Starting a MoO3 game

[Bakkus]

Hello there,

I´m about to start a new MoO3 game in the coming days, an I was hoping that anyone here could give me any helpfull tips on how to make the game as plesant as possible.

Do you know about some Mod(nothing that changes the game dramatically), fixes or other helpfull things that I should have in mind before I start my journey. I´m almost a total noob to this game so every small tip that you think is not worth mentioning, probably is very helpfull and will be much appreciated.

From the top of my mind I remember having alot of trouble with designing ships and constantly trying to keep my ships up to date, or even understanding what was missing in my fleet and why my ships did so bad in space combat. Is there any auto design and (auto-)upgrade for my ships possoble in the game. Also is ther ea posibillity to halp make the interface more accessible and/or possibly get a better resolution ingame?

Well anyway I´m quite exited to go home after work and nice session started, so if anyone has anything helpfull to add please do so, so that hopefully my experience will be as pleasant as possible.

And most important of all, if there are other people in the same position as me they could possibly benifit from this thread aswell.

Best regards from Iceland.

[Bakkus]

Update #1
I started off by Updating my game to version 1.25. Then I updated my game with the following mods for more enjoyable playtime(http://www.moo3.at/mods/).
Gofur's MoO3-UI v1.0
Gofur's Moo3 UI v1.2 Update
Encyclopedia Mod v5.0

Then I started playng. First off I started as Human and was mainly just a single System empire, and focused on just infrastructure and Reasearch. It was goin well and I was gettin to know the game. Main activities were in the diplomatic arena(and getting raped by enemy spies.
The main thing I did during my empire management was changing the levers in the Finance window, choosing spending Vs. saving, and prosperity vs. war. In the end I got Blockaded by an enemy Empire and my Civilization slowly bled out. not a big surprise, but I managed to learn something along the way.

In my second game I decided to try to be more of an expansionist. so I built more colony ships and some default warships aswell. I took me a while to figure out the "Create Taskforce" function. :S
I also start designing new ships(a must with ever changing technologies), but it seems to me that I´m not able to upgrade old ships with newer versions of items.

What frustraded me the most was how hard it was for me to Colonize planets in a system where my friend had one planet colonized before. It seem that the fact that he had a ship in the system prevented me from colonizing any planet in that system, is that correct? The only way for me to colonize would be to attack him?

This frustrating situation endured for the remainder of the game... just loads of Colony ships in the system(the AI sends them there constantly), yet nothing gets colonized(and nothing is said in the reports from the AI at the beginning of the turn, so I wonder if its a bug or something).

And if I Allowed the AI to build Col.ships and colonize as it saw fit it constantly colonized planets that where not selfsustaining and eventually the ppl just moved away from the planet, so I stopped that AImanagement.

In this game I even managed to win some epic battles with my fleets and that was just cool. I did not have any way of evaluating the outcome in advance, so it was all quite random to me, if I should win or loose. Then agan Ground combat is something I have never tried and no idea how to do... my AI builds alot of troopships but then again I saw some action where I was able to "create groundforces", but I´ll have to look into that later.

Anyways just some thoughts I had here at work.

BR.

[Whoha]

Bhruic's patcher has a bunch of bug fixes for the game so get that.

and getting raped by enemy spies

Either get the no spy mod, or always choose dictatorship and max the oppressometer. While you are at it max FLU's, those are brokenly good at adding production to various DEAs.

What frustraded me the most was how hard it was for me to Colonize planets in a system where my friend had one planet colonized before. It seem that the fact that he had a ship in the system prevented me from colonizing any planet in that system, is that correct? The only way for me to colonize would be to attack him?

Signing a nap might let you do it, but it has been so long since I've signed a nap that I don't know for certain.

Ground combat may as well be random, though bringing more troops than the other guy generally works, alternatively always bombard from orbit.

Space Combat is generally about alpha strike missiles and fighters, if you see the other guy first, and launch first you generally win, though armor and shield tech will obsolete fighter weapons and missile warheads. There is no way to tell how the enemy ships are outfitted unless you've been fighting them for a while, so you won't know how the combat will turn out until the shooting has started. The ai will always launch a volley of its heaviest missiles first(the volley most likely to be ignored by the PD bug...) then followed up by a bunch of harmless PD missiles so don't despair if it seems like a giant wall of missiles is headed for you. There is of course much more to space combat, and many guides with far more depth have been written, though it seems like the old sites are gone.

One last bit of advice, disable immigration, that seems to speed up my game. In
\GameDataSets\Classic_01\GameData\Common\ there is a file spreadsheets.mob, this may be opened with a zip utility. one of the files inside is called Population.txt. Extract this file to a folder called SpreadSheets and change the following line:
This line is important:
Distance to system -5 per jump
Change the -5 to -999 and it seems to short circuit the loop that checks through where population can move to. -5 is much too low, that means that every region on every planet checks every region on every planet for a minimum of 40 jumps for government encouraged migration alone.

The other benefit to no migration is fewer multispecies planets, which don't really work in moo3.

[vmxa1]

For sure get 1.2.5 patch. Then I would use Strawberry mod. It has most of the Bhuric patches and some from Gerra. Vanilla mod stays as close to original as it can, but Strawberry has a 1024 patch made for it that support 1024x768.

In Spreadsheets.mod I copied it to Spreadsheets.zip. Unzip that and looked for unrest.txt. Then find unrest.BAD and the field for Pirate and changed the 3 to 0.

This stops the nonsense of making system ships to quell unrest. It is many to save me a lot of work putting up 3 to 5 cutters every place that says it sees pirates.

To get rid of all spies go to spybuilding.txt and set the MaxSpiesPerBurner to 0.

Lock the military queue when you get a new colony. This lets you control what is build, for the most part.

Obsolete all ships and design new ones as you need them.

I prefer to not make any LR or SR ships or at least task forces. No missiles either. Instead I will design a PD ship that is actually a carrier. When you get LFG, then you can make some true PD ships.

SP will charge in and die quicker, LR are nearly as bad. Carrier, PD will move out of the way, if they can and let the fighters do all the work.

One thing I did was to install Strawberry and then copy the executable from Vanilla over it. Then if you want to add other patch use Bhruic patcher. The only one I have beyond the Strawberry is the Retreat patch.