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Pure Garbage

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: July 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

One of the worst games I've ever played, and I've played a lot of them. Master of Orion 2 is a better game and that was made years ago, by a different developer.

I played it for about a week when it first came out, and the bottom line is that it is just not FUN!!!

I even gave it another chance when the patch was released, and it still just wasn't fun.

Entertainment is the point of playing a game like this. The problem is that the guys who developed Master of Orion 3, created a game that is too much work for too little entertainment value!

The graphics have all the charm of an excel spreadsheet, and the interface (while not impossible to get used to) is needlessly complex.

Save your money...just do your taxes, it's pretty much the same thing!

If there is to be a Master of Orion 4, it's development needs to be taken away from Quicksilver...they don't know what fun is.

Play MOO 2, this isn't worth the time it takes to learn

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: July 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is cumbersome, difficult and, well, boring. I played at least 20 hours of this, and I really wish I could have those hours back. I guess I kept expecting to stumble across something I had missed that made all the ridiculous interfaces useful.

The space combat just plain stinks, there is no reason to even attempt to control it. The ground combat is completely unintelligible. I never could manage to figure out how to bombard a planet, it just wouldn't ask me if I wanted to although it is listed in the 200 page manual as an option. My spies continually died long before they ever did anything useful. Threatening representatives of other races resulting in nothing (playing politics was the thing I was most looking forward to in this update).

I tried really hard to like this game, the graphics are good, and the 3-D map is cool. But the MOO series is about being able to control worlds and manage empires, and frankly, I felt like I was just along for the ride. MOO 2 is a much better game and I still highly recommend it.

Warning - DO NOT BUY THIS GAME

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: June 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I pre-ordered this game, I played it for more than 40 hours, you see I thought any game with lots of complexity must become fun at some point, it doesn't. The game is much like "playing" an Excel spreadsheet. The interface is a unique combination of unintuitive, counterintuitive, and downright irritating. If your idea of fun is hunting amongst many menus for information, which you will do a lot of as the game ships with one of the worst manuals ever put on paper, then there is an outside chance you won't begin cursing at the screen. It has been described as a macro-strategy game, a better term would be a game that is primarily designed to play itself with the only neccessary human action being clicking the turn button. As of this review thay are working on a BETA patch, You can expect lousy customer support from Ataris and Quicksilver. I reiterate, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. Save your money.

Micromanagement Hell

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: February 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I tried the demo and found this to be a truely awful game. The question you would normally ask at this point is "Why did you buy it?"

Because we are using it to investigate products with awful user interfaces as part of a class project. By comparing this game with the two prior Master of Orion games, we can understand what happened and how the problems can be avoided. As a case study in bad design, it's excellent. As a playable game, it's awful.

A specific example: It's a space conquest game, so you would expect to need to create ships. Many ships, many times, on a lot of planets. You must go through at least 5 levels of menus to build a ship, on every planet where you wish to build a ship.

The rest of the operations you would normally perform as a would-be space ruler are equally difficult. I wish they had spent less time on the flashy graphics and more time testing how users would use the game.

Stay clear...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: March 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

...this 'game' is a joke on every thinkable level. It takes more micromanagement to prevent the moronic AI from doing things you don't want it to, than if everything had just been left to you in the first place. The latest patch fixes a few glitches, but you cannot repair a poorly designed and coded game with a patch. Do you know it is actually possible to win this game at the hardest setting, without doing anything after the first round? Some call this title strategy. I call it silly. Get Space Empires IV: Gold Edition, or Galactic Civilizations instead. I noticed that Infogrames has changed their name after this title was released. Perhaps, after the other great title they messed up, Grand Prix 4, they saw the writing on the wall...

The good the bad and the ugly... without the good

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Lots of good ideas in this game, unfortunately almost all of them are half baked. Just about every feature would be great if it were implemented well. Like exploring planets. Why can't you see the details of the planet untill you land on it. Even a hint would be nice. I like the idea that you can have a multi culture empire, so that you could land the matching subjects on the matching type of planet -- if you could figure out the planet type before landing, or you could see the speicies ocuping the colony ship.
Don't even get me started about the space combat -- not only is it impossible to control the ships but you can't see details of the enemy. Does their tech outclass you ships -- cant tell. I know they have lots of missles and fighters but there is not way to save your shots for them or support other groups with your beams, or target your small missles against their anti ship missles.
Ambitious game, but they obviously ran out of time and just had to release whatever code they had.
Terrible, awful, stupid game. Don't waste your time or money.

