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First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2009 2:51 am
by eleazar
Unlike most of you, i had never played MoO3, until yesterday.

Wow. I'm not sure if i've every seen a game that give a more complex, confused, and overwhelming first impression that wasn't made of ascii characters.

Information is everywhere, but it's not obvious what is important, or what much of it means. "Unrest level 2"? Out of how many levels? I'm told one planets has a "magnate civilization" special, but nowhere can i find out what specific specials do. I have over 20 ground combat battle plans, but no hard information on what the differences are.

The documentation is woefully inadequate. The manual is half novel, and most of the rest is seems like surface stuff. The in-game version is "searchable" but apparently only recognizes a few words. It didn't find "magnate" or "specials".

I'd read a good deal about it, but really i didn't think it would be this bad. It (at least at first) feels like a simulation of running a large, badly organized empire where none of your underlings will talk to you.

I'm going to try to play through a whole game or 2 to see what i can learn. At the very least i'll get an even stronger aversion to micromanagement.


EDIT: on the "play" disc i found a file, "Gameplay Addendum" which seems to have some of the info i complained wasn't included anywhere. It seems more useful that the manual PDF that was installed on my HD.

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 9:39 pm
by Underling
oh GOD I hated that game. The vanilla version is an abomination, and after hanging in that community for a year and a half, the finished product left me so bitter, that I ripped it off my HD and never looked back.

For what its worth, I heard that some of the fan made mods go a long way toward making the game playable.
I would suggest getting familiar with the game, and then checking out the community mods/patches and see if they salvaged something worthwhile from that mess.

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 4:24 pm
by eleazar
I patched it up right off, and added on some a few mods that would be easy to evaluate, mostly graphics ones.

What's really blowing my mind now that i'm learning my way around is how much work you have to do to move ships and ground troops around. There are complex rules governing how many of what kinds of ships can go together in a group. Groups that are impossible to make aren't greyed out, you either have to memorize what exactly all the sizes and missions mean, or randomly try them until the game is happy with your task-force configuration, and allow you to proceed. Even worse, you have to assemble your ground troops first, without any feedback on how much room your currently available troop carriers have, and if you try to send out too large a group of grunts, it doesn't bother to tell by how much, or even to edit you selection, it makes you start over from scratch.

The thing is, i can't imagine what rational there is for making you jump through these hoops, especially for the ground troops. Maybe they had a purpose once upon a time but now its just frustrating busywork.

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 4:54 pm
by eleazar
I made my first MoO3 mod. It would have been more useful several years ago, but it needed to be done, and the basic idea was similar to something i that needed to be done for FO also.

This simple mod limits MoO3 to 19 empire colors which are readily distinguishable, instead of a set of 32 which includes nearly identical colors.

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 6:18 pm
by Geoff the Medio
eleazar wrote:...the basic idea was similar to something i that needed to be done for FO also.
I'm not sure what that meant, but feel free to edit empire_colors.xml in default. The format should be self-explanitory.

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 7:15 pm
by eleazar
Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:...the basic idea was similar to something i that needed to be done for FO also.
I'm not sure what that meant, but feel free to edit empire_colors.xml in default. The format should be self-explanitory.
Err, yeah, i was thinking that FO had 32 different empire colors, which would have almost certainly had the same problem of some empires being too similar. Since there are actually only 16, there may not be a problem, but i'll look at it anyway-- i think we can still make them more distinct. Not that it's very important yet.

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 9:16 pm
by Geoff the Medio
It wouldn't be bad if we did have 32 empire colours. Currently if the list is used up, colours are randomly generated...

Re: First impressions of MoO3

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 11:14 pm
by eleazar
Geoff the Medio wrote:It wouldn't be bad if we did have 32 empire colours. Currently if the list is used up, colours are randomly generated...
...Except for the previous mentioned badness of several of the 32 colors being nearly indistinguishable on the galaxy map.

~16-20 seems like the upper limit of a sane number of empires anyway, if not pushing it. Diplomacy with more would be a mess.

Though as an emergency measure it would probably be better to double up on the colors in the list, rather than risk assigning an empire color that is nearly black, for instance.

EDIT: Empire Color stuff continued here