Sure you can find lots of good ideas in MOO3, but in the end it didn't work well and wasn't fun.

I completelly agree with you, there is a special hell for people who destroyed MOO series, MOO3 is an abomination of the MOO series. There is no comparision between MOO3 and GCII, as nothing in MOO3 even worked when the game was released, and to be honest, even if it did, the game was aweful in every possible way. Nothing was implemented correctly, and the amount of design flaws was staggering beyond belief.

Moo3 once patched, patched and patched again with some thrown in DLL by the mod community and you have a fun empire sim. Not really a game in the strictest sense, but enjoyable.

I will say that I prefer the MOO (Master Of Orion) 1 type of research tree. You only get ~70% of the tech, thus your forced to trade techs if you are missing some techs (like you have shields I and II but don't get another shield tech till VII).

Also as you go up the research ladder, the older tech auto miniturize. Thus your left with choices like "should I stick with more Phasers or go with a fewer more powerful Distrupers?" Type of questions.

I don't like being forced to do either or tech research every 5-15 turns. If you research economy type stuff, you have to hope you can get around to researching warefare tech before the universe runs out of planets. I would rather be able to allocate 25% of my reserach to "bio" 25% to "Industry" 10% to "Math" 10% to "Economy" 10% to "arts" and 20% to "Physics" That way every 5 or so turns I would discover something and would not need to micro manage the tech tree. Durring war or the build up to war I might re-allocate my research to get those latest shields, engines, weapons ect.

to each...

Just thought I'd pipe in here. First, to agree with what someone else said, MOO3 doesn't "win" just because you can get "more" of nearly everything. 4X games are not about the sheer numbers. In fact, I'd argue that Civ4 is a huge advance over previous Civs precisely because you control fewer cities, but those cities are more interesting. The same is certainly true in GalCiv2. Each colony is special, each one is important and losing any of them hurts you (with the possible exception of class 4 or less worlds). In MOO3, which is really more of a simulator than a game (because the relationship between what you do and what happens can be so attenuated. Even the so-called "tactical" battles are just "move closer and fire until the other guy dies" mindless affairs), you can control hundreds of colonies. But so what? More often than not, the governers handle everything about the colony. You don't even touch your new colonies after you have built up a lot. As far as the number of ships go, that's a matter of personal taste. Some people liked MOO and some liked MOO2 (thousands vs tens of ships, though you could get 100s in late game MOO2). Regardless, the main point for me is that GalCiv2 is like a very enjoyable strategy board game brought to the computer. What I mean by that is that it feels like a real *game.* You do stuff and if you just sit there and hit turn, your empire would die. In MOO3, you can literally just press turn and not die easily (seriously, the game will even colonize for you).

Are we talking about the same MOO3?
The one that was abandoned shortly after release (with 1 patch), and destroyed the entire MOO franchise?

Its a very tough comparison, to compare a game that is almost three years old to one that has been released 1 month ago.

You may have the privilege of playing it recently and with mods, but you had to be there to experience the sheer unadulterated disappointment.

Lets compare Galactic Civilizations 2 to MOO 3 - after 1 month.

1. AI

MOO3's AI only built troop transports and never attacked the human player - EVER - no matter what the difficulty level.

2. Diplomacy
(still hasn't been fixed)
The AI speaks totally incomprehensibly and declares war for no reason that is ever disclosed to the player.

3. Lack of interaction
The Governors of each planet would override your decisions and change your spending habits.
Couple this with incomprehensible spreadsheets of a brain dead UI and you soon begin to wonder why you try so hard to play something that is that boring.

4. Manual and Encyclopaedia

Both games are reasonably outdated by the time of release and no encyclopaedia for either.

5. Graphics

You are saying you prefer to watch thousands of little dots on the screen using the most highly updated voxels available (cough), to watching beautifully rendered (if slow) videos of battle? MOO3's graphics dated back to the early 90's. Not to mention the UI was set at 800 x 600 or something abysmal and did not allow any changes.

You can also load up a scenario increasing your logistics ability for larger fleets.

