A patch for MOO3 called Boysenberry was recently released

I somehow managed to miss MOO2 & MOO3. Can anyone give any idea what the game play is like? pros & cons? how it compares to SE5 & GalCiv2?

Anyone know of a demo version where I can try it out?

MOO2 was pretty awesome, though not moddable (people eventually started hacking the game files, but that doesn't count). It had a lot of flavor, more so than MOO1 and generally more so than unmodded SE games. Leaders, space monsters, interesting aliens and techs, etc. I'd recommend it if you can find a copy, even after all this time.

MOO3 was, and still is with these fan patches, utter garbage. It wasn't even worth it when some online retailer was giving them away for -$5 after rebate. Don't even give it another thought, and you will be better off.

GalCiv 2 doesn't really compare to any of these games (MOO or SE). Its more of a Civ game in space than a 4x space opera. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just that its apples and pomegranates.

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MOO3 had some massive potential, but didn't get anywhere close to it.

It could be a great game, but its ability to be modded seems to be lacking compaired to SE5.

Aside from that, I keep hoping the mod community for it will polish the turd enough to make it attractive.

"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
GidMod

Thanks for the news, noxxle.

Can't say I'll be going back to MOO3 anytime soon, but I like to have patches, etc. on hand just in case.

Master of Orion 3 Vanilla, Strawberry, and Tropical updates here:
http://www.moo3.at/mods/index.php?action=displaycat&catid=17

Find a copy of MOO2...they're out there. It's an addicting game; I still play MOO2 online multiplayer on most weekends. Sorry to disagree with you, Fyron, but those "hacks", or "unofficial patches" as we call them, count, in particular the version 1.4 as used in the online playing community. It makes big leaps forward by squashing many of the troublesome multiplayer bugs and exploits.

In any event, though, single player MOO2 is quite fun with the final "official" patch of 1.31. MOO2 in general has a lot of nice little personality touches, something that MOO3 seemed to lack IMO.

How does it compare to SEV? While they share many of the same 4X characteristics, I don't consider them to compete in the same genre, at least as far as playing against other humans goes. MOO2 is much more abstract, and in multiplayer, can be played in 2-10 hours depending on setup and number of players. SEV is much deeper and takes considerably longer, with multiplayer games taking weeks or even months.

Lord Brazen's blog has some good information pages, including downloads of the official and "unofficial" patches, as well as a forum filled with generally friendly and helpful folks. http://lordbrazen.blogspot.com/

You may also want to check out Lost Empire as a game to consider.

http://www.polluxgamelabs.com/lostempire/

I would wait for Lost Empire: Immortals as that will be the new game by Pollux, which will be basically the same game, but with improved gameplay. You can begin to apply for beta test in November, which will be announced on their forums soon.

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I enjoyed the user mods.MOO3 takes an age to get going but it has a epic macro quality to it.I will try the mod.

I can't pass up an opportunity to kick Moo3. I paid money for that game! they somehow sucked all the fun out of it.!!??!!?!

SEV, more than a feeling.

Actually Atari re-released MOO2 for digital download. You can buy it off their website at Atari.com. I was debating between SE V, MOO2, or SE:IV deluxe before I got SE V, still thinking on MOO2 though.

"Not just a job, it's a frakking Adventure!" Colonial Navy

MoO1 is still a good game if you can get it to run. I would buy that if they rereleased it for XP. Currently I have to fire up an old WinMe rig with 800 cpu and legacy mobo to get it to run (since nVidia hacked all the standard mobo memory settings all to blazes).

MoO2 also lots of fun but different. Still love the intro cut scene of Antaran invasion despite the dated graphics.

MoO3, cut scenes were the only good bit about the whole game. This is G4X hell at its most nightmarish. Ne touche pas.

Never heard of DosBox, obliwobly?

http://dosbox.sf.net

Open source DOS emulator to make all your favorite oldschool games run.

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Yeah I tried that a while ago, had endless fiddling to add an audio 'wrapper' or something and then it ran like treacle on a frosty morning. Not playable I am afraid. It ran better on my 233. (cpu Athlon 3700+)

