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.
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.
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