Rating: 
Summary: Good Game... Better Patched
Review: This game, while great in promise even in orginal release, had many flaws. The majority of those were fixed in the recent patch, and several more are supposed to be fixed int he next patch. Because of this, Moo3 has become a much better game than once-it-was. However, it is not (to MANY people's dissapointment) Master of Orion 2.5 - it is, in many ways, a brand new game. THis game is about macromanagement, and includes many AI-driven improvements to make macromanagement the preffered way to play. This is especially clear in the MPlayer arena - if you don't like this game, try taking it MPlayer, where it truly begins to shine.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Potential, Many Problems
Review: First, I've owned and played MOO1 and MOO2. A lot. They were great,and I still play MOO2 occasionally. MOO3 appears to be a natural evolution of the game, and it has great potential. But...There are plenty of bugs in the game and a pot full of inconsistencies. The first patch is out, but it does not make any claim to fix all the bugs and/or correct the many flaws in the game. My advice: wait for version 1.5, hopefully by the end of the year (my guess, not theirs). The biggest problem, for me anyway, is getting used to the AI. Actually, there are two of them, one for the computer players, and one for you. The AI for the computer players needs work and the developers know that. But if you can live with the strange way it does things (e.g. going to war for no reason, then declaring peace two turns later, and declaring war again two turns later, etc.), you can play on. I'm not sure, but it may be possible that the AI cheats. In all the games I've played, the computer opponents were always far ahead of me in everything: ships, weapons, strategy, money, etc., etc. They can be beaten, but even in easy settings you'll have to work hard to do it. Your own AI, known as your viceroy, is a macro-manager. You have to give it some guidelines, of course, but then it takes over and manages your affairs for you. Micro-managers beware -- you only make it harder by constantly fiddling with settings for your individual planets. Another "but..." You will want to get involved in some micro-management anyway, especially ship design and some building lists. You have to learn the hard way what your viceroy does well and what it doesn't. There's more: you travel between stars on starlanes, just like in Space Empires IV. That makes for some interesting strategy. It also makes the game really, really slow. Research is another tedious process. You spend lots of time and money researching the empty spaces between objectives. Combat is...well, it's slow, too, and you don't have a lot of control. Also, all ships have to be assigned to Task Forces. I'm not sure why this was done, but I find the process unnecessarily cumberson. And ships that are not assigned are just not available for anything; they don't even show up on the map. Ground troops are managed in much the same way. I find all this too complicated. Individual ships can't be upgraded; you build replacements and (eventually) get rid of the obsolete ones. The game manual is best described as skimpy. It usually tells you where the buttons are, but it gives no clue about why and how anything works. It's printed on dark gray paper in 6-point type, so if you use reading glasses, you can only read it in bright, direct sunlight. The illustrations are black on black and very small. If you were thinking of buying the official strategy guide, my advice is DON'T. It was apparently writen for the Beta version; much of the information is incorrect, lots of things are completly missing, and some advice is completely wrong. Check out the forum instead. In summary, this may yet be a great game when all the bugs are worked out. In particular, the viceroy is a cool idea that simply needs more work. Right now it's a bit of a challenge to play around the bugs and shortcomings, and because it's so slow at first, I find the game's not a lot of fun. While you're waiting for the next several patches I recommend Galactic Civilizations.
Rating: 
Summary: Warning - DO NOT BUY THIS GAME
Review: I pre-ordered this game, I played it for more than 40 hours, you see I thought any game with lots of complexity must become fun at some point, it doesn't. The game is much like "playing" an Excel spreadsheet. The interface is a unique combination of unintuitive, counterintuitive, and downright irritating. If your idea of fun is hunting amongst many menus for information, which you will do a lot of as the game ships with one of the worst manuals ever put on paper, then there is an outside chance you won't begin cursing at the screen. It has been described as a macro-strategy game, a better term would be a game that is primarily designed to play itself with the only neccessary human action being clicking the turn button. As of this review thay are working on a BETA patch, You can expect lousy customer support from Ataris and Quicksilver. I reiterate, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. Save your money.
Rating:
Summary: So where are all the old reviews?
Review: To sum them up, this game[...]....
The graphics are outdated, it has lots of bugs and even worse a great deal of inconvenient features (that could have been so much better or already have been better in previous MoO incarnations). Gameplay is very clumsy and its also visually unattractive. Your influence as player is decidedly limited compared to MoO2. You can usually achieve good enough results by just letting the AI handle everything and just clicking the turn button.
Especially if you liked MoO2 a lot you will be sorely disappointed by MoO3 since they didn not improve but reinvent the wheel, and it ended up with a flat tyre, and I want to warn everybody not to waste their money on this like I did. And if you don't know MoO2, get that one instead, its cheaper and most people like it better...
Rating:
Summary: Junk ...
