First Impressions?

[Spectrex]

My first impressions of MOO3 are 100% opposite from what other people seem to be feeling. Every turn I get diplomacy messages that need to be dealt with. I've been moving fleets around and trying to squeeze the last little bit of money out of my planets . Interesting to see how far you can go without pissing off your population. Almost every turn I get some diplomacy message or I need to attend to the Senate.

Information overload? It's not like MOO2 for sure where you can just see at a glance everything you needed to know, but it's more of a challenge now to balance everything out correctly, and I like that - not just a matter of moving little worker icons from the Industry row to the Farming row. There's still a Planets screen and you get just about everything you need from there.

[peacenik]

Spectrex- I agree completely. The key to great replayablity is variables. It looks like many different styles will be feasible approaches, and probably none will be automatic. The downside is the learning curve, and I think now we know why QS took so long delivering the product. I think it will be worth the effort, but I hope they bring out a tutorial in a patch to help newbies/time-strapped. This would have been the first time in years I would have liked a step-by-step tutorial, and I have to believe it would be a pretty easy patch add.

[Craig P.]

First impression:
What learning curve? I'm clearly atypical, but so far it seems more of a gentle slope.

OK, I don't really feel comfortable using dev plans (heck, I don't really feel comfortable zoning out a planet), and I don't know exactly why the AI does everything it does. Nor do I feel comfortable with what sort of emphasis I should be giving my diplomatic messages (except to never beg or plead with the Saurians!). Regardless, in my first game, my empire is running smoothly, and I feel as though I am largely on top of things.

The main thing I'm missing right now is accumulated wisdom. I know how to do the things I need to do, but I don't know exactly what I should do with them. See the comfort level comments.

The interface is nice, except for the slightly broken font system (whose bright idea was it to set something up where there's subpixel spacing between letters???). The main thing that annoys me is that I sometimes want readier access to the military build queue. The view in "Planets" only shows the top item, the view in the system screen only shows icons (which are the same within certain classifications of ship, and sometimes the distinction matters to me).

I figure I'm probably not driving my empire hard enough. I've got massive surpluses at most of my planets (the viceroy seems to like to save), and I'm building a good surplus at the empire level as well.

[Yodasplat]

Interface is a little counterintuitive. Hard to find things and hard to navigate... unless you read the manual that is! Some of my problems with the interface got solved when I took a good hard look at the manual.

More than anything else the game is not hard to understand: you build, you research, you harvest, you attack. The usual.

What is hard to understand is the long term consequences of one's actions. For example right now I am using "natural" zoning. But I have no idea if that is the right thing to do. I mean it sounds good and all but that is a choice that doesn't make much difference at first but can have potentially disastrous consequences if you have a 50 planets empire and you didn't zone it right and now you have 50 slow-growing slow-producing defenseless balls of rock orbiting in space.

No idea so far. Gotta play the game through at least ONCE to start figuring out what the best choices are for your race/game style etc...

[Craig P.]

I'm playing Klackons with natural zoning, and the viceroys are building a lot of mining and industry DEAs. I'm not sure you'll need to worry about slow-producing, except to the extent that there may not be enough food surplus to drive pop growth (and hence employees for your DEAs).

[TrainWreck20]

Yup, I think that is part of the learning curve everyone is referring to...learning how to push their empire to the limit. Which is very important if you plan on crushing other people in multiplayer someday (or the AI on harder levels, I am guessing).

I have figured out how to manipulate most of the controls and what the short term conseuences are, but what is a 'good' production level? Long-term, what am I aiming for? Should I force normally non-industrial planets into higher production to increase my production at the cost of food? What happens in a really big war? What happens to unrest, food, etc.? Time will tell.......

[Harry Seldon]

Originally posted by Stuie


You probably won't have to wait long; seems to happen with any game that's released. I can never understand why someone who likes a game cannot accept that others may... *gasp* ... dislike it. And vice-versa. And then they get all defensive and insulting about it, as if that's going to validate their position.