For what do you need an audio wrapper with dosbox? O_O

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I'm posting here (and apologise for the length of my contribution), because I would like to add a new flavour to this discussion - I personally think MOO3 is or has become actually quite a good game, compared with other 4X games.
I admit that my first experience with MOO3 was frustrating - as if the game was playing me instead of I was playing the game. Although I know MOO1 and MOO2 quite well, MOO3 appeared to be just more complex without adding noticeable benefits. Consequently, I uninstalled MOO3 and laid it aside for a long time.
Every now and then I browsed the internet for new developments concerning MOO3. The majority of people played "Bash MOO3" or even "Bash MOO3 Lovers", but some developed improvements, user patches - vanilla, strawberry, tropical, imod, ... Then I happened to find a document called "iModders Guide" by Laryllan. It opened my eyes - I began to understand the ideas behind MOO3 and how they were implemented, and what's behind all the things going on in MOO3. And I re-installed MOO3 (and "strawberry" - but that's not the point here) and started a new game. And I played a different game, almost like a role-playing game, interesting, challenging, exciting. I knew what I was doing, I understood how I could influence the game and what the outcome of my actions was. It's not perfect (and I'm not a perfect player), but that's true for its competitors, too, be it GalCiv or SE or SOTS, who all have their strengths and weaknesses (and their own "personalities", if I may say so).
In my mind, one of the main strengths of MOO3 (or Strawberry, I don't care) is that it lets the player decide, at each turn, how much or how little micro-management he wants to do. My personal style is to do as little micro-management as possible, but I want to be able to take control when I think it's necessary. And I don't mind a little "fighting" with my gouvernors and their own (more or less) hidden agendas. MOO3 fits this style.
MOO2 doesn't - too much micro-management, in my opinion, although it's still a good game. I like MOO1 better than MOO2 because it's simpler, straightforward, but still challenging and funny.
Bottomline is that we don't simply play MOO3 - we're playing very different games all labeled MOO3, depending on our playing styles, our expectations, our degree of understanding (and agreeing with) the concepts of MOO3. Let's bear this in mind when we hear or read that someone likes or dislikes MOO3. If you think MOO3 is crap, then it's crap for you, but accept that others like it.

PS: I am still running MOO1 on my (off-the-shelf) XP PC - using DOSBox, and without any issues. Try it, and if you do encounter problems, search the DOSBox forum for help, it contains a lot of valuable advice.

No amount of fan made mods (and absolutely no offense to the original poster) will ever make me go back to MOO3, nor will I buy another game from them. This is really the ONLY way to send these companies the message that if they screw up AND abandon their game without releasing good patches and updated docs, their bottomline will suffer.

Moo2 was wonderful. It ranks as my all time favorite 4X game.

Kudos to MM for these official recent patches and fixes. My motto : The ability for fans to mod your game does NOT excuse you from delivering a crappy product.

Sorry my mistake it was Jabba DOS, DOSbox works much better, I just installed MoO1 and got it to run no problem. Sweet! Thanks for the tip

i tried it, but im getting a "directx surface unavailable" error .....

I can't tell you how to fix the problem, but ask in the Support area here, and you will probably get some decent help. There are some folks on the forum that are quite accomplished at getting MOO2 to work with DOSbox.

http://www.spheriumnorth.com/orion-forum/nfphpbb/

Hope that helps.

Try changing to 16bit colour.

do they still play moo3 on gamespy or is that more or less over now

Despair

Fyron dont be so wishy washy with your opinions.... Actually after the mods it is quite playable and enjoyable. And after all these years the boards are still somewhat active. You dont like it we got it

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Noxxle,
Dont feel all alone in the big bad universe their are still lots of moo fans out there. The fact that their boards are still active is truly amazing. Personally I'd like to see a merger of the two games. Take some of the strengths of moo3 and add them to se5 but I know that wont ever happen.

Groovy Baby Yeah!

I havent yet no. I have tried strawberry and tropical. I really like tropical coupled with pop toads race mod

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Ahh I remember MOO2, was my first 4X game. Too bad the comm/research animations and intro/finale don't work in the english version, and the translations are horrible in the russian version ("Heavy Hill"? "Moist Field"?). And they are both susceptible to random crashes. As for MOO3, I only got through one turn in the demo before getting frustrated and uninstalling it.

As compared to MOO(1), MOO2 added multiple planets per star and ground combat without using colonists as troops (something I hated in MOO). The MOO system for interstellar movement was retained. The way colonies were modelled was changed from the system MOO used (ultimately derived from the board game Stellar Conquest) to something similar to Civ - with the result of introducing late-game micromanagement overload like in Civ. A new tactical combat system was introduced in which ships were moved individually rather than as stacks of ships of the same class (the system was balanced to produce much much much smaller fleets than in MOO). Some new races were introduced. Also the Antarans, who were the ancient rivals of the Orions and launched random raids against the "normal" races. Other than the Antarans, the backstory was pretty much the same as MOO. Until at least late in the SEIV patch cycle, I considered MOO2 to be the "best ever" space 4X game (but truth to tell it would have been better still if they'd kept the MOO colony system and maybe just improved the MOO tactical combat system).

