How this game compares to MOO III? Is it better or worse or same?

[Yolky]

Just curious, liked MOO III, enjoyed it but never got past turn 50, not much time. Then no time to play. Hoping to get a new computer soon since I don't have the specs to play this game, so curious to all MOO III players what they think of this game.

When I get a new computer I don't know if I should reinstall MOOIII or get this game. So far my complaint of the game is the lack of contol of combat in the game.

So I would like to know what MOO III players think of this game.

[AoA]

In ways very similar to MOO3 (which I guess any 4X space game would be). But as I hated MOO3 and couldnt even get up to turn 50 before getting bored and disgusted, GalCiv2 has that one more turn feeling. Plus it makes me laugh (even just the manual)
I would give you more info but only very recently have I been able to run the program due to my old video card.

[Fosse]

Never played MoO or MoO2. Played and hated MoO3. Thought GalCiv was great and am now in love with GalCiv 2. I've way too many hours to be healthy already and only had it for... a week? It's great.

[ZargonX]

Hands down a superior product to MoO3.

[Gufnork]

Better in some regards, worse in others. It's been a while since I played MoO3 so it's hard to say, but I'd say GalCiv 2 is slightly better, but MoO3 had more potential. Those who didn't make it through the first 50 turns really has no say about MoO 3. They've never played it. It had a steep learning curve, but after that it was a decent game. But MoO 3 offered a challenge, GalCiv 2 does not. So in the long run I believe MoO 3 will win out.

Note that MoO3 is not nearly as good a game as it should have been and I'm still waiting for the true successor to MoO 2.

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Gufnork
MoO 3 offered a challenge...

You've got to be kidding me.

The MOO3 AI was beyond pathetic. Out of the box, all it could do was defend its own territory, and that only in a slow grind of imposing losses on you to take star systems away from it. That's not good enough. An AI has to be capable of attacking you and threatening YOUR territory or you are already in a Can't Lose position. The only AI I ever saw that was worse than the MOO3 AI was the Ascendancy AI.

The patch that gave MOO3's AI some offensive ability pulled its tweaks from fan-based modding. There was one guy working on variables tweaks, and one guy testing them and figuring out what the tweaks were doing and which directions to push. I was the tester-analyzer in that pair, so I got to know the AI pretty well. It was incompetent in more ways than I care to elaborate, and those tweaks could fix only so much.

GalCiv2's AI has a steeper hill to climb because it's a tile-based game instead of node-based, and it still does a much better job.

MOO3 is a study in what not to do in game development. The parts of the game that "had potential" were the parts borrowed from MOO1. The core principles from that game were sound and could be emphasized. They just did not know how to get there, though.


- Sirian

[DDT455]

Hi

I just had to reply to someone saying MOO3 was any good. It was an appauling game. I have literally bought hundreds of PC games and I have only ever taken back two, one of which was MOO3. I played and love MOO and MOO2 and was very disappointed at the total disaster area that was MOO3. The game just turned into a mass of dialogue boxes telling you that X, Y and Z had happened this turn. The ai was pathetic and the combat screen with ships on it was ridiculous.
I played Ascendency which was great fun but again suffered from very passive ai though a patch was later released which rectified this. Galactic Civilizations was an excellent game though lacked the ship building that you could do in MOO2 which was a feature I liked. I have only played Galactic Civilizations 2 for 5 or 6 hours so far but it is clearly a much much better game then MOO3. It is very well presented, the ai is very good (I have lost twice already) and it is well balanced in the sense that it feels you always have something to be doing or something to look forward to. I can't say its a great game as I haven't played it enough but I am really enjoying it so far and would certainly recommend it to friends.

Andy

[ACEofHeart]

MOO3 even after all the modding is still an inferior game compared to GALCIV1 or 2..
Virtually no aspect of MOO3 was an actual finished product and as such it never blended into a gaming experience.. and The Diplomacy in MOO3 was the final nail in its coffin for me.. No intial greeting, no understandable sentences, no pact reasoning,,etc....
I think the game GalCiv2 will soon be compared with is the upcoming Space Empires V..

[tetley]

I own MOO3 (bought it for $10 retail last year), but I made it about as far as the start screen and the instruction manual. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. My understanding was the MOO series has a steep learning curve, and since I never did MOO2, I didn't try very hard to learn.

[Gufnork]

Yeah, you're right. Now that I think of it the AI was pretty pathetic. As I said, it was a long time ago and I guess my annoyance with the GalCiv 2 AI got to me. I think the challenges I found in that game was the perfectionist empire builder in me. I found the expansion in that game fun.

