First ofl all, confessing i've played a dozen of games up until now. The game is adictive.
But
I think i expected too much of it. Maybe a real MOOIII a sucessor for the MOOII. I did not find this in the game. First of all, tactical combat is no more.
So let's get started. Some of my complains are about this inexistence of tactical combat. Mainly is about
ship building.
Ok ship outfit design is just great. Really. But i got bored of it in my second game. I just don´t use to have so many ships (diferent designs) so the basic hull and the weapon / armor / engine aditions makes it.
There're not any aditional items to ad to the ship but sensors, "linear weapons", "linear defenses", or engines.
By "linear" I mean that they are boring... laser mark V¡¡¡ first timei played the game i was so expectant to see what was after Laser to see it was just Laser mark VI [less weight for your punch in the end]
MOO had the posibility of adding lots of extras to your ships, each weapon had at least one special event [such as being powerfull but disipating with distance twice as fast or damaging directly the engines] and were much more variated [missile, beam, fighter, bombs] anc could be customiced individually [point defense, heavy, autofire...] the combat sistem [shields then armor, then hull] with the possibility of making critical hits to weapons, engines etc... and making boarding atacks, was far better.
About planet management...
I like the idea of constructing on planet slots, but the terraformation procces is quite weird. You end up being able to have extremely futuristic tech but the planets that cannot be colonized in the very beggining, wont be colonized ever. Plus all the races seems to use the same kind of planets with the same restrictions... even a robot race or an insectoid race.
Population growth is not fine it should not be linear and you should be able to "work on it" in some other ways than trying to achieve 100% happiness. The old "housing" or "trade goods" option is missing here.
Social production as a diference to military production is a weird complication that could have been solved diferently [as giving bonuses to production when building certain items to certain races]
AI
Artificial intelignce is mostly OK but AIs should work a bit more on ship design and military starbase influence. They suck at thatand most of the times i can beat superior forces... vastly superior forces because AI wont understand the use of a military starbase or wont use all the tech it has to build a reffited ship because it doesn't have the complete design [having laser mark v and using mark 1].
Also AI understands very weel that my fleets around his planets are a threat, but most of the times wont do anything to prevent such atack [on my experience] but warn you that he knows you got the ships around his territoy until you sneak atack them or declare war and atack them.
Military bases are way too overpowered. A full fledged military base and some small ships is just enough to wipe out a single race whole army, the bonuses are just too much.
Land combat is a pain. Cannot be understand. What's that random factor about??? how does one determines how many troops will have on a planet. Is not as in MOO II they had a perfect system but you had the posibility to make orbital bombardment and once in battle the odds were about the quality of your troops without this random number generator being visible in the screen. Also, defending marines were to be trained. It was more or less the same thing but much more simplified and a bit more coherent from my viewpoint.
You should also had the option to erase the planet population by masive orbital bombardment as a tactical option. Capturing a planet as the only way to act is not good enough, and some times you wont like to keep it populated.
Diplomacy is a high point in the game. But I have found this smal bug. When I gift some of my ships so my friend can wage war with... my other friend they use to keep em where they are stationary. Also some races are used to build bases in my sphere of influence, near one of my planets [influence bases] and keep being intimidated by the planet guard fleet.
I believe, there's a lot of things that i do not like at all around that i have forgot but those i have posted are my main dilemma
zafyro
