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Chieftain
Local Time: 20:35
Local Date: November 1, 2010
Join Date: Dec 2001
Posts: 59
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My Slightly Bitter Review
If MOO3 were a coin toss - I'd say the coin landed on it's side. There's alot about it to like, if it were it's own game. But it's the third in a series of games, and for my money the first two were not without problems, but more fun. There's alot of great new stuff in here, but in the intial release not much of it works to my satisfaction. I'm sure it could all be made to work with a patch and/or user mods, but who wants to spend $50 hard earned bucks for the promise of a good game after waiting all this time? There isn't even a good manual to read while your waiting, the manual that shipped with the game is weak, even by Rantz's admission.
What's fun about any space strategy game? Well, getting to build combat-ready spaceships is sure a blast for any science-fiction fan, and was one of my favorite parts of the first two MOO games. But unlike the first two games, building spaceships yourself in MOO3 is an absolute chore. There's no easy way to compare different designs in the (IMHO) abysmal and bland ship design screen, so who in thier right mind is gonna want to sit and see if Auto-Firing, Armor Piercing Procto-Blasters are more effective than Improved Recto-Phasers with two degrees of miniturization? Finding on your own that sweet combo was so satisfying in MOO2. But here, your pretty much railroaded into just hitting the "auto-build" button. In fact alot of this game railroads you into doing what the AI wants to the point that you may wonder if you're playing the game, or if the game is playing you. Regardless, having been looking forward to third-generation spaceship building, with new techs, and new graphics I found this game's answer to that to be deeply unsatisfying. I've had more fun in Excel than I do building ships in MOO3.
Well, this game is supposed to have the advanced AI that frees you from that kind of micromanagement, right? The real fun of a space strategy game is taking it to the streets mano-a-mano in glorious 3D combat. Well, don't sell the farm for that new Radeon card yet - the graphics engine must have been designed when the project first started four years ago, and apparently QS didn't have the time, inclination or budget, or all of the above to bring the combat engine into the 21st century. The graphics are not necessarily bad in my opinion, there a step up from any of the previous games by far, and I can live without them if there's strategic depth that I can control. But the combat mechanics are pretty awful, everything happens so fast, and there's no way I found to slow it down or pause it so you can effectively order your fleets, to bring the short range ships in close, sweep the long range ships out the flanks, keep the point defence, carrier ships and missile ships in a defensive cluster away from the fray. Now THAT'S fun!!! There's really no excuse for that, especially in single-player. It wants to be in there, it wants to be cool and fun, but again the ham-handed implementation of the game pretty much railroads you into just clicking "watch" and having the AI play the game for you. *Sigh* I hope my computer is having more fun that I am watching it fight massive fleet battles with my ships.
Researching exciting new technology is another fun facet of a space game. Mind-boggling advances in hyper-tachyon physics!!! Hooray! But in MOO3 getting a new tech is really kind of a drag, because you can't refit your existing fleet to use ANY new technology, so for every drive, weapon, weapon mount, special, armor or shield tech you discover or improve, you must return to the painful design screen to use it, and not just for one new ship, but every ship type in your inventory that can use the advance. Discover a faster drive? Obsolete every design, and redesign every ship you know how to build from the ground up to use the new improved tech. 16 different ships types with 9 different missions, and all these can either be system (local) ships or Starships which can patrol the galaxy at large. And between different ship systems, and improvements for existing ship systems, there must be hundreds and hundreds of techs, forceing you to either continue using "outdated" tech, or completely redesign every single ship every 10 or so turns. This is the kind of micromanagement hell I thought this game was supposed to save us from. Then on top of that, the new designs are (relative to your current production technology) so expensive that it takes many presses of the "next turn" button to start to have enough of the new ships so that you can build task forces, the basic fleet unit in MOO3, by which time you've discovered something else anyway. And that's only if you manually tell your planets to build them, otherwise they'll just crank out more and more troopships for you. The new weapon tech advances are baby steps apart instead of great leaps forward for your navy, so you can get away with not upgrading right away, but this just means there are way too many techs in the game, making the discovery of any one, a very ho-hum event. Remember when you discovered neutron blasters in MOO2? Oh Yeah. Not here though. Planetary, Government and Spy technolgies are equally plentiful, but these work a little more smoothly because either techs just apply themselves immediately, or the planetary AIs handle building them, and the AI doesn't need to refit existing buildings, it can just keep adding them to your planets as you go, constantly improving your colonies thoughout the course of the game. This would be a good thing, and is certainly nice in the early game, but later on I found my empire was mining/harvesting TWICE as much minerals/food than my empire could actually use, with no profit made from the excess, so by the time you discover yet another bioharvesting/mining improvement, I was overwhelmed with a deep sense of "Whatever". Well, if your empire is mining/harvesting too much, you're building to many mines and farms, right? Well, yes, but your not the one building them, the AI is, and going back and undoing everything it does is twice as much work and half as fun using the bulky interface as if you just chose what to build in the first place.
