If you like Master of Orion 1 or 2 I have only one piece of advice: steer clear away from this horrible "game". I just can't believe how they messed up the wonderful concept of the previous parts.
The difference between MoO2 and MoO3 is like Quake and FIFA2003. Instead of managing your colonies on your own, the AI takes over pretty much everything. This wouldn't be a bad thing if they did it right, but unfortunately the AI is so bad you are constantly correcting it. If not, you'll end up having 4000 colony ships, thousands of ground troops (which are useless, you need combat ships) and totally messed up colonies.
There is (or after the patch was released) no feedback at all, meaning you have to figure out every part of the game mechanics by yourself. And yes, I've read the manual (if you can call that a manual since it doesn't explain a thing).
Realtime tactical combat is just hilarious, so bad. What the hell were they thinking when they created that 3D engine? Looking at 2 pixel dots fighting other dots with even more dots is just so boring and it looks horrible (it probably would even look bad way back in 1995 or something). Why oh why didn't they implement it MoO2 style - combat which was way better? You have absolutely no control over you ships; they seem to just hover around.
Research is also very dissapointing. When you researched something in MoO2 you were excited when it was ready. To make it better the new tech was also presented by a researcher with a nice animation and a good text. If you expect to see that in MoO3 (which is completely logical because why else is it called MoO3) you will be very dissapointed. There are hundreds (600 or so) of techs to research but it goes so fast that in the end you are battling the Research started/almost finished/finished messages every turn. Don't expect to see nice techs, the only thing you'll see are 32x32 blurry pics of something that might be a tech.
The graphics are maybe the worst part. I never cared about graphics because gameplay counts.
Now imagine playing a game with a fixed resolution of 800x600 on a 1280x1024 LCD. The horror. It is so fuzzy it makes reading even the shortest texts a pain. And there just isn't any eyecandy, even the technologies in MoO2 had better pictures (much clearer and better).
When I bought the game I expected it to be at least at the same level of Master of Orion 2. I couldn't be more wrong. In fact, it is my most dissapointing purchase ever.
Thanks Quicksilver for destroying that marvellous Master of Orion series!
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