Let this be the thread where everybody post their first experience with Master of Orion 3...
I'm not looking for reviews, byt rather your thought and feeling upon buying the game and opening the box to install and play for the first time.
Myself, I decided long ago that no amount of bad press, poster rants, family tragedies or international crisis would keep me from buying MoO3. I had missed out on the first two installments in this series, and I wanted to own the third one, no matter what the cost. For the past month and a half, I have been playing Galactic Civilizations and have not really followed the goings on here or on the IG forums. I have been restricting myself to the GalCiv forums here and on www.galciv.com
Nonetheless, I went out and bought the game yesterday 02-28. I had heard that it would be available in Denmark starting friday, and surely...the first games shop I entered had a huge MoO3 display on their "New games" shelf. Once home, I opened the box, and found the following inside: 2 CD's, a manual, and a chart with keyboard shortcuts. Nice. No unwanted ads for other IG games.
Installing the game was pretty straightforward. Only thing that I missed was an option to not install the movies to the harddrive ,but with the sizes of harddrives these days, I guess that doesn't really matter. After installing, the first thing I did was............to turn off my PC and start reading the manual. I hadn't really read much of the backstory before, so for me it was great fiction. I would have liked to have the backstory in one part at the beginning or end of the manual, instead of - as it is - spread out in pieces throughout the manual, but this is only a minor complaint. The game looks every bit as complicated as promised, so I think that the time invested in reading the manual was well spent.
Next - my first playtest - intro movie of extraordinary quality (especially considering that QS had only five people in the art department). Then - game setup. Now as I have never played MoO before, setting up a game involved some difficulty. I truly miss an explanation to the importance of the different race settings. How much does it change if I alter bioharvesting from, say, superb to poor? How is a newbie to know? Oh well...I gues that only playtesting will reveal this. Also the meaning of many of these settings are strange to me as a MoO novice. This could definately have been better explained in the manual. BIG minus there.
The Ithkul look sufficiently scary to have warranted all the mystery. Nice touch. And a great backstory too. I decided to start my first game as harvester. For my other settings I chose easy, three arm large, and lots of long starlanes.
Then...a nice surprise. The easy level comes with tutorial messages. Great feature for a novice like me, and also considering the fact that the UI is rather complicated. The actual game graphics are good, considering that the game is forcing a resolution of 800x600. I like the zoom from galaxy to system to planet.
That's it. Those were my initial impressions. A full review will be posted in the directory in a week or so.
Asmodean
I'm not looking for reviews, byt rather your thought and feeling upon buying the game and opening the box to install and play for the first time.
Myself, I decided long ago that no amount of bad press, poster rants, family tragedies or international crisis would keep me from buying MoO3. I had missed out on the first two installments in this series, and I wanted to own the third one, no matter what the cost. For the past month and a half, I have been playing Galactic Civilizations and have not really followed the goings on here or on the IG forums. I have been restricting myself to the GalCiv forums here and on www.galciv.com
Nonetheless, I went out and bought the game yesterday 02-28. I had heard that it would be available in Denmark starting friday, and surely...the first games shop I entered had a huge MoO3 display on their "New games" shelf. Once home, I opened the box, and found the following inside: 2 CD's, a manual, and a chart with keyboard shortcuts. Nice. No unwanted ads for other IG games.
Installing the game was pretty straightforward. Only thing that I missed was an option to not install the movies to the harddrive ,but with the sizes of harddrives these days, I guess that doesn't really matter. After installing, the first thing I did was............to turn off my PC and start reading the manual. I hadn't really read much of the backstory before, so for me it was great fiction. I would have liked to have the backstory in one part at the beginning or end of the manual, instead of - as it is - spread out in pieces throughout the manual, but this is only a minor complaint. The game looks every bit as complicated as promised, so I think that the time invested in reading the manual was well spent.
Next - my first playtest - intro movie of extraordinary quality (especially considering that QS had only five people in the art department). Then - game setup. Now as I have never played MoO before, setting up a game involved some difficulty. I truly miss an explanation to the importance of the different race settings. How much does it change if I alter bioharvesting from, say, superb to poor? How is a newbie to know? Oh well...I gues that only playtesting will reveal this. Also the meaning of many of these settings are strange to me as a MoO novice. This could definately have been better explained in the manual. BIG minus there.
The Ithkul look sufficiently scary to have warranted all the mystery. Nice touch. And a great backstory too. I decided to start my first game as harvester. For my other settings I chose easy, three arm large, and lots of long starlanes.
Then...a nice surprise. The easy level comes with tutorial messages. Great feature for a novice like me, and also considering the fact that the UI is rather complicated. The actual game graphics are good, considering that the game is forcing a resolution of 800x600. I like the zoom from galaxy to system to planet.
That's it. Those were my initial impressions. A full review will be posted in the directory in a week or so.
Asmodean
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