Your first MoO3 experience

[Asmodean]

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

[Achnor]

Here is my thought on the game.

First some background. I was a devoted fan of Moo2 as well as civ and civ2. I never played Moo1 for some reason I'm not sure of. What signifies a good game for me is when you get that "good feeling" when playing. Some may say that feeling is when you *need* to click the turn button, other would emphasize on the mood of the game. I can't quantify what this feeling is but it was definately present in civ and moo2. Civ2 was also "there" but Civ3 couldn't manage properly. It was fun and entertaining but thats it.

Now to Moo3.
In my first game I read all the messages and was introduced to the "big" aspects of the game. However, much of it was forgotten within 5 minutes. I did some 150 turns and the restarted.
In my second game I left everything to the AI except for the diplomacy. All I did was hit the "turn" button and talk to the others in the diplomacy window. Eventually, I lost to some other race.
My 3 up to 10th game was more testing the races and getting comfortable with the customisation, running a few turns and see how it looked.
Now, I've just finished a 180 turn game. I don't remember the name of my race (they looked like big snales) and I picked the best bonuses in harvesting, diplomacy and government and the lowest settings in everything that had to do with war. I choose to start in the senate too as I wanted to make a "peacefull" game.
Starting the game I tried to expand as fast as possible. I got a small lead early on and managed to hold that lead throughout the game. However, it wasn't until turn 140-ish that things really got going. I was nice with everyone and had deals with all of them except for two races that insisted on making war. They were fortunately ar away from me so I didn't worry much about the military.

To understand this game you have to take baby-steps. I started learning how harvesting and populatiopn expansion worked. When I got that "under control" I started looking into science. This part is still a bit unclear since you have hundreds of techs and I can't remember them all yet, but that will come with time. Then I started to look into infrastructure and together with what I'd learned from earlier turns, it suddenly started to make sense
I micromanaged my 3-4 biggest planets, always! Sometimes I went through the list and made changes were needed. The AI is not bad but you can do a lot better on your own, still, micromanaging 30+ planets is just too much.

Eventhough I now know where I can find and do stuff, I doo feel that the interface and logic is lacking. I think much of the reason the interface is as cluttered as it is is because the resolution is only 800x600. With a higher resolution you could fit more information in one screen/menu and you could save some clicks here and there. The low resolution really hurts the game when you look at the galaxy. For some reason, the name of the stars is only shown at the biggest zoom, making it very difficult to navigate around an extended system. After I got around 15-20 planets I just had to stop paying attention to the galaxy view as it took too much time to bother about it. The nice thing about the interface is that you can do stuff in more way than one, atleast sometimes e.g. you really don't need the galaxy view. Suitable planets for colonization can be found through the planet view by sorting the list properly etc. Still, this is not good and probably my worst gripe with the game so far. Making task forces is also a very unintuitive way of handling ships. This could be changed by changing some menues. I had to search through menuen for a very long time until I found out where my newly build destroyer was hiding.

I haven't explored the "biggest" aspect of the game yet, warring! I will wait with this part unti I can truly master the economy and expansion. As I said, keyword here is baby-steps.

I noticed while playing that I got the "nice feeling" I mentioned in the beginning. It's not 100% there yet but its already "better" than my civ3 "feeling"...considering this is my 1 serious game in a very complex game I must say it looks very promising.

Just my 2 AU

EDIT: For some reason, when you found a new colony, the first DEA built is industry or something like that. I made a habit of building a harvesting DEA first on every planet. What do you guys thin about this?