The intent of the designers was to remove the micromanaging aspects, early and late game.
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With all due respect, that's not correct.
Their intent was to put their own sense of cleverness on display, by designing a very intricate gameplay system and then also designing a brilliant artificial intelligence to automate it. They failed miserably on both counts.
This is a failure of the highest order at the level of design thinking. What is the purpose of a mechanism the player is not supposed to use? Eye candy, nothing more.
They wanted to give us a "game" chock full of programming eye candy. Where their automation fails (and it fails constantly, in almost every area) the player is lured into intervention, to step in and put things to right. Thus, the exact opposite is the result: a micromanagement nightmare straight out of the worst satire comedy sketch you could imagine.
The emphasis... is on actual planning and strategy as opposed to handling minutia.
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The way to accomplish this is to abstract all the elements that do not improve the gameplay.
Don't want players micromanaging the construction order of this vs that facility? Abstract facility types so they are all the same, or at most a couple of categories.
Don't want players micromanaging resource acquisition? Make everything run off of a single resource: cash. Then let player spend the cash in a handful of different ways with meaningful choices.
MOO3 did the stupidest possible thing. Instead of abstracting, it spent all its time and energy diving into the realm of all the parts that SHOULD have been abstracted, to flesh them out and animate them, but not for the player to actually get in there and do anything himself. Dumbest game concept ever. EVER. Not to mention the hubris of believing they could code an AI from scratch that would seamlessly manage all of the crap they tossed in there. IBM Blue couldn't manage that mess effectively.
For what it's worth (and I make no claim at being a good player), I've never beaten the AI after the patch, and this isn't even on the difficult levels.
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I envy you. For me, it's the opposite. I cannot lose at this game. It is completely inept.
Food is the primary commodity. The AI cannot possibly manage food as well as a skilled player. Even taking the races weakest on food and propping up the AI with bonuses that go beyond what is possible on the game's built-in settings, the poor AI still cannot compete.
The other problem is a cap on fleet size. There's a ten-TF limit per combat. The AI cannot possibly design ships as efficient as player's. Thus, ship to ship, the player's ships are better. Once player can field ten full TF's at a bottleneck, the AI cannot penetrate. They'll throw their fleets at your invincible fleet and take horrendous losses time after time. Thus, no amount of advantage to them gets them anywhere.
With a few rare exceptions, a skilled player can't lose at MOO3. CANNOT LOSE. Winning may be a royal load of work, but the outcome is inevitable when one cannot lose. It's just a matter of time. Some enjoy that kind of gaming. Some don't.
I participated in the modmaking. I did all I could to work around, fix, or resolve the game's fatal flaws. I gave up. Can't be done. Too badly broken. If either MOO1 or MOO2 had the same type of cap on fleet sizes, they'd be hopelessly broken, too. They'd be crap.
This is where "updating" the game betrayed MOO3. They wanted to make the combat more fun, more tactical, more intense, more interesting. And they did, except they also killed the strategy in the process. Problem is, this wasn't supposed to be a combat sim, a tactical game, or an eye candy demo. It was supposed to be a STRATEGY game. A pox on all their houses.
MOO1 got it right. MOO1 focuses the player onto the strategic elements by abstracting everything else.
MOO2 went down the dark road of micromanagement nightmare. I hated it. I hated it because the gameplay was all about repetition: the same paths through the tech tree, the same chase for Antaran technology, the same ENDLESS BORING process of repeating the construction order on world after world after world, like a zombie, like a machine crunching bits and bytes, that's how petty and small-scale the gameplay was. The player in MOO2 spends all his time micromanaging: the planets, the combats. It was a decent game, but they should have called it what it was: Master of Magic II. It had squat to do with the gameplay of Master of Orion.
What's the main difference between MOO1 and MOO2? MOO1 abstracted the details, leaving the player to focus on strategy. MOO2 delved down into the details, because it would be "cool" to flesh out the planets more, flesh out the combat more, flesh out the minutiae and bring those abstracted bits to life.
Well, you can't have both. You can't have strategy and also have minutiae. You only have an empire game when the options presented to the emperor are imperial options. If the player can get in there and make local decisions, then it stops being an empire game and becomes a local game. The idea of giving us an empire game with a self-automated local environment fully fleshed out has to be one of, if not THE, all time biggest design blunders ever undertaken in PC gaming.
That's my view of MOO3. Your mileage may vary.
- Sirian
Stardock Forums
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