I actually bought MOO 3 based partially because Brad said nice things about the developers and because they put a GalCiv flyer in the box.

Look-at this post though:
http://www.ina-community.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=268780&perpage=30&pagenumber=2

One guy put it like this:

Here is how your attempt to have fun goes.

You note that the research has turned up a new beam weapon, the disinto-master. You can't control the research, so you weren't trying for this, but there it is. You decide that this would make a good long range weapon. Your idea is to design a specialized ship that will stand off in the battle and snipe at the enemy.

So you go and design the ship. You use a spinal mount for the disinto-master. You mount extra detection gear on the ship even though you aren't sure of what ranges are involved and if this will help, seems like a good idea.


You force a planet into building a couple of these manually. You get them to the front and into a battle.

The battle starts. Where is your disinto ship? You click franticlly. You find a ship that might be it... you can't really tell from the summary screen. Your ship isn't in the back where you want it. You try to move it towards the back, but the AI just seems to do whatever it wants. There is a flash! A beam weapon fired, a green beam. Was that your ship firing, or someone firing on it? You couldn't tell. Now another flash, your are pretty sure that your ship fired, but you can't see the target. Was it firing the disinto-master? All you know is that something fired. Maybe someday the color of the beam will tell you what it was. There are some dots appearing near the ship. Are those fighters or missles or little ships? Your beams travel between the dots and what might be the disinto ship. Either your ship is firing at missles, or fighters, or maybe they are firing at you? Your ship fires again at something off the screen. You zoom out to try to see the target, but everything is moving. Was it that ship? Maybe. You click on it. It does not show you what the ship mounts, what kind of armor and shielding. Is your disinto weapon working? Was it even firing at that ship? Did it hit? The ship shows no damage. Did it hit and do no damage (shields?) or did it miss? or does the weapon not work? At this zoom level everything really DOES look like a dot. Something is going on around your ship, but you can't tell what. It is either being fired at a lot and missed, or firing a lot at something. Suddenly your disinto ship explodes. What caused it?

So in the end, you designed a new ship type , forced the computer to use it, and it was destroyed, but it was pointless. You can't learn anything. You don't know if the new weapon even worked, and if it did against what? Your ship was destroyed but you don't know why or by what. Should you make more disinto ships? Improve their shields? More detection gear? Research some other area? Mount more small weapons for use against fighters, if that is what those were? Maybe they needed escorts?

In the end, you might as well just click "auto build". Your only job with ships seems to be to go in every few turns and obsolete old ships (although that does not prevent the AI from building them if they are in the queue already, and this is a problem with large ships). If you obsolete a large ship that takes 20 turns to build, you really need to go to EVERY planet and make sure that there are none in the queue or there might be some built 60 turns from now. Your other duty is to design new ships. This just involves clicking "auto build" apparently, there is no way to see what anything does or how effective it is, or what the enemy ships mount, so no point in getting fancy.

Bryan


I haven't gotten that far yet that doesn't sound like much of a pay off to me. The whole game feels like it was designed by people who don't even play games. It feels like a bunch of accountants made it.

But I have more fun with Quicken than I'm having with MOO. I hate to say that because I really want to like it.