MOO3 was conceived as an entirely new game system, owing very little to MOO or MOO2 other than the backstory (supposedly set in the distant future of the MOO/MOO2 backstory). Several of the MOO/MOO2 races were eliminated because the Devs thought them "cheesy", and some new races added in their place. It was extremely complex, but intended to avoid micromanagement by restricting the level of player control to something like a real world ruler (i.e. the ability of real world President/King/Dictator to micromanage things is limited by his time to penetrate the details on everything, so they set broad policies and leave the details to subordinates). Development went into serious (and expensive) delays due to the complexity, then they threw a bunch of features overboard, then there was a big shakeup of the Dev team and more features thrown overboard, then it was released in a pretty much unplayably buggy state to horrible reviews. Uniquely, the Devs were exposing all this to the fans as it happened via an official board in which they posted pretty much continuously, and solicited fan input (I participated on this board quite a bit). I bought the game, but never really got into it (while I had been a major player of MOO & MOO2 in their day). Regardless of how it has turned out with fan mods/patches in the end, its commercial failure basically killed the MOO franchise (i.e. nobody would be likely to put any money into creating "MOO4").

The Space Empires series has an entirely different feel from the MOO games due to interstellar movement only by warp points (ultimately the SE series was derived from the board game Starfire). As already noted up-thread, the feel of the GalCiv series is a lot like playing a space mod of a Civ game, very different from all of the above.

Both MOO2 and MOO3 disappeared from even the bargain bins years ago. You might find find them at Home of the Underdogs, though. The learning curve to figure out MOO3 is very long.

Please read http://farcaster.net/imod/moo3/iModders_Guide_to_Master_of_Orion_3.pdf
if you are interested in an introduction to MOO3 and its concepts.

Actally both Moo 2 and Moo 3 are available for digital download on ataris website Good games but still dated:
http://www.atari.com/us/platform/PC/m-s/?dd=1

Groovy Baby Yeah!

There are a lot of other little things that were cut, but they were more along the lines of added flavor, rather than the core game mechanics. I'm sure you can find a more complete history on Google, if you are interested.

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Interesting discussion. I see why Fyron (as an example) doesn't like MOO3, I don't quite see why groovyfishguy (as another example) does like MOO3, but I'm sure he has good reasons to like it. I can see what the developers of MOO3 were trying to achieve and how they failed - a sad story indeed. And it's quite obvious that MOO3 is a game which sits between the chairs, appealing and appalling at the same time, but to different people for different reasons.
Meanwhile I myself do enjoy MOO3, full stop. I enjoy exploring the (or a) galaxy, meeting other peoples, more or less peacefully, researching technologies, managing my viceroys (although they do quite a good job, overall), and not having to spend a lot of time micro-managing my empire. I noticed that I'm beginning to discover and try out more and more of the functionality of MOO3, the micro-management MOO3 lets me do, if I want to - not because I have to. That's interesting, too.

Fyron, the developers of MOO3 may have failed to achieve what they were trying to, but maybe they have still achieved a lot. Just not sold it well. In my mind, the biggest issue with MOO3 is marketing, not the game itself. I remember that MOO3, when it was released, was labeled as overly complex, with a too steep learning curve, with a lot of useless functonality, etc. A good introduction, a good tutorial could have avoided these misconceptions.
MOO3 is probably not a game for most hardcore 4X gamers, but it's at least as good as many other 4x games with better sales figures. The developers and publishers have failed to identify MOO3's strengths, and to determine and address the right target group in the right way. That, in addition to other reasons, is why MOO3 was not successful. For good reason, I'm afraid.

This was like 4-5 years ago (the game was published in 2003 but was in development for about two years - maybe longer). The Devs had a huge internal document describing how it was all supposed to work, and shared bits & pieces with the fans on the official board (they referred to the game as a whole as "The Elephant", in reference to the story about the three blind men touching different parts of an elephant and describing it based on what they could feel). One of the cut features that sticks in my mind was "Ethos", which broadly covered things like religion, ideology, philosophy, etc... I think it was supposed to work a little like religion in Civ4, except that each ethos had associated principles that constrained you if either it was your state ethos or a large number of your people adopted it.

