
But therein also lies its strength. Its going to be the biggest, most sophisticated game you've played. The gloves are off people. Sometimes you got to take 1 step back to take 3 steps forward. Although the basics are the same the interface is very different and you got to figure it out. It was frustrating hitting the turn button while not fully understanding it, but at the same time the AI does the micromanaging for you.
With time you will be able to micromanage actually quite quickly, but in the beginning you will be forced to have the AI do it because you won't fully understand how to play the game.
If you have this game or are planning on getting it, I suggest you give yourself at least a few days and goto the MOO3 boards to learn how to play it. Also download the latest patches. Unfortunately the manual won't teach you what you need to fully know.
While I love this game, to some degree the harsh complaints are warranted because the manual doesn't properly teach you how to play the game. Goto some MOO3 boards and ask around. The graphics too are somewhat mediocre, though the strategy and gameplay are 2nd to none, and that's the most important thing. There are some things that I feel need some polishing up, but considering this is the only game I know of that utilizes this level of complexity, far more than the previous MOO's and over similar games like Civilization, its still breathtaking to play this game at its full potential.
I always wanted a MOO for the big braniacs who wanted to control everything on a level of complexity that blows the others out of the water. I think this is it people, but I also think this is the same reason why many were turned off by it.

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