Rating: 
Summary: Ultimately disappointing
Review: If you are like me (interested in the next MoO title, skeptical that people who hated this game are either stupid or too impatient), you'll likely buy it anyway. When you do, you should know the following:1) The manual is useless. Worse than useless, it's often wrong. The only way to learn how to play the game is to hit the discussion forums at the quicksilver website and read the newbie questions. It will take a couple of days. 2) The game as published is buggy and almost crippled in some aspects. There are two patches available from MacSoft... download and install them immediately. 3) It's a terribly slow game. I don't mean, slow like RTS games are "slow" because there's a long startup period. I mean, slow like by the time you get well into a game, the turn processing takes >5 minutes in a large galaxy, and it starts to get boring to play it. 4) There's an open-source version of this game being developed, called Free Orion. Check it out; offer your help if you can; these people have the right idea. I wish there were a "perfect" or "definitive" game of galactic conquest out there that was optimized for the modern OS's, but there's not. This one isn't even close.
Rating: 
Summary: Requires extraordinary patience to learn, but...
Review: ...it's actually not too bad. but let's get the bad out of the way first: the battle graphics are pathetic. the world map graphics, though, are very pretty and stylish, as are the animated races which are all artistically done. the problem lies in tedium. answering all your diplomacy messages in a large game is mind-numbingly mundane, since you'll almost always accept proposals presented by other races. Also a big turn-off is the lack of automatic upgrades to your ships. You must do these manually. It's not a big deal, since you won't have to do this often, but it seems sort of unnecessary. Another very significant problem is the insane mediocrity of the first twenty turns or so. this time is spent almost entirely on colonizing other planets, give or take some turns depending on the size of the galaxy you're in and how many races you choose to surround you. One more problem lies in the AI of your governers. You can turn them off (thankfully), but then you have to make all your build queues manually, and that's also a bit of a chore since construction takes much less time than, say, Civilization 3, so a lot of time is spent readjusting the three queues in your planet bases. Also, you'll never want to control the real-time battles, nor will you want to watch them, since the graphics are disgustingly bad and the gameplay for that part of the game is weak. Now, for the good: The game is very surrealistic, the music is fantastic, the graphical style is pleasant to look at, and neat little touches such as being able to see your forces blow up entire planets, or invade them, or bombard them with long-distance starships. that's the cool part of this game, seeing all your work put to good use, creating massive armadas and armies in dropships. basically, capturing a planet comes in three simple steps: eliminate space defenders, unload all ordnance on the planet next turn, and send in your ground troops and give everyone orders. it's very nicely done. or, if you prefer, you can just blow up the planet with a planet destroyer. all in all, if you can look past the faults of the game (i'm sure for many, it'll just be too much to handle), you'll find that it's a nice piece of software that had a lot of effort put into it.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best game out there
Review: I just started to play Lords of the realm 3 and have been playing many more games lately (every month a new one). At the same time i've been playing MOO3 continuously for the last 6 months. With the patch 1.25, it's been my favorite game. There are fantastic games out there (Rise of Nations, GALCIV or CIV3 just to mention a few). However, none of these is as deep or have given me so much room for imagination. I am still learning the game, which is great. I guess if chess came out today, it would get the same bad reviews.
Rating: 
Summary: Wretched
Review: Dull, dull, dull. The game truly feels like work rather than fun. Stick with Moo2 -- it's much more enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but better than its reputation
Review: If you buy this expecting another Master of Orion 2 (as I did), you're in for some disappointment. The game is far less intuitive, has a much steeper learning curve, and offers less immediate reward than its predecessor. However, if you stick with it for a bit, and get used to the game's emphasis on big-picture control rather than micromanagement, you'll find a very rewarding startegy game with lots of replay value.
Two things cost it it's fifth star. First, theree's a lot of bugs. Second, the AI leaves something to be desired. Still, its well worth it, especially now that the price has gone down.
Rating:
Summary: Stay clear...
Review: ...this 'game' is a joke on every thinkable level. It takes more micromanagement to prevent the moronic AI from doing things you don't want it to, than if everything had just been left to you in the first place. The latest patch fixes a few glitches, but you cannot repair a poorly designed and coded game with a patch. Do you know it is actually possible to win this game at the hardest setting, without doing anything after the first round? Some call this title strategy. I call it silly. Get Space Empires IV: Gold Edition, or Galactic Civilizations instead. I noticed that Infogrames has changed their name after this title was released. Perhaps, after the other great title they messed up, Grand Prix 4, they saw the writing on the wall...
