My wishlist...

I like this idea, and it should have been in from the start.

Since part of the design was to get rid of infinite supply generation and introduce levels or resupply depots, it should have done the same for spaceports.

All we have now is a dead spaceport tech with no effect.

My thought on this was "Neat but it needs something." Scenario: Your opponent has heavily mined all his warp points such that multiple sweepers can not break through. So you bypass the warp point and head off the grid towards your opponent. If your fleet contains a ship with an "FTL" component, you get asked if you want to go "FTL". Because FTL speeds are not as fast as warp point transitions, it takes like 5-10 turns to traverse the intervening space to your destination. This lag time effectively removes the fleet from your control until they reach their destination. It's your choice if you wish to lose the use of all those ships for that long.

Oooooo, back up a second. I haven't looked at SEV but SEIV gave you the distance between stars in LY's. Distance/warp factor = time in years required. FTL at Warp 8 means that the star that is 10LY away will take you 12.5 turns (1.25 years) (say 13 with rounding) to reach. Provided you've researched Warp travel to level 8. Warp 1 would be useless as you would take 100 turns (10 years) to reach that star. Still, if you wanted FTL and you researched it long enough, this would add an interesting dimension to the game. Just imagine the look on his face when you pop into his system beyond the warp point. Ahhhh, refinement... when the calculation is done, everything to the right of the decimal point is a percentage of the distance across the destination system. 12.674 travel turns means you end up 67% of the way across the destination system.

OK, that used up my brain for the day. Back to mush mode.

Death, destruction, mayhem and confusion. Another perfect day.

I'd like to see a huge change in the way colonies and planets operate. In fact, just copy MoO3's system for planets, colonies, economy and empire management, I'd say. It's so many times better( and more complex ) than SE's that it's incomparable, and it gives a far more epic and realistic impression.

Oh yeah, moo3 was so much better. Especially the ViceRoy who built farm zones in mountain Hostile region and mines in plain very poor region. Yeah i reaaaaaally want such a brilliant AI for my planets in SE5....

Moo3 is not a reference for anything if you ask me. Ship combat with no pause anyone? Vexel graphic that were supposed to be cutting edge?(and were 5 years behind when the game got out) Non functioning sensor and whatnot? I think there still is 289 bugs outstanding for this game, so no thank you!

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There are only 2 things that are infinite: The Universe and Human Stupidity and i'm not certain about the Universe...

Moo3 went catastrophically bad. What a shame....

They should have worked on in for 3-4 more years at least. How on earth they succumbed to the publishers wishes to release is beyond me.

"You will release the game 3 months!"
-"We're not ready for that yet sir!"
"You will release the game 3 months!"
-"We're not ready for that yet sir!"
"You will release the game 3 months!"
-"Perhaps if we make some cutbacks we might make it on time. But we need to beta test."
"You will release the game 3 months!"
-"Ok"

It had some brilliant concepts in it though..

Take a look at the stock game who's forums you're on: if anything SE V was even *less* playable at v 1.0 than MoO3 was. With the latest patch, exe hacks and mods( which basically fixes most of the problems and issues ), MoO3 is simply ingenius.

As for the viceroy, you just have to learn how to use the tools provided to guide them, such as empire options and development plans. If you're still not happy, you can always just turn him off and do it manually, like in SE.

Besides, I never did propose to bring along the bugs.

So very true.

But I knew the situation would Improve that's why I waited till 1.25 which is fairly stable and playable. However I stopped tracking moo3 when the developers lost interest in their project. When I last checked the site they hadn't made a single patch update or news release for 4 months!

I am tempted to give moo3 another shot. I'll search around a bit. Got any links for unofficial mods?

I expect SE V will get sorted out eventually. Especially if the plan is to make an expansion, as well. As unfinished as the game was on the day of release, Aaron's patching rate is crazy, and it will be awesome if, when the bugs and AI is sorted out, he starts adding new stuff like those listed in this thread.

For MoO3, get the 1.25 patch and then download MoO3 Unofficial Patch Mod Vanilla, Strawberry or Tropical, depending on which sounds better to you. They all include the exe hacks as well.
They can be found here http://www.moo3.at/mods/index.php?action=displaycat&catid=17

Good link,
There are crazy stuff over there.. perhaps I'll give it a try after I finish my current game. Thanks.

Hm... I too would give modded MOO 3 a try until SE is fixed, but the tactical combat still looks pretty messy. Is it improved by the mods? How?

And even if it is messy, do the mods´ changes to the strategic game make it worth playing?

I have no idea but, do not expect a game overhaul from code hacks. Some mods over there add new features but nothing out of the ordinary as far as I looked.

Don't expect any major differences. If you didn't like the gameplay before, then you wont like it now either. It's basically just fixes for the huge number of bugs and issues that never got fixed by the developers, making the AI better, enabling bigger galaxies/more players, changing race creation some, fixing research, etc.