As for the parts that had potential, I guess you need to see my vision of it to see what I mean. It had a lot of features I loved, or would have loved if they weren't broken. That's the problem with MoO 3, it didn't work. Their ideas were good but the implementation sucked.

I still think it's better than GalCiv 2, that doesn't have that potential. And honestly, MoO 3 kept me playing twice as long as GalCiv 2. That's right, two whole weeks.

[Draginol]

Why don't you think GalCiv II has more potential?

It's extremely moddable. All the data is in plain text. Don't like our tech tree? No problem, yo could make your own. Don't like the races? No problem, you can replace them. Don't like the ships? No problem, all the graphics are PNG or .X models.

Moreover, the AI, which I wrote, is not scripted. This means it's not hard coded to any particular strategy. You can the data, the XML, etc. and the AI will adapt to it automatically. I can't tell you how much effort that involved.

[Gufnork]

The game simply lack things that would make it interesting. For instance it's completly devoid of tactics, it's purely a strategic game. While it has the rock/paper/scissors thing that Civ 4 has, the whole point of it is missing in this game. You can't control who fires on who, which makes combat completly dull. I find it hard to make it interesting.

The economic sliders are a micromanagement nightmare for those of us who expects maximum efficiency. Sure, we could ignore the inefficiency, but I don't work that way. I'm a perfectionist.

The races really aren't that different. You can't make them that different. No matter what you do to them, you'll still be using very similar strategies. While MoO 3 didn't quite achieve what I'm looking for atleast they felt much more different. They had different requirements for good planets (making for some convinient alliances), some races didn't need food, etc. It was lacking in the implementation, but the ideas were there.

What I liked most about MoO 3 was the hints of a macromanagement game. You could set tags on planets and make schemes on how they should be built. These didn't work even remotly adequate, but it's a good thought.

I think what's missing is originality. What's new in this game? The ship builder is nice and gets a lot of kudos, but it doesn't appeal to me (can't please us all). The planet quality limiting squares to build in is fairly new to me, but again not very interesting. Really, it's no different from civs worker system except you have to upgrade more often (thank god it does that automatically atleast).

That it's highly moddable is a great feature in a game and you deserve kudos for that. It's what I loved most about Civ 4, in it's raw form I found tons of complaints. But it didn't require much to fix it. In GalCiv 2 I don't know where to begin. I don't know what to do to make it interesting.

I may be overly negative because I expected too much from it, I love TBS and I've played pretty much every game in the genre. I lose interest in most games fairly quickly due to the poor AI most games have, Civ 4 is the only game I have yet to beat on the highest setting.

The thing I do love about the game though is your business policy, if you keep the updates constant. I can understand your high frequency updates right after release considering how riddled with unnecessary bugs it was. I can understand the difficulties of making a game work on every machine, but the fundamentals should work. But as it is highly moddable and you do seem to intend to release many updates (even for the AI) I still hope that I will find a version of the game that appeals to me. But I'm afraid that right now my highest hopes are for Space Empires V.

[Destroyer]

I loved Moo3, I hated Galciv.

Moo3 had fantastic depth, but poor AI.

Galciv just wast fun, had poor instructions and kept crashing.

I hope Galciv2 is a big improvement.

[tetley]

If bug-free is important to you, you may want to wait a month or two on Galciv2 and get a later patch.

[MasterDave]

I tried really hard to like Moo3. I defended it in the forums (for a while) and obsessed over it a year and a half before it came out. I even played it on line for about six months or so. In the end, there were serious bugs in the combat that killed the game for me (such as point defense only firing at random times, allowing whole fleets to die to a single volley of missiles). Also, the AI out of the box was pathetic, although later patches made it servicable.

Galactic civ2 so far seems like a deeper game, although the pacing is a bit slow. Also, there are elements missing, and there is a lack of feedback to the player about the economy, approval rating, etc. Plus the interface is somewhat lacking (I still do not know which of the 6000 subscreens tells you whether you are good or evil, etc).

I do think that the AI is pretty good, although one's success in most games seems largely dependent on how many quality planets you can rush your colony ships to before the other guys get there, and I love the sense of humor in the tech and diplomacy messages.

Being better than Moo3 is not that big a milestone, and I would say that from what I have seen Gal Civ2 would be better. However, I think that an updated Moo1 or Moo2 with current graphics and stable multiplayer would blow away either Moo3 or Gal Civ2 IMO.