1. You can customize a race, but certain factors are hardcoded. Especially youir habitability preference. For example if you are a member of the etherean race you will like gas giants and dislike everything smaller and canīt change anything due to customization. This doesnīt mean that you are stuck with the preferences of your race as you can encounter planets with mjagnate races (races which either didnīt form an empire (foe example Ajadar or Rhea) or MOO2-Races which whose empires were destryoed by the antarans (for example Darlok or Elereian)).
which, after colonising their planet, become members of your empire (if you build a colony ship it gets inhabited by the members of the dominating population on the planet, so it is possible to build colony ships for all the races within your empire as long as they have at least one planet with shipbuilding capacity where they are the majority of the population [of course this also applies to races from conquiered worlds ])
The habitability prefs of these magnate races can vastly differ from your own.

2. Nope, youīre the leader of your race, but if you want you can let your viceroys (each planet has its own leader/AI, called viceroy) take over most or even all aspects of your planetary government. Often it is wise to do so, as with empires spanning hundered of planets it can be a lot of work to micromanage everything (MOO3 also has nice tools to adapt the planetary viceroys to your preferences and needs )

3.
a) Fleet battles instead of battles ship vs. ship. You can still design your ships individually, but then you put them into armadas which can be up to 18 ships strong (a number which can be edited via text files ). In a combat for a system up to 10-12 armadas on each side can püarticipate in the battle (if you have more, the fleets that participate will get selected by random)

b) You are encouraged to use more macromanagement instead of micromanagement. There are lots of tools to do so.

c) Planets are much more detailed than in MOO2. Each planet has different regions (up to 12) and in each region you can put up to 2 DEAs (dominant economic acivities), for example research or mining which is some kind of specialization for this region (for example scientific DEAs produce beakers, whereas mine beakers produce minreals [needed for industrial prooduction, but also a source of income]). Each DEA can get upgraded with certain buildings, but this is something which is normally governed totally by the planetary viceroy.
Each planet can house different races, as it is determined per region which race lives there (so you can have region 1 inhabited by Itkhul but region 3 inhabited by Psilon for example)

d) Ground combat is more detailed. Now you choose strategies upon landing your ground forces on the planet. Ground combat can last for several turns if you arenīt able to take the planet within the first turn (and you can bring in reinforcements, if youi still have filled transport armadas within the system.

e) There is no learning curve, but a learning cliff It takes much longer than for MOO2 to master even the basic aspects of the game, it takes much longer to get deeper into the game. But if you are willing to learn the game is fun

f) You donīt have a research tree, but a research matrix. But you donīt know every possible tech the research matrix could give you for a certain level. It is determined by random at the beginning of the game which techs can be researched by your race (there is a percentual chance for each tech to be "known" by your race; you can influence the chance by the creativity pick inrace customization)

I mentioned only some of the differences between MOO2 and MOO3, there might be a lot more

YOu should visit the ATARI-Forum for MOO3, as it has lots of threads concerning the various aspects of the game:
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forum...splay.php?f=224

And, if you buy it I recommend to install this mod:
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forum...ad.php?t=469442
It fixes most of the bugs the game still (after the last patch 1.25) had and adds lots of gameplay elements which where included within the game, but deactivated.

(but there are lots of other mods within the subforum)

Last edited by Proteus_MST on 26-01-2006 at 06:57