Not intuitive either, especially compared to other games.įinally, one of the most important parts of any space conquest game: The Fleet.Ĭouldnt design ships nearly as easy as Moo2 or any other space game. Difficult to find important info, details were meaningless or impossible to find, you always had to click a bunch of times to see the essential screens. Also (cuz I like repeating other people over and over again) the UI was a big mess. They got rid of the point system eventually, but so much of the game was originally based on that one principle that everything else was a mess without it. The original only allowed you to do so many things each turn. This is largely due to the point system being removed. Its difficult to control everything and darn near impossible to get precise control over most things. The developers spent a lot of time building up this wonderful startegy game, and then 6 months before release they changed almost everything at the last minute and the result was crap. The other guys summed it up quite nicely. I need to get my hands on that expansion. I loved Moo2 and am really enjoying Galactic Civ 2 right now. Moo3 was horrid overall, but especially when compared to all the other quality space conquest games out there. Looks like everyone beat me to the punch. It has its flaws, but it's a milltion times better than MOO3, and it's even better than MOO2 in many ways (and I was a big MOO2 fan). I'll second the recommendation of Gal Civ II. Those last two were what made me return it in disgust. People also discovered that you could win a game by just clicking the next turn button without ever making a single move. It would act like it did, but upon loading, all your moves since the start of the turn would be lost. Worse, it was buggy as hell, the AI was nonexistent, and the game was unable to record a save in the middle of your turn. But the game's UI to deal with all those details the player was now responsible for was horrendous, and the vestigial advisors didn't work well. The project ran very behind, Wilson was booted, and the whole ambitious command point thing was scrapped to make it more like a traditional 4X.
You would have a limited number of command points or something that would allow you to directly adjust those details, but not enough to do that everywhere. Part of its idea was as galactic emperor you couldn't command every minute detail of your empire and would rely on advisors to run the day to day details (ie: what buildings to build on a planet), with you concentrating on setting the higher level strategies. (Probably only one of two times I'd ever needed to do that among the hundreds of games I've bought).Īs I understand it, MOO3 started as a huge, very ambitious, and groundbreaking project led by the guy who literally "wrote the book" on MOO2, Johnny Wilson. Fortunately for me, MOO3 came out before EB stopped accepting returns, so I was able to get my money back.