60 Minute Review of…
Master of Orion 3
The diplomacy, another signature aspect of the original games,
is contrived, limited, and erratic. Every now and then, out of the
blue, someone will threaten you, insisting that you cease your actions.
They don't give any indication of what these actions are, and since
your involvements consists mainly of pressing the 'turn' button,
there's not really a whole lot for you to cease. Sometimes a race
will try to trade some useless techs to you, but you have no way
of knowing they're useless without shuffling three screens over
and digging through that vast messy tech matrix. There's little
information about what various offers mean, and even less feedback
about how your offers are received. You can't even sling cash around,
perhaps because your coffers are so jealously guarded by your AI
viceroys. There's a Senate that occasionally tries to pass clever
little bills that tweak the rules, but since these affect all that
stuff going on in the background, it's no skin off your nose whether
they pass or not.
Games are suddenly won or lost, with almost no warning. Won, more
often than lost. The AI doesn't provide much of a challenge unless
it's somehow outstripped you so far that it can roll over you with
a big fleet. Otherwise, it will dribble a few ships at a time into
your superior numbers, demonstrating the tenacity and strategic
prowess of a Yorkshire terrier. But you don't have to watch the
computer players to see the failings of the AI. Check your ship
reserves a few hundred turns into the game and you'll see a thousand
troop transports that you didn't order and that you'll never use.
Hey, thanks viceroys. These will come in handy if I ever invade
Normady.
The AI seems incapable of balancing your raw production with your
processing capacity, as you'll note by the egregious surplus of
food, minerals, and reserach that build up later in the game. The
AI doesn't respond to unrest effectively, letting planets spiral
out of control rather than reining in dissent by building government
and recreational facilities. In the final analysis, MOO3 simply
doesn't have a smart enough AI to run itself like it insists on
doing. By forcing you out of the decision-making process, MOO3 is
more frustrating than streamlined.
In many ways, this is the anti-Sid Meier school of design, a throwback
to the complex wargames where much of the calculations are running
under the hood and it's your job to just shut up and move the pieces
around, leaving all those numbers alone to do their own thing. There's
no clear correlation between your actions and whatever outcome the
game eventually spits out, so you're left with the feeling that
you might as well just click the 'turn' button a few times and see
what happens. Three hundred turns later, the game's over.
There's no denying Master of Orion 3 is a complex game. Complexity
itself isn't a bad thing, but poorly organized complexity can be
the kiss of death. What's worse is poorly organized complexity that
serves as a substitute for gameplay. This is exactly what you get
with Master of Orion 3, an indecipherable pile of dense self-absorbed
data that completely fails to understand why we loved our first
MOOs.
Publisher: Infogrames
Developer: Quicksilver
Genre: Bloated strategy
Requirements: A willingness to be marginalized by bad AI
February 21, 2003
Back
to 60 Second Reviews
|
