Master of Orion 3

Review - Adrian often rants about taking over the galaxy, but we just ignore him these days.

Few series of games has attracted the devoted following that the Master of Orion games (or "MOD" for short) have. MOO2 was arguably one of the finest strategy games ever developed for the PC, and still, even years after being relegated to the bargain bucket, MOO2 is a rousing romp through the vastness of space visiting neutronium death on unsuspecting populaces.

This is the legacy that MOO3 has to follows, and from the offset, it's not surprising that Quicksilver opted to try to do things… well… a little differently.

MOO3 is the official sequel to the Antaran War (aka MOO2), and takes place twenty years after the end of the last game, and those mean Antaran scumbags have appointed themselves head of the galactic senate that attempts to regulate order in the galaxy (or Orion sector) where the game takes place.

Enter you, the supreme leader of one of 16 pre-generated races, from the bog-standard human, through the reptilian Saurans, to the fiendish Ithkul. If you like, you can also modify one of the starting races and adjust some of the strengths and weaknesses available. You may choose to be incredible scientists, hardy farmers, super industrious or have the entire race you command swear absolute loyalty to you, thereby reducing the levels of unrest that can occur from mistreating them horribly (as, let's face it, every despotic ruler should do).

The game commences with you ready to explore the galaxy around your home star system with a couple of reconnaissance scout ships and a Colony ship to start your expansion, then when your forces are ready, trample your foes and visit them with neutronium d... erm... you get the picture.

At first impressions, the user interface is not exactly friendly, but gets the job done. However, I found with the poor documentation, the very unhelpful Galactic Encyclopedia, and the limited "Master's Notes" that pop-up as you are learning, that even with a large amount of experience with previous games in the series, I was more than just a little lost. Shrugging it off for now, I instructed each of my scout ships to explore a nearby system and then checked out my home planet.

Okay, now I was very confused. The planetary status screen is a veritable cornucopia of information, but without any mouse over help, I was not getting anywhere.

This is where we introduce the planetary Viceroy. As in most games of this nature, there is an option for you to rely on the Artificial Intelligence of a Governor, who will suggest what you might want to build in some cases (as in MOO2) or in this case, just go ahead and build it for you. Now to start with, this was awesome, because to be frank (or am I Betty? I forget) I had zero idea what I was doing, so turning the responsibility to Bob the Planetary Viceroy was a great help.

Feeling somewhat more confident for the moment, I clicked the "Next Turn" button. Each of my scouts progressed a little further down the star lanes between systems. Having done that, I figured I would take another look at the planetary statistics screen.

Each planet has a number of different characteristics, which as far as gameplay goes, does make for some interesting choices. To start with your race has an ideal environmental preference where it wants to live. As you'd expect, finding additional planets with the exact same conditions is rare. Instead you will discover one of the 6 additional types of planetary make-up which range from Green 1 which is a very close match, through Yellow 1 and 2, which are hostile worlds, but tolerable to, finally, the Red 2 worlds, a veritable hell hole, comparable to, say, New Jersey.