Rating: 
Summary: Buy this game if you love pain
Review: This game was the worst use of 35 bucks I have ever seen. I may as well have taken 35 bucks out of my wallet and flushed it down the toilet. I tried to play this worthless morass of mind-bending algorithms for about three days before I literally threw the game away. Shame on these designers. What were they thinking?
Rating:
Summary: The good the bad and the ugly... without the good
Review: Lots of good ideas in this game, unfortunately almost all of them are half baked. Just about every feature would be great if it were implemented well. Like exploring planets. Why can't you see the details of the planet untill you land on it. Even a hint would be nice. I like the idea that you can have a multi culture empire, so that you could land the matching subjects on the matching type of planet -- if you could figure out the planet type before landing, or you could see the speicies ocuping the colony ship.
Don't even get me started about the space combat -- not only is it impossible to control the ships but you can't see details of the enemy. Does their tech outclass you ships -- cant tell. I know they have lots of missles and fighters but there is not way to save your shots for them or support other groups with your beams, or target your small missles against their anti ship missles.
Ambitious game, but they obviously ran out of time and just had to release whatever code they had.
Terrible, awful, stupid game. Don't waste your time or money.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but should have been great
Review: If you have the time to put into learning it, it's not bad. Overall, I like it, but as a follow-up to MOO2, it disappoints. On the plus side, I've played it on everything from an 8500/250 (pre-G3 chip) to a dual 1.42ghz G4, and the turns process well on all of them, even the 8500/250. This is better than MOO2 Mac, which didn't start processing at reasonable speeds until the G3's came out. Sadly, the graphics in the game are on the low end of the spectrum, even for when development started. The aliens are drawn well, but the diplomacy screens disappoint. Ships are just colored arrows on the screen until you get into close, and even then they are low quality (by modern standards) images. MOO2 combat graphics are better.I was disappointed by the Orion Senate screen. I was excited by the prospect of proposing laws and resolutions, but the implementation left me cold. You are allowed to propose laws and resolutions, but only within a very limited selection. And most of those don't interest me at all. When you first start this game, if you haven't read anything at all, you will be quickly lost. If you've read the manual, you'll be better off, but you'll soon realize just how many necessary things are left out - but do read the manual for the storyline, it's the best part. The best way to learn gameplay and strategy is to go to the web and find the newbie forums. After reading through them, play awhile, then go back to the advanced forums to learn the tricks you haven't figured out on your own. I haven't tried multi-player yet, so I can't say anything about that. I hope that it will be better than the single player game. MOO3 is good enough that I continue to play, but not so good that it will replace MOO2 in my list of favorite games.
Rating:
Summary: Worst follow-up game ever.
Review: Like most of the other reviewers, I'm a long-time MOO fan. I keep Win98 box around just so I can keep playing MOO2. Do not buy MOO3. All the fun stuff from MOO2 is either missing or buried so deep in the UI that I can't find it. The gameplay is neither compelling nor addictive. Playing MOO3 felt a lot like doing income tax - lots of nicky-picky details you can't ignore, hunting for the right forms to fill out, and sparse documentation telling you to do things that don't look right after you do them. A huge disappointment - save yourself the heartache and do not purchase this product.
Rating:
Summary: The bad posts speak for themselves, but...
Review: Well if anyone takes the time to read all these (i read most of them) you'll know that your not alone in thinking this game might have been the single greatest crime against humanity since the invention of the paid toilet expectations so high for this game that it disapointed gamers across the contry when it came out. i am really hoping for a MOO4 in the future that can bring this series back to its roots and claw its way out of the grave that it buried itself in. I will research the game before i buy it definitly. I just feel that if this game was released by Microprose all of our lives (and our wallets) might have been spared. i seriously had one eye become moist when i discovered the complete horrid truth; that this game blows. the first day i got this game i poped it in learned most of the controls and stuff and about 5 hours later i had this mind bending migraine that you wouldnt believe. granted i didnt want to give up on a series of games that i loved, so i kept at it for a couple more weeks......... then i lamentfully searched for the only funtion on this game that should be used. The Uninstall icon. Only get this game if you have an incredable threshold for pain. I'm talking about the kind where you can saw your own foot off lodged in a bear trap using only a plastic knife and some duct tape.
Rating:
Summary: As bad as it gets.
Review: MOO2 is one of the greatest games of all time. This being so, I bought MOO3. I was robbed. I almost never actually bother to write a review of any product here on amazon but I must do so now. I have to warn you! Stop now if you are even thinking of buying this game! I sincerely believe that some kind of class action lawsuit should be brought against the makers of MOO3. There is so much wrong with it that I hardly know where to start.
The fundamental problem is that the game is so complicated that you need AIs running practically everything to avoid the mind-numbing tedium... but the AIs are idiots! They absolutely can't get anything right. You can reset certain values to change how they act, but no matter, they'll still screw things up and you just have to shut them off.
Then there's the interface problem... even with the AIs turned on, the commands you most frequently need to give should all be accessible from 2 or 3 screens at most. Instead, there are at least 4 to 6 screens that must be accessed each turn for each and every planet you control. And that doesn't include taking any diplomatic actions, viewing the reactions to actions, engaging in space combat, or designing ships.
The graphics are as primitive as they come. Space combat looks more or less like triangles with lines extending between them (triangles = ships, lines = weaponfire)... and that's if you can even find the opponent.