Tactical combat has been improved as in that ecm/eccm is now working as intended, so ships wont go visible/invisible all the time, etc. There's also some cosmetic changes in combat.
Have a look at the mod descriptions.

In short, it's probably what the game would have looked like if they had some more time to polish it.
It's obviously a very different game from SE or MoO1/2: in those games you're an all-knowing god who has to take care of every little detail himself, while in MoO3 it's more like being the emperor and telling other people what to do, then they go and do it their way.

no real comment except to say

that made me spit my coffie out laughing.

and that Moo3 was such a great potential game that went horribly wrong. its still my standerd for why you cant blindly trust a game company to put out a quality game, even long established companys. it brings out the Regan in me. "trust but verify"

To add to that, I should say that quicksilver software had no previous experience with turn based strategy games. How were they expecting to succeed in such an ambitious project?

I liked MoO3, it had some very interesting concepts. Modablility was good also.
I think the lack of support from Atari basically killed this game, as QS could have made improvements over time just like MM does now with SE5.

Anyway, back to topic

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http://wiki.spaceempires.net - Visit the SpaceEmpires Wiki and help improve it.

I want to know if a planet is colonizable or not. I don't want to send a colonizer to a planet with a colony already on it. I don't want to have to remember that I passed by that colony two turns ago and it was colonized. THAT IS WHAT MY MINISTERS ARE FOR! Mark the stoopid (intentional sp) planet as grey or something since fog of war seems so out-of-control in this game.

You know what else? I want/expected to see races with Racial bents or tendencencies. This race knowa (intentional) nothing of fighters but does develop and use effectively droids. Races that use specific technologies that are otherwise shared by the majority of races. I'm not talking about races with technology specific trees like crystaline or psychic races. I'm talking about races that have difficulty conceiving of technologies like Fighters and will not even pursue this part of the tech tree (it would not be available to them!). Races that have no concept of DUC's and would never conceive of them or of using them yet have an alternative weapons system whatever that may be (in this game there are few other choices as ALL races start with the simplest technology even Psychic and Crystaline... FLAW). This could mean your first encounter is with a race that uses Beam technology.

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-my "Ministers are more sinister than Ministers... But who cares?"

ohh dont get me wrong, i loved Moo3 , especialy since i never played any of the earlier versions. i was a bit confuzzled about the automation of everything at first but after a long long time reading forums and asking questions i got it mostly figured out, (then shut everything off and did it all by hand anyhow) there was alot of great ideas in that game. im just feel bad that most of them werent finished. i totaly loved the feel of the game, the first time i started a game right next to the orions and didnt relize it till they came through and beat me like a 4 year old in wal-mart,all the while i was thinking how tough i was is something ill never forget and one of my best gaming moments. also the first time i took down a guardian and got one of those uber planets was something ill never forget. the story line of the game was so epic that i still get a xenophobic reaction to the harvesters, every game i went out of my way to clense them from the universe.

it was a really great game in alot of ways, but in the end it just ended up being sad. you could see what almost was peeking through. even still it wasnt unplayable, i still think the biggest trouble with it wasnt so much taht the game was really busted as it was that it changed alot from the previous version (something that everyone and their sister moaned about on the forums anyhow), and add to that the fact that some things just didnt work like you would expect them too, and you got trouble. but as i said coming into the game with no previous experiance with the franchise i liked it even still.

ok ive rambled enough now ill shut up

Hm... now, I haven´t played Moo 3 yet, and since the mods don´t change the tac combat graphically I guess i will leave it alone for now.

As for Moo 2... Well sheriff, I´ve played it, and I´ve have played it a lot... more than Civ, more than Total War. In my opinion, it was and still is the gold standard for space strategy games. And I´m sure many other people feel the way I do.

It hadn´t splendid CG, but there were a lot of nice graphic touches here and there... your spy reporting a tech stolen, a trooper reporting that new tech was found on the planet you just conquered, the diplomacy screen... All of them looked unique, and as a whole it made the game much more immersive. And the gameplay was addictive as hell.

Sometimes graphics are needed to improve your experience. Since this post started as a wishlist, I wish that in the future SE includes more art, more fluff, cool weapons descriptions... SE looks dry; every information is shown to you in a bland text box with a picture, and that´s it. It really should look to Moo for inspiration. Take the good elements in that game, use them. Then we would have a true sucessor to Master of Orion.

How I see domed colonies, they should just allow a certain number of population to live on the world, who cannot breathe the atmosphere. So, no "wrong atmos" limits on numbers of facilities, just make it so you need a facility build to accomodate people who can't breathe there. You could build 25 facilities on any huge world, even if you can't breathe there. It's just that you would need to dedicate perhaps 10 of the facilities to domes/habitats if you don't have native breathers.

"Habitats" tech can increase the numbers of population each facility can hold at each level.

Habitat would not have to be a dome; could be sealed caves or distributed living pods. Dome would be pretty vulnerable to attack wouldn't it?