Master of Orion 3 - What Went Wrong?

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Hmmm... sounds like the CivIII debacle (and yes, that was a regrettable purchase in the end).

OH well, this looked like a good game.

One reason I am simply taking a "wait and see" approach with MoO3 instead of writing it off is that I love CivIII. I was around for the hysterical ranting in the CivIII General forum when the game came out, and am wary of the same phenomenon here.

Still, the criticism I'm seeing here is mainly well-reasoned, concrete sounding stuff, which gives me pause.

I have a friend who is supposed to get the game soon, so I may wait for his opinion before deciding.

It definitely seems to need patching.

-Arrian

[Ianpolaris]

Arrian,

If you have the opportunity (ask your friend!) to try the game first before buying it, then I strongly recommend that you do. I rather strongly suspect that you will not want to buy it yourself, but you never know. It might appeal. It has apparently for some here. Just because I can't understand that appeal doesn't mean you won't.

However, I urge you...all of you...not to buy it until you have playtested it out for yourselves. Too many stores will not take the game back.....which is the mistake I made.

-Polaris

[Arrian]

Polaris,

I think he has the game on order... so there is no way to playtest it first (for him). He will just have to be my guinea pig

-Arrian

[MitchDev]

Originally posted by Arrian

I have a friend who is supposed to get the game soon, so I may wait for his opinion before deciding.

It definitely seems to need patching.

-Arrian

Do the safe thing, wait for your buddy to go on vacation or a business trip, borrow the game, and thoroughly test it as others have suggested.

There is an interesting game there, not a true MoO-game, but its not to everyone's tastes, I'm still on the fence with just a few days till my brother-in-law gets back to the states and will want the game back...

[wilebill]

MOO2 loaded under XP without complaint.

Started MOO2 and was amazed. Now I see why people who have played MOO2 are disappointed with MOO3. Of course, having learned MOO3 to some slight degree I knew generally what MOO was all about, so getting rolling with MOO2 took somewhat less than an hour. I printed out the manual on disk but I could have left it as a .pdf file since all the information you need is right there in the program.

Graphics are 640 x 480 SVGA, but they are really well done and not hard on the eyes. Music through audiophile grade headphones is acceptable, not bad at all! The "Reference" in the program seems quite complete. There is right mouse button popup help for almost everything. Speaking of not hard on the eyes, all fonts in this program are sharp and clear and easy to read. No blur.

Well, what can I really say that everyone does not already know about MOO2? Excellent game, 5 stars, anyone can quickly learn MOO2 with at most an occasional glance at the manual, if that. I will be playing a lot of MOO2, no doubt of that.

I am not giving up on MOO3. MOO2 is now at patch level 1.31. According to a review I found, MicroProse took a very long time to fix the bugs in the original MOO2 release, so if QS's MOO3 follows tradition it may be six months to a year or more before MOO3 is in the same flawless highly polished state as MOO2.

If MOO3 survives, that is. Read the post-release reviews of MOO3 at Amazon.com by people who purchased it through Amazon. They are not good.

[Ianpolaris]

wilebile,

Yes the 1.31 version of Moo2 is better than the original, but the original wasn't bad! AFAICT the 1.31 patch primarily corrected balance issues (such as the Creative Cost, Gryostabilizers), adjusted the enemy AI (to make it more aggressive in diplomatic contests), etc.

The point is that Moo2 version 1.21 (the original) was still better than Moo3....and considering that Moo2 was published in 1994 IIRC, that is almost criminal IMHO.

You are right thought. AFAICT the biggest critics of Moo 3 are ex-Moo2 players (I am one), and I think you are starting to understand why....

-Polaris

[kalbear]

Ah, NOW I understand why people say that moo2 out of the box was fine.

They were playing 1.21. Or 1.2, I thought.

That's not how MoO2 came originally. It was a 1.0 release, and it had crashing flaws all over the place. That's the version I played, and I had to wait a while to get it to 1.2 . It wasn't just balance issues, it was things like shooting planets with shields caused CTD, weird customizing issues, total lack of challenge AI, strange bugs in space combat...all sorts of things.

[Ianpolaris]

Kalbear,

You're right. It was version 1.2, and that was the way I got it straight from the CD....so at least for me (this was back in '95 of course), I found the game to be quite playable out of the box. Of course the balance issues were semi-serious which is why I loved the 1.31 patch, but that was neither here nor there for playability.

-Polaris

[vmxa1]

The later and finally boxes came with 1.2, but I had the original at 1.0 and it did have some significant problems, but was fun. 1.2 help, but was was still too easy to get the AI to surrender systems. 1.3 finally got most things fix and I think 1.31 corrected who goes first in assualting planets and a few other tweaks.
It will still crash on a rare occassion, but I managed to get dozens of games between them.
Arrian is correct that Civ3 boards had tons of unhappy players and still gts some, but the game worked out of the box for me and I understood it. Moo3 has no game bugs, but is very hard to get all the data you need to handle the game play. The more I understand it the better I enjoy it, but that is subjective.

[wilebill]

"The more I understand it the better I enjoy it, but that is subjective."

Also subjective, it seems that the more I understand, the more to understand there is revealed because the gameplay horizons of MOO3, I suppose any game, expand with the stature of the player?

Do I remember from a pre-release review that MOO3 was at one time conceived as a program that would learn from the player and adapt the behaviours of the AI's to the player based on gameplay in prior games? (Maybe I am trying to believe that the reason the AI's are seemingly idiots in MOO3 is that the program is diagnosing all of US as idiots?)

Or am I confusing this with Galciv where game strategies get uploaded to the Metaverse when you connect, and you in turn get enhanced AI strategies downloaded to you that are based on the uploaded strategies of the best players so that the game as a whole learns to play more like a human over a period of time?

[N4M8-]

No, I vaguely remember that as a stated goal because I remember thinking that the game would learn to play against me, then play like an idiot against a friend who borrowed my machine because it was geared to face me.

Not that I don't like the concept of adaptive programming, but I don't trust an industry that doesn't seem to understand what AI truly is to give me something that is truly adaptive and learns to play a generally strong game against all opponents.

[vmxa1]

You will not be seeing any neural net AI's in games any time soon.

[Ianpolaris]

vmxa1,

A neural-net game would be neat to play I think, no (assuming it was developed well)? Oh well, we can dream can't we

-Polaris