The best part of moo3 is....

[Torious]

the Intro, period.

Sorry for the spam, but I feel better now

[Whoha]

I actually Think its ok, if it didn't have the bugs/had better documentation it would be better still, and if the ai could determine whether or not a world was a research world or a ship building world for spending purposes it would be great.

[Vince278]

Re: The best part of moo3 is....

Originally posted by Torious
the Intro, period.
Sorry for the spam, but I feel better now

Actually, the intro was the first thing I hated. The motion in the video was so jerky that I couldn't follow what was going on.

[Whoha]

you have to dl the new rad tools and move a dll to the moo3 directory to fix that by the way.

[Vince278]

Already fixed it. Had to download new Bink Video DLLs.

[Alex]

Originally posted by Whoha
I actually Think its ok, if it didn't have the bugs/had better documentation it would be better still, and if the ai could determine whether or not a world was a research world or a ship building world for spending purposes it would be great.

in other words: if this was another game entirely...

[Unspeakable Horror]

[Skyjack666]

The best part of moo3 is....

The best part of moo3 is....
...uninstalling it.

[Grumbold]

Its still the only game where I really feel like I'm ruling a sizable empire, not just the gopher pushing counters around in an empty country.

[Whoha]

SMAX has governors and automated formers that did a passable job of managing cities though. Still you got a hell of a lot more by doing it yourself.

[Alex]

Originally posted by Grumbold
Its still the only game where I really feel like I'm ruling a sizable empire, not just the gopher pushing counters around in an empty country.

really? I mean, this is surprising, considering that you have so little interaction with the game...

[Grumbold]

Individually pushing around 250 workers or putting them all on auto isn't what I call interaction. I manage all the fleets, planets and policies that interest me and can ignore the others to be dealt with by flunkies. Perfect!

[dexters]

Grum, I'm assuming you're referring to Civ3.

I just have to say that I tried really hard to like MoO3. The whole build your own space empire and design your own warships thing is right up my alley as far as interest goes.

However, MoO3 is seriously flawed as a game. Feedback to user actions is hard to see. And you speak of pushing around 250 workers. Which is true and can be quite tedious when I run out of jobs for them to do, but in Civ, that usually happens in the late game (last 50 turns or so) and if you get that far, with that many workers, you've usually already won and most players stop playing and start a new map .

In MoO3, I find the tedium of constantly monitoring my planets build queue so the governors don't build something stupid to be a bigger chore, and it pretty much is a problem when the late early game hits and I have a good size empire and several well developed planets.

I'll keep trying with MoO3. I can't afford another space empire game at the moment, and MoO3 is the only thing I have installed.

[rkarmes]

I find that MOO3 is still the Space Strategy game of choice for me.

You see, I found that MOO3 is like game of Checkers, or Go. The first few times (or dozen times even) you play it, you feel that the game is... trivial. Take "Checkers" or "Go" for example, the first time I played either of these games I thought they were games for kids. The rules were simplistic and the strategies seemed trivial to me. HA! boy did I learn different after playing a few games with some experienced players. Neither game is simple or has trivial strategies, thats for sure!

MOO3 is like that. The first month or so I played it, I was dissapointed at the seeming lack of input needed from myself. I was in the "Wow, just push the end turn button and watch the game play itself... badly." camp. The manual was poorly done and the strategy guide wasnt a guide at all. It was mostly wrong in the strategy department.. but it did contain the CRITICAL manual elements that were left out of the actual manual. That fact was, I didnt have a clue how to "Play" MOO3. But I stuck with it because it had ... Something... that I couldnt realy define. It had personality, flavor, whatever. The game "Felt" like an epic space opera even if I couldnt figure out how to make the game "work" like I wanted it too.

So, I continued to play it, and I frequented the strategy discussions on the Atari MOO3 boards... and I learned. I learned that mastering the strategies of MOO3 is like mastering Chess or Go. In the beginning, you don't see the strategies, you just play. Its only after a great deal of practice that you begin to see the gem that MOO3 could have been with a little more polishing. It saddens me to think that MOO3 will never get those last coats of polish because the publisher, Atari (Infogrames) has abandoned it as a bad investment But, even so, the game has provided me 100s of hours of entertainment now that I know how to play. I'm still discovering the amazing possibilities that this game provides!

I hope, that maybe, in the future, MOO3 might have its source code released like Call to Power 2. There is so much potential there. However, MOO3 will NEVER be the simple, easy to get into game that people were hoping it would be. Its vision is so far beyond the simplistic galactic domination model that was the basis of MOO1 and 2 that it realy is in a different class all together. That, more than anything, was its downfall. A more approriate sequal to MOO2 would have been a game similar to Galactic Civ. Perhaps MOO3 would have been better received as a stand alone game not related to the MOO series? I think so.

(Yes, you can call me a "Fanboi" if you want)
Rob

[Vince278]

I find Space Empires IV Gold to be a better space game. Releasing the source code for MOO3 sounds like a great idea but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Has anyone gotten the CtP2 source code to compile yet? Haven't heard much lately from that direction yet.