Rating:
Summary: Only evil people should be punishment by playing this game!
Review: playing this game is similar to a cruel and unusual punishment.
this game is vexing , tedious , vain , working at McDonalds is more fulfilling and fun !
And I would rather commit suicide than work at McDonalds!
Do Not Suffer Your Self To Play This Game!
Master of orion 2, MOO2, is ten by the power of millon times better!
Rating:
Summary: I wanted to like this game, I really did.
Review: Like a number of other reviewers on here, I seem to have been there from the beginning. Played MOO when it came out, still play MOO2 all the time (it even runs beautifully on my new XP machine, of all things, and takes up about 78 mb. I have newer games with savefiles bigger than that). Those games were/are great. They enticed you, encouraged you to explore and expand your empire, to try new and daring things (and even had humor, like how your 'citizens' in MOO2 demand a stadium if you happen to play it on April 1st). M003 takes all those wonderful elements and converts them into something akin to getting partially stuck in a revolving door in 100 degree weather. The interface works..sort of, if you don't mind 15 subwindows at a time warring with one another. You finally figure out how to tell a mineral rich planet to build more industry, only to return later to find your Viceroy working on political buildings. Odd looking creatures occasionally show up on your video display to declare war or peace or engage in cryptic insulting matches like 'We peacefully demand you withdraw from our space with anger,' as if all the programmers were not just hooked on phonics, but smoking it like crack. You squint at glowing trade lanes, a new and hideous addition to the MOO pantheon, which converts your galaxy from idyllic space to a odd web of ships bumping back and forth like Los Angeles freeways writ large. You hope that on one of the about 8 CDs that make up the game you will find what you're looking for: Master of Orion III god damn it, bigger, better, and more glorious than ever. Another Viceroy proudly announces that your 40-transport ship task force is finally ready. Your WHAT? You begin drinking heavily. In the end, you're left with something like Highlander II or Godfather III or The Phantom Menace..people keep telling you, with a mixture of pity and cruelty, that it's related to the great predecessors you know and love and that if you just give it a another chance, download a few more patches, maybe play it with 'Ode to Joy' ringing in your ears and 3 shots of tequila burning in your gut, it will all come together for you. Well, it doesn't. Somebody wake me if Master of Orion IV ever shows up.
Rating:
Summary: Deepest Space strategy game
Review: The first game i bought was Master of Orion 1. As a science-fiction fan i loved it and still do. I spent many nights playing it and never got bored. Master of Orion 2, despite the lack of balance, is also a great game and i played it a lot.
Therefore, i was really looking forward to Master of Orion 3. When it was released, i was shocked by the reviews and the reactions of the buyers. When i got the game i was very prudent, but wasn't surprised by the bugs as i had read a lot about it. So i played a couple of games, just to get used to the game and UNINSTALLED IT. Why? because i hated it? NO...i knew they were working on a patch and decided to wait. Was the game on release unplayable? i'd say yes. Was the ai bad? no. Some bugs didn't allow the Artificial Intelligence to do it's work correctly.
The patch 1.2.5 corrected a lot of things. With the patch, the game is higly enjoyable. People who complain about the fact that they have to go threw many screens to build a ship didn't get the concept of the game: you design the ships, and the ai will produce them for you! I rarely go to the planet screens to have something special i need. Developpment plans are a powerfull tool for the ones who understand how to use them. It took me sometime to understand the game, and i am still learning (finally a game that keeps me thinking after a week). The game is deep. Who should buy this game? patient people who love strategy games, puzzles and are not afraid to go threw the discussion boards to gather informations on the game Who should not buy it? gamers that buy a new game every week and want to be able to understand everything after an hour. Even if the game is not perfect, i play it now as much as i did MOO1...to the great anger of my girlfriend. Did i tell you the game was deep?
Rating:
Summary: Micromanagement Hell
Review: I tried the demo and found this to be a truely awful game. The question you would normally ask at this point is "Why did you buy it?" Because we are using it to investigate products with awful user interfaces as part of a class project. By comparing this game with the two prior Master of Orion games, we can understand what happened and how the problems can be avoided. As a case study in bad design, it's excellent. As a playable game, it's awful. A specific example: It's a space conquest game, so you would expect to need to create ships. Many ships, many times, on a lot of planets. You must go through at least 5 levels of menus to build a ship, on every planet where you wish to build a ship. The rest of the operations you would normally perform as a would-be space ruler are equally difficult. I wish they had spent less time on the flashy graphics and more time testing how users would use the game.
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