Review: Don't buy this game ... The design is horrible ... It's almost a fraud to release a game in this shape ... You don't understand what is happening, the game play itself and there's no enjoyement. It's strategy game where cause - effect relations are unclear ...
MOO1 and MOO2 were clearly better than this trash.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy this.
Review: The most aggravating thing about Master of Orion III is that I can see the truly great game it could -- and should -- have been. Individual features are worth bragging about, but the assembled product leaves something to be desired. Like fun. The gameplay suffers from cumbersome controls that bog down, rather than enhance, the play. For example, micromanagers like me will find tons of options for controlling every aspect of each of their interstellar colonies. This is great, but I find myself fighting the menus more often than I do the other races. To do one simple and oft-repeated task, it is necessary to move down through four or five submenus. The onion-layer approach is a decent idea, but in my opinion, there should be a shortcut menu for common functions. Many of the existing menus and functions are misleadingly labeled. For example, there is nothing labelled "Production": to see what a planet is building, you must find two separate menus under "Economy." You cannot even see a colony's garrison and ships all at once. This, to me, runs counter to common sense. Similar obstacles exist in the game's myriad other menus. The colony-manager AI is halfway decent, in that it takes care of mundane things for you. On the down side, unless it is heavily customized, it tends to do a slipshod job, and to build huge numbers of often-substandard military items you don't want or need. If it is left unchecked, you may find yourself with 50 or so troop transport ships, but not a single division of soldiers to put on them. The foreign-relations aspect of MOO3 is frustrating. The other races' attitudes towards you are totally unpredictable: they change on the spur of the moment, and there is nothing you can do to influence them. As an example, I have seen another species coldly refuse my offer for a pact on one turn. The next turn, THEY came to ME, all smiles, looking for the same pact, which I accepted. The next turn, they nullified the pact and declared war on me. That wouldn't be so bad if it was a fluke, but that kind of thing happens ALL THE TIME. A degree of random action is expected and acceptable in diplomacy, but this is ridiculous. If the developers had just not bothered putting diplomacy into the game it would have been less of a headache for everyone. The graphics, especially in the battle scenes, are (ahem) less than spectacular. Games looked like this four or five years ago. While revolutionary visuals are not to be expected in a strategy game, they could have done much better (Imperium Galactica II's cool looks come to mind.) I'm a sucker for science fiction, so I find the tech chart interesting and useful. The research process doesn't make much sense to me, though. Maybe I missed something. The sound is good enough. Again, one hardly expects stunning effects while playing a strategy game. This game reminds me of Rubik's Cube: I enjoyed it for about twenty minutes, but then I realized it wasn't much fun if you spent hours on it and still couldn't figure out which way to twist it. Some may find MOO3 suits them, but like Rubik's Cube, most people will quickly put this game on a shelf and leave it to gather dust. Final analysis: There are better ways to spend your time and money.
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy it
Review: If I could give it zero stars I would, this has been rehashed by many reviewers. The most recent (6/6/03) patch still doesn't solve the game's fundamental problems of playability and lack of "fun." Don't buy this game.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing menus, space battle sux, generally dissapointing
Review: The graphics for the alien races were flawless, a masterpiece even, totally realistic looking, the rest of the game, was not. MOO 2 was far better when it came to gameplay, the space fights were switched to realtime, however controls are clumsy, and thats being gentle, gameplay itself is even worse, menues are burried deeply into each other, finance has to be nitpicked over each and every turn. Buy this if you like spending an hour or more each and every turn of the game, or like having to go thru 4 layers of menus to change planatery development(don't get me started on that aspect!!)....this feels like it was MOO 0.5! MOO 2 was far superior, I strongly recommend anyone thinking of purchasing this game consider dusting off MOO 2 and playing, the gameplay was far better there and the space combats there look 20+ years ahead of the garbage they want to call a space fight in this game. The only reason it got 2 stars are the animators who made the realistic looking racial representitives, otherwise amazon would have needed a 0 star option.
Rating:
Summary: This game is an abomination
Review: Completely unworthy of the Master of Orion title as this game is a slap in the face to the previous two games in this series, which both offer a far suprior playing experience. Forget about managing your planets, the new viceroy does that for you. Think you can control how your fleets in battle? Forget about that too. You just tell your ships who to attack now and they do the rest. And for that matter, the graphics on the space battles are 80s era. With this game, expect to just hit the turn button many times while the game for the most part plays itself. A complete waste of time and money.
Rating:
Summary: Master of Orion 3 (or why, oh why, did I waste my money?)
Review: I enjoyed Master of Orion and Master of Orion 2. My dislike of MOO 3 is equalled only by my dislike for prune pudding served on ultra bran wafers and topped with an alphalfa derivative syrup. The interface is extremely poor, the graphics were dated when MOO II was new and the enjoyment level doesn't even register. Bottom line don't buy this game. If you really think you want to try it out do a friend a favor and borrow their copy ... and then keep it. Your friend will thank you.
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