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OTHERWORDLY EXPECTATIONS
I loved the original MOO, and had a lot of fun with MOO2 despite wanting something more along the lines of the original.
I purchased M003, expecting some changes, (assuming some I'd like, some I wouldn't like) and was excited to try the next iteration in the genre-defining series of Master of Orion.
Unfortunately, the game has turned out to be an utter bust (as anyone who doesn't live under a rock can attest to the high level of dissatisfaction voiced by the player base) for a lot of reasons that should have never been left unchecked.
MOO3 tries to be a richly deep and complex game that does sooooo much, while letting the player use AI assistants, or "Viceroys", to help in the management of the myriad of details associated with the player's empire.
But the net affect of this design leaves players wondering if they are playing the game, or if the game is playing them.
PLANETARY MANAGEMENT (Or lack thereof)
At the start of the game, the player will send out scout ships to nearby stars to explore in the hopes of finding nice juicy planets to colonize. Unlike the rest of MOO3, this beginning task is clear and understandable. I want to find nice planets, I have scout ships to move, therefor, I move the ships out to planets and then check on what what planets look like.
Unfortunately, MOO3 moves entirely downhill from there, as everything becomes more and more muddled.
The the screen from your home planet is filled with countless variables to tweak or adjust. But there is no real explaination on what affects what or when you would want to do one thing over another. The beginning player is left utterly confused here, scratching their head over the sheer (and needless) complexity of the planetary management screen.
Even when you do get an idea of what each thing is supposed to do and attempt to make some changes to get your colony moving in the right direction, the game offers you zero feedback to indicate what affect (if any) your changes had on your planet.
And thus becomes the main theme of MOO3. Lots of things to do, none of which matter.
In addition to this, the bottom of the screen is filled with empire tabs that allow you to go to various settings for your empire. Things like research, finance, ship building, etc.
RESEARCH WOES
Research is another example of how the designers, with likely the best intentions in the world, somehow ended up breaking all the rules from Design 101.
You have 6 areas of research, just like in the previous versions of MOO. You can even slide the scales around a little to emphasis one area of research over the other. But again, we are bombarded with a barrage of needless information that serves only to muddy and obfuscate what is really going on and what is important.
As a player looking at research, I want to know a few simple things. What am I researching, when will I get it, what can I do to get it faster?
In the original MOO, players would establish their own "build order" of research depending on their starting position. Usually, players would set a certain threshhold of environmental research level, to allow their colonies the tech to flourish at a reasonable rate, then would focus on other things, like getting a specific ship hull upgrade or weapon.
But in the original, the goals were clear. They were tangible and attainable. In M003, it is the opposite. Each turn, the player is assaulted with 10 to 20 research updates. "Such and Such is running a bit behind." "Such and Such is not ready for prototyping." "Such and such is now visible in the tech tree!" And on and on with tons of needless information.
And again, if the player makes changes in an attempt to try and boost over all research at the expensive of something else, or tries to foster one school of science over another, there is no meaningful feedback to allow the player to gauge what effect their actions had on research. This prevents the player from learning what works and doesn't work, important knowledge they'll need for the next game they start, and the next.
Unsurprisingly, most players just shake their heads and ignore research, letting the AI handle the management of it. This essentially removes research, one of the cornerstones of a space strategy game, from existence in the game. It becomes a case of "I have reseach and my enemies have research. Each turn, we each are given more technical goodies." It entirely removes the strategic element and becomes just something that happens in the background.
HOLLOW SPACE COMBAT
So here we are playing MOO3, but we are ignoring planet development in favor of the Viceroys, and we're ignoring research as well. So what does that leave?
We can still build and move around starships to protect our planets and colonies, which will inevitably lead to some conflict.
After much wrestling around trying to understand how to get ships into task forces, players can send the ships they build out to defend their planets and frontiers.
When an enemy force is located and the decision made to attack, combat is done in real time on space grid, where you can elect to control your task forces or simply watch the battle unfold. The battle scenes have a little bit of a "2D Homeworld" feel to them, giving a nice feel of combat despite the limited time and effort put onto the graphics front.
However, even space combat suffers from the overall feeling of irrelivance on the part of the player. When you encounter and battle enemy ships, you are only told what type of task force they have and what their weapon damage, range, and speed are.
Once of the best parts of the original game was designing and building ships with weapons and tools that would provide a distinct advantage in tactical combat. Anyone familiar with MOO will remember a battle where they had a combination of a ranged weapon and a repulsor beam that they used to beat their opponent bloody without letting them land a glove.
This led to almost a rock-paper-scissors strategy with ship design, where you would move around a fleet until it met an enemy fleet that out matched it, which would send you back to the design board to come up with the right combination of weapons, engines, shields, utilities to allow you to match the strengths, and take advantage of the weaknesses, of the enemy fleet.
