Master of Orion III, the much awaited sequel to the first two excellent (if quirky and cheesy) Master of Orion games, fell a little bit short due to a radical design change halfway through and a reduced
budget/timeline. It was
developed by
Quicksilver Interactive and published by
Infogrames. It has some cool new
species, like gas-giant inhabiting
jellyfish things and what essentially amounts up to
giant headcrabs. Many of the design ideas come from the old
Delphi board, which, many said, was
the beginning of the end for the
game. Anyway, even its biggest
fansite (http://www.orionsector.com) now has somewhat rejected it. Many tell me that this
game is
fun only for a very select group of people.
While it was
nice, I, personally, found it pretty much unplayable to the
weak AI,
bizzare interface, and
hyper-
abstract everything. The AI almost never attacked you and seemed to have poor
strategy, the interface was rife with inconsistancies and irrationalities, and every part of the "charm" of MOO2 was abstracted to a
table of numbers and a report at the end of every
turn.
Bascially, the main difference (quality aside) between
MOO2 and MOO3 is that MOO3 was "de-
civ-ized": that is, most of the elements borrowed from the
Civilization series were removed: most notably the "
population points," but also "
city (or in this case
planet) views" and the "
nerfing" of many of the combat things. With MOO3, everything was supposed to balanced, etc. at least in
theory, but,
of course, that didn't quite manifest itself, at least, not until the first
patch, which will hopefully be released soon. Finally, the combat system was radically changed, some say for the better, some for the worse, but it IS very different than the MOO2 and MOO1 systems. And, of course, there are
viceroys (
competant AI planet
management assistants) which you can "influence" with
development plans. Other than star-lanes and a much more complicated
backstory with significantly more bearing on the game, little in the way of INTENDED game mechanic has changed.