The documentation is almost worthless unless you like to read low-grade space sci-fi. You get one densely written booklet, most of which is uninformative. Yeah, thanks guys! Even if this game had been fun, anyone who hadn't already played MOO2 would probably never have bothered (or been able?) to learn this one.
Then there's the really absurd stuff like the syntax generator controlling the computer's diplomatic speech. You get things like the diplomat "beseechingly castigating", "threateningly imploring", etc.
Finally, the game's producers apparently eliminated the possibility of engaging in defensive intelligence. As far as I could tell, all spies had to be given assassination or sabotage missions. In short, when alien spies wreak havoc in your empire, assassinating and sabotaging, there's basically no way to stop them... the most you can do is try and "get even". I'm almost in disbelief about this one since defensive intelligence was an essential part of the last game (actually, it should be an essential part of this one too!). Maybe I've overlooked something and there's a way to do this, but if I've overlooked it, that's just testament to how nonintuitive the interface is.
Anyone interested in artificial life programming, AI, sociological modeling, etc. might find some of the things in MOO3 amusing, but no one else will.
I can imagine that in 10 or 12 years some descendant of MOO3 might actually make a decent game, but it will be almost unrecognizable from MOO3.
Anyone who gives this game 2 stars is one of the above-named number-crunching types. Anyone who gives it more than 2 is almost certainly on the producers' payroll and trying to slow the freefall of their reputation. Don't believe a word they say. Some people are writing reviews making it out to sound like the trouble lies not with the game but with the game's players who are just too impatient or too stupid to know any better. It's a dirty stinking lie and anyone who's played the game knows that.
Rating:
Summary: This couldn't get any worse
Review: Wish I could give it 0 stars. Too bad. I shelled out $50 like a chump. Now they're giving it away almost. Still not worth the $15 Amazon is charging. Maybe $.01. Actually they'd have to pay me knowing what I know now. No redeeming qualities. Everyone who gave it a positive review is an Infrogrames/Atari hack, all games released by that company are junk. The amount they sold of this title came from brand recognition alone, and all those people were betrayed. Moo2 is still the best game of its kind, I wish another group of developers could try to re-create something similar. I miss it so.
Rating:
Summary: Not a sequal to Orion II
Review: I think the biggest mistake by the producers was to market this game as a sequal to MOII. It simply isn't and doesn't feel like one. Rather this feel like the first in a second series of more sophisticated space empire games.
The main problem with the game itself is that it seems very much to be a working model released as a final product. I think they have the basic framework for a good game here, but most aspects seem poorly developed. The game leaves you with the impression is was hijacked by a bunch of supernerds halfway through production.
The menus/control panels are poorly designed especially at planetary level. Here you're left with the feeling of having little connection with what is actually happening (you can't see what is going on) and the graphics are what you would expect from a game developed 15 years ago on a commador 64. Manipulating planetary production using the simplistic icons feels more like programming a computer.
As people have already said the game is clumsy and navigating through it is difficult and confusing.
Most importantly the game feels very flat, there is no arcade quality about it, no gameplay as such. For most this will mean there are no fun bits.
I could recommend this game only to real hard core number crunching obsessives, for who it will be worth the money. For the rest-it feels like a budget game and I would wait untill it is
Rating:
Summary: All Work and No Play
Review: My advice, don't touch this game, even if you get the game for free. That is, unless you enjoy spending hours and hours and hours... being frustrated as you toil away. After "playing" mooIII for a couple of weeks, I felt I should have been given a paycheck.
Rating:
Summary: At least it was cheap...
Review: As a big fan of the original MOO, and an even bigger fan of M002, my interest was peaked with the release of M003. After getting side-tracked with other things in life, I stumbled across the game recently for much less than the usual amount, so I picked it up. It pains me to say, this is a complete disappointment. I would've been better off spending the money on lunch, at least that would've been temporarily satisfying. I think most of the other posts covered the rather pathetic AI system. The part of this game versus M002 that really bugs me is the change in the space combat. Not sure who thought it would be a good idea to change from the turn-based combat to "real time", but they need to be smacked around. With M002, you had much better tactical control of combat situations. There were many-a-time in M002 where I had my 4 titan-class ships going up against 90 doom-star/titan enemy ships. With the control of individual ships, it was just a matter of using superior tactics to wipe them out; with no casualties of my own. But in M003, all you can do is give general "attack", "move", "retreat", etc orders, and can only sit back and watch as the AI bungles it and your fleet gets decimated. In M002, with each class of starship, there were also various shapes/designs to choose from. So a squadron of "cruiser-class" ships didn't all have to be the exact same look. This might be a picky detail, but I always named each ship individually when I constructed them. To me, it gave the game a more personal feel. Also, in M002, you could take your ships back to space-dock to be re-fit/upgraded when new technology was discovered. In M003, all you can do is label a design "obsolete", and have to start all over again. The ship design and combat sequences remind me a lot of the Star Trek game "Birth of the Federation". (That was another great disappointment.) The game "manual", while about 150 pages in length, was rather useless. Most of it was taken up with a "pre-history" of the game and events that ran through the other two games. It seemed to me that someone at the company just fancied themselves as some budding sci-fi author, and used this as an opportunity to try their hand at writing. Tip to the designers for next time (if there ever is one): Don't completely gut the core of an already great game. Just tweak it and/or upgrade graphics and such. Of course, if there is another installment to this series, I doubt I'll even give it a chance.
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