Frustration to the max

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: March 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Yeah, I'm a little late in writting a review for this game (about three years). I decided to write one now, because i bought this game the day it came out, and just within these past few months (of 2006) i actually figured out how the game actually works. It definitely has a high learning curve, i must of had 300 or so hours in playing this game before i was even a novice at it. To say it's complicated is a serious understatement. There's so many settings and buttons that it reminds me of one of those purposly complicated chain of machines and gadgets they use to do simple things like open doors for fun. Just when you think you have it figured out, something happens that makes you throw a drink across the room and shout "Why the $%%# is it doing that???". The main weakness in the game is the manual i think, it simply doesnt do a good job of explaining how the game actually works. Only about 40% of the features and interactions are explained in it. You're basically on your own to figure out everything else, which leads to a mountain of questions. Heck, it took me about two years of playing the game on and off before i actually figured out how to create a task force. Other questions still haunt me, with no answers to be found. Can you disband a ground force unit? Do they actually cost maintenance like the manual says....? Anyone?

Supposidly, the game has a lot of automation features that make it easier for you. Unfortunatly, these never work the way you want them too. I cant count how many times i've been in the thick of a war, only to find that all my colonies are building scouts and colony ships rather than warships. Great, the enemy is pounding away at our borders, but i got 30 colony ships in reserve, thanks a lot. I'd like to say that the "Planetary AI" feature does some things right, but it really doesnt. Instead of setting an compromised, steady financial setting it usually likes to just run the colony into the ground for a few turns, then do nothing at all for a few turns to fix the damage.

The fix, of course, is to simply turn all the automation off and do everything by yourself. Which....can be quite a task when you're controling 30 or 40 worlds. A single turn can take upwards of around 20 minutes like this (usually it takes about 600+ to win the game). It's kind of sad that this is all the game is about when it comes down to it. About 80% of your time is simply going to be spent on getting your colonies to do what you want them too, when supposidly it's supposed to be done for you.

Of course...all this frustration has to be leading to something really good right??? Nope. The battles systems is....pretty basic. There really is no room for strategy, brute force always wins. The Ground combat system is laughably simple, yet confusing as to how it works.

Which leads me to my next rant: Taking Planets from enemys. This....is extremely difficult. Invading a system, and destroying and local fleets, and planetary defences is actually the easy part of invading. The hard part is what to do next. Do you want to just destroy the colony on the planet? Or do you want to invade the planet and control it yourself?

Well...if you want to choose the wisest path and just nuke the colony, you got yet another headache in store for you. It's basically darn near impossible to do so. It can (and does) take about 30-40 turns of orbital bombardment to destroy a colony (as opposed to the one or two in MOO2). The only time effiecent method is to invade with ground forces and take the colony for yourself. This leads to yet another series of headaches. For one, the ground battle system is kind of a masterpiece in that it is both idiotically simple, and complicated at the same time. You get to choose from about 20 different battle tactics on how you're going to assault the planet, without any explanation at all on the benifits or weaknesses of any of them. Basically it's just a matter of guessing and hoping for luck. If you do conquer the planet, you're in control of all the alien race there. This isnt so great because the AI isnt very picky in choosing planets, so you usually end up with a real dump (yet another planet you have to manually control), with a population thats useless to you. You cant really create things like colony ships there, because they'll create ones of their race, not yours. So on top of the mountain of frustrations you have already, you get another: Somehow finding a way to keep your entire empire populated by your original race for simplicity's sake.

I'll stop before i get to far into this, rest assured i could write pages more of the headaches you have to deal with, but you get the idea. The only other thing i want to mention is the interface really is a terrible design. The first thing i learned in my freshman VB class was to make the interface user friendly (number 1 priority), these designers had a whole different agenda. I wont go into many details but let me ask you this: When you go to File, then Save As then click a file, it asks if you want to overwrite the file. As an industry standard, which side of the little menu is "OK" and "Cancel" on? "Ok" is on the left. Of course, the designers of MOO3 just felt the need to be different, and cause tons and tons of frustration for people who blindly think that clicking on the left button saves the game.