But not in MOO3. Here, you enter combat, watch the explosions go off, then skim the results. Winning or losing cannot be attributed to anything but "I had much better tech I guess" or "I just had him really outnumbered." Once again, leaving the player feeling as if the outcome, for good or bad, was totally uninfluenced by anything he/she did.
GROUND COMBAT CONFUSION
MOO3 tries to take ground combat to the next step. No more of just sending troops down to fight and getting back a numerical result like in the original. Now you actually build your troops into various unit sizes and control them as they actually battle.
When in battle, your forces have countless tactical manuevers they can attempt. Ruse, Flank, Massed assault, and 10-15 more to choose from. But, again, there is no explaination what these different manuevers do, or in what situation you would choose one over the other.
Perhaps it's some bizarre twist on rock-paper-scissors, but if so, you are still not given any feedback as to what manuevers the enemy chose. So once again, the player is left clicking on various commands, without any idea what works and what doesn't. The end result is that most players simply ensure they have more then overwhelming odds in their favor when entering ground combat to secure victory despite the effectively random effects of various combat "tactics."
PUTTING THE DIP IN DIPLOMACY
Strategy games over the years have seen many great leaps forward in AI diplomacy. Anyone who has played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri will remember finally getting the feeling that the player's actions and decisions really had an affect on relationships with AI opponents.
In MOO3, diplomacy seems as random and pointless as almost everything else. in the early game, when you first start meeting the enemy civilizations, you will get mind-bogglingly cryptic messages from your opponents. "Lensar, you are pushing your luck. Please cease your actions immediately or face our wrath." Huh? I am sending out scout ships exploring? What specific action are you unhappy with? Or do you mean you are unhappy that I started a new game and would prefer I quit?
In other games, even games from many many years ago, you could at least build and lose faction with AI empires. But in MOO3, the AI behaves like Sybil on a bad day. Declaring war out of the blue, demanding trade or research treaties, offering congrats or condemnations.
Instead of being a rich addition that contributes to the depth of the game, diplomacy ends up feeling like an annoying interruption. Players are left thinking, "Grr! I am busy trying to find something I can do that will actually make me feel like I am leading my empire here, and you clowns keep sending me pointless messages?!" Often, the player is better off just ignoring any diplomatic messages from other civilizations since, at the end of the day, nothing the player does diplomatically seems to have an affect on anything.
UNTIMELY END FOR THE MOO SERIES
All of this boils down to the fact that the game's overall design, despite whatever noble intentions may have driven the design decisions, is a tragic failure.
It would be easy to blame the developer entirely for how MOO3 turned out, but most of the blame needs to be levied on Infogrames.
Developers working so closely on a game for so long often lose themselves in it and cannot see the forest for the trees. But how anyone at Infogrames who wasn't intimately familiar with the design could load up MOO3 and think the game was critically or commercially viable is beyond comprehension.
Even if, after weeks of study, experimentation, and forehead slapping, some players are able to find some fun and playability in MOO3, this doesn't change the fact that 95% of the people who pick up the game will be turned off in the first few hours of play and simply place MOO3 on "that shelf", or worse, return it to the place of purchase.
In the retail world of computer games, the first two or three weeks of sales are driven by hype and expectation. Beyond that, and especially in the strategy genre, sales become determined by word-of-mouth as friends, reviewers, and posters on internet boards like this one, inform the would-be buying public of how the game stacks up.
I am not sure what the price of the game is at the time this review is being written, but it's not difficult to predict how it will go. MOO3 sales, although perhaps brisk at first, will quickly slow down. This will scare retailers who have a poor selling game hogging lots of shelf space. The publisher, in turn, will become afraid of returns and the possibility of having to take back a pile of inventory they cannot sell, and will there for "price protect" the game by lowering the wholesale cost to retailers.
This is often the first sign of the death spiral for the game. Lowering the price is an attempt to flush the existing inventory out of the retail channel in reaction to poor sales.
In the end, it's hard to imagine that MOO3 can even come close to breaking even financially with a design so inaccessable to 95% or more of the target audience.
This will make publishers and retailers gunshy and will almost certainly rule out the chance of there every being a MOO4 or 5 or 6.
And that's the real tragedy here for all of us who love this genre. Even if countless patches, tutorials, and documentation are issued as damage control to try and salvage some of MOO3's playability, the death shroud has already been lowered.
The one shining light in all this is the hopes that developers and publishers can learn from this failure and put their finger on what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.
We need more fun and playable space strategy games on the market. Unfortunately, MOO3 is a horrible freefall in the absolute wrong direction.
