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moo3: what's the word?

Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 1:56 am
by snoe7
sup all. i used to play moo and moo2 like crazy. Then moo3 came out and i played it for about 30 minutes and didn't like it for some reason. I didn't really give it a chance though. So I'm thinking about trying it again. Has anyone played moo3 very much? Is it a good game by itself? And if it is a good game does it even hold a candle to moo2? Thanks.

snoe7

mo3

Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 5:30 am
by Manilla Moxy
moo3 was fun - I would spin the galaxy for about 3 minutes. Then I would get bored and just push the TURN button. didn't boither making ships because they get obsolete once you make them. Just keep pushing TURN my friend and you'll do great!

Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 12:03 pm
by Zanzibar
There are now a lot of fan-based mods and fan-based patches for this game (Atari/QSI stopped patching after 1.25) so I highly recommend checking out the official forums here

Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 4:59 pm
by yaromir
You can't patch a bad game to be a good one.

Tolerable...probably, but not good.

Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:07 pm
by skdiw
Moo3 isn't that bad. It's got a long learning curve, but once you understand how it is intended to be played, it's quite okay. You definitely need to mod and patches, like techs delays and another for combat for examples.

moo3 is different from moo2 and moo so if you are expecting a upgrade, you'll be disappointed. One of the major difference is that you lose a lot of control to your empire. The game got a super complicated mechanics so how the AI manages your empire and where they get the values seems really confusing. It is possible to micromanage, but that's not really how the game is played. You suppose to use your viceroys, even though they may not do exactly what you say or how you wanted, kind of like real life when you manage a bunch of projects and people. Believe it or not, you do get your overall goal achieved, but you have to be patient and wait for quite a few turns. There are many other big differences that makes moo3 a different game than its predecessors.

Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 3:06 am
by Dreamer
... wich doesn't sound atractive at all. For a "game" like that I would choose another name... "Master of Burocracy 3" for example. But what the hell, after all considerations is all a matter of individual tastes :)

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 4:34 pm
by yaromir
I am continuously amazed by the resilience of appologists. Moo3 sucked. It was not enjoyable. It is impossible to know what affect what and how at what time.

Some techs are utterly useless (like ECM, ECCM, Cloaking). Combat map is too large, and early on, you can spend minutes just trying to find your enemy. NOT enjoyable. I had to impose 2 minute time limit on space combat because I got seriously tired of waiting.

It is a complex game, but almost everything happens under the hood. There is little for you to do. Vice-roys? Humph.

What is the difference between Republic and Democracy? I saw little to no effect from switching.

About the only thing it did get right was the policies.

You could go on autopilot first 200 turns and still do very well, just turn auto-colonization on.

The game is just not enjoyable, it is even hard to call it game at all.

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2005 5:51 pm
by haravikk
I actually really enjoyed MOO3, it's just different.

You do really need to skip through the early turns quite quickly though, and there are a few annoying AI quirks. However, once your empire is built up a bit, it gets very fun as the only things you have to worry about are the more enjoyable aspects, combat :twisted:

I love the big space fights especially!

Diplomacy sucks ass though, I just ignore it as they're all going to be my enemy soon anyway, usually within 3 turns of each other. Just keep building spies and fortifying systems.

I just wish it still had active developers, because it keeps crashing for me, oh well. I'll have to dl the latest OS X binary for FreeOrion, see where it's at :)

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 7:41 pm
by yaromir
Actually with all the fan-hacks MOO3 is much better. Still, quite a lot of work to get it to "tolerable"

Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2005 12:06 am
by Carbon Copy Man
My trouble with the game was that I'd start a game, and build up my empire. There were a lot of details for micromanagement, etc, but I could keep up with them because I'd started small.

Save, exit. Return a week later and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Are those ships an offensive fleet preparing for war, or are they just a standard stockpile? Who would I have attacked? Am I ready for taking the offence? How does my tech compare to the enemies'?

I check the build queues, tech research, galactic map and diplomacy screens and find only abstractness. I can't remember which choices were mine and which are the governors'. I'm not even sure how big my fleet is.

And that's about when I give up.

bad...

Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:57 pm
by Vladimir
But im think MoO3 isnt a good game. When i played MoO and MoO2, it was a game about real space. And MoO3... is a game about... maybe about space... but in Exel-tables

Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 2:52 am
by Zoetrope
Wisdom told me that the salient facts about MOO3 were: (1) most of MOO3's design team had never played MOO1 or MOO2; (2) the prevailing spirit was graphics, graphics, graphics; (3) the designers who actively interacted with the community seemed to have little grasp of simple concepts suggested to them; (4) there seemed to be mucho concept art, but very little code to implement any real concepts; (5) the only members who had any prior MOO experience were sacked.

Despite those clear and evident signs, hope and desire overwhelmed caution, and after seeing that the community was patching the game, I eventually bought it.

As Fermat would have said, the major faults are too numerous to catalogue here, except to decry, in their entirety, MOO3's: diplomacy, spying, planetary management, navigation, combat, technology, economics, user interface, population dynamics, AI, user interface, and slow turns. (I accidentally twice mentioned UI in the roll of dishonor: but that seems appropriate.)

The best thing about MOO3 is that the running game can be used as a screensaver in Linux(!)

One more thing: between single-player turns, why oh why did MOO3 copy the mistake MOO2 made in multi-player, and rob the player of access to star map in favor of useless images? We need to see the map (and maybe look at our planetary and fleet details) to plan their next move in the interim between our turns. That would save us (and any multiplayer opponents) a lot of tedious waiting.

I do hope the FreeOrion team will learn from all of that, in a positive sense.

Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 11:03 pm
by Skaro
MOO 3 always felt like a incomplete game to me, you'll notice tons of stuff that never made it into the game when you dig through the files. Sure lots of fan mods greatly improved it, but a mod can only do ever so much.

Let's some up the good and bad:

Good:
- The Ithkul
- Unrest
- The space battles were kind of cool (although it could have been done better)

Bad:
- Everything else


How it should have been:
- The game should have basicly been a heavily upgraded MOO2
- Space combats should have been like Homeworld
- Diplomacy should have been far more balanced
- Spacemonsters!
- We should have had a department of espionage/counter espionage instead of single spies
- A template to design fleets, you should also have been able to build fleets according to this template

That's just to name a few.

Re: moo3: what's the word?

Posted: Wed May 05, 2010 4:20 am
by Alabaster Paladin
I realize that there have been about 5 years since the last post, but I hold out hope that someone will read this.

The major reason people dislike MOO 3, once the numerous problems are rectified with the various official and non-official patches, is that it is such a radical departure from the previous games. The same thing happened with D&D players going from 1st and 2nd Edition to 3rd because most people don't like change, whether or not the new system is an improvement.

MOO 3 may share a common name, history and vital concepts with the first 2 games, but on a whole it is an entirely different game that appeals to many different types of players. Without the undue expectations placed on the game based on its name, and some more polishing time, it may well have become far more popular and accepted. Sure it has its flaws, but what game doesn't. The problem here is that people take one look at the interface and say, "what the hell" and then give up because they assume that it's too complicated, almost without trying. Trust me, it's totally not that complicated because I was 14 and I figured it out, so I'm sure the game community should be able to manage without too much trouble.

People on forums go on and on about how confusing it is and how they gave up; or how it's not in the manual.
I have to things to say about that
#1) How many people honestly read the manual? The answer, almost nobody.
#2) Manuals are almost never good, largely because people know that nobody reads them anyways.
#3) Spending half and hour on the game and giving a half hearted effort at figuring it out is the exact reason why people don't figure the game out.

I know the game has its share of problems, which is why I hope the FreeOrion game turns out well, because it seems to have barrowed many of the good ideas from MOO3 and added excellent content as well. MOO 3 can be clunky, slow in the late game, the AI can suck and even macromanagement can be difficult later on when you have 300+ planets.

However with proper patching, and maybe a little spreadsheet modification, it becomes a good game, with solid play and unmatched scale. I can't think of any other 4X games that currently allow for empire size, fleet size, gameplay time and replayability that can match MOO3.

If anyone wants to know what mod/patch set I use, as well as the spreadsheet changes that I would suggest, I'd be very happy to give that information out because it definitely makes MOO 3 playable and good.
(btw: I admit that without patching the game does kinda suck)

Re: moo3: what's the word?

Posted: Wed May 05, 2010 11:25 am
by Zanzibar
Alabaster Paladin wrote:I can't think of any other 4X games that currently allow for empire size, fleet size, gameplay time and replayability that can match MOO3.
Have you tried Sword of the Stars with all it's expansions? It's a very solid contender here...