Gamers! Have you ever stared at the screen of Space Empires IV and thought to yourself, “gosh, if only this weren’t so simple”? Did you find yourself leaving just one enemy planet left in Master of Orion 2 so you could fiddle with your empire until every single system had every single building? Would you reload battles in Birth of the Federation just to see what different strategies did—even though you already had the numbers memorized? Well, then we’ve got a game for you! It’s called Master of Orion 3, and it will take you years – years! – to explore every permutation! Your school-age children will be married before you have a savegame of every race in victory over the largest galaxy setting! All of your current pets will be dead and replaced with new current pets before you’ve tried all the combinations of star arrangements! IT’S THAT AMAZING!
Infogrames’ Master of Orion 3 follows in the titular footsteps of its predecessors. One takes on the role of an ageless, omnipresent emperor whose people are vying in deadly competition for power in a hostile galaxy. Sometimes called the “4X” genre (a term coined by Alan Emrich, who actually helped develop the game concept for MoO 3), it means eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate, and it’s a fair assessment of one’s goal in this series. Starting from humble beginnings, one colonizes and industrializes the surrounding worlds while researching powerful new technologies. Players can help or hinder one another – “hinder” seems more common for some reason – through diplomacy, spying, and conquest, but at some point in the game, the competition takes over and the last one standing wins. The first two games, especially the original, were noted for their deceptively straightforward gameplay and breezy pace in the early to midgame.
The third installment in the venerable Master of Orion series develops the drive towards complexity in a major way. There hasn’t been a game that has diverged as totally from the pace and feel of its predecessors as Master of Orion 3 has from the other two, previous developments notwithstanding. Insofar as there can be a “realistic” space TBS, Master of Orion 3 stands as a tower of realism—a space empire simulator, if you will.
All aspects of space opera have been carefully excised save the Byzantine backstory. Gone – to the dismay of many fans – are the Bulrathi, Mrrshan, and other MoO staples, and in their place are creatures truly alien to the human experience. The artwork put into the various species is something truly special, and the sound effects are no less enjoyable. Nebulous gas giant dwellers creak and groan under unimaginable atmospheric pressure, atavistic machines whirr and spin, and the demonic Harvesters salivate over every word as if they were hoping you’d be good enough to douse yourself in BBQ sauce before they said anything else. Even the familiar humans seem a little foreign, with a Cyrillic-sounding language set and unusual world names.
From a gameplay side, a couple of innovations dramatically change the feel of the game from previous installments. First up are star lanes, most recently seen in Space Empires IV but hardly a new idea. Star lanes mean a tactical shift from previous MoO games because it is now possible to set up a single “fortress” system at a critical focus point; no more sending one’s battle fleets straight to the capitol system and stomping it, and no more having to keep a defensive force in each and every system that might be struck by counterattack.
The other added factor is a new one, and an interesting one in this day of UN Security Council Measures and debated International Law. All of the species start roughly the same as one another—except one. The “New Orions,” formerly the enslaving Antarans, start the game with a significant fleet, a huge tech advantage, a hundred times as many starting votes in the Senate as anyone else, and a complacency that keeps them comfortably in one system the whole game. They preside over a Senate where the diplomatically savvy can manipulate the less-tactful into a variety of unpleasant situations. Starting near Orion can make an otherwise slow and methodical game into a sudden, desperate conspiracyfest as deals and side deals are made and broken with dizzying speed and limited resources are grabbed rabidly. One of the possible victory conditions is to win by being elected the new Senate President; while it won’t happen immediately, it will shorten a game dramatically. Playing on the smallest galaxy with the largest possible number of players will result in spending more time on the diplomacy screen than the whole rest of the game combined.
Not that there’s nothing else to do. MoO 3’s complexity cannot be overstated. Each star has a varying number of planets. Each planet has a varying number of economic regions. Each economic region can support two of seven Dominant Economic Activities, which are dependent on raw materials and population. So, if an industrial DEA has lots of funding, lots of minerals, and only 60% of the population base it requires, it can’t work at full capacity. The same result occurs if it has enough funding and population but not raw materials, etc. This is one DEA, in one region, on one planet, in one solar system. Tracking a 100+ star empire gets problematic well before the midgame.
To help with this, Quicksilver has put in “viceroys,” planetary AIs that handle build queues, tax rate, and DEA assignments. The viceroys will theoretically build up the economy, take on special economic projects like shipyard upgrades, train troops, build and launch colony ships, and prepare warships-of-the-line. The viceroys are an absolute necessity to keep the game from bogging down, and they are what will make or break this game in the eyes of the player. For those who prefer a good twitch-fest to a stately game of chess, the viceroy will certainly come across as playing the whole game for you, and playing it extremely poorly at that. But for those obsessive souls who can/will etch out a vast interstellar empire one nation at a time, this is where the game will begin to shine. The layers of viceroy interaction are many. A viceroy’s decisions are based on: current military funding, tax levels, degree of specialization allowed on each planet, and “development plans,” among other things like consideration of planetary specials and current proximity to hostile species. The player determines development plans, like all of the other qualifiers, but each plan has a primary, secondary, and tertiary goal, and each planet can fall under the jurisdiction of no less than five simultaneous development plans. This is where the learning curve of the game begins to show itself—the viceroys will not be as efficient on their own as they would with the right development plans in place, and the player must know the game well enough to draw up the best development plans. The viceroys’ decision-making process is essentially a mystery until many hours of play have occurred. Unfortunately, only the true turn-based strategy gaming diehard will still be interested after the first twelve hours.
And sadly, there are larger complaints that this game is guilty of committing. Chief among them is the graphics. While the alien species are impressively, lovingly rendered in brief FMV cutscenes, these cutscenes and even the image stills are only viewable from the diplomacy screen. Where MoO 2 had repeated reminders that the player had chosen to play the Warrior Space Babes on the research, espionage, combat, and diplomacy screen, there is no such atmosphere to be found in MoO 3. This detraction is made more noticeable by the quality of the art, not less. The crystalline Geodic species plays on the same faux-Star Trek spreadsheet as the underwater Ichthytosians and good old humans. This is especially noticeable when one takes on the universe as the evil Ithkul; in their case it seems like the spreadsheet should try to hurt somebody somehow. But it doesn’t, at least not any more than it was already.
The save games are another difficulty. In a game as vast and intricate as this one, having save games that only record the situation as it stood at the beginning of the term seems like an amateurish oversight. But when those savegames are loaded and the player discovers that he can’t see his turn-by-turn situation report, it becomes a much bigger problem—there’s no way to no what needs to be done, so the game only occasionally can be saved without any risk of important projects falling between the cracks.
And the documentation is an embarrassment. Over and over, one will look to the manual to ask a basic question (what do all these techs really >do
The backstory, by the way, is dark and imaginative, but also very clearly trying desperately to reconcile previous games that weren’t designed for such a story. It doesn’t entirely work, but it does bring the current game alive in a way that the others weren’t. Why does that ambassador hate you so badly? Oh, yeah, they’re your former slaves who successfully rebelled. Somehow I doubt they’ll make for solid friends.
Ultimately, MoO 3 is something of a throwback, and not to its predecessors. Those gamers who yearn for the days of massive, elaborate-for-the-sake-of-being-elaborate DOS wargames will be in heaven for the first time in years with just a little work. On the other hand, those gamers who were raised on Warcraft and consider Heroes of Might and Magic to be “hardcore strategy” – nearly the whole current generation of gamers, most likely – should definitely pass this one up.
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Reviewed by Joel Rasdall.