As to saving the game, no. It is as Fyron wrote. The game was pushed out the door because the money to finish it was gone and after literally years of development the publisher would not throw any more at it. The game was so huge - sort of "sim galaxy" - that there really wasn't any coherent subset of working features at the time they started cutting. At the time the cuts started, it was more or less an alpha. At the time of publishing it was more or less an early beta. Up until the cuts, there had been major feature creep (egged on the the fans on the board, several of which got invited to join the dev team) and the team had pretty much lost focus. There wasn't really time or resources to clean it up when the publisher lost patience.

Even had it been bug-free and working as intended, I fear it would not have been popular (nd therefore not very commercially successful). Experienced 4X players - particularly the highly competative sort that play against other humans - are conditioned by their experience to see micromanagement for the purpose of optimization as the key to victory. The macromanagement concept of MOO3 would be inherently frustrating to that sort of player even if perfectly executed. All that detail, but they can't get at it, and the lame AI is botching the job (AI is always lame as compared to a highly analytical human). Personally, I'm more of a roleplayer and I think I would have gotten into it had "The Elephant" been delivered as originally described, but an enormous and vocal subset of the MOO fan base would have hated it (they already did - lots of heated discussions on the dev board over that).

In retrospect, I think a better MOO3 vision would have been to reverse the changes MOO2 made to MOO that increased the micromanagement load of big empires (basically going back to the Stellar Conquest-derived economic model of MOO instead of the CIV-derived one of MOO2) and making the game "big" by having diplomacy & number of computer players on the order of the Paradox games (over 100 nations in play simultaneously).

To my surprise, a lot of stuff from back in the day is still online. I think the material there reflects the original intent before the big cuts and dev team shakeup, as I don't think anybody had time or energy to update it afterwards.

I used to visit the delphi boards everday and listen to the devs,before the cuts the game sounded amazing.

I was fairly regularly on the dev board, too. It was a very unique experiment in game development, but not a particularly successful one I suppose.

Fyron my comment about your opinion being wishy washy was sarcasm your opinion came through very clearly. I actually respect your opinion and your right to express it. As for us still waving the moo3 flag. Many of us are in love with the concepts and the magnitude of the project. Heck some of us still pray that a new developer will pick up the flag and make a moo4.

Groovy Baby Yeah!

This game is now available as a beta buy thingie, its KICK ASS and a marriage between it and SE V would mean we would be allright for all eternity.

RTS , but paced slow...you build and play with large capitol ships and play in solar systems. Tech and economy is simpler, but technologies are done in a superb way.

A few notes...
Guys.. MOO 1 was okay, but it was old, it had some big flaws, and generally owes its notority to MOO2 which was WAY superior. It had awesome tactical combat (face is moo 1 combat was just blob vs blob), it gave you
choices in empire STILL lacking today (can we say bland generic empire makers ).
And MOO2 had seriously little micro if you think of it, given if you wanted a HUGE empire, you had to manage one, but that comes with choosing huge galaxy mkay?

As for MOO3...eh doh..they botched it up, I have only ONCE had as much trouble finding out what does what in a game, and that was Paradox Victoria..it was probably 10x as complex, but it took ages knowing what did what.

As such, MOO3 still required HUGE amounts of mico despite 'claiming' you didnt have to, but if you didn't micro your empire would suck raw egg after a while..so it beccame meaningless.
Fleet combat though, rocked somewhat...it had some cool things...flawed by being to simple in the end (doh, MOO 2 combat was WAY more complex )

So thanks and again...leave Moo 1 to rest, it was the beginning of something great, but it was called Moo 2 and if ever Space Empires V gets an AI which actually plays the same game as me, I will have fun here too.

But again, SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE...cheesy name I know..but boy does it rock.

Janster

How does it compares with Sword of the Stars?

Heh, SoaSE vs SotS...

A shakeup in the dev team is putting it nicely. They basically fired everyone when the game was at alpha build level and replaced them with a new team that didn't really have a very good understanding of the previous team's work. They did this so quickly and so harshly that none of the original team was left (or willing) to consult the newcomers on the work that had been done. Then they told the new staff to build an entirely new game out of the alpha build. The new staff basically admitted shortly after the release of the game that it would have been a lot less buggy and much more stable if they'd just finished the original design rather than trying to adapt a whole new one on top of it.

I have to agree with Fyron personally. No matter what the community does they'll never fix that fatal flaw of MOO3.

Yeah ,they had Alan Emerich who I remember had a article in a magazine about how a 'good' design philosophy was all they needed.

Sadly when you have no idea how coding works or how ai works....then you may find that your idea just can't be translated into a viable game without BIG problems.

As such his grand idea should have been just a moo2 remake , flashier gfx and more bells...but eh.

Janster

well with ataris problems their is still hope that someone else might by the franchise...

Groovy Baby Yeah!