I loved the original MOO, and had a lot of fun with MOO2 despite wanting something more along the lines of the original.
I purchased M003, expecting some changes, (assuming some I'd like, some I wouldn't like) and was excited to try the next iteration in the genre-defining series of Master of Orion.
Unfortunately, the game has turned out to be an utter bust (as anyone who doesn't live under a rock can attest to the high level of dissatisfaction voiced by the player base) for a lot of reasons that should have never been left unchecked.
MOO3 tries to be a richly deep and complex game that does sooooo much, while letting the player use AI assistants, or "Viceroys", to help in the management of the myriad of details associated with the player's empire.
But the net affect of this design leaves players wondering if they are playing the game, or if the game is playing them.
PLANETARY MANAGEMENT (Or lack thereof)
At the start of the game, the player will send out scout ships to nearby stars to explore in the hopes of finding nice juicy planets to colonize. Unlike the rest of MOO3, this beginning task is clear and understandable. I want to find nice planets, I have scout ships to move, therefor, I move the ships out to planets and then check on what what planets look like.
Unfortunately, MOO3 moves entirely downhill from there, as everything becomes more and more muddled.
The the screen from your home planet is filled with countless variables to tweak or adjust. But there is no real explaination on what affects what or when you would want to do one thing over another. The beginning player is left utterly confused here, scratching their head over the sheer (and needless) complexity of the planetary management screen.
Even when you do get an idea of what each thing is supposed to do and attempt to make some changes to get your colony moving in the right direction, the game offers you zero feedback to indicate what affect (if any) your changes had on your planet.
And thus becomes the main theme of MOO3. Lots of things to do, none of which matter.
In addition to this, the bottom of the screen is filled with empire tabs that allow you to go to various settings for your empire. Things like research, finance, ship building, etc.
RESEARCH WOES
Research is another example of how the designers, with likely the best intentions in the world, somehow ended up breaking all the rules from Design 101.
You have 6 areas of research, just like in the previous versions of MOO. You can even slide the scales around a little to emphasis one area of research over the other. But again, we are bombarded with a barrage of needless information that serves only to muddy and obfuscate what is really going on and what is important.
As a player looking at research, I want to know a few simple things. What am I researching, when will I get it, what can I do to get it faster?
In the original MOO, players would establish their own "build order" of research depending on their starting position. Usually, players would set a certain threshhold of environmental research level, to allow their colonies the tech to flourish at a reasonable rate, then would focus on other things, like getting a specific ship hull upgrade or weapon.
But in the original, the goals were clear. They were tangible and attainable. In M003, it is the opposite. Each turn, the player is assaulted with 10 to 20 research updates. "Such and Such is running a bit behind." "Such and Such is not ready for prototyping." "Such and such is now visible in the tech tree!" And on and on with tons of needless information.
And again, if the player makes changes in an attempt to try and boost over all research at the expensive of something else, or tries to foster one school of science over another, there is no meaningful feedback to allow the player to gauge what effect their actions had on research. This prevents the player from learning what works and doesn't work, important knowledge they'll need for the next game they start, and the next.
Unsurprisingly, most players just shake their heads and ignore research, letting the AI handle the management of it. This essentially removes research, one of the cornerstones of a space strategy game, from existence in the game. It becomes a case of "I have reseach and my enemies have research. Each turn, we each are given more technical goodies." It entirely removes the strategic element and becomes just something that happens in the background.
HOLLOW SPACE COMBAT
So here we are playing MOO3, but we are ignoring planet development in favor of the Viceroys, and we're ignoring research as well. So what does that leave?
We can still build and move around starships to protect our planets and colonies, which will inevitably lead to some conflict.
After much wrestling around trying to understand how to get ships into task forces, players can send the ships they build out to defend their planets and frontiers.
When an enemy force is located and the decision made to attack, combat is done in real time on space grid, where you can elect to control your task forces or simply watch the battle unfold. The battle scenes have a little bit of a "2D Homeworld" feel to them, giving a nice feel of combat despite the limited time and effort put onto the graphics front.
However, even space combat suffers from the overall feeling of irrelivance on the part of the player. When you encounter and battle enemy ships, you are only told what type of task force they have and what their weapon damage, range, and speed are.
Once of the best parts of the original game was designing and building ships with weapons and tools that would provide a distinct advantage in tactical combat. Anyone familiar with MOO will remember a battle where they had a combination of a ranged weapon and a repulsor beam that they used to beat their opponent bloody without letting them land a glove.
This led to almost a rock-paper-scissors strategy with ship design, where you would move around a fleet until it met an enemy fleet that out matched it, which would send you back to the design board to come up with the right combination of weapons, engines, shields, utilities to allow you to match the strengths, and take advantage of the weaknesses, of the enemy fleet.
