Moo3 was a sinking ship, I don't know why you made life rafts for it. Your time could be well spent building mods for a ship that is seaworthy. Also, comparing a ship you have several life rafts keeping barely afloat with a ship that is perfectly seaworthy is an unfair comparison.

i reckon it was a mixture of devoted love, mental sickness, hope for a lost dream to be at least partially regained, gluttony for punishment, and something Elerian fetish that kept the dream alive.

also, underneath all the warts, there's lots of cool details.

for example, it's cool when you're designing a ship to be able to specify if a weapon is light, heavy, or spinal mount, if you want options like armor piercing, and to balance that against using the next most advanced weapon intstead... and to have those choices actually mean something in how battles play out.

contrast to GalCiv2, where the newest version of the next weapon type is always better than the most advanced version of the last, making it nearly a no-brainer to figure out what weapons to include. and there's no concept of range during combat, so choosing between a high damage but short range weapon vs a long range but low damage weapon isn't required.

if i could have a visual ship design system from GC2, with the weapons variety from Moo3, and combat that has range and tactics like Moo3, but looks like GC2 combat?

yeah, baby. that would do the trick for me, Elerians or no...

Unfortunately all the great things you mentioned about Moo3 are completly superfluous when you consider how terrible the AI was. Not only did that mean predictable boring opponents that made every game the same, but it also meant that most of the game was spent dicking around with time-consuming colony micromanagement to counter the ineffectiveness of the AI governers in managing the overly complex planetary development system.

so, the AI empires in Moo3 are more predictable than any other 4x game?

me, of course, i play them like a harp, but i do that in GalCiv2, the Civ series (when i played it), and SMAC too. have you ever met an AI you couldn't out-think?

as for the planetary viceroy, once one actually understands how to use Development Plans, it's not that hard to get the 'roy to build pretty much approximately what you want, approximately where you want it. not perfect of course, but good enough for government work.

from there, you have to tweak a bit, but if you didn't have to do that, we'd hear the "all i do is hit the Turn button" complaint.

the main thing it's missing, though is "re-developmet" plans, for tearing out old resource generating developments, and putting in resource consuming ones, once efficiency is improved by techs. other than that, any other "time consuming micromanagement" is the result of poor understanding of how to "ride the 'roy".

but hey, different things kill different games for different people.

I bought MOO3 the day it came out but very quickly returned it (El. Boutique still had a liberal return policy back then). The final straw for me was when I discovered that the save game function didn't actually save your current game state, only your turn's starting point, no matter when you actually hit the save button. The game didn't tell you that's how it worked, so it took several times when I lost 30+ minutes of planet micromanagement effort by saving and exiting the game without ending the turn first before I figured out what was going on.

I monitored the MOO3 forum for a while afterwards to see if the devs would substantially fix the game's problems, planning to repurchase it if they did, but I eventually gave up on them.

I gave both games a go.
MOO3 I gave two goes, one about a year or so and just recently.
Both times I was disappointed in the complexity and not so friendly interface to the new user. I somehow managed to finish one mission this time around.
Then tried a skirmish, full size. By the time I had an "armada" the AI totally owned me. And this was on easy (not novice or cat walk, one level below normal)

So I searched for other reviews of games like MOO3, as I was a big fan of Civ 4 and Roman :Total war?
And I found GalCiv 2.

So I got my hands on the expansion pack! I have to say, it is much simpler to play, you dont need to get RIGHT into the micro straight away. Sure you have to have some understanding, but you can actually just jump into the game. After a while you get the basic idea and get further and further into the game.
All the techs tell you what they do, you dont just research something random, but choose exactly what you want!


The only down for me was less ships in a battle and simple espionage system (good at the start, but bad once you get advanced)

I am a very happy GalCiv2 player.

Hah, this reminds me "dragon isles" (i think is what it was called", back in israel, in hebrew... one of the most fun games I ever played, it was a real time strategy game written back in the early 90s (before win 95) by a 9 or 11 year old kid... I had a really good time playing that.

(you would build "farmers huts/tents/whatever" each will claim a certain circle of land around it (so you cant build too close) and grow crops to provide you with money... you use the money to build more tents... aswell as buildings that make warriors of various kinds (there was a ninja who could climb walls, castles, archers, etc...
It was a real blast and very well designed game to boot.

Comparing MOO3 to Gal Civ2 is the equivalent of comparing a turd to caviar.