Rating: 
Summary: Its deeper than I first thought
Review: At first I was so upset at this game I thought it was trash.But since I bought it I figured Id play it and the more I played it the more I learned and now Im thinking about it at work and Ive only had a week or so. It takes some learning and some thinking. But i was tired of the "open the box play and win" games. Its deep.
Rating: 
Summary: Try Galactic Civilizations instead
Review: I should have taken it as a sign when the rebate earlier in the summer (2003) meant that Amazon was giving this game away for free.This game is too complicated and not enough fun. I loved MOO II and hoped to find this as an improvement. It's a huge step backwards in playability and the game does not seem to be particularly stable. There are a lot of interesting concepts in the game that are poorly implemented. The interface is not easy to decipher and I finally gave up. Fortunately, I found Galactic Civilizations instead. The AI, game play, and support and all excellent. I'd recommend spending your money on that instead.
Rating:
Summary: A Waste of $20
Review: Unfortunately, this game is a waste of the $20. I am sorely disappointed. As a fan of civilization II and MOO2, I expected much better. The initial graphics were slick, but the backstory makes little sense to me. The interface is difficult to navigate (e.g. you press escape to go back a level, but press it too many times and the game asks if you want to quit). It also tends to overlay windows and superfluous graphics over your selection. I found myself simply pressing the turn button over and over again with no real purpose. Controlling planetary production was pointless. But letting the AI do it meant it chose the wrong thing to build 25% of the time (I had 4 troop ships and no battle fleet to conquer a star first!). This is one of the few times that I'd like to get my $20 back. This game isn't worth the price of the media it's produced on.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Dont waste your money, just get a mod for orion 2
Rating:
Summary: MOO2 is better
Review: MOO3 offers little that is better than MOO2. The only major improvement is in the quality of the graphics. The planets are gorgeous. Everything else is horrible. Menu navigation, ship battles, exploration, espionage, ship design and colony management were all much better in MOO2. This game has become more tedious, not less as promised by the game designers. The manual tells an interesting story but is otherwise worthless. This game should have used MOO2 as a starting point. Don't be fooled - this game is nothing like the excellent games that came before it.
Rating:
Summary: Spare yourself some wasted time
Review: This game is hardly worth writing a review for. The only reason I am writing is to tell you to stay away from it. In a word, the game is: boring. The game was delayed over a year (it was a "top 10 vaporware") game of 2002. When I got the game I realized why. Half the stuff just doesn't work right in the game. 1. The developers promised a book on the game in March, 2003 (the one that came with it was WAYYY out of date). It is now September of 2003 and the developers won't even answer the question about when we will see the manual on the Atari boards. 2. The game was patched twice (one data patch, one code patch). They say they will patch it again, but it might be December 2004 before they get around to it (that is their words, not mine). The game is trash and the support is trash. Don't buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Galactic Domination... 32 hours of gameplay later
Review: I picked it up after talking to a friend who absolutely loved it and was spending 4-5 hours a night playing. Couldn't be too bad if he was into that much, I thought. Well it wasn't bad, but it wasn't very good either. The game itself progresses pretty slowly, especially in the beginning as you have to research everything from scratch or trade it from other races. The pace picks up after you begin colonizing a few systems and actually have some ships. Eventually you'll progress to a point where you'll have so many ships and planets that it takes the computer a while to process a turn - I have an Athlon XP 2000+ and it took almost 2 minutes per turn toward the end of some games. Be prepared to invest 10 hours in a full game, if not longer. The concept of designing your own ships is excellent and very useful. The downside to it is that everytime you develop a new technology you have to redesign your ships and can't apply a simple upgrade to your existing designs. It would save a lot of time if they would incorporate that feature in a patch or update. The diplomacy end of the game is pretty well done. The character animations are very well rendered. Often times your survival in the game will depend on your diplomatic relations with certain races. Espionage can come in handy, but I found it to be highly annoying having to deal with enemy spies. But that's part of the game, covert operations are supposed to be annoying. I played the game for a few weeks before putting it aside. I haven't had the urge to pull it back out yet and hope that a MoO4 might be better.