But not in MOO3. Here, you enter combat, watch the explosions go off, then skim the results. Winning or losing cannot be attributed to anything but "I had much better tech I guess" or "I just had him really outnumbered." Once again, leaving the player feeling as if the outcome, for good or bad, was totally uninfluenced by anything he/she did.
GROUND COMBAT CONFUSION
MOO3 tries to take ground combat to the next step. No more of just sending troops down to fight and getting back a numerical result like in the original. Now you actually build your troops into various unit sizes and control them as they actually battle.
When in battle, your forces have countless tactical manuevers they can attempt. Ruse, Flank, Massed assault, and 10-15 more to choose from. But, again, there is no explaination what these different manuevers do, or in what situation you would choose one over the other.
Perhaps it's some bizarre twist on rock-paper-scissors, but if so, you are still not given any feedback as to what manuevers the enemy chose. So once again, the player is left clicking on various commands, without any idea what works and what doesn't. The end result is that most players simply ensure they have more then overwhelming odds in their favor when entering ground combat to secure victory despite the effectively random effects of various combat "tactics."
PUTTING THE DIP IN DIPLOMACY
Strategy games over the years have seen many great leaps forward in AI diplomacy. Anyone who has played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri will remember finally getting the feeling that the player's actions and decisions really had an affect on relationships with AI opponents.
In MOO3, diplomacy seems as random and pointless as almost everything else. in the early game, when you first start meeting the enemy civilizations, you will get mind-bogglingly cryptic messages from your opponents. "Lensar, you are pushing your luck. Please cease your actions immediately or face our wrath." Huh? I am sending out scout ships exploring? What specific action are you unhappy with? Or do you mean you are unhappy that I started a new game and would prefer I quit?
In other games, even games from many many years ago, you could at least build and lose faction with AI empires. But in MOO3, the AI behaves like Sybil on a bad day. Declaring war out of the blue, demanding trade or research treaties, offering congrats or condemnations.
Instead of being a rich addition that contributes to the depth of the game, diplomacy ends up feeling like an annoying interruption. Players are left thinking, "Grr! I am busy trying to find something I can do that will actually make me feel like I am leading my empire here, and you clowns keep sending me pointless messages?!" Often, the player is better off just ignoring any diplomatic messages from other civilizations since, at the end of the day, nothing the player does diplomatically seems to have an affect on anything.
UNTIMELY END FOR THE MOO SERIES
All of this boils down to the fact that the game's overall design, despite whatever noble intentions may have driven the design decisions, is a tragic failure.
It would be easy to blame the developer entirely for how MOO3 turned out, but most of the blame needs to be levied on Infogrames.
Developers working so closely on a game for so long often lose themselves in it and cannot see the forest for the trees. But how anyone at Infogrames who wasn't intimately familiar with the design could load up MOO3 and think the game was critically or commercially viable is beyond comprehension.
Even if, after weeks of study, experimentation, and forehead slapping, some players are able to find some fun and playability in MOO3, this doesn't change the fact that 95% of the people who pick up the game will be turned off in the first few hours of play and simply place MOO3 on "that shelf", or worse, return it to the place of purchase.
In the retail world of computer games, the first two or three weeks of sales are driven by hype and expectation. Beyond that, and especially in the strategy genre, sales become determined by word-of-mouth as friends, reviewers, and posters on internet boards like this one, inform the would-be buying public of how the game stacks up.
I am not sure what the price of the game is at the time this review is being written, but it's not difficult to predict how it will go. MOO3 sales, although perhaps brisk at first, will quickly slow down. This will scare retailers who have a poor selling game hogging lots of shelf space. The publisher, in turn, will become afraid of returns and the possibility of having to take back a pile of inventory they cannot sell, and will there for "price protect" the game by lowering the wholesale cost to retailers.
This is often the first sign of the death spiral for the game. Lowering the price is an attempt to flush the existing inventory out of the retail channel in reaction to poor sales.
In the end, it's hard to imagine that MOO3 can even come close to breaking even financially with a design so inaccessable to 95% or more of the target audience.
This will make publishers and retailers gunshy and will almost certainly rule out the chance of there every being a MOO4 or 5 or 6.
And that's the real tragedy here for all of us who love this genre. Even if countless patches, tutorials, and documentation are issued as damage control to try and salvage some of MOO3's playability, the death shroud has already been lowered.
The one shining light in all this is the hopes that developers and publishers can learn from this failure and put their finger on what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.
We need more fun and playable space strategy games on the market. Unfortunately, MOO3 is a horrible freefall in the absolute wrong direction.
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