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Master of Orion 3 page!

	The Masters Of Orion III section has finally been Lost In Space... Yes, yes, yes, I know - Master of Orion 3 is a turn based game and not RTS at all (except for a few bits), and many people play it only in single player, not in netgames... It has finally been retired as an RTSC game section.

Master of Orion III (MoO3) is developed by Quicksilver Software and published by Atari. This is the third installment of the venerable Masters of Orion "4X" series of space strategy games, concerned with the epic struggle of conquering the Orion Sector, a fictional patch of outer space. You vy for control of the entire Sector, either by defeating the other empires by force of arms, becoming the elected rulers of the Orion Senate through politics and diplomacy, or discovering five "X"'s hidden amongst the stars. One of Master of Orion's selling points is that it pushes "4X" up to "5X": (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate), the fifth "X" being "eXperience". Between itself and Civilization, Master of Orion epitomises the big picture strategy game on the PC.

While Master of Orion III is a continuation from its two predecessors, its hardly like either of them. This is a complete redesign and rebuild, not an upgrade with prettier graphics and inherited features. The developers wanted you to feel that you really were the controlling force behind a vast space empire and rebuilt much of the game from scratch. Their attempt at the fifth X has pretty much succeeded in that regard: you can, in a large galaxy game, control several hundred stars and tens of thousands of ships, while sixteen other cultures jostle for position all doing the same thing. There's a strong sense of scale, of space faring civilisations facing off, circling each other trying to realize their ambitions. As populations expand and empires slowly evolve into multicultural societies during the progression of the game, the amount of complexity in your empire becomes astronomical.

This is as exciting as the environment in the game gets! A small cross-section from a large galaxy map. The lines represent star-lanes that connect up the dots, each a star system. For some inexplicable reason, MoO3 is locked to a single resolution: 800x600 pixels.

Your empire's economy is huge and complex but readily manageable. Much of it is controlled by a battalion of AI's. Each Colony has its own Planetary Viceroy, an economic AI that can grow a tiny outpost into a thriving homeworld resplendent in its own terraformed paradise. Most of your decisions are implemented on an empire wide scale with novel use of Empire Plans and Imperial financial tuning. At the same time, the Viceroys will also accommodate any direct commands and changes on a planet that you desire. You have some limited control over arbitrarily setting build queues, but most of it is automatic and much of the fiddly details of building and improving worlds is locked away. This high degree of automation works remarkably well as designed - although not necessarily as many players might expect. Be warned: you have to work with the game, not against it for the best results. You basically set policy while the Empire buckles down to accommodate your whims - but your colonies and people still have lives of their own.

At the Imperial level, you have a wide variety of choices and policies you can set for your Empire. You can do a lot at this level, but control is indirect and it might take twenty turns or so before you can really see if your decisions and plans were the right ones. In any case, you'll be adjusting them to accommodate your evolving culture and position in space. You galactic bureaucracy can even weigh down your Empire if you're not careful: MoO3 models what it calls The Heavy Foot of Government - a little multiplier than simulates how expensive and bureaucratic your Empire can be whenever it tries to do anything.

Simultaneously, your colony worlds are busily developing themselves and churning out your precious navy. The amount of detail contained in a single planet is astonishing for a game like this: you can have over a thousand planets and no two will ever be alike. Planets and populations lead their own lives and the Viceroy's first priority is to the planet they administrate - not your selfish ambitions. This is a living galaxy that follows your Imperial policies but still at heart follows its own path.

Combat between space fleets is played out in real time. You can bypass this when you take a turn, or attempt to control it - but frankly, MoO3's real time controls are an absolute dog. Most people simply watch the battles play out, with their finger on the General Retreat button if things start to go wrong.

Of absolute importance to developing planets and designing ships is developing the technologies to stay ahead of the pack. Master of Orion has always had a huge and extensive tech tree, and MoO3 has expanded on it. Huge areas of your empire will be devoted to nothing but research. Quite simply, tech's. make or break you. There's a huge number of them to research, and the game factors in cost overruns and surprise bonuses. Ship numbers are significant, but the fleet with the better technologies will wreak havoc on those who haven't kept up. Planets cannot improve or ramp up to build the really big capital ships unless you've bothered to keep up with the social, biological and economic technologies. Super ships are important, but if you neglected your planetary improvements to get those better weapons you may find you simply can't muster enough production to build enough of them in time. And not all species see the same tech tree, either. Different species have different strengths and weaknesses; some have a lot less tech's. available to them than others. More often than not you need to obtain your precious technology via other means: espionage, invasion or diplomatic exchanges.