6. Technology Tree

Ho hum, I just researched another 5 new technologies this turn for MOO3. Why do I care? The technologies were so meaningless.

Gal Civ 2 at least injects some humour into the text of the discoveries.

Summary:

I have tried to erase the painful memories of MOO3 which even after one patch was one of the worst games of all time. You can't count mods done by diligent and faithful players, especially after this game was simply abandoned.
MOO3 was hopelessly broken at release and there are countless more examples of errors and bugs throughout i.e. point defence systems not even working.

I've stopped buying all atari games due to that fiasco.

The only good thing about that time, was I learned about Gal Civ 2.
I never played Gal Civ 1, and Gal Civ 2 in my mind could be better.
However, its like comparing a BMW to an old skateboard.

The wonderful thing is that, it took 4 months for Atari to put out a patch for a broken game.
One patch has already been released for Gal Civ 2 and many more ar eto come.

One of the reviewers said it best.
Gal Civ 2 v Moo 3 was like a battle of David versus Goliath.
The only difference was, in this case David won because Goliath bludgeoned himself to death and fell off a cliff.

Personally I found MOO3 to be a Click Next Turn button game.

To each his own, although I really fail to see why anyone would post a comparison between 2 different games on the official forum of one. It's something I might do on a forum with a group of gamer friends which is not specialised for one game.

You mean you can actually play MOO3, I thought the point of hte game was just to hit the next turn button and see how many transports the AI would build for no apperent reason.

When I won at MOO3 by repeatedly pressing the enter button, that was the end of the game's life on my hard drive. Admittedly, I didn't have the AI set to a difficult level, but the game automatically populated my planets, sent out colonies, and populated those planets. After a while I had so much population that I was voted in as the galactic ruler. There were no wars or space battles, just population growth and expansion until the end of the game.

That being said, MOO3 had some nice ideas: the aliens that populated by eating other aliens, the fact that planets could be shared, and a few other things along those lines. The good ideas got mired down in an indifferent presentation, and everything was dragged down by a tedious game that was more work than fun at the best of times. Not only would I now not pick MOO3 out of the bargain bin, but I refuse to give away to friends the copy I pre-ordered and bought at full price, because I am afraid that doing so might ruin a perfectly good friendship.

I really have to admit MOO3 wins GalCiv 2 when it comes to empire size and planet count. In MOO3, on the largest galaxy, I can be controlling 300+ planets in the mid-game while dominating 1/3 of the galaxy (total planet count would be almost 1000 planets). Contrast this in GalCiv 2 where I have about 50+ planets controlling 1/4 of the galaxy (projected total planet count of 200+). Of course, I have yet to colonize the Class 0 planets (which I hope will be possible in the late game).

I have had over 1000 planets in GalCiv 2. (Using Gigantic settings, with abundant in all options, and loose cluster stars.)

as the keeper of the "higher resolution" mod for Moo3, you know i've got something to say about all this...

the game is sooooooo much better now than when it was released! we've taken it apart, put it back together, and it is actually playable and enjoyable now by a much wider audience.

on the boards we get a constant trickle of "tried it when it first came out and hated it" players who've found the CDs under the dresser, thought "what the heck, why not?" and reinstalled, got the latest mods and patches, and now love the game.

here are the usual complaints, and what's been fix or what we've learned:

"all the Viceroy ever builds is transports and ground troops."

this was a common complaint at release time, and was at least partially helped by the last patch that QSI/Atari dribbled out before slinking away in shame.

since then, we've learned that what is causing the remaining "problem" is that the player hasn't designed any ships that the Viceroy thinks are "affordable"... usually becasue they've gotten so excited about researching a new hull size that they've redesigned all their ships at maximum size, leaving nothing that less developed/smaller planets can build in reasonable time... except for? you guessed it: tranports and ground troops.

the solution is to design a range of ship sizes and costs, so that all planets have something that they can afford to build in a reasonable time.

