MoOving In: A Detailed Preview of Master of Orion III
PART 2: FOR CUSTOMIZATION'S SAKE (Page 5)
By Daniel Quick | Apolyton CS Co-Owner/Administrator

Bioharvesting is, for all intents and purposes, farming in space: your race's means of food production. Presuming a planet has a medium-size population, you can set this as a Dominant Economic Activity (DEA) and set priority to build related structures there. In regards to 'Race Picks', choosing the Poor option deducts -1 from farming efficiency and decreases the amount of rare materials harvested by 15%. Good adds +1 farming efficiency and increases rare materials harvested by 15%. Doubling these two values will give you the details behind the Superior option. Average uses the default farming calculations as its name implies. Humans' Bioharvesting ability is Average. Elsewhere, there are four options to choose from in the Citizenship menu. Loyalty and Duty deducts from the unrest factors on your planets by -15 and -7 respectively. Conversely, Liberty adds +5 from the unrest factors on your planet, and this is the Human race default level. Association uses the default unrest calculations.

Under the Creativity banner, the Original and Adaptive settings decreases the chance of having a technology overrun and increases the following: that the overrun is beneficial, if it occurs, and the chances of an overrun being reported to you. The difference between the two are the levels in which these actions occur: 10% and 5% across the board respectively. Imitative, on the other hand, increases and decreases the said odds in the reverse order by 5% across the board. The Normal option is self-explanatory. In Master of Orion III, Humans have the latter most ability in this capacity. That said, as I soon discovered the Human race is Dangerous when it comes to Cunning ability. This option adds +2 to spies' abilities and adds +10 to their luck. Sharp uses the default spy calculations; Quick and Slow options adds and deducts -1 to and from your spies' abilities respectively.

Economic(s)ally, Humans are by their nature Investors: interest rates earned are 5% higher above the default economic calculations held by the Specie option. This refers to hard, coined money. Debt interest is decreased by 2% and by 25% so is the "heavy foot of government", i.e. the amount of effective control government influences over the economic patterns in a society. Monetarists affect the same areas in the same direction only instead by 2%, 1% and 10% respectively. The Barter system decreases interest earned by 1%, and increases both debt interest and "the heavy foot of government".

Two of my personal interests are history and politics. Academically, half of the double major Honours B.A. degree I am currently pursuing is the law. As such, one area of computer strategy gaming that I especially like to look at if and how governments are incorporated into the game itself. MoO3 has this in spades. In a future instalment of this preview I will come back to the specific forms of governments here. What is important to establish at this point is that unlike turn-based titles in the Civilization series, you do not acquire all of these through technological advances in MoO3. Based on the Government Type that you select within the 'Race Picks' screen prior to commencing gameplay, you will be limited -- at least at the start -- to forms of government that fall under your selected categorization. What Quicksilver, the game's developing house, has done is distinguish between government type and government form. As such, a little pre-planning is required on your part.