MoO3's Foreign Matrix lets you quickly assess your place in the galactic diplomatic scene with empires you have made contact with. It also lets you quickly see who's allied with who, who knows who and what everybody thinks of everybody else. Its an essential tool for keeping tabs on diplomacy. Our human friend is in serious trouble: the red lines indicate he's at war with five separate empires. Lets hope his alliances (green lines) come through!

The AI's would band together if anyone got too far ahead in the power graph; or switch allegiances if they thought it necessary; and help as often as harm. Some species are naturally hostile to each others; others require particular approaches to get by. You can actually cultivate good relations and build up some very strong alliances. Playing like an all powerful warlord and dominating the field is simply courting trouble for yourself. You can quickly drain yourself fighting on more than one or two fronts - and even the AI's take pains to keep their conflicts to a minimum if they can help it.

Spying, unfortunately, is a bit disappointing and counterintuitive. Its essential to maintain though, and you can steal tech's and disrupt other civ's, but its all a bit haphazard.

One of the MoO3's problems is that while it does tend to function properly much of the time, it doesn't always match up with people's expectations. It is often infuriatingly vague at times, hiding critical details from you that can prove to be disastrous later on (especially when it comes to landing troops and invading planets) Even worse, some of its interface is opaque (meaning you have no idea what it might or might not be doing) and many of its labels are downright misleading. Its real time combat leaves a lot to be desired, too: having the AI making most of the tactical decisions for you is fine provided the AI seems to know what it's doing... Many of the existing issues were knocked on the head with the first official patch; but there are many more to trip you up. I suspect its unlikely Atari is going to release another patch, which is a real shame.

So it goes without saying there's a considerable learning curve, but the payoffs are there for those willing enough to squander the time on it. What's remarkable about MoO3 is that despite all its bewildering detail it's actually a macromanagement game. This flies completely in the face of most 4X strategy titles, where lovingly building all your ships and micromanaging every single last detail to death is the norm. If the howls of outrage echoing across the forums were anything to go by, it would seem that a lot of space 4X fans do not like the basic formula being fiddled with. You can skip a most of the ocean of details with (some) impunity in MoO3 to concentrate on the big picture without too many problems. The AI does a mostly sound job of handling all the messy details (and there's millions of small details) while you sit back and see how things develops as the turns cycle by.

Some of this sounds a little downbeat, no? Well, I don't know about you, but I was unable to tear myself away from Master of Orion III for months. It trumped Rise of Nations(!) and stalled the RTSC RoN section for weeks, even distracting me from the Homeworld 2 demo. I found something about Master of Orion compelling, stupid bugs and frustrations notwithstanding. The game was a bit of a disaster when it first came out, but now the 1.2.5 patch is out its eminently playable for the uninitiated. The AI's do work, provided you let them work within the parameters they prefer - but this in no ways means you're a helpless spectator. Control freaks and micromanagers will quickly find themselves at loggerheads with the AI's as they try to assert themselves on the game. If you want to get into something much, much simpler and a little more conventional and direct, try Galactic Civilizations. Its not too shabby, but lacks the complexity and subtly (and numerous issues!) of MoO3. Nevertheless, if you can sit through all those issues, or have the spare time to sink your teeth into it, there is still an enjoyable game to be had with plenty of replay value. MoO3 is truly ambitious when it attempts to force 4X strategy into macromanagement - no mean feat in itself, and one that demands an intense use of AIs to do the fiddly hands on stuff for you. This is great, but, like AI heavy games like Kohan, some people find that having the computer play most of the game for you is sort of undermining the whole point of why they'd be playing in the first place. If you're after the finally polished, media rich game play of a Civilisation or a Rise of Nations, then Masters of Orion III is probably going to be a horrible experience for you. But it does a brilliant job of looking vast and feeling like a huge, galactic empire.