"diplomacy is broken, the AI attacks me for no reason"

as mentioned above, there's be a mod to the diplomacy spreadsheets that makes the alien text make much more sense. it's still fairly disjointed (they are aliens, after all), but it's not complete garbage anymore.

the interlocking web of racial hatreds and friendships are now understood, so it you don't understand why an empire you just met wants you to die a painful death, it's becasue you haven't read this Link thread.

finally, if one of your old friends suddenly turns on you, we now know it's becasue you haven't been watching the diplomatic matrix, and failed to notice that they agreed to an Alliance with one of your enemies, and that enemy has demanded that they honor the Alliance... would it be nice if the game would tell you that? yes, of course it would. but you should be looking at the matrix anyway, and preventing your friends from getting cozy with your enemies long before they have an Alliance. if it gets that far, it means you messed up 50 turns ago and didn't nip that friendship in the bud like you should have.

the AI never invades

fixed with a patch. the AI was mobilizing transports, then one turn after they left port it would realize that it had just launched a task force with inferior weaponry, panic, and disband it.

but it's fixed now. the AI will actually invade. we've now seen AI players take each other out, fairly early in the game.

i just kept hitting Turn, and won the game

yes, the AI can be set to colonize for you, and the planetary Viceroys will select improvements and queue ships for you, but it will never design new ships for you, never mobilize a war fleet, and will not do diplomacy for you.

if you selected a high-growth race, get lucky and start the game in the Senate, get lucky and have no other high-growth races in the Senate with you, have the Senate Victory condition on, get lucky with who your neighbors are, and are playing at an easier difficulty level, then yeah, it is possible to just hit Turn and win: your population grows faster than the other Senate members, nobody attacks you becasue your neighbors all like you, and eventually you have enough votes to win.

solution is obviously to turn off the Senate victory condition. duh.

then you actually have to get our there and do some fighting, which will require designing ships, mobilizing them, and directing them into combat. with the Allied Victory patch, you don't even need to invade every last speck of rock in the galaxy.

alternately, you can win in the Senate faster than the Turn-pushing breeder, even with a low-growth race, by actually doing diplomacy, building a faction of friends, getting your enemies kicked out, and invading (by designing ships and mobilizing fleets) planets full of future voters.

for an example of how a Seante game goes when players are paying attention, check out the Succession game we played recently: Link

and the list goes on... people who've actually been keeping up with the current state of the game can easily recognize those that gave up and left in disgust right after the abomination was released, simply by the things they complain about!

yes, the game is an abomination... a breach-born, red-haired stepchild, changeling abomination. but now it is our abomination, and it's grown up to earn a place in the hearts of those that dare to brave the horror.

Master of Orion was not the first 4X, but it was the first one for the masses. A company called Simtex created it and "beta" version called "StarLords is in the public domain.

The 4X genre goes back a long, long time. In 1981 I wrote a game called Galactic Empire for the Sanyo MBC-550 (an early IBM PC clone) and it was a 4X, albiet a very primitive one. But it did have graphics, and gameplay could run for maybe an hour or two. I sold it to a magazine called SoftSector, which was one of those publications which printed program listings that you had to type in yourself. I think they paid me $500, which seemed pretty cool to me at the time -- I was 13. I got the idea from a similar (but even more primitive) game, still a 4X, which I saw running on a black & white text-only timeshare terminal at one of the military bases where my father worked, so that puts the origins back in the late 70's at the very least...

hey there, Skyjack! good ta see ya.

so, yeah, that was where once you had taken one of the Orion planets, the remaining defenders of the system would use their superior initiative to make you defend that planet, instead of letting you attack the next planet in the system?

i never experienced it myself, but i heard about it...

anyway, there's a lot less work to bring the game into a playable state now. consensus is building around the UOP mods (available in Vanilla, Strawberry, and Tropical flavor, depending on how much you want the game changed) as de-facto standards for single-application paths to playabilty.

fresh install from the old CDs, 1.2.5 offical patch, then Strawberry patch mod, and you're good to go. it contains everybody's favorite Bhruic and Gerra patches, an improved UI (Gofur's, i think), and a couple of minor spreadsheet tweaks.

the 1024x768 mod still needs some work, but some folks like it applied on top of Strawberry as a garnish.