OK,what about space fleets, those are pretty cool in space games right? Just think of those battle groups of Imperial Destroyers scouring space for the rebel forces in Star Wars! Yeah! Well the task force system is very cool in MOO3, and adds a nice naval flavor to military fleet action, with different ships and fleets filling different roles just like fleets today. The different roles each ship, and then each task force are assigned to do add a very deep strategic layer to the mix, and I think this is one major improvement over the previous games. But then again point defence ships don't seem to be working consistently against missiles, which seem to be overly powerful in comparison to other weapon types without this balance. Troop transport Task Forces automatically disband after landing thier armies, kinda like if we invaded Iraq and then had our boys walk back home, or even weirder if we disbanded the units they were in and they magically appeared back home after a few years. Who's the game guru who came up with this ground combat deployment model? Nothing that can't be fixed, but after all the delays in releasing this game, with the promise that it was to fix bugs, I'm not too forgiving about this kind of stuff anymore. So yet another great idea has most of the fun beaten out of it by a faulty implementation.
OK so maybe MOO3 wasn't really supposed to be a tactical space combat game at all, but an game of political intruigue and struggle amongst strange alien races. Well, as I see it, that missed the mark by a light-year. Races will declare war or threaten you for no apparent reason, and then the war will mysteriously end. No, they won't approach you with a lucrative offer of tech or cash or galactic real estate in exchange for your mercy, you'll just look in the sitrep at the beginning of some turn and it'll say "War has ended with the Turdarians". Yawn. But don't worry, it'll start again in a few turns as quickly as it started, and for as little reason. Allies do seem to stick closer to you in MOO3, which I like, but don't bother asking them to trade with you. Unless they come to you, I've never had even my closest ally accept any trade offer. Making a counter-offer to a proposal doesn't work at all, and I've heard bad things about the Orion Senate being bugged in the forums, but starting a game without being a member you can't ever get into it anyway, and I haven't had the good fortune of starting a game in the senate yet, so I wouldn't know. And anyway when I think of this kind game, I'm seeing laser beams blazing across the cosmos, I'm not really as interested in C-Span in space, although that can be a nice facet, if properly implemented. Which it's not. Again.
So to sum up - The macromanagement angle of the game is a great idea, and the big galaxies with the starlanes to channel forces into provides a nice strategic element, so the game plays much better in the mid to late parts than either of the other two by far. The Task Forces are very cool. Ground combat is better in someways, worse in others. Alot of the game looks much better, but some of it doesn't work as well as in the previous games. The byzantine and inconsistant user interface is a drag, and they took away alot of the really cool features the other games had, like leaders, heros, fleet experience and ship design. Oh sure leaders are in this one too, but they are more like special events that last a few turns than valuable additions to your empire because they die of old age or get killed by spies in a few turns regardless of how much you love and protect them. Just a couple of tweaks here, a few fixes there, and a smattering of what was great in the past would make this game one of my favorites, and I'd be first in line for the expansion pack. The only reason I bother to air what I feel are this games flaws for you to read is that I can tell this was a labor of love for QS, and I hate to see something so good come so close to greatness but miss the mark because of silly little stuff. You know how when you say a word over and over 100 times in a row it starts to lose it's meaning in your mind? I think thats what happened at QS after four years of working on this baby. Now with fresh feedback from us and little more TLC and elbow grease from them, we're gonna have a real winner on our hands. But until a patch comes out I would hold off on dropping my cash down for this one, unless you feel sure you know what you're in for. Peace to the races, and props to QS for getting us this far, just don't leave us hanging please!!!
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