Rating:
Summary: Sad
Review: Sad. Just sad. I LOVED and still play MOO2 on a semi-regular basis - one more turn, one more turn . . . I waited for over a year, participated in the discussion boards (Clasby - the tiny giant) and anxiously awaited the game until my pre-ordered copy showed up. Part of the big enhancement was supposed to be the reduction in micromanagement but it is actually worse! Example: you want to deploy five armies worth of ground troops to conquer some planet. Go to ground force creation, *click*, decide how big a force (division, army, whatever) *click* type of force (marines, tanks, whatever), *click*, then decide which specific troops you want in the unit, (potentially hundreds more clicks based on race, experience level or whatever but luckily there in an auto-build), *click*. Yes you could, in theory, decide that on specific troops to account for the planets gravity and terrain but the combat itself is so abstracted that it's really hard to tell if it makes any difference anyway. And you can't really figure out what exactly the terain is like until you've already unloaded the troops. Besides, you have SO MANY ground troops by mid-game that your really better off just dumping whole (and multiple) armies anyway. Ok, so now you've got the army, *click* ok, then got to another screen where you put them on your troop transports *click* - yes they have their own task force and you can add escorts - but you don't want to. Everything gets dibanded when you unload troops. That is they disapear for a time, then go into reserves for next deployment. Ok, so that's at least six clicks per ground force. You wanted five - so that's thirty clicks - at least. So much for getting rid of the micromanagement. Moving the ships around once their deployed is even more frustrating as it's hard to figure out where they are, where they're going and so on. Ship design is confusing and muddled, it's hard to compare weapon systems etc., etc., etc. and basically imposible to build up to date ships. I spent A LOT of time going to every planets build que and deleting the old crappy designs, and the THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of non-Combatant ground forces it wants to build to get something useful built. Even once that's done your 'viceroy' will change the funding levels every turn so you never really know when a unit will actually be finished. Technology: Lots and lots of tech. To bad you can never be sure what exactly it does or control how, when or where it gets implemented. Diplomacy: just accept whatever they want as it dosn't matter anyway. Spying: Ugh! I could go on about the details but the basic problem is that I never feel much in control of the game - and what I can control are the most tedious aspects. I'm one of the few who dosn't seem to mind the combat, but getting to that point is pretty much not worth it. Sad.
Rating:
Summary: Still a spreadsheet
Review: Bought game, found it to be a mess. Got patch. Less of a mess and now it's apparent it's just not a fun game. After the greatnest of MOO 1 and MOO 2 it's incredible that somethign this bad got out the door.
Rating:
Summary: Like most, I¿m disappointed
Review: ... the interface and control features are weak. I was especially looking forward to the in-depth political side of MOO3, the give & take of alliances of convenience with the bitter betrayals (i.e. UN security council). I quickly realized that if you don't get into the Orion Senate then you never will. It's my impression that being in the Orion Senate is a random happening at the start of the game, you're in or you're out, based on how close your home system is to Orion. In the games where you are in and you try to get others in, the other races vote against you. In fact more races were voted out then into the Senate during my games. Empire to empire dealings go strictly along race lines, it was very predictable. I found it frustrating that every planet changed my military production when the production finished (hello, I need warships not ground troops). I really disliked have to recreate my warships after improved technology was invented. I expected this to be automatic and my existing fleet upgraded when put into some type of drydock. I didn't find any way to upgrade existing ships. When any military units are produced they go into a reserve area, which if you produced a mobilization center can form an active unit from all reverse units. I found this very unrealistic. In a game where most things are controlled by the computer, if you don't take control of ship to ship combat then you can't bomb or invade the planet. If you do bomb the planet, you have to keep bombing it turn after turn effectively anchoring your fleet in that system because the population and building get less in number but never completely get destroyed. Did I mention that when you take control yourself you will have to guess where the enemy is, because nothing shows you. I did like the 3D galaxy map. If you can take control of a key system at the beginning of a spiral arm then you have control of the whole arm. I also liked the research system. You can research 6 fields at the same time allocating X % to each one equaling 100%. You could also apply more money into research to gain more research points. All in all, a very weak game. I have uninstalled MOO3 altogether for the hard drive space and went back to playing MOO2.
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