MASTER OF ORION 3 SERIES

However, this difference in the complexity of planetary management, and of the interface needed to work with it, is the main one, and usually goes right to the root of whether one prefers one game over the other. Obviously, there are other differences between them as well. So MOO1 and MOO2 are very different (and each very good) games. The interface, while prefectly reasonable for what it's trying to do, is fundamentally more complex than the MOO1 interface: you have to dive two levels in to change what a planet is doing, while the MOO1 options are right there on the main galaxy screen. Where in MOO1 you could set a planet's sliders to a reasonable level and then just leave it alone for a while, in MOO2 you need to pay pretty close attention to what each of your planets are doing at any given time. The result of all this is insane micromanagement. So, rather than adjusting the planet's ecology slider to make it terraform itself, you'd have it build the 'terraforming' improvement, and maybe allocate more workers to construction to speed it up. The concept of simply dividing a planet's efforts between five discrete categories was abandoned in favor of a system where you build buildings, which each affect the planet in some way. The diplomacy screens, for example, seem almost identical to it, and, more to the point, the planetary management stuff seems very similar as well. The designers imported much of the design (most of the bits that differ from the first one) from the game Civilization 2. The whole philosophy of using sliders for everything, as the first game did, was pretty much abandoned. Master of Orion 2 was a bit more complex. And, just to drive the point home, it was simple. Though the game's graphics weren't pretty even in its day (not to mention now), this interface was reasonably elegant and easy to use. The things it could do were divided into five categories, and you could set a slider for each category to divide that planet's efforts. Planets could only do a few things: improve themselves, make ships, build missile turrets, research things, and so forth. Each star in the galaxy could have, at most, one planet (thus making 'star' and 'planet' synonymous). These simple rules, when put together, made a pretty complex game. The first Master of Orion featured an extremely simple interface, and very simple rules. It is, like the previous games, a turn-based strategy game, set on a galactic scale. Before its release, this game was extremely hyped by many members of the gaming press and community, but this is nothing new.

MASTER OF ORION 3 SERIES

The third game in the Master of Orion series was published by Infogrames and developed in-house by Quicksilver, and was released in February of 2003 (after about three months of delays).

Master of orion 3