MOO3 review (if anyone cares)
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Well, I bought MOO3 and have played around 600 turns as the Psilons so far. I have gone from hating it, to being entertained, to being annoyed at it. All in all, I have probably spent 12 hours playing since I bought it Thursday.
There is a lot of the game that is undocumented and you learn through trial and error. For most games I rarely read the manual until after I have played the game for 4 hours or so. With MOO3 I read a good deal of the manual first, but it didn't help that much. I think the real manual is the strategy guide
There are a lot of things to like about the game, but so far I am feeling that they are overshadowed by the problems in the game.
Here are the problems as I see them, and I will admit that some of them may be from choices I made in my race in the game.
First, starting location affects your game by a huge amount. The first few games I started with other races near me. What happens is that all the races colonize planets wherever they can and as fast as they can. The problem with this is that everyone ends up sharing their systems with someone else. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but if you go to war with one of these races they can make fleets at any fairly developed planet. There is no way to afford to put a defensive fleet at every single planet to fight these off that I can see. In the current game I am playing, I started out on an arm of the galaxy that had a choke point system that had a guardian on it. This kept the AIs from attacking/seeing me, so I could develop tech and ships without intervention.
The AIs love to spy. You can make a spy every 4 or 5 turns, this applies for the entire game. No matter how much tech you have this doesn't seem to change. If you don't put your spies in enemy governments they act as defensive spies. Well, I can barely replace my spies as fast as they are killed (either inserted in enemy territory or on defensive duty.) I don't think I have had any tech stolen by keeping 2 science spies on defense duty constantly. But I have to constantly make new spies to replace the ones being killed. I think defensive spies need to have a huge bonus to being found and killed, you would think they would fit in with your own people. The spy game amounts to playing MOO2 against 5 darlok races, regardless of your tech advantage.
I am playing a standard game, with a 2 arm galaxy (medium or small size I guess) and the game is taking forever. Even with my huge tech advantage and starship production it takes forever to take a system. And even the largest ships (titan's and behemoths) seem to go down fairly easily to the enemy task forces (sometimes they start close to your ships and can take them out, and once again, this is my latest top of the line ships with a huge tech advantage. When it takes 7 to 14 turns to build these big ships it really hurts to lose them.
In the later game the only starships that seem to survive battle are carriers and missle boats. All other ships, even equiped with lots of point defense, shields, armor, and ECM VIs, get destroyed. As far as space combat goes, if you take control of your fleet you suffer a large handicap in that you can't launch fighters and missles unless you can see the enemy. Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't see anything in the manual. If you just monitor the fight and let the computer run it, he will immediately launch missles and your fighters and send them out to do recon for you I guess.
Oh, the graphics SUCK! I really don't care too much about graphics in a strategy game, but these really blow. The 800x600 resolution is limiting, but can be tolerated. It's a bit blurry on my 19" LCD, but that is partially a limit of LCDs and scaling. The combat screens are horrible, you can't tell which ships are which. They are 3d, but don't scale well. I think they have about 3 textures used on all the planets and ships. And with 3d you would think they could run that at high resolution.
There doesn't seem to be any way to refit your ships, you just obsolete their designs and either destroy the ships or throw them at the enemy. After obsoleting a design, they are not purged from build queues, if you want to keep them from being built you have to go to each planet's build queue and remove them. There is no shortcut to the build queue that I can see. You can either click on the star system, then the planet, then economy, then military and you can then remove each item from the queue by double-clicking on it (it's just as many clicks to get to the buildings queue.)
I do like the customizing of the starships, but it doesn't seem to buy you much like it did in MOO2. You typically want to have the longest range weapons for whatever type of ship you use.
The galaxy map is nice too, you can rotate it anyway you like. The text labels on the planets disappear after you zoom out a bit though, I would like to see this range extended so you can get a better idea of what is going on.