All in all, i play the game because I "Want" to like it....not really because i do.

A Waste of $20

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Unfortunately, this game is a waste of the $20. I am sorely disappointed. As a fan of civilization II and MOO2, I expected much better.

The initial graphics were slick, but the backstory makes little sense to me. The interface is difficult to navigate (e.g. you press escape to go back a level, but press it too many times and the game asks if you want to quit). It also tends to overlay windows and superfluous graphics over your selection.

I found myself simply pressing the turn button over and over again with no real purpose. Controlling planetary production was pointless. But letting the AI do it meant it chose the wrong thing to build 25% of the time (I had 4 troop ships and no battle fleet to conquer a star first!).

This is one of the few times that I'd like to get my $20 back. This game isn't worth the price of the media it's produced on.

At least it was cheap...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

As a big fan of the original MOO, and an even bigger fan of M002, my interest was peaked with the release of M003. After getting side-tracked with other things in life, I stumbled across the game recently for much less than the usual amount, so I picked it up.

It pains me to say, this is a complete disappointment. I would've been better off spending the money on lunch, at least that would've been temporarily satisfying.

I think most of the other posts covered the rather pathetic AI system. The part of this game versus M002 that really bugs me is the change in the space combat. Not sure who thought it would be a good idea to change from the turn-based combat to "real time", but they need to be smacked around.

With M002, you had much better tactical control of combat situations. There were many-a-time in M002 where I had my 4 titan-class ships going up against 90 doom-star/titan enemy ships. With the control of individual ships, it was just a matter of using superior tactics to wipe them out; with no casualties of my own. But in M003, all you can do is give general "attack", "move", "retreat", etc orders, and can only sit back and watch as the AI bungles it and your fleet gets decimated.

In M002, with each class of starship, there were also various shapes/designs to choose from. So a squadron of "cruiser-class" ships didn't all have to be the exact same look. This might be a picky detail, but I always named each ship individually when I constructed them. To me, it gave the game a more personal feel. Also, in M002, you could take your ships back to space-dock to be re-fit/upgraded when new technology was discovered. In M003, all you can do is label a design "obsolete", and have to start all over again.

The ship design and combat sequences remind me a lot of the Star Trek game "Birth of the Federation". (That was another great disappointment.)

The game "manual", while about 150 pages in length, was rather useless. Most of it was taken up with a "pre-history" of the game and events that ran through the other two games. It seemed to me that someone at the company just fancied themselves as some budding sci-fi author, and used this as an opportunity to try their hand at writing.

Tip to the designers for next time (if there ever is one): Don't completely gut the core of an already great game. Just tweak it and/or upgrade graphics and such. Of course, if there is another installment to this series, I doubt I'll even give it a chance.

apallingly bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: April 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The makers of the game (not MacSoft) had some good ideas for how to expand this game beyond MOO2, BUT the implementation of those ideas was absolutely horrid. Win XP GUI programmers fired by Microsoft apparently built the user interface. It is the definition of ugly.
The game has the user running the mouse around all over the screen like a mad scientist in a bad 50's horror flick just to do simple things. It takes a minimum of 5 clicks strewn across the width and breadth of the screen just to get to where you can change what a planet is producing. In MOO2 it took 2. If I want to mouse like crazy, I'll play a first person shooter; it's much more gratifying.
This game reminds me of Pax Imperia in many regards (ship design, fleet movement, planetary development). Pax Imperia turned my stomach over a decade ago.
The game is not complex - it's cluttered and cumbersome.
The automation in the game is a godsend, except that by the time you get the clunky parts of the game automated to the point of not having to deal with them, all that remains is click the turn button again and again like a trained ape. Boring.
On the good side MacSoft did a great job of porting the game. Maybe that should be on the bad side - MacSoft could have improved it. The star chart looks nice as do the aliens, but those things aren't worth the asking price of this game. Don't buy this game. In fact, the makers should recall the game and us all our money back. Or maybe just tell everyone it was really a cruel April Fool's joke.

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