I can't understand why someone who doesn't like the game would still want to be involved in a forum discussing said game.

[Yodasplat]

Originally posted by Harry Seldon


I can't understand why someone who doesn't like the game would still want to be involved in a forum discussing said game.

To express their frustration I guess. Some of these people are disappointed in the game (and there's people like that: the game cannot please everybody, it would be unrealistic to expect that).

So they come here to vent, especially those that used to come here in the recent past while waiting for the game to come out and after a (long maybe) wait they have been disappointed.

It's understandable (IMO)

[Ray K]

Originally posted by Harry Seldon


I can't understand why someone who doesn't like the game would still want to be involved in a forum discussing said game.

Perhaps they want to warn people who have not yet bought the game to not believe the hype.

[Harry Seldon]

That's understandable, I guess. I'm referencing more to the ones who repeatedly post about how they feel the game is really the sixth house of hell and buying it will bring about the coming of the antichrist, global warming, blah blah blah. I suppose I should be more understanding; spending fifty bucks on a hunk of crap is enough to make anyone flame.

[Ray K]

I will say that I was looking forward to MOO3 for quite some time until the reviews starting coming out.

To be frank, some of the *good* reviews were causing me to reconsider. I'm one of those guys who thought that MOO2 was too big and sprawling, so I was hoping for something in between that and MOO1.

Now, I'm just hanging around on the hope that I'll hear about some killer feature that will make me again want to buy it.

[Harry Seldon]

Just out of curiosity, are you the same Ray K that's writing the java MOO?

[Ray K]

Originally posted by Harry Seldon
Just out of curiosity, are you the same Ray K that's writing the java MOO?

Yes, I am. One of the reasons I temporarily put it on hold was because I was afraid it would be a pointless effort once MOO3 was released. Needless to say, I think I will be firing up the Java SDK again.

[ChaotikVisions]

So its your opinion based off reviews that you don't like it? Fine. But why constantly go at other people about it, afterall, it is just your opinion.

Anyway, about the finaces, heres a little overview I think is correct. Also a note, I play with all the AI settings off, I like managing my own empire.

System/Empire Taxes in Finace Tab: These control the tax rate obviously, and is what you allocate to planets for extra research/military/unreset/planetary grants spending.

Budget Setting in Finace Tab: This is how you choose what extra of your budget goes to things. Need more ships? Bump up the military grants slider some to increase funding, it'll get done faster. The same with research.

For Unrest Spending in Budget Funds: You'll see 1-3 fists depending apon whats going on. An unreset spending level to the left of the red fist means you'll be having people pissed off. One to the right thats before the Yellow could mean still some unrest, past a Yellow fist if its there means minor unrest. If its past the green hand it means they're content. Think of this as the Luxary setting from Civ3, the higher you have it usually the happier they are, but the more costly it becomes.

For Planetary Grants in Budget Setting: This is the extra funds that go to helping a planet develop. This would help sliders like the Normal Economic Development/Terraforming/DEA building I believe.(Note: It may just be giving extra funds in general to planets, nothing i've seen to clarify this or not. But one thing is sure, it'll give more funds to developing worlds and less to well developed ones.)

Not going to go over the Planet settings right now, still working them out. One thing to note, you can run a deficit on either the Empire or Planetary level. The debts you make will have interest as you pay them off, so its wise to shoot for a balanced budget. Anyway, hope this helps.

In many ways this is like when I first "found" Civ2, or MoO2. I had no idea what exactly was going on at first, but gradually I figured everything out. I dunno about this whole cliff buisness though, micromanagement is possible, maybe i'm tunneling under instead of climbing? So long as we get to the same place I guess.

Edit- I really should read what I type so I know wether some of my sentences actually make sense or not.

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by JonahFalcon
You'll lose if you keep clicking End Turn over and over.

I think his point was that he should have lost a loong time ago. Ai not being up to task. Capisce?