Heh, I wasn't planning on typing this much. I guess in summery I would say that Galciv is way better. The 2 main things that bug me about MOO3 is the lack of any big advantage from an overwealming tech advantage and the UI issues.
There is a lot of the game that is undocumented and you learn through trial and error. For most games I rarely read the manual until after I have played the game for 4 hours or so. With MOO3 I read a good deal of the manual first, but it didn't help that much. I think the real manual is the strategy guide
There are a lot of things to like about the game, but so far I am feeling that they are overshadowed by the problems in the game.
Here are the problems as I see them, and I will admit that some of them may be from choices I made in my race in the game.
First, starting location affects your game by a huge amount. The first few games I started with other races near me. What happens is that all the races colonize planets wherever they can and as fast as they can. The problem with this is that everyone ends up sharing their systems with someone else. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but if you go to war with one of these races they can make fleets at any fairly developed planet. There is no way to afford to put a defensive fleet at every single planet to fight these off that I can see. In the current game I am playing, I started out on an arm of the galaxy that had a choke point system that had a guardian on it. This kept the AIs from attacking/seeing me, so I could develop tech and ships without intervention.
The AIs love to spy. You can make a spy every 4 or 5 turns, this applies for the entire game. No matter how much tech you have this doesn't seem to change. If you don't put your spies in enemy governments they act as defensive spies. Well, I can barely replace my spies as fast as they are killed (either inserted in enemy territory or on defensive duty.) I don't think I have had any tech stolen by keeping 2 science spies on defense duty constantly. But I have to constantly make new spies to replace the ones being killed. I think defensive spies need to have a huge bonus to being found and killed, you would think they would fit in with your own people. The spy game amounts to playing MOO2 against 5 darlok races, regardless of your tech advantage.
I am playing a standard game, with a 2 arm galaxy (medium or small size I guess) and the game is taking forever. Even with my huge tech advantage and starship production it takes forever to take a system. And even the largest ships (titan's and behemoths) seem to go down fairly easily to the enemy task forces (sometimes they start close to your ships and can take them out, and once again, this is my latest top of the line ships with a huge tech advantage. When it takes 7 to 14 turns to build these big ships it really hurts to lose them.
In the later game the only starships that seem to survive battle are carriers and missle boats. All other ships, even equiped with lots of point defense, shields, armor, and ECM VIs, get destroyed. As far as space combat goes, if you take control of your fleet you suffer a large handicap in that you can't launch fighters and missles unless you can see the enemy. Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't see anything in the manual. If you just monitor the fight and let the computer run it, he will immediately launch missles and your fighters and send them out to do recon for you I guess.
Oh, the graphics SUCK! I really don't care too much about graphics in a strategy game, but these really blow. The 800x600 resolution is limiting, but can be tolerated. It's a bit blurry on my 19" LCD, but that is partially a limit of LCDs and scaling. The combat screens are horrible, you can't tell which ships are which. They are 3d, but don't scale well. I think they have about 3 textures used on all the planets and ships. And with 3d you would think they could run that at high resolution.
There doesn't seem to be any way to refit your ships, you just obsolete their designs and either destroy the ships or throw them at the enemy. After obsoleting a design, they are not purged from build queues, if you want to keep them from being built you have to go to each planet's build queue and remove them. There is no shortcut to the build queue that I can see. You can either click on the star system, then the planet, then economy, then military and you can then remove each item from the queue by double-clicking on it (it's just as many clicks to get to the buildings queue.)
I do like the customizing of the starships, but it doesn't seem to buy you much like it did in MOO2. You typically want to have the longest range weapons for whatever type of ship you use.
The galaxy map is nice too, you can rotate it anyway you like. The text labels on the planets disappear after you zoom out a bit though, I would like to see this range extended so you can get a better idea of what is going on.
Heh, I wasn't planning on typing this much. I guess in summery I would say that Galciv is way better. The 2 main things that bug me about MOO3 is the lack of any big advantage from an overwealming tech advantage and the UI issues.
