Master of Orion III

Yes, I know exactly what you're thinking. It's been seven very long years since Master of Orion II, the turn-based, 4x space strategy game that set a standard for the industry. There have been several attempts since then to raise the bar for this genre higher, with mixed but largely unsatisfactory results for those of us who value personality as much as ship customization, AI and game balance as much as graphics. This is the point where I'm supposed to write, Fortunately, MOO3 has changed all that. It delivers where the rest haven't. And damn...! I hate driving home a literary cliché (even with false license plates). But the fact remains that MOO3 does deliver an experience that's easily more challenging, exciting, and detailed than any game in the 4x space genre up to this time. It has its share of problems, but they're really slim given the size of the project, and don't seriously affect gameplay once you get past the learning curve.The easiest way to reveal the richness of MOO3 is to take a step-by-step saunter through a new game session. So let's do that, starting with some of your gameplay options.The Options ScreenThere are sixteen default races available to play in MOO3. Each of them is rated for native ability in a host of matters that include several kinds of resource harvesting and battle skills, research, trade, diplomacy, etc. Unlike MOO2, these races come with histories that are part of the back story, and will affect you whether you pay attention to the prefabricated stories enclosed with the manual, or not. That's because individual races "remember" what's passed between themselves and their neighbors. Silicoids are predisposed to like the Raas, which makes setting up deals between those races easier. By contrast, the Cynoid species doesn't like the Imsaeis at all, and would just as soon see the latter pan-fried as engage them in any negotiations.Some races are more or less of a challenge than others, depending upon start-up conditions. As you might expect from other strategy games, races that emphasize military might do very well in smaller galaxies, where their native advantages let them quickly close on unassuming adversaries. Larger galaxies allow races with superior research capabilities to blossom. Enjoy spying? Humans and Evons are your races-du-jour. Unfortunately, once you've chosen your race and entered a game, there's no way to see your race's attribute ratings, again.The extreme advantages that made several MOO2 races into caricatures have vanished from MOO3. You won't find any races with the Creative trait, which allowed them, under MOO2 rules, to research two-to-three times the number of technology advances as everybody else, and in the same time span. Nor can you give a race all sorts of advantages, and just take a loss to "winning points" at the end in compensation. If you configure your own race in MOO3, you have to balance out positively and negatively rated traits before you can play. The only way you can directly affect the strength of your side versus all others is by choosing the game's difficulty level: easy, normal, hard or impossible. Note that if you like the selections you've made for starting your last game, you can duplicate them for a new one using the "Quick Game" option. This not only keeps whatever customizations you've made to your last race, but also the galaxy size and shape, number of opponents, victory conditions, etc, that you've chosen. It's a convenient, handy tool, useful if you end up sandwiched in a no-win situation between three neighbors that hate your pseudopods.We'll select one of the pre-designed races, the Psilons, for our illustrated game. Their research and diplomatic skills are superb, which is really important because their resource harvesting and combat skills are on par with an ink blotter. We've also chosen to have eight opponents and a huge, three-armed galaxy with an average number of random events, and a few short starlanes, More about what this all means in due course, citizen, as we move towards our appointed destiny as Sole Rulers of the Galaxy.The Galaxy and Solar System MapsWe start on the galaxy map, viewing our home star at a distance. As it happens, we're in one of the more isolated galaxy arms rather than at the core, so we don't see the New Orion star system. If we did, that would mean we were in the Orion Senate, probably with several other races.The Senate has its initial advantages, since you can create sundry diplomatic deals with your neighbors. Of course, things might get unpleasant if they're the kind of neighbors who throw grenades into your house at two in the morning, which is why a race of unprepossessing geeks like the Psilon frequently do better in the early game if they're on their nefarious own.You'll immediately notice a pair of starlanes. These are new to MOO3, and the quickest way by far to get between one star and another. Travel otherwise can take several dozen to hundreds of turns to a supposedly nearby location: it's the difference between a four-lane, interstellar Autobahn and a cow trail. We begin with two scout ships and a colony ship, so we'll send the two scouts out along the starlanes and see what planets are available at the neighboring star systems for the picking.Meanwhile, when we double-click on our star, it expands into a closer image, revealing all its planets and their satellites conveniently lined up in rows. Clicking on a specific planet brings up a series of its most important statistics, including its fertility and mining resources, size, gravity, etc. To make the data easier to assimilate, MOO3 employs a color-coded system based on the ideal environment for your race. Planets identified as Green are good matches for your people, while Yellow planets are really a stretch, and Red planets are truly hostile to your species. This system works on several levels, but the most obvious is colonization: a green planet can be colonized by one colony ship, a yellow requires two (or one with a long wait for population growth), while a red planet takes four.