	Master of Orion III OVERVIEW
	Version & Install		1.2.5. Make sure you have this! Download the Master of Orion III 1.2.5 patch. Some official patch info from Quicksilver themselves: This patch is a free upgrade for purchasers of Master of Orion 3. Please feel free to redistribute this version to other owners of original copies. You are permitted to place unaltered copies of this patch on third-party Web sites ('mirrors') as long as such sites include this notice. This installer will overwrite the executable and various data files, so users of third-party mods will want to back up their files before installing the patch. This version supersedes all previously released MOO3 patches, which are no longer available. Master of Orion III was a bit of a mess when it was first released. The fan base, impatient after many years of development, demanded an early release, and basically got what it asked for - an early release. It wasn't ready, and many features were either bugged or broken. Needless to say, the fans promptly took Quicksilver apart for releasing the game too early with too many bugs...
	Spawns		No!
	Demo		None! You'll just have to risk buying it.
	FAQ's		Infogrames (now Atari) Support and downloads The Orion Sector's Whiner's Guide to Masters to MOO3 The Orion Sector's Ultimate Bugs Chart, by Renaux GameFAQ's Master of Orion III FAQ's
	Networks		Networks 1-8 players on LAN, direct TCP/IP Internet or through Gamespy.
	Maps		Star maps are generated randomly by the game every time, and saved out with the game. There is no "campaign" or a string of small maps to complete; nor is there any pre-defined terrain. All the alien races and other game elements are randomly shuffled every time. Not all races appear in a game; some are doubled or tripled up, competing against each other like everyone else. Every star in the main Star Map is a solar system that can hold anything between 0 and 8 planets. An occupied planet represents a single Colony. Thus, you could have up to eight colonies in a star system. One of these becomes the System Government. Individual colonies are subdivided up into Regions. A Region is the equivalent of a continent, like Africa or Antarctica. Depending on it's size, a planet can have from 1 to 12 Regions. It can also have up to five moons, but moons simply add more Regions to a planet. Each Region has its own economic devleopment, racial composition, terrain, climate, and a huge swag of improvements and developments, all handled automatically for you. Each Region performs differently to others based on its composition, demographic and development. In other words: despite having hundreds of worlds in a typical game, no two are ever alike. It's an attempt to make the MoO3 universe seem alive. Treat it a bit like SimCity.
	Units		Essentially, you have ships and ground troops. See Space Fleets when I get it finished. i.e. Never.
	Resources		Galactic Currency: the Antaran Unit. (AU). MoO3 doesn't deal in specific resources. Rather, economics and production are described on a planetary or Empire wide scale in a series of screens, ledgers and lists. Each colony is developed into economic zones called DEA's (Dominant Economic Activities). DEA's are the building blocks of your galactic economy. Collectively they produce Food, Minerals, Research Points, Industrial Points, Production Points, Unrest, and income. Each Region on each colony can support up to two DEA's and a Spaceport. A Colony goes through several stages of development, based on how many DEA's and how built up they are. The progression is: New, Frontier, Secondary, Primary, and Core. Again, those labels are misleading: a Frontier world is NOT one that lurks on the fringes of your empire - its simply a Colony in the early stages of establishing DEA's and infrastructure. A Core world is one that has filled up with people, DEA's and developments. You could have a Core world on the very edge of your Empire, or a Frontier planet right next door to your homeworld. Colonies are run by Planetary Viceroys, whom you can override directly or influence with empire wide policy. A lot of the low level economics are completely automated, and not accessible by the player. See Economics when it gets finished. Relax - it won't.
	Research		There's a large and extensive research tree divided into several broad fields: Economics, Mathematics, Energy, Biology Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. Research Points (RP's) generated by your colonies go towards a galactic "pool" subdivided into six streams of research. Your funding policies decide how much goes where. The number of RP's required to pass each level of research increases exponentially. There are about 50 levels of research to pursue in each field, and each level in each field can have between zero and half a dozen separate separate techs. Research is done on two levels. The main effort goes into simply passing tech levels in the six research streams. As each level is passed, it unlocks specific techs that are automatically studied separately. Separate techs can take their own sweet time to resolve and overruns are frequent. Its all automatic though, so as far as the player is concerned it simply affects when they become available after they've been "discovered". There's a global tech tree that all races share, but individual races can only see certain techs. Playing as a Creative race will gain you access to more techs than an Unimaginative one. Of course, tech's can be acquired through research, diplomatic exchanges, theft by spies or be captured through planetary conquest.